In Bed With the Opposition (8 page)

“Then why run?” Ethan asked, unable to tamp down his arched brow.

“If I run, powerful people will have to listen and start stockpiling the necessary vaccines. It’ll draw attention to my concerns.”

“There have got to be easier ways of getting attention than putting yourself through the torture of a campaign.”

The professor eyed Ethan. “I’ve been told you’re a man who knows how to get attention, and you don’t look like you think campaigns are torture.”

Ethan drummed his fingers on his knee as if trying to recall a marching beat. “Oh, hey. Don’t get me wrong. Elections are modern-day gladiator games, where I get to fight in the arena by proxy and slaughter my opponent. I love it. But you’re the one who’d be out there, bloody and beaten, waiting for the mob to give you a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Not me.”

“That’s an interesting analogy. I’d say gladiator games were more dignified than our system,” Professor Kim said, going on to explain all the reasons that running for office would help highlight the issues he cared about. “I wouldn’t put myself or my family through it unless someone of your stature was behind me. We’d have to keep it quiet until I’ve cleared everything with the university, so can I count on your discretion?”

“Naturally,” Ethan said. “But I haven’t said yes.”

“Give it some thought.”

There was no way the professor could afford his normal fee, but Ethan was starting to warm to the idea. It was the first thing that had interested him in a long time. When Grace offered him the job working for Senator Halloway, she’d all but accused him of having sold out—of having abandoned his political passions for cold hard cash. Maybe it
was
time for a change. This would certainly shake things up.

Ethan loved an underdog, he liked Professor Kim, and if he took this job, he could stay right here in Maryland and see if there was anything worth pursuing between him and Grace Santiago.

Not bad for a more permanent solution…

Chapter Eight

Grace’s boss was yelling at her. Again.

“You let the majority leader’s people gut this bill,” Kip Halloway thundered, pounding the huge stack of papers on his desk. “Clearly, he’s on the payroll of Big Pollution!”

Because she’d been sick, work had piled up. She’d had to skip lunch, so her stomach was growling. Add that to the senator’s red-faced temper and Grace should’ve wanted to curl up into fetal position.

But her mood was buoyant.

“
Big Pollution
, sir?” Grace asked, merrily. “Is that a thing now?”

“Don’t snigger at me, young lady.” Grace’s phone rang and she knew it was Ethan, but she dared not answer it when the senator was this cranky. “You march over there and get them to back down.”

“
Me
?” Seriously, what kind of crazy talk was this? It’s not like the majority leader’s staff listened to anything Grace had to say. She was just a special assistant to a senator without presidential ambitions. Worse, she was pretty sure Dale Delmont had poisoned the majority leader against her before he left for the press corps.

“Yes,
you
,” her boss said, offering his arm to the nurse taking his blood pressure. Grace could only imagine how high it was, and when the nurse gave her a cool look, she decided not to argue. She checked her watch—3:30 p.m. Hopefully, the majority leader’s staff would be gone for the day. The holidays were near and there was no earthly reason they should be as conscientious as she was. With luck, she could go home and get a good night’s sleep.

She picked up the phone and prayed no one would answer at the majority leader’s office. Unfortunately, someone did. Sighing, Grace headed over there, balancing her phone against her ear when it rang again. “I’m not ignoring you, Ethan. It’s just crazy over here.”

Ethan dropped his voice, low and sexy. “What are you wearing?”

Grace smiled big. “Stop it.”

“I really liked the strapless bra you wore on Halloween, the one with the little pumpkins on it…”

Grace vividly remembered the way they’d made out and hadn’t realized he’d sneaked a peek at her bra. It was a very distracting thought. She almost walked into the corner of the wall. Grinning goofily, she said, “This isn’t an appropriate workplace conversation, Ethan. I’m on the taxpayers’ dime…”

“What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?” he asked, mercifully changing the subject. “I’ve got two tickets to the party’s annual gala. Wanna be my date?”

Grace tried not to let out a juvenile squeak of excitement. He was asking her to one of the biggest, most glamorous parties of the year. She’d attended a few times as a volunteer, but never as a guest. “I’ll need a fancy dress…”

“Only until midnight, then you’ll just need bare skin,” he replied, smooth and suggestive. “So I’ll see you New Year’s Eve?”

“Yes!” she crowed.

He chuckled a little. Probably at her enthusiasm. Then he said, “I don’t think I can wait that long. What are you doing on Christmas?”

“Um…placing the stockings by the fireplace with care?”

“What if I fly out, spend Christmas Eve with you, then take you back home with me for Christmas Day… My family will like you.”

Holy moly.
Was he actually asking her to come home with him to meet his parents?

This time Grace
did
walk into something.

Or
someone
. The majority leader, to be exact.

Mortified, Grace chirped, “I’m so sorry, sir!”

The majority leader glared.

Meanwhile, Ethan snickered into the phone. “Did you just call me
sir
? I could learn to like that. I could learn to like that a lot…”

“Shut up,” Grace snapped.

The majority leader looked decidedly put out. “Excuse me, young lady?”

“Oh my gosh, not you, sir. I’m talking to someone on the phone. Or, I was, anyway.” Grace ended the call without saying good-bye. Luckily, the majority leader shrugged and brushed past her. He was a busy man with lots of things to do. But just as Grace thought she was in the clear, she heard someone call her name.

“Grace!” Norma Billingsly was on her heels. “You forgot your files.” The senator’s chief of staff resembled a school principal and scolded with just the same tone. “And you nearly plowed over the majority leader.”

Grace fought the urge to dig her toe into the nonexistent dirt. “You saw that, huh…”

“It’s not like you, Grace. Something has you distracted lately.”

Not something.
Someone
, Grace thought with some guilt. Not too much guilt, though. And two hours later, she wasn’t feeling any guilt at all. Just frustration.

As she’d suspected, she didn’t have the authority to get the majority leader’s office to roll back any of the changes. They didn’t take her seriously. If this bill had any chance of passing, Senator Halloway was going to have to take a more active hand in matters. She returned to his office to tell him just that, and found Blain standing by the scheduler’s desk.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said.

They never spoke about the Thanksgiving fiasco, which suited Grace just fine. So when Blain asked her to review the senator’s schedule, she tried to keep things all business. “It’s hard on a man his age. I think you should cancel some of these campaign events and let him focus on legislation.”

Like her environmental bill.

Blain nodded noncommittally, sitting on the edge of the desk. “Say, Grace, what are you doing for New Year’s?”

With all the smugness she could muster—which, at the moment, was quite a lot—Grace said, “I’ve got a date.”

Blain actually blinked, which gratified Grace in every possible way, right down to the tips of her pinched toes.

“Who’s the lucky guy?”

“Ethan Castle,” Grace answered, unable to smother her grin. Truthfully, Ethan made her grin a lot. They’d been calling, e-mailing, or texting every day and Grace couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so happy. And she also couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Blain look so dumbfounded.

“You’re kidding, right? He’s a shark, Grace.”

“So are you.”

“What about that whole song and dance you did about how you were afraid anyone might find out about you two all those years ago? What if he uses that against you?”

Normally, Grace would have chided him for so casually bringing this up at work, but it was almost the holiday and the Hill was practically a ghost town. The snow was really coming down outside and the staffers were gone except for Norma Billingsly, who was in her office with the dark wooden door closed tightly.

So Grace eyed Blain levelly, spoiling for a fight. “Ethan doesn’t know about the pictures. And even if he did, why would he use them?”

“I know his type. He wants something from you.”

Grace tried not to let her satisfaction show. Oh, Ethan wanted something from her. The same thing Grace had been trying to give Blain for years. If he was jealous now, well, too bad. “If Ethan knew about the pictures, he’d be embarrassed by them, too.”

“Get real, Grace. He’s a guy. He’s not going to be embarrassed that someone took pictures of a girl going down—”

“I’ll hit you if you say another word,” Grace hissed.

“Fine. But we’ve got a campaign to run. I don’t want him to unbalance you.”

“Too late.” Grace did feel unbalanced, and it was a euphoric feeling!

Blain furrowed his brow. “I’m not just saying this for Grandpa’s sake. I’m saying it for your sake, too. A lot of opportunities come up during a campaign. This is a time to be focused on work, not your love life. If you let yourself get distracted and miss a chance to get ahead, you’re never going to forgive yourself.”

…

Tinsel and garland. Presents and bows. Santas on every corner. Christmas was here, and the nation’s capital was decked out in pine boughs and colorful lights. Grace was in her glory.

Yet, Molly trudged behind her as they jostled with other shoppers to get into the mall and announced, “I hate this holiday.”

Grace gasped. “How can you hate it? It’s the one time of the year when nobody considers it self-indulgent to browse store windows and eat cookies!”

In answer, Molly pointed at the piece of paper clutched in Grace’s gloved hand. “You don’t
browse
, Grace. You execute
shopping missions
. You’ve categorized every store and color-coded the ones with sales!”

“I’m just making a list and checking it twice. One day you’ll thank me for it.”

Once inside the mall, Molly stomped directly toward the Starbucks. As they waited in line, she asked, “So, this is really it, right? You swear that you’re not going to sit around again waiting for Malibu Ken to get drunk enough on eggnog to grope you under the mistletoe?”

“I’m done with Blain Halloway,” Grace said airily, resisting the urge to stomp on Molly’s Goth-booted toes, and producing a coupon for their beverages instead. “I’m spending the holidays with Ethan. Christmas Eve, anyway. After that, he’s going back to spend Christmas Day with his family. He’s invited me to go with him, but I think my mother would be heartbroken…”

Molly took out a few bucks for a passing Salvation Army Santa then shook her head at Grace. “I knew you’d ruin it.”

“What?”

“You should be meeting him in a seedy hotel and having wild monkey sex with him. Instead, you’ve got him talking about taking you home for the holidays! Your outer good girl has bashed your inner bad girl into submission.”

Oh, Grace wasn’t too sure about that. She’d been the one to demand they take things slow, but now the enforced chastity was killing her. She was constantly dreaming about all those heart-stopping, blood-pulsing, mind-bending things they’d done in law school, and she kept waking up in a fevered sweat.

Grace grabbed her cocoa from the counter and toasted Molly. “Maybe this Christmas I’ll get to be naughty
and
nice.”

…

Christmas vacation meant, among other things, that Grace didn’t have to wake up when the alarm went off. Fumbling around to silence it, she accidentally turned on the radio to some inane morning show. She was super groggy—probably still dreaming, in fact—because she could swear she just heard Dr. Dark Ages announce his candidacy for the US Senate.

Grace snorted with laughter until she came fully awake.

Wow, she must be really stressed about the senator’s campaign to dream that crazy foreteller of germy doom was mounting a primary challenge against her boss. But she was awake now, so why was he still droning on about it on the radio?

Grace bolted upright, reeling in astonishment. No, this couldn’t be right. Something seemed off. The apartment was silent except for Thurgood snoring at the foot of her bed, whiskers twitching. Surely, someone would have called her about this. Why wasn’t her phone ringing?

“Oh crap!” Grace ran to find the cell phone she’d so ceremoniously switched off the night before. Her call log showed three calls from Blain and seven from Ethan. As soon as Grace turned on her phone, it rang. It was Blain and he was shouting.

“Let’s not get worked up,” she said, mostly to calm him down. “Dr. Dark Ages isn’t a serious candidate.”

Blain’s voice nearly cut her with its edge of nasty sarcasm. “Then why is your new boyfriend running his campaign?”

Grace rolled her eyes. “Give me a break. Ethan is a pro. He wouldn’t work for that clown.”

“He would and he is, Grace. Ethan Castle is mounting a primary campaign against Senator Halloway.”

Grace tittered with nervous laughter. No way. Her Ethan? The one she planned to spend the holidays with? “Where’d you get your information?”

“Call him. See if he has the balls to pick up the phone.”

Grace did just that. She called his cell phone. No answer.

She called Ethan’s apartment in Los Angeles. No answer there, either.

She left him a voice mail. No reply.

And in the silence, the blood slowly drained from Grace’s face. It couldn’t be true. Ethan
couldn’t
be working for the enemy. If he was, that would mean that he’d been working her for information right from the start. And he wasn’t that kind of guy, was he?

The awfulness of it started to sink in. He was a politician. He knew how to work people. And he’d worked her just the way Blain had warned her he would. She’d let him do it, too. She’d let down her walls just a little bit and…

Grace remembered how he’d turned down the chance to work on the Halloway campaign. Now she knew the real reason why. It had nothing to do with campaign excitement or even working for Blain Halloway.

She’d been flattering herself to think that he was actually into her. He’d been sizing her up. Waiting for her to tell him something he could use!

Men
, Grace thought bitterly. Other than the senator, she couldn’t trust them. Not her father, not Blain, not Dale, and definitely not Ethan.

Grace launched her slipper across the room. It crashed onto her dresser with a clatter, knocking over several perfume bottles (which she promised herself she would immediately reorder as soon as her temper cooled).

The smash disturbed Thurgood’s nap, and he hissed in protest. Grace felt like hissing, too. Here she’d been fantasizing about putting her hands all over Ethan but now she only wanted to get close enough to choke him!

…

And this
, Ethan thought,
was the downside to working with political neophytes.

He’d packed his stuff, closed up his apartment, and spent seven hours on a plane readying for his big move to Maryland without having any clue that this maelstrom was brewing. The minute he touched ground, his iPad lit up like a Christmas tree and he had more phone messages than he could count.

When Professor Kim asked for discretion, Ethan assumed that went both ways. He never expected the guy to announce his candidacy during a random college presentation on preventing the spread of the common cold.

“Listen,” Ethan snapped at the professor, clutching at his phone while making his way out of the airport. “This never happens again or we’re done. If I’m working on your campaign, you do things my way. That means you ask me before you do
anything
. Got it? From now on, always assume you’re being recorded.
Goddamnit
, I didn’t sign on to a winning campaign, but I didn’t sign up for amateur hour, either.”