The Scandal and Carter O'Neill (3 page)

Her address on a scrap of paper burned in his pocket, and he wanted nothing more than to go over to Beauregard Town and strangle her. Of course, that wouldn’t do much for his image. Maybe he’d be better off parading her around town and making her tell every single person they met that she’d lied about him.

“He’s calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” Carter said through gritted teeth.

“Actually,” Amanda said, swallowing and standing, as she gathered a stack of papers in her arms, “so are the Houston Chronicle, and the New Orleans Sentinel and—” She tossed the papers on the desk, each one hitting the mahogany with a flat thud like a nail in Carter O’Neill’s coffin. “The real kicker, the pièce de résistance, if you will—”

“Amanda. We don’t need any more theater.”

“Third page in USA Today. They’re all calling you Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.”

He hissed as if burned. And it felt that way; his anger was so hot he had to stand up and walk to the window, looking down on St. Louis Street, quiet and slick with rain.

This was going to be his legacy. He could clean up every neighborhood in this city, but he’d still go to his grave as Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.

He was, at this point, the opposite of Bill Higgins.

Bill Higgins, who came out of retirement last year after the previous administration was finally exposed in its corruption, and who was reelected Mayor-President. It was a quirk of Baton Rouge politics that the Mayor of Baton Rouge was also the President of the Western Baton Rouge Parish, but it hardly mattered. Bill Higgins was king in this city. Hell, in this state.

And Carter wanted to align himself with such a man.

He needed to, if he had any hope of becoming mayor in eighteen months.

But he should have known better. He was an O’Neill, after all—scandal was practically his middle name. He thought that he could keep the dirty part of his life away from the clean part.

But honestly, when had he ever gotten what he wanted?

“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.

“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.

“How about something to eat?” she asked. “I have ginger cookies. I just made them and there’s some salsa in the fridge. Not that you’d want that together, obviously. But I have some chips. Somewhere.”

He tossed the newspaper on the coffee table, carelessly knocking her favorite pig mug onto the rug. Luckily it was empty. She leaned over to pick it up and caught sight of herself, right there on the front page of the paper.

On a chair, a little blurry, but obviously pregnant. And frankly, the look on her face was pretty good, if she did say so herself. It managed to say it all—I loved you, but you hurt me so much that I can never forgive you.

All those acting classes her mother insisted on had really paid off.

Carter cleared his throat.

Right. Matter at hand. Political scandal.

“Are you involved with someone?” he asked.

“Involved?” she asked, yanked sideways by the question.

“Yes. Dating, or—” he heaved a big sigh, as if all this were a distasteful job “—whatever.”

“No,” she said.

“The father?” he asked, gesturing vaguely toward her stomach. “Is he around?”

“How in the world is that any of your business?” she asked, horrified.

“They’re calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” he said. “You kind of made it my business.”

“I know,” she whispered, guilt choking her. “I saw.”

“Papers in Houston, New Orleans and USA Today,” he said. “Did you see those, too?”

She blinked, her stomach in knots. She shook her head.

“All right, then how about you answer my question. The father—”

“Not…ah…” She got lost for a second in the absurdity of this conversation. “Around.”

“That will make things easier.”

Things like disposing of my body? she wondered. “Look, I didn’t know there was a photographer there. Or that any of this would happen.”

“Clearly,” he said, his tone dubious.

“You don’t believe me?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. Or what you thought when you stood on that chair like a child and made up lies about me.”

She gasped. She couldn’t help it, it just came out.

“Don’t you dare,” he whispered, his voice and eyes, everything about him so suddenly menacing that she collapsed backward in the watermelon chair. He was gigantic; his hands could palm her head. He could make mincemeat out of her in a second. Not that she thought he would, but still…

“Don’t pretend for a moment that you are in any way the injured party in this situation. You put us here.” He pointed to the front page of the paper. “And you’re going to do whatever I say to get us out.”

Her eyes narrowed. Whatever he said? Not likely. “I can write a letter to the paper,” she said. “Tell people that I’m off my meds, like you said. That I made it all up. Or we could just tell the truth, that someone paid me a thousand—”

“No,” he said, his laugh not sounding like a laugh at all. “We won’t be telling anyone the truth. Jim Blackwell is all over this like a dog on a bone.”

“So…ah…what are we going to do?” she asked, suddenly light-headed with nerves.

“You,” he said, pointing at her, pinning her to the chair, “are going to say nothing. To anyone. And we—” he waggled his finger between them “—are going to date.”

For a moment, his words didn’t make sense, and when they did she laughed. She laughed so hard she had to put a hand under her belly. And here she thought Carter didn’t have a sense of humor.

“I’m not kidding,” he said, stone-cold serious.

“You’ve got to be!” she cried. “There’s no way in the world anyone is going to believe that I am dating you!”

His face hardened, a cold mask that chilled her from across the room. Cruel and distant, his eyes raked her, pulled off her clothes, her skin.

Got it, she thought, pulling the tutu and mug against her chest as if the pig and the silk might keep her warm against the chill of him. You wouldn’t date me if I was the last woman alive. Message received.

“Then why do this?” she asked, her voice a little shaky.

“Because,” he said, “you’ve made me and this administration a laughingstock and the only way to bring back any legitimacy is to put our heads up and pretend like it was a bump in the road.”

“What road?”

“Our road.”

“We don’t have a road! I stood up on a chair and…” She blinked, shook her head, something awful occurring to her. “People are going to think this baby is yours.”

He stared at her as if she’d grown two heads. “They already do,” he said. “And no one, no matter what we say, or whatever letter you write is going to believe otherwise.”

“So how about we don’t do anything. We lie low—”

“The news crew that’s been following me around all day followed me here. They’re camped out on your front lawn.”

“What?” she cried, whirling in her seat to peer through the light green sheers over her window. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. He was right. A camera crew was loitering right in front of the main entrance to her loft building, smashing the bougainvillea Tootie Vogler had planted last year. This is not good.

“Did they see you come in?” she asked, her voice so high it practically scraped the ceiling.

“They followed me, Zoe.”

“You can leave out the back!” she cried. “Plead the fifth if anyone asks. Just pretend—”

“I’m a public official,” he interrupted. “I can’t lie low, and if this isn’t addressed in some way, the speculation will only grow. And I can’t let that happen,” he said. “I won’t.”

For the first time in the brief twenty-four hours she’d known him, he seemed human. The ice in his blue eyes melted and revealed something vulnerable, as if he had something he cared about and might lose in this whole farce. His job.

“You like your job?” she asked.

He blinked, and after a long moment, he nodded. “I love my job. I have…work I want to do for this city.”

Ah, man, why couldn’t he go on being a jerk? Now she was totally sunk—she couldn’t be responsible for him losing his job.

“So we date?” she asked, still dubious.

He nodded. “We’ll tell people I met you at one of the community center informational meetings. That I fell for your—”

Beauty? Charm? Too-big heart?

“Quirkiness. Your…ah…offbeat sense of humor. We’ll tell them that stunt on the chair was your idea of a joke. Not a good one, but a joke. For a few months, we go on some very public dates. We get our photos taken and then you dump me.”

Dumping him, she liked the sound of that. “What if I was married? Or in a relationship—like you said—”

“I knew you weren’t married,” he said. “But if you were involved in some other more informal relationship, our research might not have—”

“Research?” she interrupted, a cold chill spreading down her arms and across her chest. She stood, a toe shoe falling out of her hands, and she reeled it back in by the ribbon, reluctant to lose any of her armor. “You researched me?”

“Of course.” He sounded as if he researched all of his dates. As if it made perfect sense.

“What exactly do you know?” she asked. “About me.”

“You’re thirty-seven, single.” He arched one of those imperial blond eyebrows. “You were raised by Penny Madison, a single mother who works for the post office. You are—I guess were—a dancer. You recently moved back to Baton Rouge from Houston.” She held her breath, a cold sweat blooming across her back. Was this happening? Did he know? Was her secret in a file somewhere, discussed at a meeting as though it was nothing? A bubble of nausea burned up her throat.

“You teach dance classes to kids and grandparents,” he said, leaving Houston and her secret behind. “And obviously…you’re…ah…pregnant,” he said, gesturing, embarrassed, at her belly, as if she were carrying a Shih Tzu in a dress instead of a baby.

“That’s all?” she asked.

“Is there something more I need to know?” His blue eyes narrowed, sharp as knives.

“No.” She edged around the blue couch to get as far away from him as possible. Unbelievably, she still felt the warmth from his body, like a distant sun. “That’s my life,” she muttered, wondering how something so full could be reduced to a few lines.

It occurred to her she didn’t know anything about him. Not his age, not where he grew up. The lack of knowledge felt lopsided, but it’s not as if it would ever occur to her to have him researched. Vetted.

She didn’t work that way.

She looked at him, the compelling stillness of him, the cool of his eyes and the fine bones of his face. He was like nobility or something, a man removed from the messy realities of the kind of life she lived. Who looked, honestly, pained to be here with her. As if he were barely holding back all the disdain he felt for her.

This wasn’t going to work. There was simply no way anyone would believe they liked each other, desired each other, respected each other—not for a minute.

“I know I made a mistake,” she said. “I’m—” she swallowed and shook her head “—prone to that kind of thing, but look at you. You can barely stand to be here and, frankly, I don’t like you being here. No one is going to believe that we’re in a relationship.”

Carter wiped his face and sat down on the edge of her coffee table. His knees a few inches from her legs, the edge of her silk robe trembled as if trying to get closer. “Look, we go out on a few dates. Get our picture taken. We make it…convincing.”

“Convincing?” she squealed, wondering if that was code for sex. “I’m not sleeping with you.”

He rolled his eyes. “We go to dinner, smile at each other. We hold hands.”

“Hold hands?” She laughed. “Like we’re teenagers? That’s not going to convince anyone.”

His hand, big and warm, stroked the kung fu grip she had on her tutu. His thumb surfed the bumps of her knuckles and his fingers found her pulse, which jackhammered against her skin.

Touch. Warmth. He had calluses on the tips of his fingers, and the abrasion sent little shock waves through her body, waking up the parts of her that were hibernating during her long cold winter. Oh, lord, it had been so long.

Her blood slowed, turned to honey, as desire warmed in her belly.

The mug fell from her hand, thumping onto the carpet.

“I think we can make it work,” he said, pulling his hand away and standing up, crossing to the far side of the room.

Golden sunlight burned through the windows, setting him aglitter. He was truly the most handsome man she’d ever seen, and that was saying something. It wasn’t as though the Houston Ballet Company was filled with trolls.

Awareness and embarrassment buzzed through her, and she bent to pick up Sir Piggy as if the dollar store mug were her most prized possession.

The silence between them hummed, loud and awkward. He watched her, quiet. Waiting. But not smug—if he’d been smug, she would have chucked Sir Piggy right at his head.