A kiss and an upgrade from dude to Sam—yep, I was in trouble now.
“Got it,” I said.
Satisfied, she leaped off my lap and ran out of the room at full speed. That seemed to be her only speed.
I turned to Paige, not completely sure I’d really just agreed to be here at five thirty-two in the morning. I expected Paige to have a big grin on her face, like she’d planned the whole thing to see a six-year-old fall in love with me. But her expression was softer, sadder somehow, while she stared after Keisha. When she caught me looking, she cleared her throat.
“You did good,” she said.
“Forty-six books?” I asked.
She nodded. “I think she’s got it bad for you if she wants to share all of them with you.”
“Jealous?”
“Of her reading skills? Yes, I am.”
I kicked Keisha’s chair out of the way, grabbed a leg of Paige’s chair, and dragged her closer, so close our lips nearly touched. Her breath hitched. One of her nipples grazed my arm through her T-shirt, a perfect bud hard enough to cut glass. Her gaze slipped to my mouth, and hers fell open so I could feel her gasps on my chin.
Voices and laughter, most of which sounded like the after-effects of sucking too many helium balloons, drifted from the hallway.
Paige stood. “I better go help. I’ll send all the girls to you, okay?”
“Pretty sure they’ll find me on their own,” I said with a wink.
She snorted then disappeared into the approaching crowd, her dark ponytail swinging.
People wandered into the room, mostly stuffy business-suit types attached to little kids who pulled them in several different directions at once, but mostly toward the cake. Others, old and young, looked around at the books. I didn't think I'd ever been surrounded by so many literary types in my life.
This was Paige's natural environment, though, and she socialized easily with a group of people in the corner. Not like me who was eyeing the cake with the rest of the sugar addicts.
A guy with graying sideburns that matched his suit and pinned-on enthusiasm all over his face walked up to me. Rick Morrissey, friend of my dad’s, and all around asshole. I’d never liked the guy, especially when I’d caught him making out with my mom. That had been...weird. Luckily they hadn’t seen me.
He had the same cutthroat look in his eyes as a used-car salesman, but he dressed better and didn't smell like sweat or breath mints. I would bet half the cake that I wouldn’t like him any more today than all those years ago.
“Sam Cleary,” he said, slapping my back and shaking my hand simultaneously.
I quickly slid my fingers out of his clammy ones. “Rick.”
“What have you been up to? How’s your mom and dad? Is Riley here with you?”
I wanted to tell him he was blocking my view of Paige—of the cake, too—because I’d run out of people skills fast.
"Great turnout, huh?" he said.
"Yeah.” Okay, his hyperactivity was starting to rival Keisha’s but was way less cute.
He gave a bobble-headed nod and glanced around, but let his gaze linger a little too long on the corner where Paige stood talking. Surely he remembered her since she practically grew up at our house, but there was something in his eyes...something I didn’t like.
"Did you come here alone or...?” Rick asked.
What a strange question. It almost sounded like he was hitting on me, but from the way his body was half turned in Paige's direction, I didn't think so. He was fishing for something.
And I would take the bait just to see if he was all worm.
"I'm here with Paige Sullivan," I said, jutting my chin in her direction.
His eyebrows climbed up his forehead. "You’re here...together? Are you...?"
Fucking her? He didn’t even have to finish the question since an arrogant smirk stretched his mouth.
I narrowed in on him with fine-tipped precision. A growled warning linked my mouth to my fists. "Am I what?"
Over his shoulder, Paige turned. The smile that had brightened her face since we came here fell. Her lips and the corners of her eyes pinched themselves into hard lines. The only thing that could rip that smile away, here of all places, had to be Senator Rick.
Which made me want to murder his fucking face.
19
Paige
SEEING SAM AND RICK, together, knotted my insides with one-hundred-pound string. Was Rick here because he knew me and several voters would be? Did my news about Rose only satisfy him for one night?
Panic flamed my cheeks hotter. He wanted more. I knew it.
From the rage mounting all over Sam’s face, Rick likely wasn’t telling one of his very few lighthearted war stories. Rick wouldn’t confirm everything I told him about Rose. Would he?
I flew toward them then reined in my speed. Both of them were too skilled at reading me like an open book, so I blanked my expression and calmed my erratic breaths. Then I flipped on the smile I reserved for interviews and sidled between them, pushing Sam out of Rick’s personal space. The last thing Belle needed was a brawl in the middle of the literacy center fundraiser.
“Hey, guys,” I said with a chuckle. “The testosterone levels over here have skyrocketed. Let’s take it down a notch to save room for cake, okay?”
“We’re just catching up.” Rick’s arm bumped my shoulder as he clapped Sam on the back. Hard. “Talking about you and everything you’ve been...doing.”
Sam’s chest tightened against my fingertips, the only thing holding him back, and Rick’s obvious innuendo curled my hand into a fist. I caught Sam’s intense blue gaze and shook my head, a plea not to take a swing at a senator in a public place, even if he was a worthless piece of shit.
“How’s Rose doing, Sam? No one’s seen her in a while.”
Rick’s words crawled up the back of my neck on a cockroach’s legs. I shivered against the feeling, at the infinitesimal jolt through Sam’s jaw at the mention of his sister. A kind of pain that had nothing to do with the yellowed bruise over his eye flickered across his face. A private pain, one I had no right to prod with the sharpest of sticks when I’d spilled the news about Rose to Rick.
“She’s not in some kind of trouble...” Rick continued.
Blood raged through my veins with sickening speed, and I whirled around to face him. What the hell was he doing?
His mouth quirked up in a smile aimed directly at me. “Is she?”
Without a word, I swiftly took Rick’s jacket sleeve and tugged him away. My head hammered with a blur of staring faces as we passed them out into the hallway, but I couldn’t let Rick continue to fish for answers about Rose when he had no right to. He already knew. So why rub it in Sam’s face?
I spun Rick into one of the small, side offices and shut the door behind us a little too hard. “Why are you making a spectacle?” My voice sounded low and deadly, a complete stranger’s. I had been back in D.C. for just over three weeks, and already, the city was trying to rot me from the inside out.
Rick crossed his arms and leaned casually against the messy desk behind him. His dress shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and his customary tie was missing as if to better fit in with everyday folks. “You’re the one who dragged me out of there, Paige.”
“You already know where Rose is,” I hissed. “What more do you want? Why are you here?”
“I was invited.” His gray gaze slid down to my chest and lingered several beats past uncomfortable. “Same as you.”
He was trying to intimidate me, to control the situation, but I wouldn’t let him. I’d given him enough control when I handed him my body and he’d given me back a lifetime of guilt. I tipped up my chin and refused to curl in on myself to hide my curves from his probing stare.
“You already have what you want,” I said and lowered my voice when footsteps echoed in the hallway.
“What you gave me is good, don’t get me wrong.” He lifted his hand from the desk and stared at the film of dust c
oating his fingertips in disgust. “I need more, though. More evidence.”
I glanced at the closed blinds on the window by the door, swallowing my disappointment. Of course he wanted more. It had been naïve to think a single piece of information would make him vanish out of my life forever. More information meant more snooping and lies. If I was going to do that and have a real chance at a Library of Congress job, then I was going to have to explain this whole Rick scenario away to Sam somehow. Based on the murderific way he looked at Rick, he likely wouldn’t forget all about him by the time I got back.
Meaning, I would have to lie to him, the same way I had been lying to everyone, including myself, for the last seven years.
You can’t tell anyone about us, Paige. They won’t understand as well as we do.
I promise.
But lies and half-truths couldn’t build a solid enough foundation to live the rest of my life on. It would crack and become brittle like the floor on which I stood. Plus, I was so, so tired of dishonesty.
“You know what will happen if I don’t get the evidence I need,” Rick said, as if sensing the direction of my thoughts.
I snapped my gaze to him. “Yes, you made that very clear.”
His mouth pinched in a sucks-to-be-you sort of way. The long scar along his chin folded in on itself as he nodded smugly, and it was such a weird, grotesque sight, my barely functioning stomach turned. It was hard to believe I ever found him remotely attractive.
“Maybe it would help if you told me exactly what you were looking for so I’m not stumbling around in the dark quite so much.”
“Rose,” he stated simply.
Okay, was I still drunk or was this conversation going around in circles?
“You already—”
“She knows.” His regal, arrogant exterior fractured with the slight trembling in his mouth when he spat the word ‘she.’ He cleared his throat and brushed imaginary lint from his collar, and my gaze sharpened at that rare loss of composure.
There was something he wasn’t telling me.
“She’s the one who can ruin the Cleary family,” he continued, “but I need solid evidence, like pictures or proof that she’s at drug rehabilitation. Maybe you can visit her.”
“Pretty sure they don’t just let random people by for a visit. It’s not a pet store.”
“Maybe you can go with Sam. You two are together now, so...” He smiled and waved his dusty fingertips at me as if he wanted me to finish that sentence for him.
“He doesn’t know I know where Rose is. He and Riley are very tight-lipped when it comes to her, so I doubt a daytrip is going to happen anytime soon.”
“Are you screwing Sam?”
His words reverberated through me like a slap. “Fuck you, Rick.”
He chuckled and pushed himself off the desk. “The offer’s always open, honey.” He sidled closer, but I refused to shrink away from him. His two dirty fingertips slid up my bare arm toward my shoulder, and a bitter shudder rolled up the twin dust trails behind them. “Just say the word.”
“What we did was wrong,” I said, voice airy because I was trying to breathe through the nausea that multiplied under his touch and the too-sweet smell of his cologne. “The pictures, the sex... It won’t ever happen again.”
Rick’s eyes narrowed. “Why does it sound like you’re blaming me? You’re the one who climbed into my bed...” He leaned in, his fruit punch-infused breath hot on my ear. “Naked.”
“I’m just as much to blame as you, but you could have said no, that it wasn’t right.”
“And continue to watch you prance around in your short shorts and tight T-shirts? Honey, if you wouldn’t have offered when you did, I would have taken it.”
Bile climbed up my throat in one swift wave, and I choked it back down. I wrenched myself out of his grip and threw myself at the door, panting, silently pleading for his spoken words to morph into something tangible. Something real. Something I could use against him.
“So you’ll get me what I want, then?”
No, I wanted to shout. The word perched on the tip of my tongue while I stared at the doorknob. Tears blurred it into a useless silver blob, but I hung on to it anyway, allowing the cool metal to strengthen my resolve. I could still turn this all around on him, but I needed more time. Not just to save my internship, but to save me from the burden of guilt I felt about all of my secrets. To save Her from the hundreds of mistakes her mom made.
“It won’t happen overnight.” My throat, burned with bile and the rest of my tears, made my voice sound like I’d gargled with knives. “Give me time to get Sam to tell me about Rose on his own, and then we’ll go see her.”
“Good.” He rubbed his hands together, the sound filling my head with images of flies with papery wings and scars on their chins. “And remember we’re looking for physical proof , anything incriminating.”
“Not just incriminating against the Clearys?” I narrowed my eyes over my shoulder.
He cleared his throat. “You can look at it however you want to, Paige. Just get me something. I’ll give you two weeks.”
“Fine.” Two weeks? That likely wouldn’t be enough time, but I needed out of here. I turned the knob and shot straight into a muscled wall with a scowl etched into his face a mile deep.
I tensed, not from the ungraceful rebound, but from the immediate angry charge that emanated off Sam. From the thick forearms crossed over his chest and the twin blue eye-bullets zeroed in on Rick, it was hard to tell one way or the other if he’d heard anything over the excited voices carrying down the hallway.
Rick sauntered up behind me, and everything that had just transpired in this room, the truths that had been laid bare, shook an uncontrollable tremble through me with him coming closer.
Sam’s cold gaze flicked to me then back to Rick.
“Thanks for keeping me up to date, Paige. I’ll be in touch.” His voice dripped with a political version of innocence, which didn’t sound innocent at all.
He sidestepped around me in the doorway to face off with Sam. “It was good to see you, Sam, but I’m afraid I can’t stay to catch up with you.” When he angled himself between Sam and the doorframe, he chest-bumped Sam’s shoulder, then clapped his hand there as if to make it look like an accident.
Sam’s arms dropped to his sides, his hands squeezed into fists, body ready to spring until I hissed out a garbled warning.
“Sssst.” It sounded like I was leaking air from the lady balls Charlotte had said I had, but I really, really didn’t.
Rick hiked his dress shirt sleeve farther up his forearm, a cocky grin plastered to his face. “Tell your mom I said hello, Sam.”
Then he walked out, leaving me to deflate in silence.
20
Paige
ALMOST TWO WEEKS LATER, I sat in the Library of Congress cloakroom smelling my hair, looking at a picture of an empty store, listening in to Charlotte and Nicole’s conversation while Adele’s “Hello” played from my phone, and shoving a chocolate éclair into my mouth. The éclair was for research. Also, I needed to remember to put multi-tasking ninja on my resume.
“You could do a crowdfunding campaign,” Nicole said from her seat on the floor next to me. She leaned against the wall of lockers behind us and hugged her knees to her chest with hands that were only marked with two numbers each: eleven and thirty-four. The rest had been scrubbed off, and I still had no idea what any of them meant. “Other start-up businesses have done it, and some have even done it successfully.”
Charlotte sat on a short bench in front of us, one leg sticking straight out. “I just don’t know about asking people for money, though. Doesn’t that seem...weird?”
“Businesses need capital,” I said, handing her back her phone with my non-chocolatey fingers. “Sometimes you have to rally people so they realize that, but for an all-night bookstore, I know a few people who would get behind it. Myself included.”
“This would be the perfect place for it, too.” Ch
arlotte sighed wistfully at the picture on her phone.
Before the company who had owned it upgraded to a bigger facility, it had been a quirky gift shop with such items as a ‘Ask me how I set feminism back fifty years’ pin and socks covered in cats with laser-beam eyes. Nicole had squealed loudly that she owned a pair exactly like them. It was the feminism pin that had really struck a chord with me.
My time was up, according to Rick, but I hadn’t wormed myself into a trip with Sam to see his sister or revealed any more dirt on the Clearys other than Riley’s strange text about an abandoned warehouse meeting. My next set of actions all came down to what I wanted, and depending on my location, that ebbed and flowed. With Sam, things were as easy as his smile. Warm and comfortable, too, mixed with the riotous pleasure that coursed through my body whenever he touched me, looked at me, anything with me. We hadn’t been physical since—how had he put it?—I fell on his dick with my mouth, because it felt like things were building between us. Not a brick wall but a constant connection to each other’s thoughts and moods. Being close to him, whether figuratively or literally, filled me with a warm, happy buzz.
But here at the LOC, my clothes and hair infused with the rich scent of ink written centuries ago on musty paper and then bound in leather, the history, the ornate architecture, made it that much harder to resist my childhood dreams. It was like a drug to book junkies, and I was so addicted to it, I no longer cared that smelling myself may not be socially acceptable. And yet behind all that in the swatch of hair I had curled around my lips was the smell of that morning’s bacon breakfast.
I grinned in spite of myself. At the end of my internship, I would probably need the name of a good cardiologist.
Did I want to make my parents proud even if it meant using the man I could definitely maybe be falling for in order to appease Rick? What if I didn’t get chosen for the library job even if I did Rick’s bidding? What if I chose Sam, but he didn’t want me when he found out the truth that I was trying to dig up dirt on his family? Could someone like him, so young and fiercely sexy, accept that I had a daughter with Rick?
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