SEEING SAM AND RICK, together, knotted my insides with one-hundred-pound string. Was Rick here because he knew me and several voters would be? Did my news about Rose only satisfy him for one night?

Panic flamed my cheeks hotter. He wanted more. I knew it.

From the rage mounting all over Sam’s face, Rick likely wasn’t telling one of his very few lighthearted war stories. Rick wouldn’t confirm everything I told him about Rose. Would he?

I flew toward them then reined in my speed. Both of them were too skilled at reading me like an open book, so I blanked my expression and calmed my erratic breaths. Then I flipped on the smile I reserved for interviews and sidled between them, pushing Sam out of Rick’s personal space. The last thing Belle needed was a brawl in the middle of the literacy center fundraiser.

“Hey, guys,” I said with a chuckle. “The testosterone levels over here have skyrocketed. Let’s take it down a notch to save room for cake, okay?”

“We’re just catching up.” Rick’s arm bumped my shoulder as he clapped Sam on the back. Hard. “Talking about you and everything you’ve been...doing.”

Sam’s chest tightened against my fingertips, the only thing holding him back, and Rick’s obvious innuendo curled my hand into a fist. I caught Sam’s intense blue gaze and shook my head, a plea not to take a swing at a senator in a public place, even if he was a worthless piece of shit.

“How’s Rose doing, Sam? No one’s seen her in a while.”

Rick’s words crawled up the back of my neck on a cockroach’s legs. I shivered against the feeling, at the infinitesimal jolt through Sam’s jaw at the mention of his sister. A kind of pain that had nothing to do with the yellowed bruise over his eye flickered across his face. A private pain, one I had no right to prod with the sharpest of sticks when I’d spilled the news about Rose to Rick.

“She’s not in some kind of trouble...” Rick continued.

Blood raged through my veins with sickening speed, and I whirled around to face him. What the hell was he doing?

His mouth quirked up in a smile aimed directly at me. “Is she?”

Without a word, I swiftly took Rick’s jacket sleeve and tugged him away. My head hammered with a blur of staring faces as we passed them out into the hallway, but I couldn’t let Rick continue to fish for answers about Rose when he had no right to. He already knew. So why rub it in Sam’s face?

I spun Rick into one of the small, side offices and shut the door behind us a little too hard. “Why are you making a spectacle?” My voice sounded low and deadly, a complete stranger’s. I had been back in D.C. for just over three weeks, and already, the city was trying to rot me from the inside out.

Rick crossed his arms and leaned casually against the messy desk behind him. His dress shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and his customary tie was missing as if to better fit in with everyday folks. “You’re the one who dragged me out of there, Paige.”

“You already know where Rose is,” I hissed. “What more do you want? Why are you here?”

“I was invited.” His gray gaze slid down to my chest and lingered several beats past uncomfortable. “Same as you.”

He was trying to intimidate me, to control the situation, but I wouldn’t let him. I’d given him enough control when I handed him my body and he’d given me back a lifetime of guilt. I tipped up my chin and refused to curl in on myself to hide my curves from his probing stare.

“You already have what you want,” I said and lowered my voice when footsteps echoed in the hallway.

“What you gave me is good, don’t get me wrong.” He lifted his hand from the desk and stared at the film of dust coating his fingertips in disgust. “I need more, though. More evidence.”

I glanced at the closed blinds on the window by the door, swallowing my disappointment. Of course he wanted more. It had been naïve to think a single piece of information would make him vanish out of my life forever. More information meant more snooping and lies. If I was going to do that and have a real chance at a Library of Congress job, then I was going to have to explain this whole Rick scenario away to Sam somehow. Based on the murderific way he looked at Rick, he likely wouldn’t forget all about him by the time I got back.

Meaning, I would have to lie to him, the same way I had been lying to everyone, including myself, for the last seven years.

You can’t tell anyone about us, Paige. They won’t understand as well as we do.

I promise.

But lies and half-truths couldn’t build a solid enough foundation to live the rest of my life on. It would crack and become brittle like the floor on which I stood. Plus, I was so, so tired of dishonesty.

“You know what will happen if I don’t get the evidence I need,” Rick said, as if sensing the direction of my thoughts.

I snapped my gaze to him. “Yes, you made that very clear.”

His mouth pinched in a sucks-to-be-you sort of way. The long scar along his chin folded in on itself as he nodded smugly, and it was such a weird, grotesque sight, my barely functioning stomach turned. It was hard to believe I ever found him remotely attractive.

“Maybe it would help if you told me exactly what you were looking for so I’m not stumbling around in the dark quite so much.”

“Rose,” he stated simply.

Okay, was I still drunk or was this conversation going around in circles?

“You already—”

“She knows.” His regal, arrogant exterior fractured with the slight trembling in his mouth when he spat the word ‘she.’ He cleared his throat and brushed imaginary lint from his collar, and my gaze sharpened at that rare loss of composure.

There was something he wasn’t telling me.

“She’s the one who can ruin the Cleary family,” he continued, “but I need solid evidence, like pictures or proof that she’s at drug rehabilitation. Maybe you can visit her.”

“Pretty sure they don’t just let random people by for a visit. It’s not a pet store.”

“Maybe you can go with Sam. You two are together now, so...” He smiled and waved his dusty fingertips at me as if he wanted me to finish that sentence for him.

“He doesn’t know I know where Rose is. He and Riley are very tight-lipped when it comes to her, so I doubt a daytrip is going to happen anytime soon.”

“Are you screwing Sam?”

His words reverberated through me like a slap. “Fuck you, Rick.”

He chuckled and pushed himself off the desk. “The offer’s always open, honey.” He sidled closer, but I refused to shrink away from him. His two dirty fingertips slid up my bare arm toward my shoulder, and a bitter shudder rolled up the twin dust trails behind them. “Just say the word.”

“What we did was wrong,” I said, voice airy because I was trying to breathe through the nausea that multiplied under his touch and the too-sweet smell of his cologne. “The pictures, the sex... It won’t ever happen again.”

Rick’s eyes narrowed. “Why does it sound like you’re blaming me? You’re the one who climbed into my bed...” He leaned in, his fruit punch-infused breath hot on my ear. “Naked.”

“I’m just as much to blame as you, but you could have said no, that it wasn’t right.”

“And continue to watch you prance around in your short shorts and tight T-shirts? Honey, if you wouldn’t have offered when you did, I would have taken it.”

Bile climbed up my throat in one swift wave, and I choked it back down. I wrenched myself out of his grip and threw myself at the door, panting, silently pleading for his spoken words to morph into something tangible. Something real. Something I could use against him.

“So you’ll get me what I want, then?”

No, I wanted to shout. The word perched on the tip of my tongue while I stared at the doorknob. Tears blurred it into a useless silver blob, but I hung on to it anyway, allowing the cool metal to strengthen my resolve. I could still turn this all around on him, but I needed more time. Not just to save my internship, but to save me from the burden of guilt I felt about all of my secrets. To save Her from the hundreds of mistakes her mom made.

“It won’t happen overnight.” My throat, burned with bile and the rest of my tears, made my voice sound like I’d gargled with knives. “Give me time to get Sam to tell me about Rose on his own, and then we’ll go see her.”

“Good.” He rubbed his hands together, the sound filling my head with images of flies with papery wings and scars on their chins. “And remember we’re looking for physical proof , anything incriminating.”

“Not just incriminating against the Clearys?” I narrowed my eyes over my shoulder.

He cleared his throat. “You can look at it however you want to, Paige. Just get me something. I’ll give you two weeks.”

“Fine.” Two weeks? That likely wouldn’t be enough time, but I needed out of here. I turned the knob and shot straight into a muscled wall with a scowl etched into his face a mile deep.

I tensed, not from the ungraceful rebound, but from the immediate angry charge that emanated off Sam. From the thick forearms crossed over his chest and the twin blue eye-bullets zeroed in on Rick, it was hard to tell one way or the other if he’d heard anything over the excited voices carrying down the hallway.

Rick sauntered up behind me, and everything that had just transpired in this room, the truths that had been laid bare, shook an uncontrollable tremble through me with him coming closer.

Sam’s cold gaze flicked to me then back to Rick.

“Thanks for keeping me up to date, Paige. I’ll be in touch.” His voice dripped with a political version of innocence, which didn’t sound innocent at all.

He sidestepped around me in the doorway to face off with Sam. “It was good to see you, Sam, but I’m afraid I can’t stay to catch up with you.” When he angled himself between Sam and the doorframe, he chest-bumped Sam’s shoulder, then clapped his hand there as if to make it look like an accident.

Sam’s arms dropped to his sides, his hands squeezed into fists, body ready to spring until I hissed out a garbled warning.

“Sssst.” It sounded like I was leaking air from the lady balls Charlotte had said I had, but I really, really didn’t.

Rick hiked his dress shirt sleeve farther up his forearm, a cocky grin plastered to his face. “Tell your mom I said hello, Sam.”

Then he walked out, leaving me to deflate in silence.