Chapter Seventeen

 

Linda Owens settles into her couch again. It's late. Too late. Any sleep she might be able to get would only make things worse, and besides that, in a few hours, they'll be dropping the equivalent of a fifty megaton nuclear bomb on the unsuspecting news media.

Who could sleep when somewhere out there, Tom Delaney is cackling like a madman over the possibilities that are sitting in front of him? Who could sleep with the question of how Adam's going to snake his way out of it on their mind?

There had been other clients before him who had worries about a scandal of this proportion. They'd done everything they could to fight it. They'd worked their asses off to pretend that it was nothing, and in the end, some of them failed to contain it.

Those candidates crashed and burned, like Icarus too close to the sun. She laid back and stared at the crack in her ceiling, wondering if they were going to ever fix it. It wasn't ruining her life, so she didn't force the issue. But eventually, one day, the crack would turn into something ugly, and then her landlord would have to deal with it or deal with the damages.

Other people had tried to navigate the tangle that she was about to walk into before. She'd done it, too, and like anyone else she had failed.

Adam Quinn gave off an air of absolute confidence. Confidence that had taken him from the sort of kid in high school you would expect to get a C average at Brown—on the back of his father's generous donations, of course—to the sort of man who had school buildings names after him.

The sort of man who gave commencement speeches to schools he didn't even necessarily attend, so they give him honorary degrees to give him an excuse to speak there.

If it were anyone else looking at the mine field and acting as if there were an easy way through it, then Linda would assume that they were crazy or stupid or more likely both.

Somehow, Adam Quinn didn't inspire that sort of worry. Whatever he was, he wasn't crazy, and he wasn't stupid.

Aggressive and dangerous? Sure. Demanding? Definitely. And he took whatever he wanted. He'd wanted her, he'd taken her, and she'd let him. And to top it off, not an un-gifted lover. Her hips still hurt, and she had to wonder how she was going to look walking into the office the next day. Maybe it would be best to get there early so nobody saw.

There was more to it, though. There were plenty of people out there who were all of those things. None who were all of them at the same time, and all of them toward her, but it was not an uncommon list of traits.

Self-made men tended to have a certain bragging nature. They wanted everyone to know just how much of an ass-kicker they were, and they made damn sure that they told as many people as possible.

They were as numerous as the stars and they were about as useless. Adam, on the other hand… he had a way about him. A way that convinced people that he had a handle on things. Which was what upset her so much.

She should have been scared to death. Worried sick over the news about to drop. It should have kept Adam up at night, and Tom Delaney should have been the one pushing hard to release. He was the one who had off-the-wall ideas. Candidates trusted that he knew what he was doing, but they should have apprehensions about it.

Linda wasn't the one with crazy ideas. She was the one with a proven track record. The one who covered up other people's risks and mistakes by being damn careful with the campaign. It wasn't lost on her that for a man running Democrat, Adam Quinn had chosen her because she was, in a completely apolitical way, quite conservative. A voice to be balanced against Delaney's.

She swallowed hard. There was going to be hell to pay if this went sideways. Tom Delaney got a certain amount of leeway with mistakes. He suggested risky options, and they were risks. You knew that things could go sideways when he said them.

She wasn't that kind. She presented the sane options. None of them were bad, or even potentially bad. Because that was her role in the campaign. To avoid risks.

Something in her gut told her that Adam wasn't afraid of risks. If he was, then… well, he shouldn't have run. He had a past that was as colorful as anything. Motley. Then there was the fact that it was impossible to make money without stepping on someone. There were thousands of people whose backs he'd stepped on to get to the top.

Those people should be coming out of the woodwork any day now. There were more than enough and they no doubt had something damning to say about him. There would be one eventually who would say something that would stick, and it would be a rush to figure out how to get it to go.

Instead, though, there was a whole lot of nobody showing up. Nobody even trying to come out as far as she could tell. What caused this?

What was it about him that led to it?

What was it about him that had led her to him?

There was one thing that she knew, now that they'd already slept together: It couldn't happen again.

Because of all the stories out there that could hurt him, that was the one that would ring true, that would damage people deep down. It would remind them of every political scandal of the past twenty years.

A politician fucking his female subordinates? That had already gotten one President impeached. There was no way they could elect someone who had already done it before even becoming President.