Campaign For Seduction

by Ann Christopher

  Frowning and suspicious now, she snapped at him. “Why me?”

  This seemed to catch him by surprise. Quickly turning his head, he pushed away from the seat, walked back to his table and looked down at his paperwork. “It’s never a good idea to look a gift horse in the mouth. Unless you think you’re not ready for the assignment?…”

  This subtle dig raised all of Liza’s hackles, as he’d surely known it would. “Of course I’m ready. I just want to make sure that you don’t have any unrealistic expectations about working with me.”

  Though the lighting in the cabin wasn’t the greatest, she saw a dull flush rise up and over his sharp cheekbones. For a minute he sifted through the papers, looking for something, and then he looked up with an inscrutable expression.

  “Unrealistic expectations?”

  “Maybe you think a black journalist—”

  His eyes widened with sudden comprehension—he almost looked relieved—and a bemused smile inched across his face. “I wouldn’t expect any special treatment from you, Liza—”

  “Because I’m not going to pull any punches—”

  “When have you ever pulled any punches?”

  “—and if you’re granting me access, I want access. None of this off-the-record business when I ask tough questions. No closed doors when the real decisions are being made. If that’s what you have in mind, then I’m not the right woman for you.”

  “You’re the right woman.”

  Liza paused.

  Suddenly she wasn’t quite certain what she was fighting for or even if there was a disagreement. Some combination of the lateness of the hour, her sleep deprivation and, probably, wishful thinking, made her mind play tricks on her. She could almost believe that she heard longing in his husky voice, saw smoldering want in his intense gaze.

  If this was a sign of things to come, then she was in deep trouble.

  The senator’s charisma was part of his immense appeal. She knew that. He was one of those rare people—like, say, JFK, Bill Clinton or Sting—who had the knack for looking at a person—especially a woman—and making him or her feel like the only other person in the world. It was one of the keys to his success, this ability to create the feeling of intimacy where there was none, to make a meaningless person feel important.

  Liza understood this in the rational part of her brain. The problem was that the rational part of her brain went AWOL whenever she was in the room with him.

  She blinked, wondering what, if anything, had been resolved.

  “So…we’re agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  A faint smile floated across his face as he sank into his chair and looked back at his paperwork. Normally she would have shaken hands to seal a deal, but the last thing she needed—ever—was to touch this man.

  He picked up his pen.

  Time to go, Liza. Return to the back, where you belong.

  Right now.

  Let’s go.

  Liza didn’t move. Her feet ignored the command because she didn’t want to go and he didn’t kick her out. In fact, although he didn’t look at her again, he didn’t seem particularly interested in whatever was spread out on the table in front of him and gave no sign that she’d worn out her welcome.

  With no clear instructions, she stayed put, paralyzed with indecision.

  For the first time in a while, she became aware of the music. Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Reasons” was now coming through the speakers, ratcheting up her loneliness. The generic longing she’d felt for years, ever since her divorce, was more acute tonight, probably because she was sleepy and her defenses were down.

  She sighed.

  Her wayward imagination began to wander. Before she knew it, she’d superimposed Senator Warner’s face onto the body of the nameless man she periodically wished she had in her life.

  She wanted—

  “Something on your mind, Liza?”

  His low voice, husky now, caught her off guard.

  “I—” She blinked and stammered. “I’ll just let you get back to work.”

  His dark eyes gave nothing away, but his jaw tightened. Nodding sharply, once, he lowered his head, silently granting permission.

  Everything within her body—each bit of subatomic particles—seemed to protest, to deflate. So that was it. Their interlude was over and she was now consigned to the back of the plane, far away from him, its heart and center.

  Turning, she trudged toward the door to the conference room with slow and resistant feet. A burning patch between her shoulders felt like his lingering gaze, but of course that was only her runaway imagination wreaking havoc again.

  Delusional or not, she just couldn’t go. Not yet.

  Hesitating on the threshold, she looked back to discover that he was looking at her, his expression troubled, his paperwork forgotten.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said on impulse. “Off the record?”

  It took him a long time to answer. “You can ask me anything.”

  “You seem so sane. Why do you want to be president?”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled. “Only a wacko would want the job, you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe I’m a wacko.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  He stared at her, no doubt seeing too much, and embarrassment rose up in her cheeks, hot and uncomfortable. She hadn’t meant to disagree so vehemently, but, really, everything she’d ever seen or read about this man—everything her gut screamed at her right now—told her that, despite his wealth and privilege, he was a true public servant. A man of the people who wanted the best for all Americans.

  He was not, and never had been, a wacko.

  “Why?” she asked again.

  “Do you want the sound bite answer, or—”

  “I always want the real answer, Senator.”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  Something in his expression softened, swirling into a mesmerizing image she could study for hours if not days. Nerve endings prickled to life low in her belly and in her breasts, and that was before he raised a hand to beckon her and spoke in that black velvet voice.

  “Sit down with me, Liza.”

  Drawn into his orbit, a poor circling planet seeking the sun’s warmth, she sat in the seat across the desk from his and held her breath, waiting for him to confide something clearly private and meaningful.

  “My mother died when I was in grade school. Brain tumor.”

  Liza blinked. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this. She’d known they had this shared tragedy in common, but there was something unbearably intimate and raw about discussing it with him now.

  “I know.” She hesitated. “My mother died when I was ten. A…stroke.”

  Their sad gazes locked in mutual understanding—their mothers both died when they were young and no more needed to be said about it—and the invisible connection between them tightened as though someone had bound them together with black crepe.

  “My father was a real piece of work,” he told her. “If he could have slept with all his millions under his pillow at night, he would have. I never understood him, and he sure as hell never understood me.”

  His late father, Matheson Warner, had been a giant in the publishing world, having started a magazine in the sixties and growing it into an empire that eventually included newspapers and TV stations before it was sold upon his death—what was it? twenty years ago. She’d also known that Matheson, along with his older brother, Reynolds Warner, who’d built his own clothing empire, WarnerBrands International, was a cutthroat businessman.

  What she hadn’t known was that his son was anything other than proud of him and the family name.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “You probably have a great father. Wasn’t he in the army?”

  Startled as she was that he knew this detail about her private life, her stubborn streak would not let her sit by while someone used the word great in the same se
ntence with her father.

  “My father has Alzheimer’s—”

  His face fell. “I’m sorry. My uncle Reynolds had Alzheimer’s.”

  “—and before that he was an army colonel who never had a conversation with me without trying to make me feel bad because I wasn’t the boy he wanted. His expectations of me are exceptionally high. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met one of them.”

  He looked as if he wanted to say something sympathetic—they did have a lot in common, didn’t they?—but sentimentality wasn’t her thing.

  “Are you trying to dodge my question, Senator? What have difficult fathers got to do with the presidency?”

  He paused and she had the feeling he was marking her confession, cataloging it for later review and analysis. “My father thought he was entitled. That the rich should get richer and the poor should sit down and shut up. That if you worked full-time but still couldn’t afford college for your kids or health insurance it was because you were too stupid to get a better job or too lazy to get a second job.” He shrugged. “It pissed me off. Why shouldn’t everyone have the same opportunities I had? Why couldn’t the gardener’s son, who was my best friend growing up, by the way, afford to go to Yale when he got in just like I did? What sense did that make?”

  “You want social justice?”

  He grinned. “Let’s just say I’m a big fan of Robin Hood.”

  “Lots of people admire Robin Hood, Senator, and they don’t subject themselves to Washington politics.”

  The grin widened. “Did I mention I like the behind-the-scenes deals and the strategizing? I like engineering solutions to complicated problems. And I’m good at it.”

  “And modest.”

  The grin turned wicked and so hot that she could feel its effects in her flushed skin and the deep ache between her thighs. “If you show me a politician with a small ego, Liza, I’ll show you a person who doesn’t have the juice to be elected dogcatcher.”

  They laughed together, and it was so deliciously wonderful and perfect that Liza’s breath caught and held in her throat. The pull she felt toward this man was so strong it thrilled and scared her. She shot to her feet with all the grace of a beached walrus.

  “I should go. You’re busy.”

  His face darkened with what looked like disagreement, but he nodded anyway and rifled his paperwork. “Yeah. Great.”

  “Great.” She headed toward the door as fast as she could.

  “Did I hear that you’re in negotiations for the anchor’s chair?”

  She froze and cursed under her breath because how could she leave when the conversation turned to her favorite topic—herself? Glancing over her shoulder, she smiled.

  “I’m afraid you don’t have the clearance for that information, Senator.”

  The senator, who was on the influential Foreign Relations Committee and therefore had a clearance level that made him privy to state secrets that would probably uncurl her hair, thought this was pretty funny.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. For the record—I think you deserve the job.”

  “For the record—you’re darn right I do.”

  Another delicious moment followed, one with smiles and the glorious warmth of his amusement and approval on her face.

  “What’s that I smell? A big ego?”

  Liza shrugged. “Big egos have their place, don’t they?”

  “Darn right they do,” he told her. “You’re not as prickly as I thought you were, Liza.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, Senator.”

  Staring at him, wanting him, it was a physical effort to keep her feet where they were, to stay on her side of the cabin when she wanted to be in his lap, straddling him. The ache between her legs was now a wet throb and would soon be a torment.

  Time to go. Past time.

  “Good night.”

  She was determined to escape this time, because it was becoming harder to convince herself that this was a business meeting and they weren’t flirting with each other.

  “I’ll answer one last question if you want,” he told her. “For the road.”

  Curses. The offer to answer questions was like crack to a journalist—irresistible. Fortunately, she had one ready.

  “What’s all this like?”

  “This?”

  “Being the candidate. The media attention and lack of privacy. The security.” She hesitated, trying to find a word big enough to encompass all the sacrifices he’d made to get to this point in his life. “Everything. What’s it like?”

  He shrugged. “This is what I signed up for. I knew it wasn’t day camp.”

  “Yeah, but it can’t be easy. What do you most miss about your old life?”

  “What do I most miss?”

  Uh-oh. Why was he looking at her as if she’d developed green-and-white stripes across her face? Mortified, Liza clamped her jaw tight shut, but the horse was already out of the stupid barn and galloping away.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Why didn’t she know when to keep quiet? It’d seemed like a reasonable thing to ask, but now she felt D-U-M-B, especially with him giving her that furrowed-brow look. Poor man. He was probably regretting his decision to work with her and worried she’d next ask about his favorite color.

  “Dumb question.” She edged toward the door. “I’ll get out of your hair—”

  “Wait.”

  Something in his expression had changed, grown dark and hot. When their gazes connected, she felt that lightning bolt sensation again, as though a powerful charge of electricity had shot between them and then radiated out to illuminate the cabin.

  This wasn’t flirting. Flirting could be innocent.

  This, whatever it was, wasn’t.

  It felt so strong that she wondered if the force of it would interfere with the plane’s systems and knock it out of the sky.

  Tossing his pen aside, the senator got to his feet and stretched to his full height—all long legs and broad shoulders and sexier than players in an NBA locker room.

  Liza’s heart screeched to a halt, and her mouth went dry with unadulterated lust as she waited to see what he would do.

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 5

  H e came closer, his ruthless gaze skimming her from top to bottom as he approached, pausing on her breasts, hips and legs, missing nothing and savoring everything.

  Oh, God. He wasn’t the presidential candidate. Not now.

  This was a man who desperately wanted her and wasn’t afraid to show it, a man who would, with very little provocation, slide his hands up her bare thighs and under her skirt, slip her panties down and off, plant his palms on the cheeks of her butt, and lift her so that she could wrap her legs around his waist.

  He would unzip his pants, free himself and plunge deep inside her body. He would press her against the cabin wall and pump his hips back and forth—endlessly, expertly—until she passed out from pleasure with tears in her eyes and his name on her lips.

  And she, with very little provocation, would welcome him.

  He came right up to her, breaching the divide between them until she had to crane her neck to look up into his glittering eyes and the flaming warmth from his body burned her. Until the faint but addicting scent of his musky cologne invaded her senses, fogged her brain and clouded her judgment.

  “In my old life,” he told her, “If I thought a woman was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, I’d say so.”

  “Oh,” she said, stunned.

  He drifted closer and his hoarse voice dropped until it was a mesmerizing whisper that she felt inside her body rather than heard with her ears. The secrets poured out of his mouth, and she greedily absorbed them, knowing, but not caring, that each word complicated her life and inched her closer to the kind of trouble that ruined careers and lives.

  “If I thought of a woman all the time, even when I was supposed to be doing my work, I would tell her. And I would ask if she ever thought of me.”

  Liza, hearing t
he question buried in his words, couldn’t deny him even though a smarter woman would. One corner of her mouth turned up in a tiny smile, a yes, I think of you, too, and she did nothing to stop it.

  A tremor went through him and his breath hissed softly. Raising one hand, as though he wanted to cup her face, he let it hover inches from her overheated cheek without ever making contact, killing her with her own longing and need.

  His gaze lingered on her lips. “If a woman had a beautiful mouth, I would kiss it. If her hair looked like silk, I would run my fingers through it. And I’d—”

  He would what? What?

  Liza waited and hoped but…nothing. For several long seconds he tortured her by not answering and letting the delicious images writhe through her brain without giving them complete focus.

  And yet it was all there in the depths of his gleaming dark eyes: him slipping inside her body…the two of them flowing together…the friction and slide of their damp skin…the excruciating thrill of his absolute possession.

  The need to make this scene a reality was too great to stay quietly inside Liza’s body and she gasped. Was this really happening? Could the sexiest man in the world really be attracted to her?

  Searching his intent face for answers, she found one: he knew the risks and was as troubled by their chemistry as she was. This was not the gambit of a player who tried it on every woman he met, just for kicks, nor was it the habitual practice of a man who stood beneath a tree weighted down with ripe peaches, shook a branch and caught the easy fruit in his waiting hands.

  He wanted her despite all his best intentions, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  Dropping his lids to cover his fever-bright eyes, he took a harsh breath. When he met her gaze again, the heat had disappeared. The man was gone and the candidate was back, erecting such a solid wall against her that she could almost see each brick.

  Though he wanted her, he wanted to be president more, and that was that.

  “But I’m a candidate and I can’t do those things.” He used his speech-making voice now, the one that did the voice-overs on all his commercials—I’m Senator Warner and I approved this message—rather than the husky voice of a man who wanted. “Can I?”