The Phoenix Candidate(46)

I meet her clear, calculating blue eyes with my amber eyes, and I don’t blink. She is one fierce bitch, but that’s what it takes to win, and the competitor in me respects that. “Crystal.”





Chapter Twenty-Eight





I don’t know who’s pulling the strings, Conover’s team or Darrow’s, but the flood of requests to my offices in Oregon and Washington, D.C. keep Trey and the rest of my staff hopping.

Press requests for comments on a variety of pending bills. Profile pieces in two women’s magazines. People wants to know what I keep in my handbag. I decline that one, but write an op-ed for Time on the parental leave issue I brought up during Women to the Helm.

When Harper’s Bazaar requests a photo shoot, Trey nearly loses his shit, squee-ing from excitement. We take a shuttle to New York for the afternoon and they tape me into a haute couture ball gown of gunmetal silk. They tell me to put my hands on my hips and shrug my shoulders forward so the hollow of my collarbone is more pronounced.

My hair is a wild mass of curls in the shoot and the makeup artist gives me a wicked smoky eye lined with silver. I can’t help but feel that it’s not very vice presidential, but Trey says he’s been in touch with Darrow’s people. This is on the approved list.

Jared’s away again, somewhere in America, somewhere with Conover as he fundraises with increasing desperation. But he’s my lifeline at the end of the twelve- and fourteen-hour days, the sanity that grounds me as more than a packaged politician.

I’m a woman, and he pulls out all the stops to remind me of this. I clutch my phone and a glass of wine in the quiet of my apartment and I don’t feel so lonely.

“What was the best part of your day?” His familiar rumble warms me through the phone line.

“Meeting with Moms Against Gun Violence. I got to tell them about my bill that would provide more safety measures and training in schools.” I pause, listening to Jared’s subtle breath across thousands of miles. “How about you?”

“Imagining what I could do to you. With my teeth and my tongue.”

I can’t suppress my laughter. “Thinking about me was the best part of your day, Jared?”

“Less thinking and more doing would be better.”

I rest my hand on my thigh, feeling the warmth and weight of it, imagining it could be Jared’s. “Tell me more about that.”

“You want to know what I’m thinking? What I picture when I wrap my hand around my cock in the morning because your lips aren’t there?”

My breath catches in my throat. I whisper, “Yes.”

“I’ve imagined you everywhere, Grace. Bent over my bed in each hotel room. Crawling to me like you did that first night.” He’s quiet for a moment. “You liked that. You liked the power I had over you, and the power you had to say no.”

It’s true.

“I wanted you to take the lead,” I confess, my hand moving between my legs, my knees drawing together around the pressure of my fingertips. “Sometimes, I know what I want and need, but I just can’t say it. I need you to say it for me. I need you to demand it.”

I get a rich sigh from Jared at that admission. “I’ll be happy to demand that from you, Grace. I can be all kinds of demanding.”

“And pushy. And controlling.” I squirm in my seat.

“I can’t pretend controlling you isn’t fun. It’s such a fucking turn-on, Grace. Telling you what I’m going to do to you and demanding you obey me, and your body, and all of the things you want if you’d get out of your head for one fucking minute.”

“What would you do to me right now, then?” I pant. My panties are drenched with moisture and I lean back on my couch, the phone pressed to my ear the way I wish his stubbled cheek were right now.

“I’d make you ache with my fingertip,” Jared says. “I’d touch the tip of your nipple, just brush it with the pad of my thumb, until it was hard and tight, the skin puckering around the tip. I’d touch that beautiful dark rose color, until your back arched and you were begging me for more.”

My back is arched as I touch myself the way Jared describes.

“And then I’d trace that fingertip down your sternum and over your stomach. Over your scar, Grace, and even though you hate it, I love the ridges and ripples on your body. I love that you’ve lived, and that every one of those is part of your story. I love that they’re part of you.”

The words love and you are dangerously close together in that sentence, but I say nothing. Just let Jared take me further down the rabbit hole with his deep baritone and delicious words.