Cold Hearted: Bad Boy Romance

by Amy Faye

  Chapter Eighteen

  There was something awful about watching the interns field calls from journalists. Watching them give half-way denials and refuse to answer the questions. The only feeling that Linda could really compare it to was being on a roller coaster, getting to the top, and staring down the first big drop knowing what's about to come but not being able to do anything but go along for the ride.

  Then you hope to hell that the carts don't go flying off the tracks and lift you back out of it. Even then, though, everything moves so fast that you barely have time to react. And that was what was about to happen. Everything up to this point had been like going up the hill.

  Slow, methodical, and with the sure knowledge of what was going to come next. Come eight o'clock, they'd be on every news station for miles. They'd been given a script to read, just about. And everyone gave the sort of 'I don't know' denials that don't keep stories off the news.

  So far, everyone had avoided giving her the phone. That was intentional, but it was only a matter of time before Linda had to respond. Mr. Quinn's response would come later, of course. Adam had to keep himself distant from it, or the eventual denial in the interview with Ellen Holden would either be old news, or would be unbelievable.

  It had to come then. The forceful, real denial. Which meant that he had to weather the storm without talking to anyone for another forty-eight hours. For many men, it wouldn't be any sort of challenge. They did all their talking to the press through intermediaries and surrogates in the first place.

  When you talk to the press through a surrogate, they are basically the same as the candidate coming on television. They get to say everything you believe, they get to project absolute confidence in the candidate and in the campaign.

  On the other hand, when they fuck up, and when they say something that offends half your constituency, you get to claim that they were just saying what they thought, and your opinions don't align at all on that issue.

  It's beautifully easy to stay safe that way.

  Adam Quinn, of course, didn't do any of that. He liked giving the interviews himself. He liked to field phone calls when he could. He liked to do his talks face-to-face, even if it meant that they'd get a cut-up video package of him looking stupid. That sort of media manipulation isn't unknown.

  So for Adam, unlike anyone else, there was a good chance that he wouldn't be able to keep himself from talking to the press without it looking quite conspicuous. Two days might be little enough time, and with the way that Ellen's been advertising, there's some hope that they won't have to worry about anyone asking why he's avoiding anything that could be misconstrued as an interview.

  What worries Linda, though, is when she finds Adam sitting at his desk with a phone in his hand. Not only is he on the phone, but he's clearly on the phone with a reporter, assuring her that Adam Quinn would never be caught dead in a place like that.

  He's trying to hide his voice, and he's toned down his particularly noticeable word choices, but it won't take long for the speculation to begin. He turns and looks at her absently, before turning back to the phone a minute later.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, Miss Owens is, uh. She wants to talk to you. Thanks."

  He hands her the phone and turns back to his computer as if he had never been doing anything.

  "Miss Owens?"

  "Speaking."

  "I'm calling from WXKB for comment on a story we've received from very reliable sources—we'll be running it this evening. We've heard that your candidate was found in some sort of… 'sex party?' Care to comment?"

  "That's absolutely disgusting," Linda answers flatly.

  "Can we quote you on that?"

  "You can. Have a good afternoon, ma'am."

  Linda sets the phone down in the cradle and leans over.

  "Adam? What was that?"

  He looks at her out of the corner of his eyes. Then he shrugs. There's a curious confidence about it. If anyone else were doing it, they might be acting like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. After all, that was the case. He couldn't help himself, the idea of talking to the press was just too tempting.

  But instead, he was acting aloof. Almost blowing her off. Part of her burned at it, and yet another part revved up at the challenge.

  "Don't do it again."

  He shrugged again, a sign that he would absolutely be taking calls. Linda hadn't expected any different. Tom Delaney will be proud when he hears about it, no doubt.

  But right now, it just means another mess to clean up.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Adam Quinn had a reputation as a man who'd never told himself 'no.' It was a reputation that in many ways was well-earned, and yet in many other ways, it could not have been less accurate. There had been a thousand times that he told himself no. A thousand times a day.

  They were just in the less-public parts of his life. And of course, the reputation of being a bit of a playboy had served him well up to this point. Even in politics, it had been serving him well the past few days, getting him impressive press coverage since the very first announcement of his candidacy.

  Of course, there were more than enough people who had asked him to run the past thirty years that he wasn't particularly afraid of anyone suggesting that he wasn't a serious candidate.

  To his great surprise, though, it had happened. Now it was time to be himself a little more. To play to the press corps's fears. It was a magical formula for press coverage that worked just about every time: give them something surprising, then stir the pot a little, and wait for it to bubble over.

  The press will supply their own heat, after all, and they'll boil over at the drop of a hat. It's in their best interests to do so; every time that something exciting happens, ratings go up.

  Every time ratings go up, they get to go back to their shareholders and tell them that they're increasing in popularity. The shareholders and the board give them more money to play with, and then they wait for the next chance to get everyone riled up and watch the cycle continue.

  It made Adam sick to his stomach. Rank dishonesty at its best. In his mind, it was what was wrong with investing. What was wrong with America. Everyone was doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, and they managed to get away with it because there was no other system.

  Well, he was ready to shake things up. If nobody else could sit at the table of a rigged game and try to play straight and honest, then at the very least he could do it. He had the popularity, he had the name recognition, and he had the friends to make sure that he got on long enough.

  The only other thing that he really had to worry about in the end was that a scandal would appear out of thin air that would ruin him before they could recover. There was always a recovery after a scandal, but you had to weather the storm first.

  This would be his first real test. Of course, it was also very nearly the worst thing they could throw at him. That meant very good things for him, if he was actually able to avoid getting hurt too badly.

  Nothing that the press could throw at him after this would stick, not really. Because they'd get themselves out of the accusation, of course. And then everything else would pale in comparison to the time that Adam Quinn didn't go to a sex party in DC.

  It was beautiful in its simplicity, and it was beautiful because the only way to disarm the trap for any of his opponents was to let him go without scandals. Of course, it ignored the very real possibility that he would leak another. And another. And keep himself at the center of a media shitstorm for the next year.

  People are desensitized to things that happen over and over again, and with Adam Quinn, scandals are constant. They blow over quickly, because he doesn't generally do anything wrong.

  There's exactly one exception to that rule. One thing that could ruin him if it got out. One time that he didn't practice self-denial when it counted, and if it bit him in the ass, well… he deserved it.

  And that time was two nights ago.

  There was nothing wrong with Adam Q
uinn, tech mogul, sleeping with his secretary. Nothing wrong with Adam Quinn, philanthropist, fucking his business partners. It didn't even make the news. Not when there were more interesting sexual partners to explore.

  But Linda was a mistake, because Adam Quinn, possible future Democratic nominee for President fucking his campaign manager was something that could hurt him.

  He should have been kicking himself the past two days. He should have been, but he wasn't, and he didn't feel as if it was likely to come on any time soon.

  He settled into the couch beside her. She can't hide the subtle lean into him, though nobody who wasn't paying attention would have noticed. It wasn't anything as obvious as laying her head on her shoulder, so much as body language. Her body telling the room that she liked being close to him.

  Adam pretended not to notice. Tom Delaney didn't pretend not to. Adam took note of it, but didn't respond to that either. Because they were about to watch the firestorm unfold in front of them, and it was going to be glorious. Too glorious to ruin with a conversation that none of them truly wanted to have.

  "Good evening, I'm Ellen Holden, and you're watching Tonight, on CNN. We've got a great line-up of stories for you, but first, breaking news out of Washington. We've all come to expect scandals from Adam Quinn, since he first started his own line of personal computers in the 1980s.

  "Well, the Quinn Labs CEO now has another title to add to his list, and that is Democratic Candidate for President, and with it, we've got a brand new scandal.

  "A source close to the campaign has informed us, under the promise of anonymity, that there's been a shakeup in the campaign after the discovery of Adam's presence at a masked party specifically for the purpose of casual anonymous sexual encounters.

  "Our producers' attempts to reach out to the Quinn campaign for comment were answered with a stock response: 'We don't know anything about such allegations.' Could this be the first signs of trouble for an already rocky political candidacy? What will Mr. Quinn have to say for himself at our interview Thursday? And what could he possibly say for himself that would deflect such a story?"

  Adam's heart raced, pounding in his chest. He kept himself seated, his jaw tensing and un-tensing.

  It was perfect.

  Chapter Twenty

  The office is dark. The summer heat has just begun, but keeping the lights off keeps the room cool, and the only one still there doesn't mind the dark. At least, Adam Quinn thinks he's the only one there. He barely manages to hide his surprise when Tom's gravelly voice pipes up from the door.

  "How'd we do?"

  "What?"

  "The news report. You still feeling good about it?"

  "You know I trust you," Adam answers, not looking away from the screen. "I hired you because you know what you're doing. Better than I do."

  Adam can hear the heavy sound of his footfalls. "That's great to hear. I wish all my clients were as trusting."

  "Most of your clients don't know how to run a Smash TV campaign."

  "Most of my clients don't know what Smash TV is."

  "No, I guess they wouldn't," Adam answers. He shouldn't really be coding. There are guys working for him who are geniuses at this stuff. Guys working for him who are making too much money to be in the trenches were geniuses. The guys working below those guys, those were the ones who wrote code.

  But here he was, digging into an editor. It made Quinn feel a young again. How had he let himself get away from this? What had taken him away from what he was good at and into all this? He knew intrinsically. He was a businessman now, not a code monkey. He made too much money and too much of a difference.

  "What are you doing here, Tom?"

  "I wanted to figure something out."

  Adam closed the line of code and his fingers flew across the keys as he commented in what he'd planned to do next. Nothing was worse than coming back to the code and not having the least idea what the fuck you were doing with it.

  Then he turned. The light from the hall spilled into the room. It didn't quite touch Adam, but it framed Tom in light in a way that he might not have realized when he'd set it up, but Delaney would have been very pleased to discover.

  "Yeah?"

  "You slept with her," he says. It's not particularly an accusation. There's no hurt in his voice, or anything like that.

  "Is that what you came here to say?"

  "I need to know you're not going to let this get in the way of the campaign. I've seen men who were much less controversial than you go down over just this sort of thing."

  "I know what I'm doing."

  "That's what worries me," Tom says softly. "You always know what you're doing. Always five moves ahead."

  "What's your point?"

  "My point is, you're always five moves ahead, and you like situations that get ugly. I don't care what you do with the girl, but don't ruin her, and don't put me in a position where I can't make the campaign work."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Adam couldn't read his face, shrouded in darkness and surrounded by light. Tom Delaney had never been a sentimental man. It was strange to imagine that he might have suddenly grown a heart after all these years. Extremely strange.

  "I don't think I need to say any of this, but if you're really not sure, then I'll lay my cards on the table." He steps out and away from the light, leans against the back of a couch. "My priorities in this campaign are few. I work for money, and it's money you're supplying. There's no problem there. But I have an image to protect, and I'm not going to let that get hurt. I think of you as a friend, but I'm not going down for you."

  "I wouldn't ask you to."

  "You've done worse to better men over women."

  "There's no worry about anything like that, Tom."

  "Is it? Because I think she's taking it to be something."

  Adam frowned. He wasn't wrong, and there wasn't an easy answer. It raised questions he didn't particularly want to answer right now. Questions like what it really meant, if it wasn't what she thought it was. If it meant nothing, then why get so uptight?

  And if it didn't mean nothing… what did that mean?

  "Your concerns are noted, Tom. I'm not going to fuck you over on this. I watch out for my people."

  "And as much as it might surprise some to learn," Tom said, his low natural growl almost tamed by the softness of his voice, "but so do I."

  "Then we're together."

  "We'll see," Tom answers. "Don't work too hard."

  "I've never worked too hard in my life," Adam answers. "I could do a lot more if I wanted to burn myself out."

  In the darkness, with his head no longer framed by light, Adam can almost make out a smile on his usually-dour face. "That's what worries me."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Linda knew instinctively that there was no real reason to be worried. She'd been in worse spots than this before. There were problems that were much bigger than a little campaign-staff fling, and much more likely to get leaked to the press.

  After all, who even knew that she had seen him? Sure, it was the second time, but the first time, she'd been nobody in particular, in a room full of women. The second time, who could have seen? Nobody who would tell anything.

  So why was she so worried about it? There was no chance that anything was going to happen. No leaks to the press, no reason to worry. No reason to think that there might one day be a leak to worry about.

  Even still, though, it didn't stop her from worrying. And why exactly should she stop worrying? What was there to convince her that she wasn't in extreme danger of running into trouble down the line?

  A few vague self-assurances? Firm belief that everything would be fine? How many clients had assured her that there was absolutely nothing to worry about? How many in fact had something to worry about after all, when the chips finally fell?

  Nothing made her any different, when it came down to it, except that if she prepared for the eventuality, she'd be able to deal with it. The first part—the most importa
nt part—of preparing for any story you know can hurt you is to minimize.

  Minimizing damage comes down to three things, and her case would be no different. The only way to assure that Adam—and, Linda had to admit, herself as well—was going to be protected was to treat her own case just like any other.

  First, you make the story as implausible as possible. If nobody believes the story, then it's a non-starter. If the public has doubts, then that's nearly as good. It's all shades of gray, until you figure out how to get away with it.

  Second, you create deniability. That's not the same thing, though it might seem like it is at first blush. An implausible story is one that nobody believes even without knowing the evidence. 'Hitler was a great guy and only wanted the best for the Jewish population,' for example. Right on the face of it, nobody needs to investigate because it's obviously not true.

  Instead, it's closer to finding an alibi for the night of a murder. Sure, there was a reason you wanted the victim dead. It just so happens that in this case, you didn't kill them even though you could have and wanted to. After all, you were at the bar all night, and everyone saw you there.

  The story is believable, but on further inspection, must be untrue.

  Third, and the most important part, is to minimize the effect that it will have when people do believe the story in spite of your best efforts. The last line of defense.

  And the truth was that in Adam's case, this was already done for him. There are a thousand ways to minimize the damage. Desensitization is one of the most effective. Thirty years of the press reporting on the thousands of women that Adam Quinn has slept with mean that one more doesn't hurt him any more than a report of another big win in the tech field. It's expected at this point.

  It would follow her, though. She'd always be the one who fucked her boss, and there would always be a question of whether or not she'd done it before. Whether or not her entire reputation was built on all the men she'd been willing to sleep with.