Rogue Affair

by Tamsen Parker

  Brynn knew all the relevant aides and lawyers. She’d approached everyone who would have had access to this information. She had a sense of who was unhappy—and no one else would have done this except Lee.

  Lee wasn’t hers. Brynn didn’t have or want dominion over Lee, and at times, she’d felt frustrated by Lee. Every story Brynn had gotten on her own had felt like an accomplishment. She’d conjured something out of the air all on her own; she could fly without her feather.

  Why shouldn’t Lee give information to Drew or any other reporter? If the truth mattered more than anything else, who cared who printed it? And besides, Drew didn’t even know Lee was Brynn’s source. No, Lee was one of Brynn’s sources. Her many, many, many sources.

  But she was shaking. She could see her fingers trembling on the keyboard and feel her breaths coming in shallow pulls. She was seriously pissed.

  Knowing she wasn’t going to get anymore work done tonight, she closed up her computer and headed home. After eating a few handfuls of wasabi almonds, taking a quick shower, and spending a few minutes tossing in bed, she seized her phone.

  Great piece, she texted Drew.

  The truth was she couldn’t remember anything about what he’d written beyond who’d given him the information, but she had to acknowledge it. They’d been texting too much for her to ignore it. Hell, she’d thought they might be dating. She was obligated to acknowledge her near-boyfriend’s big story.

  Thanks. The dots popped up indicating he was writing something else. Where are you?

  Stewing in dumb rage wasn’t a physical place, so she wrote, At home.

  Can I stop by?

  She drew an audible breath. She wanted to demand he give her a reason then tell him no. She was too irrationally pissed to see him now. But…she was also curious. Was he buzzing on the high of publishing a piece that was going to boost his career? Did he want to gloat? Was this a booty call? Did she want it to be?

  No. N-O. But instead, her fingers typed her address. After thumping her head against the pillow a few times, she climbed out of bed and found a ratty Columbia sweatshirt to put on over her camisole. That would aggravate him.

  She stalked around her living room until a knock sounded. When she opened the door, his gorgeous mouth was set in a hard line. They were both pissed, then.

  He came in and leaned against the wall. He truly was too pretty for any of this to have made any sense.

  “I would have thought you’d be celebrating.” Jeez, she sounded mad.

  He closed his eyes and nodded. Maybe her tone answered whatever he’d come here for. “My editor’s thrilled. I have a bunch of interviews lined up for tomorrow. This is big for me.”

  “I’m happy for you.” Well, she would be. Someday. Maybe.

  Back in her room, her phone made the email notification noise. She didn’t care about that, not now, but it was a reminder of where she should be: getting some sleep. She needed him out of her apartment.

  “You should probably go,” she told him.

  “I should…but here’s the thing, I feel sort of—I have to ask you something. About your source.”

  He was having an attack of conscience and he had theories. A rainbow of emotions shimmered in her: she was mad, and she knew she shouldn’t be. She was jealous, and she felt like a petty bitch for it. She was tired, and she knew she wouldn’t sleep. She wanted to fall into him, and she knew she couldn't. Not anymore. Not ever.

  As calmly as she could, she said, “I have a lot of sources, Drew. I’m sure you do too.”

  “Most people think you have one big one.”

  “You know I can’t talk about that. Don’t ask.”

  “But you know Hadley Darlington.”

  There it was. Well, there had always been a chance someone was going to put it together. She didn’t confirm what he knew; instead, she raised her brows as if to say, And your point is?

  “I met her at a hearing four days ago.” His phone started buzzing in his coat pocket, and he silenced it, which gave her time to process his words.

  He’d met Lee before they’d had dinner. Well, now Brynn was super glad they hadn’t slept together. He’d still been fishing, and she chomped at the bait like a guppy.

  “Don’t tell me anything more.” It was wrong and dumb to have the emotions she did, but they were real and they were hers. In lieu of screaming, she said what she wished she could feel, “You should be enjoying this. It’s a huge scoop.”

  “But I’m not, because I’m thinking about you.”

  “I’m fine,” she bit off.

  He did that thing with his mouth she was now fairly confident was a repressed smile. “I don’t know you very well, but you don’t seem fine.”

  “And you don’t seem like the guy who followed me to find a source.”

  “I’m not feeling like him either.”

  It was like missing a step and tumbling down the last third of a flight of stairs. She wanted so badly for him to mean it.

  “Why should I believe you?” Her voice wobbled around the edges.

  “You probably shouldn’t, but dinner was real. Everything I said to you was real. It wasn’t about a story. I like when you call me on my shit. I like your smart mouth. Dammit, Brynn, I like you. This article is going to change my career, and I want to celebrate it. I’ve worked years for this. Even before I got the memo and the interview, I’d decided to walk away from you. This is precisely why we shouldn’t be together, and it’s going to keep happening, isn’t it? But all I can think is you aren’t going to let me near you anymore, and that feels…it feels unacceptable.”

  He’s a crush, he’s a crush, he’s a crush. Let him go. “Can you blame me?”

  “Yes. Because this is my job. I did exactly what you would have done. It has nothing to do with us.”

  She held up a hand and hated that it was shaking. “I can’t discuss this with you right now.”

  “I’m not asking you to reveal your contacts. I’m asking how we move forward.”

  “I don’t know if we do.”

  He’d been leaning toward her, but at that, he snapped back against the wall. “Well, there’s the answer then. I thought you only cared about the truth.”

  “I guess I’m more selfish than I thought.” She closed her eyes and exhaled. “Do we have to decide this now? Can you give me a little longer to process? And why in the hell do our phones keep buzzing?” A cacophony of notifications was going off. Way more than was normal for 9 p.m. on a Thursday.

  “Alien invasion,” Drew offered as he pulled his phone out.

  “Wouldn’t that be perfectly in line with the past year?”

  He inhaled sharply. “Hadley Darlington resigned.”

  “What? Lee did what? That’s impossible.”

  “It’s on Twitter. It’s everywhere.”

  Brynn stalked to her bedroom. She’d missed a call from Grace, about fifty text messages, and more emails than she wanted to quantify. She walked back to the living room, reading as she went. “Oh my God, she really did it. She quit. And she shared her resignation letter everywhere.”

  Brynn and Drew began talking over one another.

  “She outs herself as a whistleblower and says she went through the Justice Department internal review processes—”

  “—and when that didn’t work, she began giving stuff to the press—”

  “—she names both of us as people she provided tips and documents to.”

  “—she says she did it for the good of the nation.”

  They both looked up in stunned silence.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Brynn said.

  “I guess I didn’t have the story of the day.”

  Brynn exploded into laughter: pressed her phone to her head and cackled. It wasn’t funny, not really. But there wasn’t any rational response to all the things it was.

  “I’m so damn tired,” she got out between giggles.

  Drew’s eyes were soft and a bit sad. “I know. Me too.”
>
  “I don’t want to be part of the story.”

  “But you want to tell the news from your point of view.”

  “Those aren’t the same thing.”

  For what felt like the length of a pop song, they stared at each other. Brynn had no idea what she felt any longer. The absurdity of the moment had tugged her under like a riptide, and she couldn’t do anything but wait to surface.

  “I have to go back to work,” he finally said.

  “Me too.” She should call Lee and Grace, and she had to write something about this twist and how she had been involved. She wasn’t going to get a lick of sleep tonight.

  “Promise me in a few days, we can talk.”

  “Sure.” But she didn’t mean it any more than he did.

  He hesitated, started toward her, and stopped himself. With a regretful shake of his head, he opened the door and left.

  Brynn engaged the lock, and it tolled—a death-knell for whatever it had been. She didn’t have the time to parse how she felt about it.

  7

  Drew jerked awake. Shit, what time was it? Was he late?

  He was halfway out of bed when he glanced at his ancient clock-radio. It was Sunday and before 8 a.m.; he didn’t have anywhere to be until noon. With a grateful sigh, he flopped back down and pulled a pillow over his head to block the light.

  Every muscle ached. The past two days had felt like some of the longest of his life, with writing, doing interviews, watching the world meltdown, and being, for the first time, truly at the center of it. The administration was having a conniption, probably because Hadley Darlington was poised, brilliant, and ruthless. Some people were always going to distrust a whistleblower, of course, but she’d been deposed by the special prosecutor before going public and now she was telling a rational, terrifying story about corruption to anyone who would listen.

  From a professional perspective, the story and follow ups had been good for Drew. Personally though…he wasn’t sure.

  He’d chased a blockbuster to impress Steven, but this story would’ve broken without him. Darlington had been planning to go public, so people would have known about it no matter what. If Drew wrote this kind of thing all the time, who would write about cuts to Legal Aid?

  And why couldn’t he get Brynn’s eyes—angry, hurt, accusing—out of his head?

  Knowing sleep was a lost cause when he was thinking about Brynn, he got up and showered. Since he had a byline on the front page, he walked to a coffee shop down the street to get extra copies of MTL. His mom would want one, so would some of his aunts. He bought a bagel and coffee while he was at it and settled in to read about the city council’s goings on.

  As he finished, someone sat across from him.

  “Morning.” Brynn, in workout clothes and without a speck of makeup. Her cheekbones, her jawline, and the slope of her nose were emphatic against the morning light. The declaration of her, the economy—that was where her beauty was.

  “Hey.” He gestured to the Chronicle, where she had a byline on page one as usual. “I liked your piece.”

  “Thanks. Yours too. I was…” She licked her lips and glanced out the window, seeming to search for words. He wanted to stay in this moment when he could pretend what she was going to say would be happy.

  “I needed to clear my head,” she said finally. “I went for a walk. I knew you lived near Logan Circle. I didn’t mean to come this way, but seeing you, I think maybe I did it to tempt serendipity.”

  He could feel his pulse in his fingertips, but it was way too early in this conversation to feel hopeful. “I’m glad. I was going to text you.” He’d wanted to see her when they talked and they’d been too busy; that was why he’d waited. “I wasn’t happy with how we left things on Thursday. I gave you the wrong impression when we met. I don’t care about your sources.”

  “Anymore.” She was never going to let him live that down.

  “And not again. Things are different now.” He’d gotten what he wanted, and he knew it didn’t satisfy him.

  “They’re different in ways that make this impossible, even if I could trust you. What happened with Lee—it’ll happen again.”

  Except it might not. “What if I wasn’t reporting on the Hill or the White House?”

  “Pardon?”

  The muscles in his shoulders and thighs instantly relaxed. He was right, this was right. No matter if she’d give him a chance or not, he wanted to change focus.

  “I’m a reporter. I care about whatever my editor points me toward. But sometimes, I feel like my eye is drawn to smaller stuff.”

  “Like the cuts in the omnibus?” Her question was still pointed, but no longer dismissive.

  “Yeah, but not the special prosecutor—which everyone will write about—but Legal Aid or Meals on Wheels. They’re small dollar amounts in the District, sure, but eliminating that funding would hurt people’s lives in big ways. Or maybe I should write about the city council or the school board. The lower levels of government.”

  “You’re not going to be able to avoid bigger stuff, not after this.”

  Drew exhaled. “Sure, and I’m going to write about what I hear. But if Steven and I can work it out, I don’t think these kinds of stories—” He pointed to the papers still on the table to indicate the big stuff, the stuff she wrote. “—are me.”

  For four heartbeats Brynn chewed on this. “Why?”

  “Because it’s not the career I want to have.”

  “What if it’s the only way to have a career?”

  He affected the Majority Leader’s accent: “I won’t address hypotheticals like that.”

  She laughed, and the space between them changed, became warm and filled with possibilities.

  He started playing with his napkin so he’d have something to do other than reach for her. “I can’t guarantee it’ll work. I only know it’s what I need to do.”

  “Does it feel like walking away from something?” From how she said it, it was clear that was how she would feel. But even if this story wasn’t over for her didn’t mean it wasn’t for him.

  “No, it feels like running toward myself.”

  “Are you sure? Everyone wants the bigger fish.” Her words were skeptical—but tender.

  “If you need a public defender and there isn’t one, that’s a pretty big fish. Where are those perspective changes you want?”

  “Touché. But what if you hear something juicy and decide to write it? What then?”

  “I probably will someday. But I hope by then we’re secure enough to get through it.” That was what he wanted: to write his stuff and to have her and to cheer her changing the world.

  Another pause. An endless pause.

  Then she gave a firm nod. “Okay.”

  Okay…what?

  But before he could ask, she stood. “I have to go home and shower before going back to work. Walk me?”

  “Of course.” He got up and set his hand on the small of her back where it fit perfectly.

  Trust was extra-logical. It was probably secreted by some otherwise vestigial organ, and thinking had little to do with it. As a reporter Brynn had a trust deficit. Skepticism was her default setting.

  When Drew declared he was going to pursue different types of stories, though, it tasted honest, and a teaspoon of conviction spread in her veins. Brynn wanted to believe him. In point of fact, she already did. She couldn’t logic through it; it was how it was.

  It probably helped that when Brynn had finally talked to Lee on Friday night it was obvious Lee had never considered the implications of giving Drew the document. For her, the dam had been about to burst, and lots of people needed to be there to soak up the spillover.

  Brynn and Drew stopped at a red don’t walk sign, and she glanced at him. Wind ruffled his hair and the sun painted across his cheekbones, and she felt a little breathless.

  “You realize this and dinner with you is the most time I’ve taken off in months.”

  He shot her a look. “Are you
trying to say you don’t have time for me? I’m not clingy.”

  “I don’t think I’m warning you off.” She actually knew she wasn’t. “It’s more of a realization. Maybe I need more balance. The first year of this presidency was…intense. But it’s not ending anytime soon. Maybe we all need to pace ourselves.”

  “Maybe.”

  They talked about nothing in particular as they strolled down the street ceilinged with golden leaves, but he kept brushing his hand over her back and along her forearm. She wanted to protect her heart, but it was already too late.

  They walked through the lobby of her building, up the stairs, and to her door.

  “So.” She wasn’t quite able to make eye contact. His face was merely a gorgeous smear on the side of her vision. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Having dinner with you.”

  “Good.”

  He set one hand on her hip. “Can I get a preview?”

  Her nod felt clumsy, but she tipped her head back to meet his and when his lips brushed against hers, the kiss felt inevitable and oh so right.

  When he’d been questioning the Majority Leader, she’d memorized the shape of his mouth. The way it transformed when he talked. The sharp attractiveness camouflaging his smiles. The way his lips twitched when he was deciding what to say. She’d studied every detail—except the feel and taste.

  Now she knew kissing him was a slide into a hot bath. Creeping heat starting in her toes and spreading upward. Another brush of their mouths, and she felt it on the back of her knees. The inside of her thighs. The bottom of her breasts. Cell by cell, he twisted her inside out.

  She parted her mouth, just a little, and clung to his bottom lip. His answering gasp filled her with still more trust. He slid his free hand up her side, under her jacket and shirt, and stopped abruptly. The skin-to-skin contact was unbearably intimate, and it seemed to surprise them both.

  After an instant of still shock, his fingers dug into her. She could feel the question there: Is this all right?

  In response, she wrapped her arms around his neck. It wasn’t enough merely to touch her lips to his. She needed the reassurance, the weight, of all of him.