Chapter Six

 

There's good and bad things about having no time for yourself. Every two years, Linda gets to put her life on hold. If there's something left after a year, then she gets to press play again. So far, there hasn't been much luck in that department.

At least this time, though, Jim left her at a good stopping point. So there's that, at least. She got to press pause on her life, and in that time, whatever ache that's there can go away. Easy as can be.

She got along without him very well. Quite well indeed. Except when she smelled the pine-scented air freshener in her car. It reminded her of his body wash. Sharp and refreshing, a startlingly clean smell.

She couldn't avoid it as well as she would like. She should have gotten rid of the air freshener. Replaced it with cinnamon flavor, or birthday cake, or tropical fruit, or anything else but pine.

But she didn't. She had too many other things to worry about with her time. Shopping for an air freshener wasn't one of the things that she could worry about. Not in a rental car. Not when she'd just be leaving to go on the campaign trail proper come January.

She shivered against the cold and turned up the heat. It came out readily and only blew that pine scent stronger into her face. She closed her eyes and opened them again.

There was a solution to the problem. There was always a solution. She missed Jim. She could call him up. But then she'd have to face the fact that he left her. It wasn't a mutual decision; it wasn't a fact of her job that she was currently without any sort of companionship.

She closes her eyes. There was another solution, of course. Some people in politics have good sense. Not many, and none have enough to be able to go without her services.

But some of them have the good sense to fuck their wives instead of their mistresses. Others, less so.

Still others, somewhere in between, know how to keep their affairs quiet and keep them from attaching strings. Which is exactly what Eric Lang had done.

He'd never been capable of keeping anything a secret from her. He was a terrible liar, and it was honestly a surprise that she'd managed to get him into Congress at all. 'Moral Majority' her ass.

Nor, in spite of his strict promises of secrecy, had he been able to cover up the apparently quite wild sex parties that he frequented.

Linda frowns. She's not the sort of woman to go to one of those. Nor is any man she might be interested in the sort of man to go to one. Right?

Who would go to one of those parties? Nobody that she knew of, not off-hand. Nobody would be caught dead, except maybe Eric Lang. A famously randy man. Womanizer. Couldn't keep his hands off women, and they had a warm relationship with him right back.

Women who weren't Linda Owens, at least, who had on more than one occasion had to make clear the fact that she wasn't particularly interested in what he was offering.

And she still wasn't. But a good fuck would certainly take the edge off. That, by itself, meant nothing. She wasn't going to go picking up guys, not now that she was on TV. She wasn't going to hire someone. That was absurd.

Which left her with precious few options, and the phone number of a man who owed her several favors and somehow managed to have discreet affairs—in spite of having different women every night.

There must be some kind of trick to it. Some kind of system. She could—

Linda pulled into her parking spot and with that shut the thought off by stepping out of the car.

No. She was fine without it. If it was still bothering her by the time she reached her apartment, she could give herself the night off and lay down with no pants on and something that was very much not cable news on the TV until she had completely forgotten about any edge of nervous arousal that had built up.

She hefted her bag onto her shoulder and made it over to the elevator. She had too much work to do to worry about that kind of thing anyways. It would pass in a minute. What on earth kind of rumors could she start that wouldn't stick?

More than that, what kind of rumors could they start that would stick? The question seemed strange to ask. Rumors stick. They're quite good at sticking, surprisingly so.

And yet, the fact was that she had seen rumors come and go about Adam Quinn. Rumors that he was sleeping around on his wife—rumors that, apparently, were true. Rumors that had done little to hurt his public image and apparently hadn't prevented a presidential run in his mind.

And if the preliminary opinion polls meant anything, which they of course did not, then they didn't prevent a presidential run in the minds of the American people, either.

There was a question how Eric Lang managed to find himself with so many women. How he managed to keep it quiet. What that would have done to his campaign, it was impossible to say. Or, it was impossible to say how deep a hole he'd dig for himself.

He'd either lose the race at best, lose his place in politics completely in all likelihood, and very possibly never work again at anything.

There was no question how Adam Quinn managed to get with the women he got with. Nobody who saw him would question it. He was the kind of man who fucked supermodels. He was very much the grown-up version of the high school quarterback who had easy access to all the cheerleaders.

And as far as how he kept it a secret, that much was easy, too. Unlike Congressman Lang, nobody needed to call him up to find out what he did to keep the women quiet.

It was a very easy system indeed: He didn't.