The President's Secret Son (Bad Boy Romance)

by Faye, Amy

And what I'm seeing now is that every single signal that Eric is sending my way is positive. Overtly positive. And, the rare time it's anything but pure positivity—not respect, not adoration, but approval—he's sending me signals that a brother and sister shouldn't be sending each other.

  I can't blame him, because in the whole new world of people sending overt signals to each other, in the world where people use their actions to send messages that they can't or won't send with their words, I have noticed something else, too.

  I've been sending them right back.

  Chapter Eight

  The insides of airports are different every time. I think my favorite is O'Hare in Chicago, but they're all different. Some seem small, cozy. Others seem big and ritzy. There's a range. Same as anything.

  I've been doing this for almost ten years, and I've been in dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. I stopped counting after the first few. There's no point in it. Just a reality of the job. It's always the people who don't take airplanes often that think they're anything sexy or worth remembering.

  Once you take more than a few, it changes. Becomes a hassle. Same thing's true about anything. There's something entertaining, though, about watching Autumn's face. She's tired. I can tell that, right off the bat. She'll have time to sleep on the plane ride home, but I wonder if her nerves will let her.

  I looked down at my watch. The minutes ticked by a second at a time, as they had been for the past hour. Then he looked up at the digital sign behind the counter.

  There were three people standing there. I don't think they need more than one, though they like to switch a lot. So that's reason enough for two at least. On the other hand, three… that means they're either about to start boarding, or there's something going on.

  I can't help noticing that we're supposed to be ten minutes out of boarding, according to the boarding passes.

  Yet, the sign now says that we're not expected to depart for an hour. I suck in a breath and look over at Autumn.

  Looking at an attractive woman has an effect on a man like a shot of espresso. I can feel my eyes open a little wider, my shoulders straighten up. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, though it won't last.

  "I think there's a problem with our flight."

  She looks at me like I've been speaking gibberish, and then I can see her play it back in her mind.

  "You think?"

  "We're going to want to find someplace to stay tonight."

  "Are you sure, though?"

  "You see our plane out there?"

  "No."

  The windows were big. If the plane were at the end of the terminal, you'd be able to see it. All around the multi-spoked hub, planes sit at the terminal—but not ours.

  "Well?"

  "I see what you mean," she finally says.

  "You mind making the calls?"

  "No, sir," she says.

  Autumn reaches into her jacket pocket and gets up from the less-than-comfortable airline seat. I watch her walk. It's a bad habit I've gotten into, but like all bad habits, I don't dare kick it. Her hips slip from side to side.

  For an instant I wonder if she knows I'm watching. She definitely knows. I think, though I wouldn't say it to her face for fear of a lawsuit, that she likes it. The way she adds just a little pop to her step when she's walking away. Like a model on the runway.

  I find myself mesmerized. Is it the fact that I've barely slept four hours a night, and even that was restless?

  It must be. Women are an incredible wonder to behold, but they don't have that kind of power over me. It's that simple. Sorry, that's just how it is.

  That, and I've got better control over myself than that. I know how her mother was. That was my first experience with women, and how they can get. That taught me just about everything I thought I needed to know.

  Keep your nose clean. Don't go looking for trouble. Above all else, don't get too invested in them. Because you'll want to, and you'll regret it when you do.

  I can already feel the regret looming as she walks back, slipping her phone into her pocket. She settles down into a seat beside me, leans in close, and is promptly cut off by the woman on the speakers.

  "Delta 1272, bound for New York, has been delayed indefinitely. Again, Delta 1272, Phoenix to New York, has been canceled, after a medical emergency forced the inbound flight down mid-flight. See the customer service desk for new tickets, we apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused."

  I watch Autumn's eyes flick back from the boarding desk to my face. "There you go, I guess."

  "What did I tell you?"

  "I got us two rooms at the Best Western."

  "What, you didn't want to cuddle up with me?"

  She rolls her eyes. If she's offended, she's hiding it well. "Sorry, not tonight. I wanted to get some sleep."

  "What else would we do?"

  She looks at me and blinks, and then blushes. "I, uh. Didn't mean—"

  "No?"

  "I wasn't thinking."

  "That's the best way," I tell her, standing up.

  I heft my bag in my hand and wait for her to get up and join me. I think everyone in the terminal had been hoping to get on the flight and get to their destinations. The fact that they hadn't managed that was more than a little frustrating, and it was going to mean an even longer wait until he could sleep.

  A little flirting couldn't hurt anything, but at the very least, it might keep him awake long enough to make it to a bed.

  Chapter Nine

  Had he said what I think he said? Had he meant what—well, that's a silly question. He obviously meant what it sounded like he meant. There's no other way to take it.

  I've been around the block. Once or twice. Well, okay. I slept with a guy once. It wasn't a great experience and I wasn't looking to repeat it. Two minutes of fumbling that had left me about as dry as a bone, except for the unpleasant stickiness on my stomach that stuck with me the rest of the evening.

  Long story short, not something I was looking to repeat, and the guy—I can't remember his name, just that he had longish hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses—had been startlingly unable to measure up to anyone I could think of to compare him to.

  That list was shorter than other girls' lists, though. Most women might have a dozen names. Celebrities, mostly. Hot guys they knew from school. Guy friends who never quite ended up turning into anything.

  My list was one name long, and I just accidentally offered to stay up all night with him. He'd laughed it off. It might have stung if I had realized at the time what I'd been saying. But I hadn't—not that the idea hasn't been in my head since we got here.

  Three nights, we've been in the same hotel. He'd slept in a bed just across the hall. But then—was I even allowed to think it?

  Better not to. After all, he was my brother, once, and he's my boss, and he's a big powerful lawyer—none of them things that I'm remotely interested in getting on the wrong end of.

  I lean into him, my body too tired to stay upright in the bus seats. It feels good to be so close to him. Too good. That cologne of his, that reminds me so much of him, is powerful in my nose, filling my head, setting me on the edge of a reaction that I definitely shouldn't be having.

  If he was anyone else, it wouldn't have been such a struggle. If he was anyone else, it wouldn't have been such a temptation. Why couldn't I have just—done something different. Anything.

  Why couldn't he have stayed, so I'd have had time to grow apart from him? To learn that he's not all he's cracked up to be?

  Why couldn't he have been someone else, not my stupid brother?

  Why couldn't he have stayed gone?

  Too many questions, and all of them were just to avoid one simple reality. I wanted him. It was hard not to feel like he wants me, too. The little signs, the flirting, the signals… I must be misinterpreting. He's not interested in me, and there's no reason for him to be.

  But it's impossible not to feel as if I'm picking up on signals that he's laying down.

 
; "Eric?" My voice sounds dreamy.

  "What's up?"

  "I don't want to—" I can't finish the sentence. My words catch in my throat.

  He looks down at me. He's got such a nice jaw. He keeps it tight and it makes him look like some kind of action movie hero.

  "Something wrong?"

  I should leave it there. I know it as he asks the question. It was a moment of weakness that made me start the sentence. And yet, as he asks, I can feel that weakness washing over me again. I shouldn't. But I do.

  "I don't want to be alone tonight," I say, softly. There's no question that he hears me. His arm wraps around my shoulder and pulls me in close.

  "Shh," he says softly. When I open my eyes again, we're at the hotel, and my head's at least three minutes clearer than it was when I shut them. Somehow, even feeling more alert hasn't changed my mind.

  I don't want to be alone tonight, and the only man I can think of in the world who I want to spend it with is slipping his arm out from around my shoulder to stand up and grab his luggage from the rack.

  "Get up," he says softly. "We're here."

  Chapter Ten

  I hadn't expected her to crack so easily. I'd expected the game to last longer than it did. Maybe she didn't realize who I was, after all. It was a long time ago, and she was a lot younger than I had been when I finally had to leave.

  Maybe she was just like her mother, and she couldn't live without a man for five god damned seconds, and I was the only one around.

  It's difficult to say, because for a moment there, I had almost believed that she was a hard worker. Serious. A real blue-chipper. Which is entirely at odds with my image of her mother, to be perfectly frank, and I think that's understandable.

  What I'm less certain of is whether or not the image fits her perfectly. It's just something that I'm going to have to see.

  I lay on the bed and I close my eyes and all I see is her. Her and her mother and everything that I'd left behind a long time ago. Dad's off the hook. It took a long time before that happened, but he's off the hook.

  Which leaves just the girl and her mother. Deep breaths now. It's not doing him any good to think about it all. If it was going to do him good, then sure. Lose sleep over it. But there's no plan going forward.

  He's not going to ruin her life for nothing, and there's no proof that she deserves it at this point anyways. But the fact is, at some point, the opportunity will arise.

  I should have forgiven them all a long time ago. Any therapist would have told me so. It's not about them, they'd tell me. It's about you. And for a long time I hadn't thought the name 'Deborah Greyson,' in anger or otherwise. It wasn't until her daughter stepped into my office.

  Mixed emotions flood through me. They always will, when you're in the middle of something like that. Particularly when you get mixed up in someone's marriage problems when you're young. Particularly when the someone whose marriage problems you're stuck in the middle of is your father.

  It might not be fair to Deborah to hold everything against her for so long. It probably isn't fair to Autumn to hold her accountable for any of it.

  Fuck fair.

  It wasn't fair what happened to me, either, but nobody had come along and asked his opinion on it. I lost his home and had to go out and figure out a place to stay while I worked my way through school.

  There are plenty of people out there who say, 'nobody helped me get where I am.' They're usually full of shit, in any practical reality.

  Maybe they didn't borrow any money—they usually did, but they can have the benefit of the doubt at the very least—but they got plenty of help. Just not in the form of dollars and cents.

  They had a place to stay. They had parents who would feed them if they ran out of food money for the week before the check came through. They had at least some sort of safety net.

  Well, I never say that nobody helped me get where I am. Everyone I knew helped me, with two notable exceptions. Supposed to be my parents. Or, my step-parents. My step-mom whose sexuality was a weapon, and Dad, who decided to stick by her, rather than his son.

  I open my eyes and turn to set my feet on the ground. I'm not getting any sleep this way. I need to cool down. The plane ride home is going to be extremely long and extremely frustrating if I don't. I don't get enough sleep as it is. Every article that comes through my inbox says so.

  Which means I can't be sitting there hyper-focusing on ancient history. I moved on. I got through school with all the help I could ask for, from anyone who would listen, and I used every bit of help I could find to get my firm off the ground.

  Now that it's off the ground, I can be the one to give help sometimes. It's nice to be able to give back to the people who helped you, or to give forward to the people who might go on to help someone else some day.

  The whole world turns on that kind of thing. You have to feel like you owe something, and then you pay into the pot. It's wonderful, beautiful, perfect.

  There's on person who doesn't need my help, though, and if she does need it, she's not getting it. And now, as if she's trying to prove me right, she's taking her body—her incredible, hard to refuse and harder to forget body, and she's trying to use it against me.

  Just like her mother.

  Well, I'm not twenty years old any more. I'm not some idiot kid who just wants to know what the hell is going on here.

  The situation might look similar, but the tables have turned in every real sense of the word. So maybe, if she's lucky, I'll let her make her play.

  But I don't expect for one second that I'm going to find anything has changed. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

  Then again, maybe that applies both ways. Dad was always a dope. Never able to see the bigger picture. It's tempting to think that I'll be different, that I know better.

  But if I don't—

  I shake my head, padding down the hall toward the ice machine.

  I can't afford to worry about things like that. Can't afford to even think that I might be the one getting played. Because if I am, and I don't see it coming, that will be twice to the same woman, practically.

  And I'm not going to make the same mistake twice, no matter how pretty or smart she is. You can't afford to make the same mistake twice, when margins are thin, and I've been walking a razor since I left home ten years ago.

  Chapter Eleven

  The plane ride back was worse than the one going out. At least the way out to Phoenix, I knew that if I died, I'd at least be dying going out to do something new and interesting and doing the work I loved.

  If I died on the way back, one, I'd just be going back to work, and two, almost worse somehow, I'd be dying after a crap plane delay. As if the fact that the flight was delayed caused the death. A bunch of horseshit, is what it would be.

  To compound matters, the flight hit turbulence and just stayed in that turbulent air for a good quarter of the four-hour flight.

  Floating up a few feet and the feeling the air just drop out from under the wings. A horrifying reminder that at any minute, the wings could fly off the plane and then we'd plummet forty-three thousand feet to our deaths.

  And there would be nothing any of us could do about it.

  There was a certain strange familiarity to the situation. Train-wreck was the usual term, rather than plane-crash, but Mom is exactly that.

  Some women mellow with age. They drop the drinking, drop the smoking, and they calm the hell down. It would be a miracle if that happened to Mom. Not that every time she goes a day without a drink, she doesn't try to tell everyone she knows that she's quit drinking, and this time it's for good.

  It lasts between twelve and thirty hours before she's back at it. So the feeling that eventually, you're going to come crashing into the ground and there's not a damn thing that you can do about it, is a feeling that she's more than used to.

  Somehow the difference between 'your life will be ruined' and 'you'll die in a horrible fireball' seems wider than normal, though, when it c
omes down to it.

  So when I saw the skyscrapers in the distance, my head plastered to the window with just the intention of seeing it coming when we either reach safety or careen into the earth, it came as an incredible relief.

  We descended as a team, my stomach twisting and jumping and kicking and thoroughly convincing me that I'd never be completely alright with airplanes. The captain did most of the work controlling the airplane, while the passengers and the flight crew did the harder work as a whole of making sure that the plane continued moving on faith alone.

  The wheels touched down, and I stayed seated as the rest of the cabin stood. It would be nicer to just be able to get off the plane immediately, but if I couldn't, then I wasn't about to do something as silly as force myself into a thronging crowd of people desperate to get into the terminal.

  After all, I'm not desperate. I've got time. I've got no plans today. Work isn't going to get done. Eric was very clear on that. Don't come in, just get some rest and come in in the morning. No problem, I said. I can do that.

  And I can. Easy as pie. Just go home, relax, and don't do anything that would get me into trouble? Well that sounds like my kind of Friday. And Saturday and Sunday, for that matter.

  Armed with a full night's sleep, I play back the events of the last week in my head. I play back the research in the New York office. I play back the trip down to Phoenix, talking to anyone and everyone with the possible exception of the guy in the mail room, who I don't believe got more than a snippet of legal advice.

  The last day—my face gets hot. I shouldn't think about it. Flirting is one thing. I can flirt. He can flirt. We can flirt together. Men and women flirt naturally.

  Talking about going to bed with a man is a very different thing than just a little laughing, teasing, and playing around. A very different thing indeed, but not to worry because I'd stepped well outside that boundary.

  The line starts to thin out, as people go past. I let them continue until there's a decently large break in the bodies passing down the aisle, and then I slip out of my seat.