Fair Game
Authors: Doreen Owens Malek
FAIR GAME
Doreen Owens Malek
Published by
Gypsy Autumn Publications
P.O. Box 383 • Yardley, PA 19067
First printing April 1989
Copyright 1989 • 2012
by Doreen Owens Malek
The Author asserts the moral right to be
identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recoding, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the author or Publisher.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
“An extremely talented author…writing
with conviction and power.
Ms.Malek excels in detailing
human relationships under fire.”
– Rave Reviews
“SHH.”
She put her finger to his lips, and he kissed it.
Ashley moved her hand and touched his face, running her index finger over the hard line of his jaw.
“It’s like a miracle to be able to touch you, after wanting it for so long,” she whispered.
“You could always touch me,” Tim said. “Anytime.”
“If only it were that easy,” she murmured, her eyes filling. “You’ll lose your job if your captain finds out you were doing anything more than guarding me.”
“What have I done?”
“Oh, Tim, don’t be naive. This wasn’t supposed to happen, and you know it.” She bit her lip, her eyes searching his.
He reached for her and pulled her into his arms. When he kissed her, the satisfaction was so intense for both of them that they remained for a long time locked in a fierce embrace, like teenagers who are loath to lose contact for fear the magic may never happen again.
Then Tim finally lifted his head and Ashley buried her face against his shoulder.
“Come down to my room with me,” he said huskily.
Table of Contents
New Releases by Doreen Owens Malek
Chapter 1
ASHLEY FAIR glanced into the giltedged mirror over the hotel dresser and automatically straightened the bodice of her silk dress. It was going to be a long day, like many others before it. She knew she had to look flawless because of her position, and she accepted the burdens along with the perks.
She lifted a few errant strands of ash
blonde hair out of her collar and surveyed herself with wide gray eyes. Good enough. Then she reached for the cup of coffee that sat steaming on the room service tray and took a sip, mentally running through the morning’s schedule. Ashley grimaced at the coffee’s bitterness and began to add more cream, when a knock sounded on her bedroom door.
“Come in,” she called. It was very early, but everybody she knew got up in the dark these days.
Meg Drummond, her father’s assistant, walked in through the adjoining sitting room and said, “My, don’t you look nice. New dress?”
Ashley nodded. “Giancarlo contributed it to the cause.”
“What cause?” Meg asked dryly. “Your father’s election campaign or Carlo’s design career?”
“Both,” Ashley replied, smiling. “I want to look my best for Dad, and when Carlo sends me things I don’t have to waste time searching for clothes. But I told him we’re paying full price, no freebies, no discounts. Got it?”
“Got it,” Meg replied crisply.
“Don’t let him talk you into anything else. He wants me to be indebted to him so he can collect later, and that’s exactly what I want to avoid. He’ll go along in the end. What he wants more than anything is to get his creations before the public eye, and I serve that purpose very well.”
“Speaking of eyes,” Meg said. “Jim thinks Carlo’s got his on you.”
“Don’t be silly. The only figure Carlo’s got his eye on is his future sales total. Did I mention that he’s hired a team of chemists to create a new perfume? He’s going to sell me an advance sample as soon as it’s ready.”
“What’s it called? ‘Avarice’? That guy is a bandwagon jumper; if your father loses the Presidential election, Carlo will disappear like a mist at sunrise.”
Ashley gazed at her friend levelly. “I know that,” she said quietly. “But you’re the political animal, Meg. I don’t have to tell you that it pays to deal with people like him. For the moment, we can help each other, and that’s what counts.”
“Yeah, well, I still don’t like him,” Meg said darkly.
“All that oily charm. After I shake hands with him, I always want to take a shower.”
Meg grinned. “One hand washes the other. Now, what’s on the agenda for today?”
“This just arrived by messenger,” Meg said, handing Ashley a thick manila envelope with the Justice Department seal on its cover.
Ashley slit the flap with a fingernail and glanced inside the parcel. “Oh, this is the case Harry called me about yesterday, remember? He wants me to read the briefs and give him some suggestions.”
“I don’t know why the Department felt they had to give you a leave to work on your father’s campaign when they know they can continue to send you mounds of paperwork,” Meg grumbled. “You have enough to do as it is.”
“I told Harry when I left that I would continue working in an advisory capacity,” Ashley replied, draining her cup and setting it down.
“Well, the way things are going you’ll be reading that file in the bathtub,” Meg said. “I don’t see how you’ll find any other free time. You have the regional Bar Association meeting at ten o’clock and then the League of Women Voters luncheon at twelve-thirty, with your father and stepmother in attendance.”
Ashley didn’t quite make a face, but her mien altered slightly. Her stepmother meant well, but her main interests in life were shopping and redecorating the Harrisburg mansion she shared with Ashley’s father. Ashley didn’t have an hour to waste making mealtime conversation about the deplorable lack of variety in the spring collections or the shades of color in fabric samples. But the image of solidarity must be preserved, so she resigned herself to the lunch. She hoped she would be seated near somebody more lively.
“And Jim is picking you up at eight for the Democratic dinner. It’s at Congressman Marshall’s house,” Meg was saying.
Ashley nodded.
“And, oh, I almost forgot,” Meg concluded. She snapped into a salute. “The boys in blue are arriving this afternoon.”
“The boys in blue?” Ashley asked, staring.
“The police bodyguards the commissioner is sending over to stay with us during the Pennsylvania tour. Don’t you remember?”
Ashley remembered. The Senator was launching an eight-week tour of his home constituency to build grassroots support before widening out to canvass the nation. He had his own security force, of course, but his advisers had insisted on taking a couple of local professionals along for high-visibility protection.
“What time?” she asked Meg.
Meg looked at her notes. “After lunch.”
“Do I have to see them?” Ashley inquired.
“You know better than to ask me that. Your father will be rushed; he’ll just meet them quickly and pass them on to you. You’ll have to do the official welcome.”
Ashley sighed. As a civil rights lawyer, her impression of cops was a somewhat jaded one, and she was not looking forward to making nice with a couple of flatfeet when she could be preparing for the congressman’s dinner, which was important. Her father was a prominent Senator with a healthy groundswell behind him, but he still needed the wealth ard influence of the Philadelphia contingency to launch him into the national spotlight.
“Okay, I’ll come right back here after the lunch. By the way, what are we going to do with them?”
“I’ve booked suites all along the route. The plan is for them to sleep on convertible couches in the adjoining sitting rooms.”
Ashley closed her eyes, then opened them. “Can’t they stay in separate accommodations? We’ll be tripping over them, for God’s sake.”
“Be reasonable, Ashley. How can they guard you if they’re off somewhere down the hall? You could be dead before they realized anything was wrong. I’m booking rooms for them to shower and change and store their clothes, but they’re sleeping with you and your father. In a manner of speaking.”
“How many?” Ashley asked, picturing the Assyrian horde camped out in her anteroom.
“Only two.”
“Thank God for that.”
The telephone rang, and Meg picked it up. She listened for a moment, said, “All right,” and replaced the receiver in its cradle.
“Our master’s voice,” she said briefly to Ashley. “Gotta go. I’ll be in your dad’s room if you need me. See you later.”
Ashley lifted her hand as Meg left and then turned to the window to look down at the street. Her beloved Philadelphia was waking up below her. She thought of the town house her maternal grandmother once had only a few blocks away, in what was now Society Hill. But her grandmother had been dead for ten years, the brownstone long sold, and the happy Christmases she’d spent there now only a cherished memory.
Her mother, an only child, had died in an auto accident when Ashley was a year old, and her father had remarried four years later. He and his new wife raised three other children, and despite his efforts to include Ashley in everything, she had always felt like an outsider with his second family. She knew her decision to work with him on his Presidential campaign, a position her stepmother was too unskilled to fill and her stepsiblings too young to assay, resulted in part from a desire to fit into his life, in some essential way, at last.
Dad, she thought, gazing unseeingly at the increasing traffic. Joseph Randall Fair III, senior Senator from the state of Pennsylvania. She had watched his rise from state representative to lieutenant governor to his current pursuit of the highest office in the land. And in many respects he was still a stranger, a smiling, competent, charming stranger.
Fair was a liberal democrat, like his parents before him, bastions of the Main Line for many years. Joseph Fair II had been Ambassador to the Court of Saint James, and his widow, the candidate’s mother, was even now a dowager socialite active in local and national charities. The candidate’s younger brother, Ashley’s uncle Will, ran the family business, a real estate conglomerate, and his sister was a prominent clinical psychologist with a hospital practice. Achievers, all of them. Ashley thought it was as if their collective liberal conscience forced them to work like demons and to contribute disproportionately in order to justify inheriting all those millions.
And I’m carrying on the tradition, she thought wryly. Dean’s List, Law Review, shunning private practice for the less lucrative but sociologically correct Justice Department. There she was able to prosecute white-collar criminals who took unfair advantage of the system she and her family believed in so strongly. Yes, she had done everything right, all down the line. Then why, when Ashley had five minutes alone to think about it, did she feel so empty? She filled her days with frenetic activity and fell into her bed exhausted so those reflective intervals didn’t come too often.
