The Phoenix Campaign (Grace Colton Book 2)

by Heidi Joy Tretheway

  Tomorrow’s the first time he’ll meet Mama Bea, beyond a quick hello at the convention. I’m nervous.

  “I promised. And I think Jared knows I’ll murder him if he finds one more campaign thing to keep him from showing up.”

  ***

  Maybe it’s the pregnancy, maybe it’s the lack of coffee. Either way, I crash early and hard as soon as night falls with my speech for Trey’s school still unfinished.

  September’s chipping away at the humidity of summer so I leave my bedroom windows open to the cool air. When sleep claims me, I’m borne up on a raft of dreams, tossed in the ocean of mixed emotions and circumstances beyond my control.

  Jared, fire in his eyes, demanding that I follow his command.

  A sea of people, faces turned up, watching me expectantly at a podium.

  Secret Service agents in suits, guns bulging beneath their arms.

  The hollow eyes and pockmarked cheeks of the shooter who killed my family.

  A baby, fresh skin perfectly smooth, its chocolate brown eyes so much like Jared’s.

  I wake to hot hands reaching for me, Jared pulling me close to his chest between the sheets, and the scent of him, rich and dark. His hands skate over my breasts that they feel heavy and tender, a sensation that flashes back to my twenty-something self, when I was pregnant with Ethan.

  “It’s the middle of the night. Don’t open your eyes.” Jared’s voice rumbles through his chest and I snuggle closer. He’s home. He brushes a kiss on my cheek and chases the dreams away until morning.

  ***

  “She doesn’t like cursing. Or taking the Lord’s name in vain,” I explain as the Secret Service SUV pulls up to Trey and Mama Bea’s apartment.

  Jared opens the car door for me. “So if I say, ‘Jesus Christ, Grace. Give me one fucking minute,’ that won’t go over well?”

  There’s mischief and light in his eyes as I get out of the car and I wrap my arms around him. I love Playful Jared, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he winks at me and pinches my ass.

  “Under no circumstances will you say that unless you want Mama Bea to punish both of us!”

  “I know a girl who likes a little punishment.” Jared’s voice is a low, dirty growl. “Something to suit her crimes.”

  I’d been up and out of my apartment before Jared woke this morning, a reversal of our usual roles. He sent me more than a few dirty texts today to show his displeasure at not getting me naked immediately after his trip:

  I’ve been thinking about the way you taste for two days.

  I want to dig my fingers into your flesh. Remind you you’re mine.

  I’m going to make you beg for every stroke, and I’ll relish every scream.

  I twist out of Jared’s reach and compose myself as we walk up the steps, glancing sideways as if there are paparazzi in the bushes to catch that ass-pinch. There are none, but it’s a stark reminder that most of the tabloid press wants to know who I was making out with in pictures that went viral.

  So far, they don’t know.

  “Grace! I’m so glad you brought your new gentleman friend,” Mama Bea’s smile is wide. She wraps large arms around me in an embrace that’s warmer than anything I experienced from my biological mother.

  She gives an extra squeeze before releasing me and when Jared puts out his hand to shake, she ignores it and hugs him too. His shoulders pinch at first, but then he relaxes. He hugs her back.

  He’s a good man.

  Trey lopes out of the back bedroom and greets Jared with a strong shake, a bro’s shake. “Glad you could come.”

  It’s their second meeting, though they didn’t have much time to speak at the convention with Jared running point on a million details for Shep.

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  A glance passes between Trey and Jared. It’s a warning—they both know Jared skipped a couple of invitations last week from Mama Bea. She cuts the tension by inviting us to the living room, telling us to sit, bustling around like a good hostess.

  “I brought this for you.” Jared offers a wine gift bag to Mama Bea and she withdraws the bottle of red. “I thought we should celebrate. We’ve been going so hard and fast since the convention, we’ve hardly had time to think straight, much less take a minute and enjoy Grace’s success.”

  “And yours,” Trey adds. “You put Shep one election from the White House. That was some major juggling in the eleventh hour.”

  Jared nods but his mouth is tight. “We made a lot of trades in those last few days. But what’s important is we got here, and we’ve got a ways further to go.”

  Trey eyeballs the label and gives a low whistle. “That’s some nice wine.”

  “Since when do you know about wine?” I ask.

  “Since I made friends with a sommelier.” Trey trips over the word friends and I give him a raised brow, just between us, but he shakes his head slightly to say, Not now.

  Somewhere between the turkey dumplings and the pie, Jared relaxes with my adopted family. Even Trey’s sly ribbing and Mama Bea’s not-too-subtle inquisition don’t throw him off. But when I leave my very expensive wine untouched except for a few tiny sips, he gives me a questioning look.

  “Are you feeling OK?”

  “Fine.” I say as the Secret Service drives us back to my place. He glances at me, then back out the window, so I feel like I have to justify myself. “I’m just tired. The campaign.”

  “You’ve been saying that a lot.” The SUV turns onto my street and enters the underground garage. When both agents are out of the car, he murmurs, “You want me to get a hotel room tonight so you can have some quiet time?”

  “No!” It feels like he’s pulling back and his eye crinkles are absent. “You can stay.”

  “Good. Because I need you. I’ve been thinking of all the things I want to do to you while I’ve been gone. And I want to do them right fucking now.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Electricity buzzes through me as I follow Jared to my front door, Secret Service in our wake.

  Jared flicks on the light and I pass Ethan’s photo in the entry, my routine of touching it holding a different kind of tenderness now that I know that he’s not my only child.

  I could be a mother again.

  The thought knocks me back a step, makes me look at Jared with new eyes. He is a father and he doesn’t even know it.

  Maybe I’m cruel to hold this information back from him, but it’s still so fresh in my mind, it hasn’t knit with the fabric of my reality yet. Jared takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom.

  “Stand here. Close your eyes.”

  I do, and I feel Jared’s warmth as he draws close to my body, as his familiar hands caress my cheek and grasp my neck. They slide lower, between the folds of my jacket and blouse, disrobing me piece by piece.

  I let blindness amplify everything else about the here and now. His hand skims down the back of my legs and he eases my feet out of my heels. I drop a few inches in height.

  His breath skates across my collarbone. I hear the cadence of it catch as he unclasps my bra and lets the lace fall away from my breasts. He eases my panties over my hips, down my legs.

  “So beautiful. So precious and wild.” Jared’s voice aches with need as his hands explore me, across my shoulders, down my ribcage, circling my hips and pulling me against his body. “Grace, you are fucking perfection.”

  His fingertips circle my breasts, then he cups them in his hands, testing their weight. I can feel my nipples harden in response, my breasts heavy and tender.

  I shiver, the electricity crackling in the air as anticipation builds. What will he do to me tonight? Will he take me hard and raw? Or sweet and soft? I can’t gauge his mood just from his voice, so I open my eyes without permission.

  They are voracious.

  The intensity of his focus floors me, arrests me, sets me on fire. His jaw tightens as if he’s a predator, coiled to spring, and I straighten my spine, ready to take whatever’s coming.

 
“I told you to close your eyes,” he growls.

  “I needed to see you, to know what you’re thinking.” I reach for the buttons on his shirt, fumbling to open them and feel his skin, the soft curls and hard planes of his chest.

  “I think you know what I’m thinking. What I want.” Want. The word ripples with meaning, speaking to the taboos I’ve only just started to explore with him. “What do you want?”

  “I want your skin. I want your mouth.” I pull the shirt from his arms and drop it on the floor, then dive for the button on his slacks. I want him naked as quickly as possible, want to skip this foreplay and just do it so I can feel the fullness of Jared inside me.

  “You have all of me, already. For the taking,” Jared says, shedding the rest of his clothes. “But tonight, I need to take you.”

  In a whirl, he spins me facedown on the bed, pulling my hips up high so my ass is in the air. He enters me and my jumbled thoughts unspool as I feel him fill me.

  It clears the clutter.

  Kills the noise.

  Removes the static of the Secret Service and Mama Bea’s inquisition and what’s on our agenda tomorrow and next week.

  But it can’t take away the one true thought that’s become core to who I am in the last twenty-four hours.

  We have a child.

  Jared thrusts, his rhythm increasing in tempo as his breath comes hard. I grasp the pillow in front of me and try to focus, try to relish this moment when I am finally with my lover again. I’m finally whole, and home.

  And yet I am not. Jared’s balls slap against me, our skin smacking together as he finds the deepest place inside me. His cock feels impossibly thick, impossibly hard, and I squeeze my muscles around him as I try to let my orgasm come.

  “Come. Now, sweetheart. I want you to fly.”

  Jared’s hand reaches around me and he flicks my clit, hard and fast, to push me to climax. My skin prickles but my body refuses to go where he leads. I can’t get there. I can’t get high enough to reach that climax, to taste the satisfaction of letting everything go.

  I can’t let it go. We have a child.

  “I can’t. Hold on. Much longer.” Jared grunts with the effort, his hips slamming into mine, his finger working my clit so hard I feel that familiar twinge. But it’s not enough. I can’t reach the climax. I can’t get through the haze of a million questions without answers, a million ways my life will change.

  “Oh, God, Jared, yes!” I yell it, but my heart’s not in it. It’s empty and forced. “Yes!”

  I feel his fingers still and his hips rock harder against me. His body convulses as he climaxes—short, sharp thrusts that tell me he’s coming.

  And then he’s spent.

  And I am a liar, because my climax never came.

  Jared pants as he molds his chest to my back, as he tips us sideways to spoon, as he whispers beautiful, heartbreaking words into my ear.

  They’re not enough. They’re not the words I need to hear.

  It will be OK.

  I want this child.

  I want this child with you.

  As Jared fails to tell me the things I need to hear in this moment, I’ve failed him too. I’ve made him believe I felt something I did not. I don’t know what’s worse—my deception, or the fact that he didn’t even realize I’d faked it.

  Is our connection so superficial that he can’t see that?

  Jared buries his face in my hair, inhaling it, and I shut my eyes tight against the tears.

  ***

  When his breathing evens and deepens, I slide from beneath Jared’s arm and wrap myself in my robe. I pad to the kitchen and start my tea kettle. I already know it’s going to be a restless night, but I don’t know if I can bear it with the man I love so close and so terribly unaware.

  I crack open my laptop and stare at the screen where the speech for Trey’s old high school leers at me, taunting and unfinished.

  I type a few words. I erase them.

  I type a few more and they start to come more easily. They come in phrases, then sentences, then whole paragraphs as my fingers fly over the keyboard.

  Some kind of dam breaks inside me and I write about the pain of losing my husband Seth and son Ethan to a depressed and psychotic gunman who brought three semiautomatic weapons to the Willamette Mall and opened fire.

  Six people down. By the end of the day, three of them dead.

  Seth, the good man, the carpenter who never had a bad word to say about anyone, whose patience ran longer than the Columbia River.

  Ethan, the curious and active little boy, dark hair like mine and blue eyes bright like his father’s.

  I’ve done my mourning, faithfully charted my five stages of grief in journals, and come to terms with what I’ve lost.

  The question is now, what could I gain?

  Vice president of the United States seemed like such an enormous, insane dream two months ago. And now it’s less than two months away from being a real possibility. But a mother? Again? It flies in the face of vice president and makes me wonder if I can do both or if I’ll have to choose.

  “Why are you up?” Jared’s voice startles me and I look up too quickly. Guiltily. He’s in a T-shirt and boxers, his face bearing creases from my pillow.

  “Working on the speech for Trey’s school.”

  “No wonder you’re always tired. It’s almost two a.m. You know we have speechwriters who are paid to do this for you, right?”

  “Give them the hard assignments, then. I have to do this myself.” I push my laptop away from me on the table. “I can’t imagine one of them being able to write what I need to say about this. They just don’t know. They weren’t there.”

  Jared pulls a chair out from the kitchen table, flips it around and straddles it so his arms rest on its back. “But you’ll run it by them, right? Before you speak? We’re getting a lot of media requests for this event and our comms team is going to want to be sure you’re on message.”

  I huff. “This speech isn’t about being on message.”

  “The hell it isn’t. Every speech is about being on message. That’s why we do this. Because in a campaign where you can’t control ninety-eight percent of what happens, you can at least control what’s coming out of your mouth.” Jared’s eyes flash with annoyance.

  It gets my hackles up. This is exactly the kind of controlling behavior that sets me off. I can’t let him get away with it, even at two a.m. “You can’t control what’s coming out of my mouth. You can recommend, but you can’t require. Or have you forgotten that already?”

  “I haven’t forgotten how stubborn you can be.” His hand plunges into his hair and his fingers work over his scalp, then trail back across his stubble. As sexy as that stubble is, right now I don’t want to run my fingers through it.

  I want to wring his pushy, obnoxious neck.

  “You call it stubborn. I call it principled. Potayto, potahto. Even if you sent my speech to your writers to get it processed and focus-grouped and rubber-stamped, I’m not promising I’m going to say what they tell me to.”

  “You’re not a puppet.” Jared’s words snap with sarcasm, echoing my claim from the first week we met.

  “No.”

  “But you’re smart. And you want to be vice president. And you’re my candidate. I want you to win this, but you’ve got to trust me enough that you’ll give me one fucking minute and let me vet your damn speech. You’ve got to, before you spout it off in front of seventeen cameras that are going to slice and dice what you say into soundbites with totally different optics than you intend.”

  “Optics?” I’m seething.

  Jared is silent, just a short, sharp nod.

  “This is what you can do with your fucking optics.” I slam my laptop closed and stalk back to the bedroom, where I grab a pillow and an extra blanket. I walk out to the living room and toss them on the couch. “Don’t you dare speak to me like I’m someone to be managed. I have a mind of my own and you’ve known that from the start. That�
�s the only way that we’re going to be able to do this.”

  Jared looks at the couch, then back at me. “Oh, hell no, we’re not doing this. You will not be the rogue candidate on the most important campaign I’ve ever managed and fuck up Shep’s run at the White House—or your own. I will not let you do that.”

  I cross my arms, anger boiling beneath my skin. “How exactly do you expect to not let me?” I’m taunting him, pushing us both closer to the edge in a fight that could tear us apart.

  “Easy.” Jared stalks back to my bedroom, returning with pants and shoes on, his dress shirt hanging open. He scoops his things into his bag and strides to the door. “I quit. You’re not my candidate anymore.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I can’t wrap my brain around what Jared quitting means, so I cope the same way I got through the aftermath of Seth and Ethan’s murders—I go to work.

  I surprise my Secret Service agents, Mac and Eric, by popping my head out of the door before six a.m. An almost sleepless night has left me dragging, but I resolve to get into the office, get my legislative work done, and head home for a nap by lunchtime.

  “You want coffee? I’ll be ready to go in ten.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Colton, but we can’t accept.” Mac’s bun seems even tighter today.

  “You can’t accept coffee? I’ve got a full pot and I’m not allow—I mean, I’m not going to drink it all.” I appeal to Mac and Eric with a smile, but they stand straight with military precision. “Call it a public service. Don’t let good coffee go to waste. This is Kona peaberry. Smooth and strong.”

  “We can’t accept because we need our hands free,” Eric explains.