by Amy Faye
Adam's heart raced, pounding in his chest. He kept himself seated, his jaw tensing and un-tensing.
It was perfect.
Chapter Twenty
The office is dark. The summer heat has just begun, but keeping the lights off keeps the room cool, and the only one still there doesn't mind the dark. At least, Adam Quinn thinks he's the only one there. He barely manages to hide his surprise when Tom's gravelly voice pipes up from the door.
"How'd we do?"
"What?"
"The news report. You still feeling good about it?"
"You know I trust you," Adam answers, not looking away from the screen. "I hired you because you know what you're doing. Better than I do."
Adam can hear the heavy sound of his footfalls. "That's great to hear. I wish all my clients were as trusting."
"Most of your clients don't know how to run a Smash TV campaign."
"Most of my clients don't know what Smash TV is."
"No, I guess they wouldn't," Adam answers. He shouldn't really be coding. There are guys working for him who are geniuses at this stuff. Guys working for him who are making too much money to be in the trenches were geniuses. The guys working below those guys, those were the ones who wrote code.
But here he was, digging into an editor. It made Quinn feel a young again. How had he let himself get away from this? What had taken him away from what he was good at and into all this? He knew intrinsically. He was a businessman now, not a code monkey. He made too much money and too much of a difference.
"What are you doing here, Tom?"
"I wanted to figure something out."
Adam closed the line of code and his fingers flew across the keys as he commented in what he'd planned to do next. Nothing was worse than coming back to the code and not having the least idea what the fuck you were doing with it.
Then he turned. The light from the hall spilled into the room. It didn't quite touch Adam, but it framed Tom in light in a way that he might not have realized when he'd set it up, but Delaney would have been very pleased to discover.
"Yeah?"
"You slept with her," he says. It's not particularly an accusation. There's no hurt in his voice, or anything like that.
"Is that what you came here to say?"
"I need to know you're not going to let this get in the way of the campaign. I've seen men who were much less controversial than you go down over just this sort of thing."
"I know what I'm doing."
"That's what worries me," Tom says softly. "You always know what you're doing. Always five moves ahead."
"What's your point?"
"My point is, you're always five moves ahead, and you like situations that get ugly. I don't care what you do with the girl, but don't ruin her, and don't put me in a position where I can't make the campaign work."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Adam couldn't read his face, shrouded in darkness and surrounded by light. Tom Delaney had never been a sentimental man. It was strange to imagine that he might have suddenly grown a heart after all these years. Extremely strange.
"I don't think I need to say any of this, but if you're really not sure, then I'll lay my cards on the table." He steps out and away from the light, leans against the back of a couch. "My priorities in this campaign are few. I work for money, and it's money you're supplying. There's no problem there. But I have an image to protect, and I'm not going to let that get hurt. I think of you as a friend, but I'm not going down for you."
"I wouldn't ask you to."
"You've done worse to better men over women."
"There's no worry about anything like that, Tom."
"Is it? Because I think she's taking it to be something."
Adam frowned. He wasn't wrong, and there wasn't an easy answer. It raised questions he didn't particularly want to answer right now. Questions like what it really meant, if it wasn't what she thought it was. If it meant nothing, then why get so uptight?
And if it didn't mean nothing… what did that mean?
"Your concerns are noted, Tom. I'm not going to fuck you over on this. I watch out for my people."
"And as much as it might surprise some to learn," Tom said, his low natural growl almost tamed by the softness of his voice, "but so do I."
"Then we're together."
"We'll see," Tom answers. "Don't work too hard."
"I've never worked too hard in my life," Adam answers. "I could do a lot more if I wanted to burn myself out."
In the darkness, with his head no longer framed by light, Adam can almost make out a smile on his usually-dour face. "That's what worries me."
Chapter Twenty-One
Linda knew instinctively that there was no real reason to be worried. She'd been in worse spots than this before. There were problems that were much bigger than a little campaign-staff fling, and much more likely to get leaked to the press.
After all, who even knew that she had seen him? Sure, it was the second time, but the first time, she'd been nobody in particular, in a room full of women. The second time, who could have seen? Nobody who would tell anything.
So why was she so worried about it? There was no chance that anything was going to happen. No leaks to the press, no reason to worry. No reason to think that there might one day be a leak to worry about.
Even still, though, it didn't stop her from worrying. And why exactly should she stop worrying? What was there to convince her that she wasn't in extreme danger of running into trouble down the line?
A few vague self-assurances? Firm belief that everything would be fine? How many clients had assured her that there was absolutely nothing to worry about? How many in fact had something to worry about after all, when the chips finally fell?
Nothing made her any different, when it came down to it, except that if she prepared for the eventuality, she'd be able to deal with it. The first part—the most important part—of preparing for any story you know can hurt you is to minimize.
Minimizing damage comes down to three things, and her case would be no different. The only way to assure that Adam—and, Linda had to admit, herself as well—was going to be protected was to treat her own case just like any other.
First, you make the story as implausible as possible. If nobody believes the story, then it's a non-starter. If the public has doubts, then that's nearly as good. It's all shades of gray, until you figure out how to get away with it.
Second, you create deniability. That's not the same thing, though it might seem like it is at first blush. An implausible story is one that nobody believes even without knowing the evidence. 'Hitler was a great guy and only wanted the best for the Jewish population,' for example. Right on the face of it, nobody needs to investigate because it's obviously not true.
Instead, it's closer to finding an alibi for the night of a murder. Sure, there was a reason you wanted the victim dead. It just so happens that in this case, you didn't kill them even though you could have and wanted to. After all, you were at the bar all night, and everyone saw you there.
The story is believable, but on further inspection, must be untrue.
Third, and the most important part, is to minimize the effect that it will have when people do believe the story in spite of your best efforts. The last line of defense.
And the truth was that in Adam's case, this was already done for him. There are a thousand ways to minimize the damage. Desensitization is one of the most effective. Thirty years of the press reporting on the thousands of women that Adam Quinn has slept with mean that one more doesn't hurt him any more than a report of another big win in the tech field. It's expected at this point.
It would follow her, though. She'd always be the one who fucked her boss, and there would always be a question of whether or not she'd done it before. Whether or not her entire reputation was built on all the men she'd been willing to sleep with.
Those questions would be all it took to stop whatever growth she might have been making. By the time that it was time to be ser
iously thinking about settling down, the difference would be big enough that you'd notice.
Which meant that she had to figure out some way to protect herself, some way to minimize the damage. It happened, but… But what?
But it hadn't happened before, and wouldn't happen again; but she'd had diminished capacity; but she regretted it?
None of them really rang true. All she could think now was that it all sounded like lies, and she had better figure out what she was going to do about it, and she'd better do it now. Or else things could end up going south very quickly.
Chapter Twenty-Two
They shouldn't have had him there alone. Linda was more than a little bit upset that they weren't there.
She and Tom should have been there to cover bases. An intern, at least, to make sure that everything is above-board. It's not hard to edit footage down to make someone look stupid. That's why you have your people there, making sure that it doesn't happen.
It was her job to make sure that this Holden thing didn't turn into a hit piece, and if it did, that she was able to respond to it quickly and efficiently. But like it or not, that wasn't what was happening.
Adam decided, right or wrong, that he was going to go alone, and it wasn't her place to question it. She wasn't about to try to use whatever leverage she had with him, but she wasn't exactly ready to go all-in with her nascent plans to cover her ass if their relationship came out in the press.
Which left her sitting in the office, watching the news. Tom was silently watching on the other couch, as well. Both of them waiting for news, as if they were waiting for the gallows.
Nothing was happening. A slow news night. Which, in this case, meant talking about Quinn again. The usual stuff, this time. Nothing too exciting, and in spite of what the press clearly thought, nothing particularly damaging.
He's inexperienced in politics, they say. Sure, he's got plenty of money on the line, and he's been at the edge of politics since he first got into it. Sure, he runs one of the most successful, efficient charities in the country. Sure, he's smart and proven that he can take projects to completion time and time again.
None of that matters. He hasn't been a politician for very long, only a couple weeks. That means that he's ill-suited to the job because only politicians can be good politicians.
It doesn't matter that he's strongly defined his positions—focus on education reform first and foremost, then revitalizing the American economy, with no foreign conflict.
He's incompetent, he's not a real candidate. And that's all they've got to say, so they're going to have to say it quite a few times.
It should feel like failure for Linda. Her client was getting this kind of beat-down on Television, on a slow news night? Scandal talk constantly. The positives were all but forgotten, while the negatives were enumerated in excruciating, even boring, detail.
Somehow, it didn't. It felt expected. This was just the beginning of his candidacy. Just the first step in taking the white house. He was an outsider, and he couldn't be safely ignored, which meant that he was going to be marginalized. It was always going to happen, and there was nothing that could be done to prevent it.
All she could hope for, in the end, was that it didn't hurt, and she didn't feel like this coverage was hurting him. He took it on the chin and his poll numbers went up.
What worried her was the waiting. She was wasting time. Wasting time responding to new threats that would arise in an interview with someone on Ellen's level. It was only natural, if she went after him at all, that something would come out of it. She was smart, she was committed, and she had enough of a following that there was a real risk of things getting ugly if the interview went sufficiently badly.
Tom wasn't wasting time. He wasn't supposed to respond, he was supposed to get a response. His job was, at its core, to figure out what people expected least, and what was going to have the most effective results.
That was what allowed him, on an evening where something was certainly going to come up, to keep doing what he was doing.
But when your job is to repair someone's reputation, to clean their dirty laundry and empty the skeletons out of their closet…
Well, those things required that you knew what was coming, that you knew what people were saying. It would have been nice, of course, if there was a way to get the information straight from the horse's mouth.
She shouldn't have been frustrated, of course. It was part of the job. It was part of why she was paid quite the amount of money that she was.
If only it weren't her ass on the line this time.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The office was darkened when Adam Quinn stepped back in. The only light in the room came from the two televisions hung on the wall, side-by-side, showing two different channels. Neither one had the sound on; closed captions ran across the bottom with obvious errors visible from the moment that he stepped into the room.
The light fell on a ring of couches, illuminating a young woman, sitting there. She was attractive, Adam had to admit. Unusually attractive for a woman in her line of work.
"Linda. What are you still doing here? What time is it?"
"Late," she said softly.
"You should be at home. Asleep. We've got a big day tomorrow."
"I need to get the debrief on the interview with Ellen," she answers. The televisions click off. The light from the hall spills in, just enough light to see by, but only barely.
"It can wait until the morning."
"Or you can let me do my job and tell me what I need to be getting ready for."
"It went great. You'll love it. Perfect."
"That's good, but I'm going to need more than that."
She smelled good. Like a woman should, he thought. She was close now, as he walked deeper into the dark room.
"Is Tom still here?"
"I talked him into going back to his apartment."
Two more steps would close the distance between them, now. She'd fit easily into his arms. She'd feel good there, too. It was what he wanted, and he generally got what he wanted. Generally took it.
"Then we're alone."
"I suppose so," she says. Something about her attitude rubs him the wrong way.
"Is everything alright?"
"Fine," she says. He can barely make out her face in the darkness, but she doesn't look like everything is fine.
"You look distraught."
"I'm not. I'm fine."
He took a step, and the space between them closed halfway.
"Are you sure?"
"What's with the third degree?"
"You're right. My mistake." He took another step, and now he was close to her. His arm wrapped around her shoulder, pulled her in close.
She stiffened at his touch. She didn't pull away, though, and there was a difference.
"What?"
"We can't."
His lips found the sensitive skin of her throat and pressed themselves against her. She leaned into it a little, and he knew that he had her in his grasp.
"We can," he told her. "Nothing's going to stop us."
Her breathing was ragged, caught a little bit in her throat, and he could almost hear the edge of arousal building up in her.
"We shouldn't."
"We should," he responded. His lips moved to the other side of her throat, his teeth nipping along the line of her collarbone as he moved across.
He pushed her a little, stepping into her space until she was forced to step back and make room. Until she was pressed against the foot of a sofa and the only place she had to go was down onto her back.
"I don't think this is a good idea," she repeated.
"Fuck good ideas," he answered. His hands found the hem of her skirt and fished her blouse out of it. His fingers dashed under almost immediately, tracing the taut skin around her waist.
"I don't want to get a reputation," she said softly. She put her hands on his arm, not quite stopping him. His hand stopped, but his fingers, softly trac
ing a line across her skin, did not.
"Then don't tell anyone. I won't."
"Word gets out, though," she said. A little bit more force in her voice.
"Then I'll take responsibility."
"No you won't." Her voice is hard, now, and her hand pushes his away. He nibbles her earlobe gently, and he can still hear the edge of need in her voice even as she tells him to stop.
"I won't let you get hurt. I promise."
Her hard edge falters.
"How?"
"Won't know until I have to do it," he says. It's the truth. Linda wouldn't accept anything less than that, and Adam doesn't doubt for an instant that she would be able to hear the lie in his voice.
"Then how do you know you'll be able to do it?"
"I always take responsibility for my messes." He always has in the past.
Her hand doesn't seem to be trying nearly so hard to keep him away from her. He pulls her hips in close to his again, and she doesn't pull away. His lips trace a line back down the thick, sensitive vein of her neck.
"If you tell me you don't want it…"
She doesn't. His fingers start to work the buttons on her blouse and work their way up from her belly-button to her throat, uncovering pale skin as they go. He enjoys the shiver that runs up her spine. Linda's body relaxes and he presses her back further until she falls back onto her butt.
His hands undo the last remaining buttons, and he pushes her shirt back, off her shoulders. She pulls it down her arms and by then he's already pulling her generous breasts free of their confines.
"Do you want me," he growls.
"Shut up and fuck me."
That's the only permission he needs.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Her body is pliable under his fingers—pushing back where he wants her to push back, relaxing where she ought to relax. Her plump breasts pool on her chest, her body pressed down against the thick leather upholstery.
