“How have you been, Liz?” he asked, rubbing her arms.
“Good,” Liz said, fighting back tears.
Dutch, too, felt overcome with emotion. And he couldn’t help himself. This used to be his friend. At one time his closest friend. He kissed her on the mouth, and pulled her into his arms.
Max watched with debilitating envy as Dutch embraced her, as Dutch closed his eyes tightly and seemed lost in yesteryear. He was remembering her, Max thought. And why wouldn’t he? She was ten times better looking than that wife of his, was smarter, sharper, and would have been able to handle the DC press corps without batting an eye. And was probably far better in bed, if, as Max suspected, they’d ever been in bed.
Max even wondered if Dutch was regretting his decision. Maybe Dutch, at this moment, was feeling that he had married the wrong woman. If that were true, Max felt, then he could kiss his position in Dutch’s life goodbye for certain. Gina didn’t like him either, but she was a lady about it. She tolerated him because of his history with Dutch.
Liz, on the other hand, hated Max, and wouldn’t tolerate him for a hot second, history or no history. He’d be fired before he could plead his case. She’d turn the tables on him, he knew she would. Because that bitch, he felt, knew how to serve up revenge and serve it up so cold nothing could thaw it. He got her once, would be her mantra, now it was her time.
Dutch, however, had no thought about Max’s concerns. He was too lost in that bygone time as he held Liz; as he remembered how she had his back unlike any other human being ever had. She was a good woman who had gotten a raw deal. And he allowed his then supercharged political ambition to overtake his decency and didn’t fight to keep her in his corner. But now it was a question of Gina. And he knew he had to make amends.
“Please have a seat,” he said to her when they stopped embracing, his heart hammering as her large breasts pulled back from his chest, his eyes unable to deny how remarkably striking she still appeared.
He turned to Allison and Max, who were staring at him. “Tell Belle I want no disturbances,” he said to Allison.
“Yes, sir,” she said as she began to leave.
“May I speak with you privately, sir?” Max asked.
“No,” Dutch said without preamble, and Max’s heart dropped.
Max glanced at the back of the now-seated Liz Sinclair, certain she was enjoying the beginning of his end, stared one more time at the man he used to love above any other person alive, and then he left too.
Dutch turned and sat, not behind the Resolute Desk, but beside Liz. “It’s so good to see you again,” he said, crossing his legs.
Liz always found him so elegant, with his tall, lean frame, his big, green eyes, his gorgeously expressive face. And already her love for him was beginning to overwhelm her. “You too,” she said, heartfelt.
“I hear you’re going strong still with your consultant business.”
“I’m going anyway.”
“A surprising line of work for you.”
Liz looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“You were my father’s security chief and were considered one of the best experts on domestic surveillance and national security issues around. I would have thought, when you left my administration, you’d go into that line of work. Or at least teach at a university. But to consult movie stars and pro athletes on improving their public image seems an odd choice.”
“Not when you have no choice.” Dutch looked at her. “I was a security risk, remember? And the press had gotten wind of the risk, which meant the world knew too. Hiring a security risk on security issues would have required more courage than most men could afford.”
“You’re no more a security risk than I am.”
“I know that. And you know that. But the buying public doesn’t share our confidence in me.”
“So you did what you had to do?”
“I did.”
Dutch exhaled. It was all his fault and he knew it. But maybe now, by offering her this position, he could make amends. “I’m sure you would love to know the reason I called you here,” he said, deciding to get on with it before his emotions got the best of him.
Liz smiled. “I would say it’s crossed my mind, sure.”
“I want you to come back to the White House.”
This pleased Liz, but she knew how to maintain her cool. “Oh?”
“If it’s possible, yes, I would like that very much.”
“And in what capacity am I to come back?”
“I need you to work on the First Lady’s staff.”
Talk about a blindside. Liz certainly didn’t see this coming. “The First Lady’s staff?” she asked. You have got to be kidding, she wanted to ask.
“Yes. As her executive assistant.”
Liz smiled. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful,” she said, although she meant very much to be ungrateful, “but I don’t quite understand. You expect me to be your wife’s aide?”
“Not her aide, no,” Dutch said. “But her . . .” Dutch uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, looking at Liz. “I’m worried about her and I need somebody I feel I can trust to be around her.”
“To be around her?”
“To protect her, yes,” Dutch said, staring at her.
At first Liz still didn’t get it. Then it all clicked. “Are you saying, if I’m hearing you correctly, that you want me to be her bodyguard?”
Dutch leaned back in his chair. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“But, Dutch,” Liz said, again attempting to smile although she felt anything but joyous, “your wife has Secret Service protection. How in the world could I top that?”
“I’m not talking about that kind of . . . This is the deal, Liz. I know the Secret Service has her back externally. I have no doubt about that. But I want an extra layer of protection around her internally. But, given the sensitivity here, I couldn’t simply contract it out to some firm somewhere. I had to go with what I know. I know you are a security expert. And somebody I can trust.”
“You feel you can trust me? A security risk as they called me?”
“You said it best. That was bullshit. You are the best. I want you to protect my wife.”
Liz hesitated. They used to have a friendship that went so deep that she was amazed by its beauty. Until Max and his minions intervened and sullied it all up. And even after all of that for him to say he still trusted her was huge. And although she dreaded the assignment, it would certainly keep him in her eyesight, and keep her enemy number two (behind Max) in her bull’s eye.
“Why do you feel she needs a second layer of protection? Has there been a breach at Treasury?” Treasury was the department overseeing the Secret Service.
“No,” Dutch said. “There’s no breach. Not on that end. But here, at the White House, in my administration, I’m not so sure.”
This floored Liz. “You mean an internal breach?”
Dutch nodded. “Or at least the makings of one.”
“What happened to make you think that such a thing could be happening? Has she received threats?”
Dutch nodded. “Yes.”
“What kind of threats?”
Dutch hesitated, his heart aching just thinking about it again. “Death threats,” he said.
“And you think from inside the White House?”
“Not all of them. I mean, she’s a smart, self-confident First Lady. She and I both receive our share of death threats. But the ones I’m concerned about seem different. Not to the Secret Service, who handles these matters, but to me.”
This genuinely concerned Liz. And suddenly she wasn’t the woman scorned, or the hoping for another chance maven, but a security expert again. “Different how, Dutch?”
Dutch stood up, went to his desk, unlocked a drawer, pulled out a small stack of letters, and handed them to Liz.
He sat back down and watched her review the letters. “If you read them closely, they aren’t the standard, you should die, or I h
ate your guts kind of nonsense we receive all the time. These letters seem to be personal in a knowledgeable way. They talk about how she reacts when I make love to her--”
He and Liz exchanged glances when he said this. “And how they seem to just hate the fact that I have sex with her. That seems to be the entire point.”
Liz didn’t see it on first blush, but she eventually had to agree. It was subtle, but it was there.
She handed him back his letters and looked at him. “Any suspects?”
“Other than everybody,” Dutch said with a weak smile, although he meant every word, “no.” He tossed the letters back on his desk. Then looked at Liz. “That’s why I need you.”
“Wow,” she said. “You and your wife are really going through the ringer.”
Dutch nodded. “And even that’s an understatement.”
Liz stared at him. “How have you really been, Dutch?” she asked him.
Dutch smiled a kind of drained smile, the lines of age appearing on the sides of his eyes. If there was a better looking man on the face of this earth, Liz had never seen him. “I’m okay. I’m hanging on.”
“In the fishbowl.”
“Right.”
“Well, bud,” Liz said, crossing her legs too, pleased when Dutch’s eyes moved to glance at her rich-toned, shapely, bronzed legs, “you’ve got to do better than that. I don’t like to hear that my friend is just hanging on. We’ve got to improve those odds.”
Dutch considered her. “Am I still your friend, Liz?”
“Of course you are. Was I upset about what happened? Yes. Was I hurt when you didn’t call me, to see about me, of course I was.” She looked at him. “But I understood it.”
“How could you understand something like that?” Dutch snapped. “They railroaded you and I didn’t investigate it harder.”
“How were you going to investigate it? When your Director of National Intelligence tells you I might be a security risk, what are you supposed to do about that? Your number one job is to protect the American people, how could you allow me to remain as your national security advisor? They had no proof, but they had all kinds of innuendo and rumors, possibilities and therefores, and it sounded like a mountain of evidence even to me.”
She looked her friend dead in the eye. “But it was bullshit, Dutch. I would never do anything to embarrass you, or to breach any security. That’s why I never went public with my anger. And believe me, I was offered millions by the tabloids, and even by some of your political enemies, to go public. But I could never do that to you.”
Dutch’s heart rammed against his chest. “I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” he said. She looked at him. “They were coming at me on all sides---”
“I know.”
“Not just my DNI, but my CIA director, FBI director, my entire security apparatus and my political one too. I’d only been president for two years, the mid-terms were coming up, and the pressure was on. I had two wars to deal with, a recalcitrant Congress that was determined to show who really runs this town, and crisis after crisis that kept me in the Situation Room.”
“I know,” Liz agreed.
“But I still should have fought for you.” Dutch looked at her. “Nothing should have kept me from fighting for my friend.” Tears were now in Dutch’s eyes. Liz stood and went to him, her heart ramming too. She leaned down and hugged him, and then moved onto his lap.
“I won’t even ask for your forgiveness,” Dutch said. “Nor your understanding. I just want you to know how sincerely wrong I was. And I know I was wrong.”
Liz smiled weakly and wiped his tears with her thumb. And it was only then, when she touched his face, did his emotion ease and he realized the position she had really just put him in. She was on his lap, his penis was beginning to react beneath her, her sweet scent, her beauty, it could not have been any more inappropriate than this.
And just when he was about to move her off of him, amazed that he would allow himself to get so caught up in a moment that he didn’t stop it before it happened, the door to his office opened, and Gina walked in.
NINE
Although Belle, Dutch’s secretary, had been told by Allison that the president was not to be disturbed, his secretary relied on his other edict too: that his wife never had to be announced when she needed to see him, regardless of whom he was entertaining at the time. So she wasn’t announced, and walked right in.
Gina’s sudden entrance into the Oval Office allowed her to see what was happening before any reactions could take place. She saw this woman, this incredibly attractive, bosomy woman, sitting on her husband’s lap. She saw that this woman’s hand was on her husband’s face. And when Dutch stood her off of him, and the two of them were now standing up, she could see that his midsection had definitely reacted to that woman’s contact.
Gina then closed the door, her eyes unable to stop staring at her husband. Dutch with a woman on his lap? And that woman wasn’t her? It seemed surreal to her, unbelievable even though she had witnessed it with her own two eyes. She knew he used to be a player, Roman and everybody else she knew loved to remind her of that very fact, as if womanizers never really changed their spots. But she knew Dutch. And she knew he would never do something like that to her. But seeing him like this, in an obviously compromised position, made her less sure of him than she’d ever been.
Belle had warned her before she entered that he had company, and she had expected he would be in a meeting of some sort as he usually was, but she never expected this. And suddenly she felt alone, and lost.
Dutch felt as if everything about his life right now seemed upside down. Especially with the press commenting about his child every night as if they had a right, and insinuating that his highly moral wife was somehow unfaithful to him. They were calling Gina unfaithful, when he was always the screw up.
And the thought of it, of the way they were treating her, was eating him alive. But now his inability to stop a scene before it unfolded caused him to mistreat her too; caused him to disrespect her too.
His heart dropped.
“Come here, Gina,” he said to his wife.
Gina hesitated before moving toward Dutch and his companion, her bright brown eyes never once looking at the companion, but staring at Dutch. How could he explain this away, she wondered? Women didn’t just sit in a married man’s lap. And more to the point, a married man didn’t just allow a woman to sit in his lap. What other explanation, she wondered, could there possibly be?
When Gina reached Dutch’s side she fully expected him to pull her in his arms and apologize effusively, or some other such display of remorse and affection, but Dutch didn’t even touch her. He, instead, looked her dead in the eye.
“She was in my lap,” he said, “and I should not have allowed that to happen.”
Yes, it shouldn’t have happened, Gina thought, finding it so obvious that she wondered why he mentioned it. Because she needed to know why did it happen, not just what happened, and who was this woman to begin with.
But she still couldn’t look away from her husband. She still couldn’t look at the woman or the walls or anybody or anything else but her husband. All her life she’d been let down. Every relationship she’d ever had ultimately turned horribly bad. Every one. Not Dutch too, her heart was screaming.
“Let me back up,” Dutch said, surprised by his own sense of ineptitude. “This is Liz Sinclair, babe.”
That name actually sounded familiar to Gina. She looked at Liz. The most obvious thing about the woman was that she was beautiful. Remarkably so. Where Gina’s eyes were big, hers were bigger, her bosom larger, her curves more enticing. She seemed to be more of everything Gina was. And that was why it seemed even more terrifying to Gina. A woman like this, with so much going for her, seemed far more tailor made than she was for a man like Dutch. And this drop dead gorgeous, African bombshell had been sitting on her husband’s lap.
“Liz and I met while I was a businessman in Boston. She was the security chief for my father�
�s company. Max tapped her to work with us on my Senate campaign. And then she was one of my national security assistants during my presidential bid. When I won election, I made her my national security advisor. She left in my second term.”
Gina didn’t know what to say. Not only was this woman great looking, but she had an even longer history with Dutch than Gina had. And was once his national security advisor? Gina began to wonder if she stood a chance against a woman like this Liz Sinclair. It was an irrational thought, she knew, but it did cross her mind.
“We hadn’t seen each other in nearly four years.”
Gina still didn’t get it. “And she just happened to be walking pass the White House and dropped in to say hello?” she asked.
Liz smiled. This woman was sharp herself, she thought.
“No, Gina, I invited her to meet with me.”
Gina looked at Dutch. “Why?”
Dutch exhaled. “Come and have a seat,” he said.
Liz sat down in her own chair as Dutch took Gina and sat her on his lap. Although Liz continued smiling, Gina could see a stormy look in those big eyes of hers.
“I asked Liz to come and work on your staff,” Dutch said to his wife.
Gina looked at him. “Work on my staff? Why would she want to work on my staff?”
“She’s a security expert, Gina.”
“Since she used to be your national security advisor, I assumed she was.”
“Not just national security,” Dutch said as he and Liz exchanged glances, “but security period. She was once chief of security for my father’s firm.”
“Dutch, what does any of this have to do with her working for me?”
Dutch shifted his weight. Gina could feel his penis engorging beneath her. “With this craziness that’s going on in DC, I want you to have some personal protection.”
“Personal protec. . . You mean like a bodyguard?”
“Only until things settle back down.”
“But the Secret Service---”
“Beyond the Secret Service. I need to know that you have an additional layer of protection.”
DUTCH AND GINA: A SCANDAL IS BORN Page 8
