Chapter Seven

 

It's been three weeks since Adam Quinn has gotten laid. Not so much a choice, or even a result of striking out. Just a fact. A result of his other choices. No need to call someone and make it happen. No need to put much effort into it. They'd come to him, or they wouldn't.

Only, he hadn't been in a position for women to come to him, and only now were his teeth starting to feel on edge. Now that he'd been working nonstop for almost eight years to make the presidency happen, it was finally moving, and it was moving fast, and he was moving along with it.

Which should have been fine. It was fine. And now that it was all paying off, everything was moving so fast that there wasn't time for much else. The extra time he did have, what little of it he had, he had to spend on running his business.

As much as it might seem easy to do both—it seemed that so many people thought that running a nearly trillion-dollar-a-year-in-cash-flow business was as easy as cake—it was proving to take up all of the twenty hours a day he had to spend.

And try as he might to get over it, the lack of relief was starting to frustrate him more than it probably should have.

Adam laid his head back. There were options. There were always options. But you don't play before you're done with your work. You don't eat your dessert before you finish dinner.

There were three things that he needed to get done with the rest of his day. First, he had to send out a memo to his campaign staff. Delaney's idea, which was interesting. Linda seemed upset that she hadn't thought of it herself.

How do you start a rumor? Well, there's a simple way to do it. First, you give information to someone who is just dying to tell someone else. A campaign staffer.

You don't even have to be behind the leak on purpose, not if you know that they'll do it all for you. And, as it happens, that's exactly what they were planning on doing.

Of course, there was one problem, and that was identifying the leak. Tom had a talent for that. He could almost smell weakness in someone. It was fascinating. When he needed someone else to do his dirty work, he'd find them.

When he needed a snitch, he could find them. But it would take time. Time that they didn't have. So instead, they'd have a good old-fashioned honey pot. Something that would be impossible not to leak.

They'd make it look good, privately giving out information. And then they'd identify a small group by the details that they gave out. A half-dozen get to hear, under the strictest confidence, that he'd been around the block with a model. The other half, one of his campaign staff.

Of course… if he had to name names, he knew who he'd pick. She was a damn attractive woman, that much was clear. Not that he needed Linda Owens, or anyone else on his staff, to decide that he was giving some kind of favorable treatment to women who put out.

But she'd okayed the deal. Okayed it right to his face. So she knew what sort of rumors would start, and she must have known that it was alright. They'd be able to debunk it easily. His whereabouts had been known from the minute he got up to the minute he went to sleep for weeks.

But someone… someone would bite. And then they'd be able to see where the shortest path between two points happened to lie.

That was when the fun would begin.

Adam settled down into a seat and started writing. He'd been composing the emails in his head for a while. A firm, strong denial. A denial of something nobody had accused him of. There was absolutely no evidence that he'd been caught sleeping around with anyone.

Certainly not his campaign manager, and certainly not Miss America. It was completely absurd muckraking, and there was no reason to believe any of it. And if you were to be caught discussing such smut, then you would be fired.

He checked the recipients. Checked the text of the emails for consistency. Then he sent them off and laid his head back. How many reports would come through, exactly? He hoped that his people were honest. That they wouldn't be caught up in something like this.

He'd hired them personally, after all. He'd tried to vet every one. If his staff had as many holes as cheesecloth, then he had some very real soul-searching to do. Serious questions about his own judgment.

But if he had questionable judgment, and if he was unable to find good people, honest people, people who didn't spread rumors, then he'd have found out decades ago. He couldn't have built his empire on the backs of a bunch of desperate liars.

Now he just had to hope that he was good at hiring the right people… only, not good enough. No leaks meant no rumors. They'd have to take the dangerous risk of actually leaking things themselves. And that would be the worst of all available worlds.

Because then, the story wouldn't be 'the untouchable Adam Quinn,' but rather 'Adam Quinn, the man who spreads stories about himself.'

That wasn't the image he needed for himself. He'd built his media persona, his entire media empire, out of muscle and blood and with strong intention. How much of a fool, specifically, would he have to be in order to let himself destroy it?

He stood up. Two more things on the list, and then he could find a way to amuse himself. Twenty minutes, tops. It was a relief to imagine that he would be 'off work' for the night. A relief that he hadn't given himself for quite some time now.

Everyone deserves a night off once in a while. He settles into a dining-room chair to iron out the agenda for the next three days. Two down, one to go.