Extreme Exposure

by Pamela Clare

  “I’m happy to hear that. Thanks, Janice.” Kara helped Connor the rest of the way into his coat, knelt down, and zipped it. She kissed him on his tiny nose. “I’m so happy to see you!”

  He reached for his lunch box, while Kara took the papers and drawings from the top shelf of his cubby and looked through them. “What a nice butterfly! I love its pretty blue wings.”

  “There’s a permission slip there I need you to sign. The Friday after next, we’re taking the four- and five-year-olds on a field trip to the museum to see the dinosaurs.”

  “That sounds like fun, doesn’t it, Connor? You love dinosaurs.”

  Connor looked up at her, his little mouth curving into a smile.

  Janice lifted tiny chairs onto the newly cleaned tables. “We need parents to help chaperone, and as you work so close by, I was hoping you could be one of them.”

  “Well, I . . .” Kara glanced at the permission slip. She would love to come along, to spend a part of her day with her son and other children, but Tom would never give her time off for that. “I don’t know. I save all my personal time to use when Connor is sick.”

  Janice gave Kara a look that said she heard excuses like this from all the parents and had little respect for them. “Well, see what you can work out. We can’t take the trip without chaperones, and so far only one parent has signed on.”

  Kara took a breath and fought back a sense of overwhelm. “I’ll let you know. Are you ready, pumpkin?”

  The look on Connor’s face said he’d been ready an hour ago.

  KARA RINSED the shampoo from Connor’s hair with a pitcher full of bathwater, then grabbed a towel and wiped water from his eyes. “There you go—no more sea slugs or slimy snails in your hair.”

  This was her favorite time of day. Dinner was over, the dishes were done, and she had uninterrupted time to spend with her son.

  She’d made spaghetti—his favorite—then listened as he’d told her about the tower he’d built with blocks and how it had been the tallest tower ever. Her heart had ached to think she hadn’t been there to see it.

  The tallest tower ever.

  “Draw me a picture!” Connor smiled up at her from beneath a tousle of wet, blond hair.

  “Okey-dokey.” Kara grabbed the can of generic shaving cream she kept just for this purpose and shook it. “What do you want this time?”

  “A bunny rabbit.”

  “One bunny rabbit coming right up.” She drew a circle on the tile wall with shaving cream and made a little triangle nose and two big eyes. Then she shook the can again and added long whiskers and two big, floppy ears. It wasn’t Monet, but it would do.

  Connor giggled and stood up, sloshing a wave of water over the edge of the tub and into Kara’s lap. She never escaped bath time without getting soaked.

  Connor was smearing the shaving cream across the tile when the phone rang. Kara didn’t want to leave Connor alone in the tub, nor did she particularly want to talk to anyone, so she let the call ring through to the answering machine. Connor had completely smudged her rabbit and transferred most of the shaving cream onto his belly by the time the machine picked up.

  Kara scooped up a bit of the cream with her finger and dotted it on her chin. “Do you like Mommy’s beard?”

  Connor reached out, brushed it from her chin, and placed it on his own, a mischievous smile on his face.

  “You stole my beard!”

  It was then she heard the voice. Her heart stopped. She had expected it to be a telemarketer.

  “Hi, Kara, it’s Reece—Reece Sheridan. I was just calling to see—”

  Kara couldn’t hear because Connor was laughing and chattering about her beard. She stood and listened. Was he asking her out? After everything she’d said to him?

  “I thought you might enjoy it. If you’re interested, give me a call.”

  She made a mad dash for the kitchen and grabbed the phone just as he finished leaving his number. “Hello?”

  “Kara?”

  Kara tried to act like her stomach hadn’t just tied itself in knots. “Senator Sheridan?”

  “Call me Reece, please. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “I’m just giving Connor a bath.”

  “Should I call back later?”

  Kara glanced down the hall toward the bathroom, where Connor was humming to himself. He was old enough to be left alone for a short time. “No, I can take a few minutes.”

  “How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m . . .” What should she say? That she was mortified? That she couldn’t believe he was calling? That she’d thought about him constantly since Friday? “I’m fine. And you?”

  “I’m doing well, thanks. Still at the Capitol.”

  “Late night?”

  “Yeah. I’m introducing my last bill for the session tomorrow.” He paused. “I was wondering if you’d let me take you to dinner—perhaps a trip up to Boulder?”

  “Uh . . .” A thousand emotions raced through Kara’s head—disbelief, excitement, doubt, fear. “I don’t know.”

  “Is the People’s Republic of Boulder too granola for you?”

  Kara laughed in spite of herself. “No, I like Boulder. It’s just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “Well, I’m a journalist, and you’re a senator.” Way to state the obvious, McMillan.

  “I’ll try not to hold it against either of us.”

  Fragmented thoughts chased one another through Kara’s mind. There were lots of reasons she should say no, good reasons, reasons that made sense both personally and professionally. “Really, we . . . I shouldn’t.”

  “Was it something I said?”

  The self-deprecating tone of his voice and the ridiculousness of his words made her smile. He was letting her off the hook. “No, it was something I said. I can’t imagine why you’d ever want to talk to me again. I called your sister a bimbo. I’m sorry.”

  “Make it up to me by having dinner with me.”

  “I think that’s a bad idea.”

  “Why, Kara?” This time his voice was sincere.

  Because I find you irresistibly sexy. Because you make me feel things I haven’t felt for a very long time. Because I’m afraid what will happen if I start to care about a man like you.

  Was Holly right about her?

  I think you were so hurt by that S.O.B. you’re afraid to spend time with any man who might actually turn you on.

  Kara couldn’t let Galen define her life forever. “We’d have to agree not to discuss our work.”

  “Darling, work is going to be the last thing on my mind. Would this Friday work?”

  Momentarily speechless, she felt her heart literally skip a beat. “Friday would be fine.”

  “I’ll pick you up at 6:30.”

  “Okay, 6:30.”

  She said good-bye, hung up the phone, and wondered if she’d just done something incredibly stupid. A date with Reece Sheridan? She hurried back to pull Connor from the tub.

  She was so distracted as she got him ready for bed that she forgot to have him brush his teeth until he reminded her and her tongue got tangled a dozen times while reading Fox in Sox. Finally, she tucked the blanket under his chin. He was drowsy, his eyelids heavy.

  “Mommy, will you be late tomorrow?”

  Kara sat down beside him on the bed and stroked his downy hair. She savored the smell of baby shampoo. “I don’t know. I’ll try very hard not to be late. I love you, and I want to be with you as soon as I can every day.”

  “If I had a daddy, would he pick me up so I didn’t have to be last?”

  Kara felt a pricking behind her eyes and swallowed. How could she tell him that he did have a daddy, that his daddy lived in the same town but didn’t want to have anything to do with him? “Maybe, but daddies have to work, too.”

  “Will you come with us to see the dinosaurs?”

  “Yes, pumpkin.” She vowed silently to work it out somehow. She bent down and kissed the baby-softness of his cheek. �
�Sweet dreams.”

  She quietly slipped out of Connor’s room and into her own, where she took off her still-damp sweat pants and sweatshirt and slid into her nightgown and bathrobe. Then she stepped into the bathroom and began to brush her teeth.

  She could lie. She could simply tell Tom she had an interview that morning. There’s no way he’d know she was chaperoning a preschool field trip instead.

  But she didn’t want to do that. She was in the business of telling the truth—that’s what being a journalist was all about. Lying to her editor didn’t seem right. Yet if she told Tom the truth, he would surely begrudge her the time.

  Though Tom knew she put in more than forty hours a week, he’d never really accepted the fact that she was a mother and needed to leave work to pick her son up from day care every evening by six. He’d never actually verbalized it, but Kara knew he felt motherhood had compromised her as a reporter. His idea of a good journalist was someone who routinely worked until 1 A.M. and had no personal life to interfere with the job.

  Not that Tom was a complete jerk. He put as many demands on himself as he did his staff, and he knew the Denver metro area like no one else. A consummate journalist, he’d taught Kara the ropes and encouraged and berated her until she’d found her investigative legs and a coveted spot on the I-team, the paper’s investigative team. The result was a slew of state and national journalism awards with her name on them.

  She’d never been able to explain it to anyone—had never even tried to explain it to Tom—but she’d fallen in love with her baby from the moment she’d learned she was pregnant. And though she hadn’t enjoyed the constant fatigue and nausea that went with pregnancy, she’d cherished the thought that someone new, some little person, was growing inside her.

  For a time, her condition had been her special secret. She’d hidden it from everyone at the paper—everyone except Holly, who’d found her sick in the bathroom and had guessed immediately—until she was five months along and Tom had finally noticed the growing bulge of her belly.

  He hadn’t taken it well. Though he tried hard to act like a feminist, his idea of liberation was acknowledging every woman’s inalienable right to work long hours and to have sex with him. He seemed to think pregnancy and motherhood were an extreme inconvenience, some primitive biological reaction women ought to have evolved beyond by now.

  Kara had worked hard throughout her pregnancy, had pushed herself to prove to him she could still do her job. There was no reason she couldn’t both raise a child and continue to be one of the top journalists in the state. Lots of men combined parenthood with successful careers. Why couldn’t she do the same?

  She’d gone into labor at her desk and had finished her story before driving herself to the hospital. She’d given birth alone, with a nurse whose name she didn’t know holding her hand. When she’d finally pushed her baby out in a rush of fiery pain and held him in her arms, she’d discovered that she loved him far more than she could possibly have imagined.

  Tom had always told her the true job of the journalist was to make the world safe for the future by shining a light into dark corners. Connor’s birth had put a face on that future.

  Kara rinsed her mouth and toothbrush, pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and felt the urge to talk with her mom. Besides, she needed to make certain her mother could baby-sit Connor on Friday.

  A date with Reece Sheridan. What had she been thinking?

  She walked down the hallway to the kitchen, picked up the phone, dialed, and got her mother’s voicemail. She left a quick message and then went back into the bathroom to wash her face. She had just finished slathering on moisturizer when the phone rang.

  She hurried back to the kitchen and picked up the receiver, sure her mother was calling her back. “Hello.”

  “I frightened you today, and I’m sorry.”

  The whistleblower.

  Kara hit record. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re a nice lady, and I know you’re single and all with a kid, so I didn’t mean to spook you.”

  How did he know so much about her? Kara held back the question. “I read through the documents this afternoon. I saw the photos. Thanks so much for trusting me with this.”

  “Do you understand now why no one can know where you got them?”

  “Absolutely. What you’ve done is very brave, and I would never, ever reveal your identity to anyone.”

  “Not even your boss?”

  “Not even my boss.”

  “That’s good. That’s real good.”

  Kara could tell he was nervous. “There are laws that protect whistleblowers, and there are things we can do to help keep you safe. But I do need you to trust me. I need to know who you are and how I can reach you. And I need to know the name of the company. I can’t do anything unless I know who and what I’m dealing with.”

  “Fair enough. Can you meet me at the same place at the same time on Wednesday?”

  “Yes, I—”

  The phone went dead.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  “I’D LOVE to take Connor Friday night, but I’m going to an overnight retreat at the Dharma Center. It’s a Tantric workshop for singles.” Lily McMillan’s voice sounded tinny coming across the bad cell phone connection.

  Kara rolled her eyes and wondered why she couldn’t have a normal mother like everyone else, someone who would bake cookies, wear an apron, and let her grandson call her Grandma instead of insisting he use her first name. “Tantra for singles? What is that—masturbation for Buddhists?”

  “They prefer to use the term self-pleasuring. Masturbation is such a moralistic word.”

  “So you’re going to go to a workshop on self-pleasuring? Isn’t that something a person’s supposed to practice on their own?” Kara didn’t want to imagine what actually happened at the workshop.

  “Tantra is about more than sex. It’s about channeling sexual energy in a spiritual way. Really, Kara, you need it more than I do. Your second chakra is clogged to overflowing, and it’s throwing your whole mind and body out of sync.”

  Kara had heard this more times than she could count. “Leave my second chakra out of this, Mom. Is there any way to reschedule to the next workshop?”

  “No, honey. I’ve already paid my tuition, and I can’t afford to lose it. I’m sorry.”

  “How expensive is this workshop?”

  Her mother’s voice took on an evasive tone. “It’s being taught by a husband-and-wife team who trained in India.”

  A husband-and-wife team who trained in India. They were probably divorced and hated each other. “Mom, how much?”

  “Well, with vegetarian meals and daily guided meditation it’s twelve hundred.”

  Kara’s jaw dropped. “Twelve hundred dollars to listen to a couple of self-styled gurus talk about masturbation?”

  “I told you—Tantra is more than that.”

  Kara watched the rest of the I-team head off to the conference room and fought a growing sense of frustration. She needed to find someone she could trust to watch Connor, or she needed to cancel her date with Reece. “I’ve got to go, Mom. I-team meeting.”

  “I hope you find a sitter. Would you like me to ask around?”

  “Yeah, that would be great. Thanks. Talk to you later.” Kara hung up, grabbed her files, and hurried off to the conference room, wondering if perhaps she’d been adopted.

  REECE LOOKED through the report Carl Hillman and TexaMent had prepared for him, intrigued. Every year, the company’s Colorado plant burned one hundred thousand tons of coal in its kiln to turn rock into the clinker that, once ground, became cement. This resulted in the release of tons of mercury and other pollutants into the air that were picked up by moisture in the air and dropped into the state’s soil and lakes whenever it rained or snowed.

  But TexaMent’s board wanted to burn old tires as a fuel source instead. Based on the data they had from their plants elsewhere around the country, changing to scrap tires as a fuel sour
ce would reduce air pollution while keeping almost a million tires out of the state’s landfills each year and reducing the need for coal. All TexaMent needed was a change in state law that allowed them to burn tires in a cement kiln.

  The company was being up front about the fact that burning tires would save them millions of dollars each year, as the state paid industry to dispose of waste tires. Instead of spending money to fuel their kiln, they’d be earning money, adding to their bottom line. On the surface it seemed like a mutually beneficial solution to a serious environmental problem.

  So what was the catch? Or was there a catch? Had Reece already grown so jaded that he looked for ulterior motives where there were none? Perhaps. But something about Stanfield left a bad taste in his mouth.

  Reece pored over the EPA data on tire-burning until the columns blurred. He glanced at his watch. It was almost midnight. He’d just finished packing his briefcase when the scent of a woman’s perfume wafted into his office, followed by Alexis Ryan.

  “Working late, I see.” She leaned against the doorjamb to his office, arms crossed to emphasize her artificially enhanced cleavage. Dressed in a fitted gray suit, her bleached-blond hair pulled back in an elegant French braid, she somehow looked as fresh now as she had when he’d passed her in the hall early this morning.

  “What do you want, Alexis?” He slammed his briefcase shut and grabbed his jacket, keys, and cell phone.

  “Are you this rude to all lobbyists, or is it just me?” Her cherry-red lips turned down in a slight pout.

  He strode toward her, reached for the wall beside her, and flicked out his office light. He looked into her blue eyes and smiled. “I’m not being rude, Alexis. I just know you well enough to know you don’t come around unless you want something.”

  She leaned toward him, gave him a better view of her breasts. Her perfume surrounded him like a cloying fog. “I thought we should meet this week to talk about the budget bill.”

  “Let me guess. There are a few expenditures you want to make certain don’t get cut from the prison budget.”