The Phoenix Campaign (Grace Colton Book 2)

by Heidi Joy Tretheway

  When morning comes, Sasha slams into my hospital room less than sixty seconds after visiting hours begin. “This is it. It’s time to face the music.”

  “Why? What?” I’m groggy from my restless night, interrupted too often by ridiculously cheerful, chatty nurses.

  “Shep and Jared are outside. They need to talk to you. You need to decide.”

  I sit up, pushing my hands through greasy hair and wincing at the persistent ache on the side of my head. “Right now?”

  “Right here,” Sasha affirms. “Jared’s not taking no for an answer.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “We don’t have a minute,” Jared says as he pushes open my door. I hear a scuffle as Mac and Eric attempt to pull him back out of my room, but Sasha shakes her head at them, a silent order to stand down.

  Shep enters the room behind Jared, his dark eyes aged by heavy circles. He probably slept as little as I did.

  “You couldn’t call me back? Not even for one fucking minute?” Jared’s words attack me and I shrink back into my pillow.

  “Give her a break,” Sasha warns.

  He sees my phone, laptop, and the stack of gossip magazines on the bedside table. “I’m counting at least two ways you could have contacted me. Since when is she in and I’m out?” He whips a glance at Sasha.

  That sets me truly on edge. “Since you stormed out of my hotel room in New York.”

  “Things changed.” His nostrils flare with annoyance.

  “Why? Because of Shep’s press conference I’m supposed to forget how you treated me?”

  “No, because you’re hurt and I care about you and you won’t let me anywhere near you.”

  Shep steps up to my bedside and shifts the energy in the room. “I think we all need to calm down here. Can you do that, Jared? Or do you want to take a breather?”

  Shep’s gentle question is laced with a threat. Either Jared chills out, or Shep’s going to throw him out. And no matter how keen Jared is to fight back against Sasha, he knows he’s outgunned against Shep.

  “I’m fine,” he grits out, and crosses my room to look out the window. His rigid posture tells me he’s fuming.

  “How’s your head?” Shep asks me, his face full of concern.

  “Fine. I’m sorry I messed up your press conference.”

  That draws a good chuckle from him. “Messed it up? Because I was having so much fun getting my past dragged out in public?” His sarcasm lightens my heart. “Don’t give it another thought.”

  I drag in a halting breath. “Are you going to replace me?”

  “It’s your decision,” Shep says quietly. “Do you want Jared and Sasha to give us a moment alone so we can talk?”

  Jared whirls around from the window. “You’re going to cut me out of this again? When we don’t even know what’s fucking wrong with you?”

  Sasha and Shep exchange glances and Jared doesn’t miss it. Oh, God. This is going to get ugly. I immediately realize that Sasha’s updated Shep on what’s really happening with me, but Jared has no clue.

  And being out of control is the worst way for him to be.

  “I’m going to ask you once more,” Shep says to Jared, his voice dangerously low. “This is about Grace. Not you. Do you want to step outside and take a breather?”

  “No.” Jared’s low rumble is full of hurt.

  Shep turns to me. “It’s up to you. Do you want to speak in private?”

  I look at Jared and his eyes are pleading. Don’t shut me out.

  Shep’s offered me a get-out-of-jail-free card, but I can’t take it. I can’t go one more minute with him not knowing.

  “Come here.” I beckon Jared to my bedside. Sasha and Shep take a step back; they know what’s coming. Jared stops a couple feet short of the rail on my bed. “Can you … can you hold my hand?”

  My plea softens his face and he steps closer, carefully lifting my hand and avoiding the IV tube in the back of it. He holds me like I’m fragile. Like I’m precious to him.

  And my heart soars. This will be OK. The truth will set me free.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  His dark eyes go wide, his face frozen in surprise. “You’re … really?” His tone is disbelieving. And I’m suddenly fearful. Does he blame me? Does he hate me for this?

  I nod.

  “How—how long have you known?” Jared whirls around, looking from Shep to Sasha and seeing confirmation in their eyes. He turns back to me, his expression darkening. “And they knew? You told them before you told me?”

  I blink back tears. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  “You didn’t trust me enough to tell me?” Bitterness creeps into his voice. “After everything, you couldn’t even….”

  I see the angry set in his jaw and I try to speak, to apologize, but my mouth is full of bile and regret. “I couldn’t—”

  “Stop. Don’t make excuses.” His lip curls, a nasty grimace. “I’ve shared everything I am with you. I’ve given you more than you even know, sacrificed my future for you. And you couldn’t trust me with this.” He drops my hand. “Are you even sure I’m the father?”

  The question lands like a blow to my gut and I convulse, wrapping my arms around myself for protection. Shep moves between us, his dark eyes fierce and angry with Jared. “How dare you?”

  “How dare I what?” Jared flings back, his composure disintegrating. “How dare I ask a simple question when I haven’t been getting a straight answer from her for weeks or months?”

  The beep on the monitors speeds up. Whooshing fills my ears and my vision blurs.

  “Think hard,” Shep says, menace in his voice as he steps toward Jared. “Why do you think Grace didn’t tell you sooner? Because she couldn’t trust how you’d react. And right now, you’re giving her every reason not to trust you.”

  “I don’t trust her.” He jabs his finger in my direction, his voice tight with fury. Our eyes connect and I see him soften for a moment, regret and hurt mixed with his anger. His breath hitches. “I love you, Grace. I let you into my heart. But you cut me out even when you let them in. What do you think that does to me?”

  Shep takes another step toward Jared, resting a steadying hand on Jared’s shoulder. “Take that breather now.” They stare at each other and Sasha and I hold our collective breaths. “Before you say another word, think carefully. I failed my child. I’m not going to let you fail yours.”

  Jared spins away from Shep, mistrust radiating from him. He backs toward the door, watching us as if we’re a pack of wolves closing in on him. “You all knew. And you kept it from me.”

  Jared’s eyes dart around the room and I ache for him, searching for an appeal to somehow appease him. He slams out of the room before I can say a word.

  ***

  Undermined by Lauren and my mother, outgunned by Jackson and Sharp, and now abandoned by Jared, I’m as down as I can be. I blow my nose on a scratchy tissue and cower in the quiet of my hospital room while Sasha and Shep are in whispered conference by the windows.

  They’ll replace me. I know it.

  They finally break from their sidebar and flank my bed. I search their expressions for pity, but in Shep’s eyes I find regret.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  I bow my head, anticipating the verdict. “I understand.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Shep says quietly. He pulls the doctor’s stool to my bedside so he can sit at eye level with me. “This isn’t just about you and Jared and your baby. It’s also about my child.”

  I sniff and choke back the tears. “You think we’re done? That your child will end our campaign? Because I’m pretty sure when my news comes out it will be far worse.”

  Shep shakes his head. “No. For once, this isn’t about what the public thinks. This is about Jared. I’ve hurt him the worst way you can hurt a person. And I don’t think we can recover from it.”

  An earthquake shakes my heart. Shakes what I thought I knew about Shep. “You what?”

&
nbsp; He bows his head. “I need you to know this, and I’m trusting you with my secret because you’ve trusted me with yours. I need you to understand that I did what I thought was best. But I was young and stupid and too ambitious for my own good.”

  The pieces start clicking into place, faster that Shep can get the words out. My mouth drops open but no words come.

  “I left Jared’s mother.”

  “You—?”

  “I left her. Pregnant, and except for her mother, alone. I still had my senior year in college to get through. I had my whole life ahead of me, with plans to leave Kimberling City and Springfield and make a name for myself in politics. A baby, so young, was never part of the plan.”

  The conviction in Shep’s voice unravels too many mysteries at once and my mind spins back to all of the clues that add up to this truth.

  Jared and Shep’s crinkling brown eyes.

  Their deep voices.

  Jared’s eleventh-hour scholarship for grad school.

  The fact that Shep hand-picked Jared for his first campaign. That he made Jared’s reputation as a campaign manager.

  That Shep trusts Jared absolutely.

  “Everything I’ve done for Jared since I left his mother has been penance for that one stupid mistake. If you can call the worst decision of my life just a mistake. I left Miranda Rankin when she needed me most. By the time I realized I was wrong, she was too hurt and too stubborn to let me back into their lives.”

  “He doesn’t know?” I’m reeling from Shep’s confession, from the hurt it will cause Jared. It will skewer him, rock his very foundations.

  “No. You were brave to tell me about your child. About the fact that I’ll be a grandfather again. But I was never brave enough to tell Jared what happened forty-three years ago.”

  “Because you thought he would hate you for it?”

  “Yes. Call me selfish, but I needed to see and know the man he’d become. Even when I met another woman, and married her and had three more children, I always regretted that I hadn’t been the father I should have been to Jared. So I tried. In small ways. And I know that’s not enough.”

  A shadow in my hospital room moves and my eyes flick up to see Jared in the doorway, a blue teddy bear dangling from his hand. My heart soars, believing for one second that he’s come back for me.

  But when I see the fire and ice in his expression, the anger and the pain, I feel the earthquake in this room that tears us apart.

  Shep spins, following my gaze, and Jared’s expression is scalding, incandescent with hatred.

  “You. It was … you?” Jared chokes out the words, his chest rising and falling rapidly as his fists clench.

  Shep stands and walks to him, but Jared pulls back toward the door. “I never meant for it to come out this way. I just wanted to be a part of your life in the only way I thought I could. And I needed—”

  “You used me,” Jared spits. “You left me when I didn’t suit your political plans, and you kept me around when it did.”

  The horror of the moment is amplified by the beeps and buzzes of the medical monitors, the tang of bleach and whoosh of air through a vent.

  My gut clenches with the fear of what’s next. I’m desperate to go to him, hold him, anchor Jared in this moment when he is untethered from everything he believed to be true.

  “I’ve done everything I could to repair what I ruined,” Shep says, his deep voice hoarse with emotion. He reaches for Jared’s shoulder. “I’ve tried to help—”

  “Bullshit!” Jared flings Shep’s hand away. “You’ve done everything you can? You’ve never given me the truth. After everything you stole from my life and my mother, you owed me the truth.”

  Jared whirls and strides out of my hospital room. Shep staggers backward, slumping against a wall. Sasha is frozen to her spot, but, damn it, someone needs to act.

  I yank the IV needle from the back of my hand and push my body out of bed, my stomach rolling like I’ve got a wicked hangover.

  Sasha and Shep move to stop me but they’re too slow. I burst out of my hospital room, shocking Mac and Eric to attention, my head swiveling wildly until I catch Jared’s back disappearing down the hospital hallway.

  “Stop! Stop this!” I run to chase him, past the blue teddy bear dropped in the corridor. Heads turn at the nurses’ station and I hear Mac and Eric pounding behind me.

  Jared breaks his stride and I barely recognize him through the pain on his face, the mask of a man who is beaten in every way possible. Every shred of goodness has been ripped from his life.

  He has nothing but anger left. And it’s directed at me. “Don’t even try.”

  “No. I have to try. Don’t you get it? I love you and Shep loves you, no matter what.”

  “You don’t lie to people you love.” On his tongue, lie is the foulest curse. His eyes sag with hurt and he turns away, again, swift strides down the hall. I follow as Mac and Eric jog behind me, barking alerts to the security team.

  I raise my voice to reach him. “Sometimes you have to lie, to protect them.”

  Jared spins to me once more.“No. Everything a lie touches is tainted. It’s poison.”

  “It’s protection,” I insist. Maybe they weren’t all lies, just little omissions, misdirections, each one a brick in a wall intended to protect our fragile connection.

  “Then that’s a lie you tell yourself.” Jared’s voice is hoarse with emotion. “I loved you no matter if we were fighting or fucking or politicking. And I was gonna keep loving you, win or lose, but you wouldn’t fucking let me. You shut me out. You and Shep were the most important people in the world to me. But neither of you trusted me enough to tell me the truth.”

  “But I—”

  “Don’t.” His command cuts me down. “Don’t even try to justify it. Trust goes both ways. How can I trust you after this? How can I love you?”

  Jared’s turns his back on me and disappears through a stairwell doorway. My knees buckle and my stomach drops to the floor. Cold grips me and the room tilts.

  I’m slipping, falling, and the floor races up to devour me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Strong arms carry me.

  Shouts, beeps, buzzes.

  The sting of a needle.

  The suffocation of a mask.

  The bliss of floating. The quiet. The dark.

  ***

  The pain.

  Throbbing pain wakes me, pulling me back to earth from a floating haze. I’m disoriented in darkness, small pricks of light coming into focus as I blink and look around this room.

  I’m still in the hospital.

  Still alive, or at least surviving.

  My stomach cramps and pain shoots through me again. I moan.

  A movement from the far corner of my room catches my eye and I lift my head to see a head bent, light from a tablet illuminating a face.

  “You’re OK.” The words don’t match Sasha’s sandpaper voice. “How are you feeling?”

  She crosses the room and turns on a small light at my bedside. I blink as my eyes adjust and then motion toward the bathroom.

  “You can’t get up,” Sasha says firmly.

  My mouth feels like it’s filled with cement and my hand immediately goes to my stomach. Before I can ask about my baby, Sasha disappears behind the bathroom door and returns with a tiny Dixie cup. I guzzle it down and she refills it without complaint. Twice.

  I struggle to push my hips up to relieve my achy ass that’s been cemented in one position in bed for who knows how long. That’s when I realize that my legs are tethered to the bed.

  “What is that?” I drag the covers off my feet, revealing wide velcro straps securing my ankles. “What happened to my baby?”

  “Let me help you.” Sasha presses buttons on the side of my bed and raises me to sitting. Dark circles line her eyes but she doesn’t answer my questions.

  I try another. “How long have you been here?”

  “I never left.”

  “What ti
me is it?”

  Sasha checks her tablet. “Four-thirty in the morning.”

  I take stock as my last memories race back to my brain. Shep’s secret. Jared’s anger. Running after him. Falling into an agent’s arms. And pain. So much pain radiating from my center.

  I touch my face, then inspect the tender seam in my scalp where I hit my head when I fell off the podium at Shep’s press conference. An IV needle is secured to the back of my hand again.

  Two light raps at my door give my heart hope for a moment, but it’s not the man I need to see. It’s the doctor, and his drawn, pitying face tells me everything I don’t want to know.

  My shoulders shake and I convulse, tears welling, my throat constricting with breathless sobs. “My baby?”

  “I’m so sorry, Congresswoman Colton. There was nothing we could do. You miscarried.”

  I look to Sasha for confirmation of this horror and her eyes are downcast. She knows. She knows everything—how much I would have traded to keep my child, how far I’ve come to get so close to the White House, and that I would have given it all up.

  But now the choice is made for me.

  The doctor says more words I don’t hear and my eyes volley between Sasha and him as she nods, taking in information I can’t process. Before he leaves, he pats my shoulder.

  “I know this is difficult news, but it’s not your fault,” he says. Of course it’s my fault. I ignored the bed rest order and ran after Jared. “Give yourself a break, physically and emotionally, to let yourself heal.”

  A break. Broken is all I can feel right now. My heart cleaved in two when this new life formed in me, one half loving this perfect new being, one half loving the man who created it with me.

  And now both parts are shattered.

  Night claims me, heart and soul, as I collapse back onto the pillow and wail, welcoming each new wave of pain.

  ***

  I get another dose of painkillers and brush my teeth in bed, spitting in a Dixie cup. Mac and Eric bring the suitcases Sasha and I packed from DC and lattes from the hospital coffee cart. I sip it, bitter that I can now drink as much caffeine as I want.