She grabbed two towels and wrapped them around herself as she walked out over the cold deck to the hot tub. Ethan was leaning back and had his eyes closed, but as she adjusted to the darkness, Amy could see the smile on his face as she approached. She shivered as she reached the hot tub and tossed the towels down as she slid herself in. The hot water emphasized the chill in the air, taking her breath away for a moment as she slid lower and let her body relax.
“Are you really naked?” Amy asked.
“Would you like to find out?” Ethan replied with a laugh. He was enjoying himself just a little too much. Without waiting for a response, he added, “Don’t worry: spare bathing suit. I just wanted to see how you’d react.”
“I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t try to reciprocate.”
“For you maybe. I think I would have enjoyed that.”
“I’m sure you would have.”
“Lean back and relax, Amy.”
Amy wanted to enjoy herself, but she felt like she and Ethan had to get on the same page before spending more time with Hank. She waited for Ethan to say something, but he didn’t “We need to work things out if you want to have any chance of this working,” Amy said. “I know a good deal about you. I have to. It’s my job to know. I know about your various affairs. I know where you live and how much you’re worth, but I still don’t know what your favorite food is or whether or not you watch sports.”
Ethan slid a little lower into the hot tub until the water was up to his chin. He kept his eyes closed as he started to speak. “You know, I don’t even know how you ended up in Washington.” He paused for a while and added, “I don’t even know where you grew up. I assume you went to prep school, some Ivy League feeder school in rural New England. I don’t know anything about your parents either.”
Amy bit her lip before answering. She almost always avoided talking about her past. As far as she knew, no one wanted to hear her story. She wondered if Ethan really wanted to know or if he was just pushing back to avoid answering more about himself. “My mother died when I was eight. I think you would have liked her. Her death nearly broke my father. He was a staffer for a congressman at the time. Over the next few years, he worked his way up to a senior position and moved us all to Washington when I was thirteen. By that time, the congressman had become a senator.”
“And that’s where your love of civic affairs came from?” Ethan shot Amy a glance to see if his joke had landed. It had not.
“My father devoted his life to that man. He believed in him. We all believed in him. It was our way of rationalizing why our dad had uprooted us from our lives and moved us to a city we didn’t know. It was our way of explaining to ourselves why our father spent nights and weekends at the office instead of with us. Callie was younger, so she doesn’t remember all of it as clearly, but I basically had to raise her myself. I think it’s why I’ve always been so protective of her.
“Anyway, back to the senator: when I was a senior in high school, he was up for reelection, and a former aid of his came forward and accused him of having an affair. My father swore up and down that it wasn’t true, that it was a dirty tactic used by the opponent, but it didn’t matter. When the election came, my father’s boss lost. My dad was out of a job. He never worked in politics again.”
“And that’s why you gravitated toward your current line of work?” Ethan asked. “Righting a wrong from your past?”
“No,” Amy replied, “I came to this line of work because I believed that the accusations were true. I figured the only thing I could count on was the tendency of men to lie and cheat and steal whenever given the chance. I’ve made my living off of the mistakes of men like that senator. Right and wrong has nothing to do with it.”
“I have a hard time believing that. I think you have a very fine-tuned sense of right and wrong. What about me?” Ethan asked.
“What about you?” Amy replied. “You’re probably the foremost example of my work.”
Ethan opened his eyes and shifted back up, resting his arms on the side of the hot tub. “Except you did the opposite for me. You helped me get in just enough trouble to be interesting to create buzz. How many men have you done that for?”
Amy looked off for a moment. She knew that Ethan must know the answer to that question. “Just you,” she said.
“Oh,” Ethan replied. “Well, I suppose I owe you a debt of thanks.”
“Like I said, it’s just business,” Amy said. “And right now, it would be good business for the two of us to know more about each other.”