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“You okay?” Amanda asked, and he realized he’d been silent far too long.
“How do we fix this?”
“Well—” Amanda leaned back in her chair “—we can get them to retract, but I’m not sure we can ‘fix’ what’s really the issue here, Carter.”
“Of course we can fix this. Anything can be fixed.” He knew this for a fact. A lifetime of bribery and extortion, holding the worst of his family at bay like wolves in a storm, had taught him that everyone could be bought and anything worth fixing could be fixed.
Amanda stared at him as if he was something wiggling under a microscope.
“What?”
“Sometimes,” she said, “you look like a different person. You get this expression and it’s like I’ve never seen you before.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Amanda.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you, the mask you wear every damn day slips and the guy underneath it freaks me out a little bit.”
He sighed. Amanda was great, but the frustrated novelist under her brittle public relations/press secretary exterior got a bit old. “What are we going to do about Zoe Madison?” he asked.
“The pregnant lady?” She waved a hand. “I can fix that. I can fix that in my sleep. What’s got me worried is what’s happening with your family. The postponement of your father’s arraignment is hurting us in public opinion. And you didn’t tell me you testified for your mother ten years ago in a criminal case.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, picking up the papers and dumping them in the recycling beside Amanda’s desk.
“Worrying about it is kind of my job, Carter. I need an answer when those questions start coming up again, and they will if you’re going to announce your candidacy for mayor after Christmas.”
The sentence hung there, unanswered.
He was going to do that. That was the plan. The goal.
Yesterday, before his mother’s resurfacing, it seemed like the fruition of years of hard work. The only likely outcome for his life.
Today, it seemed ridiculous. Announcing his candidacy for mayor while his father went to jail, his mother was snooping around in the shadows, and there was a missing ruby kicking around somewhere?
“That is still the plan, right?” Amanda asked.
“Yes,” he said, because he still wanted it.
“Then don’t put your head in the sand. We need a strategy and I need the truth.”
“Our strategy,” he said in a tone designed to remind her that she worked for him, “is that you say ‘no comment.’”
“The public—”
“The attention will die down. It always does. We just need to stay the course.”
“Stay the course?” She watched him dubiously. “This can’t be you talking.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you haven’t backed down from a fight once since taking this office. And now you want to stay the course? You think that’s gonna work?”
“When it stops, if it stops working, we’ll come up with a new strategy.”
Amanda blew out a long breath, said, “You’re the boss,” and leaned back in her chair, kicking her feet up on the desk. “Now,” she said, her eyes alight, “about Zoe Madison. We’ve got three choices. We can issue a statement saying you’ve never seen the girl and you are not the father.”
“Will that work?”
“In time, but in that time, Blackwell’s going to be going through your family’s dirty laundry, of which there seems to be plenty. And sure, we can fight for some retractions, but it’ll be like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.”
“We need a distraction.”
“Exactly. We can dig up a whole bunch of dirt and annihilate her in the press.”
“Annihilate?” he asked, liking the idea.
“But she’s practically picture-perfect. If we go after her, it’ll make us look like baby kitten killers.”
“Okay, what’s our second choice?” he asked, sorry to see annihilation off the table.
“Well, I’ve got an idea, and frankly it should take the heat off your shady family.”
“Good,” he said, ready for anything.
“Don’t be too eager,” she said. “This might hurt a little.” There was something about Amanda’s smile that made him nervous.
Very nervous.
THE PREGNANCY CRAVINGS were not to be messed with.
They were primitive and so strong they could last for days, taking Zoe places no sane woman should go.
She’d learned that the hard way in month three when she’d left the house in need of ice cream and had systematically torn the head off every person that had crossed her path. She’d made a four-year-old cry for accidentally riding her bike over Zoe’s foot.
A four-year-old! Zoe was going to be a great mother.
Now, Zoe stayed home and rode the cravings out like she was tied to the saddle of a runaway horse. Or she called in reinforcements.
“You sure you’re all right?” her mom asked, wrapping one of Zoe’s scarves around her neck. “That thing in the paper—”
“A huge misunderstanding, Mom,” Zoe said, lying through her teeth. Her picture in the paper this morning had been a shocker, and that little trickle of guilt she’d been ignoring all night had turned into a geyser. She was on the front page of the paper and the story made it seem as though Carter O’Neill was one step down from an axe murderer.
Deputy Deadbeat Daddy. It was awful.
Well, some cold, no-nonsense voice in her head whispered, what did you expect, standing on a chair like that?
“The mayor’s office will handle it, I’m sure,” Zoe insisted, wanting her mother out of the house with such force it was hard not to just open the door and stand there, waiting for her to get the hint.
But Mom had brought salsa.
So she was trying to be polite.
“You sure you don’t mind if I take this?” her mom asked, looking down at the green-blue ends of the scarf. “It looks so pretty on you.” It did. It does. It was her favorite scarf, but Mom needed to leave so Zoe could dunk her fresh batch of ginger cookies into the salsa in peace.
There were parts of this pregnancy business that required privacy, and this newfound obsession with ginger cookies and salsa was her own little secret.
“Absolutely, wear it in health. It goes great with your new hair,” Zoe said, and as if cued, her mom smoothed a hand down the back of her new short silver bob.
“It does look good, doesn’t it?” she asked, preening slightly in the mirror beside the door.
Go. Zoe thought. Leave. Please.
“You look much younger,” she said instead.
Her mom beamed, tossing the scarf around her neck with a little flair, and Zoe smiled. “You don’t look like you’re about to be a grandmother, that’s for sure,” she said, feeling tubby next to her mom’s hard-won thinness. Seven years ago, Mom had sworn she wasn’t going to turn fifty in a size fourteen and she hadn’t. She’d put her mind to it and lost twenty-five pounds. But that was Penny Madison for you. Once her mind was made up, that was it. Done. Deal. The weight had no choice but to leave in defeat.
“Okay,” Penny said. “I need to get to work, but I’ll see you tonight? We can go get a new slipcover for that couch.”
“What’s wrong with the scarf?” she asked, pulling on the pretty black fringe of the Spanish-style scarf that was draped over the back of her blue velvet couch. It had been part of a costume from La Bohème adaption she’d done in Houston a few years ago.
“It looks a little trashy, sweetie. We’ll get you something in a nice tweed.”
Zoe didn’t get a chance to say over her dead body, because her mom clasped her hands over Zoe’s face, squeezing her cheeks just a little so that her lips pursed. An old routine her mom refused to let go of, despite the fact that Zoe was thirty-seven and five months pregnant.
You will always be my little girl, Penny was fond of saying. And somehow she always made it sound like a jail sentence.
“Okay,” Zoe said, the words distorted by her squished face. “My last class is over at seven.”
“I’ll pick you up here at seven-thirty,” her mom said, and pecked Zoe’s pursed lips. “Remember,” she said, her eyes flicking over to Zoe’s kitchen counter, where a batch of ginger cookies sat getting cold. “Every pound you gain now is one you’ll have to lose after the baby gets here.”
Was it illegal to punch your mother? Zoe wondered, anger billowing through her. Or merely immoral? Because immoral she had no problem with. She was, after all, a political scandal in the making.
“Bye, honey,” Penny said before Zoe could even curl a fist, and then she was gone. The Craving-Goddess-turned-nightmare walked out the door, Zoe’s favorite scarf trailing behind her.
“Oh, thank God,” Zoe muttered and turned back to her cookies.
She cranked the lid off the jar of salsa and poured some into a chipped china bowl, because she wasn’t a heathen, and then dunked the nearest cookie into the tomato mixture.
It was still disgusting, not a good fit at all. Salsa required salt, not sugar. Seriously, what possessed her? She eyed the cookie in her hand and dunked it again.
And why couldn’t she stop?
A knock on the door practically shook the windows loose, and she quickly put down the cookie and slid the salsa into her fridge.
Wiping her hands and any stray crumbs from her face, she opened the door.
“Mom—”
But it wasn’t her mom.
It was Carter O’Neill, in a suit and tie, dwarfing her doorway, his hands braced on the frame as if he were holding himself up. Or back.
Lord, he was big. Those muscles filling out his fine gray suit hard to ignore. And so were the blue eyes blazing through the distance between them.
It was Carter, all right. And he was pissed.
He stepped into her apartment without a word and slammed the door shut behind him, turning her spacious apartment into a linen closet.
“We need to talk,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
“TALK?” SHE SQUEAKED, because the look on his face said that what he really needed was to take her out back and chop her into pieces.
He nodded, curt and decisive. His jawline was like the marble bust of a Roman emperor—all he was missing were the laurel leaves in his hair.
The truth was—her secret, hidden truth was—that there was something about a man in a suit. She had a history with men in suits. And this man wore a suit like no one else.
She pulled her faded silk robe tighter around her ballooning waist, as if to compensate.
He didn’t say anything, didn’t even acknowledge that he had in fact barged into her apartment uninvited. He just looked around as if he smelled something far worse than ginger cookies.
Anger trickled down through her spine, but the baby fluttered against her hand as if to say, Hold on a second. He is Deputy Deadbeat Daddy because of you.
“How did you get in here?” she asked. Someone had to buzz him in the main door.
“I helped Tootie Vogler with some groceries.”
“I…ah…guess this is about the newspaper?” she asked.
His blue eyes burned like acid.
“Can I apologize again?” she asked. “I’m really, really sorry.” He didn’t respond, and her apology sat there between them like dog poop on a carpet.
“How…ah…did you find me?”
“Phone book.”
“Right.” Her laugh was awkward, and she wanted to take herself out back and end this misery. “Of course.”
The silence was awful. It pounded between them, pulling her skin tighter, sucking out every molecule of air.
He was terribly out of place in the middle of her chaos, a dark spot, leaking menace like a fog into the center of the glitter and beads, the embroidered silk and pillows.
“Would you like to sit down?” she asked, pulling a bunch of pointe shoes and one of her more salvageable tutus off the pink-and-green watermelon chair. It was this chair or the velvet couch, with the much-maligned scarf.
His sharp blue eyes made her so nervous, so aware of the frivolity of her home, that she actually patted the seat in enticement.
Carter O’Neill, the cold fish, didn’t even crack a smile.
