The Phoenix Campaign (Grace Colton Book 2) (13 page)

But I withdraw, shaking my head and avoiding eye contact. The last thing I need is a file photo with me and Lauren, as if we’re buddy-buddy.

If she pulls the strings—and undoubtedly she would—the photo would be timed to appear after she reveals her “secret” knowledge about my affair. It would add legitimacy to any lies she tells about my relationship with Jared.

“Now’s not a good time,” I mumble to the photographer. I scan the room for Sasha, but she’s nowhere. I edge away.

“We’re not done here,” Lauren says, eager to keep me at her side.

“We are.” I lower my voice but the steel in it comes through. “And if you decide to lob a grenade at my personal life, be ready to have every ounce of firepower I’ve got turned back on you.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I trudge back to my hotel suite after the fundraiser, thoroughly exhausted from the day. All I want is a shower and my yoga pants. But the TV is on and a pair of argyle socks are propped up on the coffee table.

My heart soars. Jared’s dark head swivels and he catches my eye.

“How was it, darlin’?”

I can’t get to him fast enough. I collapse next to him on the couch, kicking off my shoes and curling under his strong arm. I bury my face against his neck, inhaling his familiar scent.

“I’m so, so glad you’re here,” I whisper.

His arm tightens around me. “Me, too. God, I missed you.” His other hand touches my cheek, tucking a dark curl behind my ear. “I needed you.”

The confession makes my heart beat faster.
He needs me.
“Tell me more about that.”

Jared’s slow smile is equal parts warm with interest and heated with intent. “I needed to touch you. To smell you. To feel you in my arms.”

“So I take it this isn’t just a campaign stop?” I tease him. “You aren’t just here to brief me?”

I feel Jared’s chuckle rumble in his chest as I’m pressed against him. “Sasha knows I’m here. She tagged out to meet up with Shep in Chicago and she wants me to prep you for the debate. But right now, the only kind of prepping you need is the kind that can’t be shown on network television.”

Jared’s long fingers slide between my blouse and jacket, nudging it off, then he pulls my blouse out of the waistband of my skirt and over my head.

I sigh as he touches me, leaning into his fingers that tease my nipples through my bra.

“Fuck, Grace.” Jared flicks my nipple and it hardens through the satin. “You get more beautiful each time I see you.”

His eyes burn my skin, a starving man hungry to devour every part of me. I close my eyes and let him explore me, feeling his touch skip from light to demanding, from a tease to a harsh pull at the cords of my own desire.

He pulls me up from the couch, his arms caging me in, forcing me to hold still. Still, still, and I pant as he strips me to nothing.

Just me. Just this stolen moment between us when none of the press or politics can touch us. He kneads my back, his fingernails scraping a column down either side of my spine, gripping my ass hard, telling me he wants more.

He kneels in front of me, his lips feathering across my hip bones, his stubble longer now, nearly a beard, tickling my skin with its tiny brushes.

He kisses me—there—at the corner of my sex, where my curls begin. His nose moves toward my center and I feel his breath on me, tempting me to melt and open and release myself to him.

“I love the way you smell.” He nudges my legs apart as I stand, then his tongue flicks out, sending bolts through me. “And the way you taste. So sweet on my tongue.”

He pushes me backward so I’m sitting on the couch, presses my knees farther apart, and then his mouth is on me, ferocious and demanding. “I need you. I need this.” His words are a jumble with my thoughts as I feel him advance and recede, his tongue dancing through my folds, twitching against my bud, taking me higher and higher.

“I need you, too.” It’s more than a confession. It’s a lifeline. He doesn’t know how much I need this reassurance in our connection.

“You’ve got me.”

“All of you?”

“Every part.” He raises his head, his mouth glistening with my juices. His eyes are on fire.

I dare to ask one more question. “Always?”

“For as long as you want and need me.”

I close my eyes. It’s a half-answer, maybe fueled more by passion than true commitment.
It’s not enough.

I don’t want him to be with me as long as I need
him
.

I want him to be with me because
he needs me
—desperately, completely. I want him to need me for himself, for his own life.

Jared bows his head again and this time plants a soft kiss on my stomach. It hasn’t rounded yet, but this simple, familiar touch sets of a flurry of butterflies that are nearly my undoing.
How can he be with me, right now, when he doesn’t know?

And if he did know, would he still be here?

I push myself up off the couch, plant my hands on his shoulders to cement an even distance between us. I wait until I’ve locked eyes with him again and then I ask. “I need to know this. I need to know how … you want me.”

“I want you in every way. I just told you that.”

I want to believe him, to take this at face value. But insecurity makes me push further. “But what happens if Shep and I win? Would you want me even then? Even if our lives get a million times more complicated?”

A shadow passes across his face. “Why are you asking me this?”

I shove a hand through my hair in frustration, our sexy mood rapidly evaporating. “Because I need to know, OK?”

“Why? Why do you need to know? What’s driving all these questions?” Jared’s eyes crease with mistrust.

All I can give him is a half-truth. “Because I need to know what you want, for when things change.”

“Look, win or lose, I want you. Isn’t that enough?”

I shake my head miserably. “No.”

“Then what? What do you want? You want a ring? You want me to propose to you? We met barely three months ago. With all the change that’s happening in your life, do you really want to force the issue of us right now?”

Keep it light. Keep it quiet. Keep it casual.
Jared’s words from before echo painfully in my brain.

Shit. I’m an idiot. I’m forcing his hand when he’s already told me he plans to fold. Or at least, that he’s not all in.

And I’ve decided to keep the baby. I’m all in, whether Jared’s playing or not.
Do I want to force the issue?
“No. I don’t want to force anything.”

He pulls me into a hug. “Then don’t. We don’t have to have all the answers right now. Just focus on what you need to get through the next couple of months.”

I hesitate, but I have to ask. Lauren’s threat to expose him hangs over me and I wonder if outing our relationship first could be a preemptive strike. “Do you want us … do you want me to ever … make us public? To name you?”

Jared’s brows shoot up. “Is that what this is about? The fact that people want to know who’s in the picture?”

“That’s part of it,” I hedge. I replay my conversation with Lauren, her threat to expose him ratcheting up the urgency to define our evolving relationship.

Jared pulls away from me and sits next to me on the couch. “Let me put my campaign manager hat on for a sec, even though that’s for Sasha to do now. Let’s say you’re dating someone.”

I feel the chasm growing between us as Jared’s dark and dirty voice is replaced by the direct, demanding political consultant.

“Are you seeing him regularly?”

I nod.

“And is this a relationship you’re willing to share with the public right now? Someone you want to expose to a whole shit-ton of media attention?”

I shake my head.

Jared’s face pinches, but he goes on with his consultant’s calculus. “Then you don’t say a word. Lauren won’t tip my name unless she stands to benefit. Right now, neither of you benefit. If you introduce your lover to America, you create a distraction. And if we broke up, it could be disastrous for your campaign.”

The fact that breaking up is even on the table shakes me. I bite my lip against against the million things I want to say and secrets I need to tell. I can’t. Even though I’ve promised Shep I
will
, I haven’t promised
when.
I’m positive now’s not the time.

“You can’t share anything about your personal life until you’re sure of it. Until it becomes part and parcel of the candidate America’s electing,” Jared says.

I chill, my nakedness making me feel too exposed while Jared’s still in his jeans, socks, and shirt. Even though he won’t give me the right kind of assurances, I need something.

“I need you right now,” I say, gripping his shirt hard to be sure he understands me. My hand slides up his thigh, caressing his cock through his jeans, and I feel the pulse of it beneath my fingers.

“You can have me. I thought you were going to have me up until everything got very … serious.”

I shrug it off: my doubts, my fears, my struggle with the secret of my child. I put them all in a box on a shelf in my mind and drag Jared behind me to the bedroom to cover all of this fear with something else.

I stop him between the bed and the mirror-fronted closet that lines one side of the room. My hands work fast on his clothes until he’s as naked as I am.

I just want to feel. I want the physical to overtake everything else, to get me out of my whirling brain and into my physical body. I want him to make my blood pump and my breath pant and my skin to feel on fire from the scrape of nails and slap of flesh.

“Tell me what you want from me.” Here I am, offering myself.

I tilt up my chin to connect with his dark chocolate eyes that miss almost nothing. Never before has anyone
seen
me with such exceptional clarity.

“Kneel.” Jared’s voice is low, rumbling. I kneel, and as I reach for him he pulls back. “No hands.”

Ah, we’re playing this game. I reach for him with my mouth.

“Eyes closed.”

I comply. The tip of his cock brushes my cheek and I turn, my lips grasping for the head.

“Slowly.” He’s coaching me as his fingers wind through my hair. He twists his wrist and fists his hand, tightening the pull on my scalp. It moves from a tingling to a low buzz so very near pain.
A thrill.
This is new. This is Jared treating me roughly, picking up speed with his hips and controlling our rhythm instead of letting me take the lead.

Before I’m ready and before he’s spent, he withdraws from my mouth. His hand remains tangled in my hair. “Keep your eyes closed.” His gruff command holds a warning.

I feel him push my head forward and I bend at the waist, putting my hands on the carpet in front of me so I’m on all fours. He nudges my knees apart further, then tugs at my hair again so I arch my back. His other hand skates up the back of my thigh, tracing my center from seam to cleft, and I take a sharp breath.

Jared’s voice startles me, his whisper so close to my ear. “Open your eyes.”

I do and I’m floored by what I see. In the closet mirror, my breasts hang heavy between my arms, my eyes are wide and lips parted with desire, my ass tilted up in the air where Jared teases me with the head of his cock.

“Tell me what you see.”

He thrusts, forcing my answer to be nothing but a cry of pleasure and pain. All in one as he fills me. When he draws back and then enters me again, my body molds around him.

“What do you see?” he demands again.

I look in the mirror, really
look
at myself and my face that broadcasts every ounce of pleasure Jared pumps through me. I look and see a wild woman whose head is thrown back, whose eyes are bright and unjaded.

“I see me. Us. Our connection.” I pant each word as Jared’s rhythm builds. His hips rock into me and I am full to bursting with the force of him. “I see your focus.”

It taunts me, his singular focus on me that seems to take in more than I give freely, to know me better sometimes than I know myself. And yet, to be so blind to the signs that he doesn’t know who I am becoming—a mother—again.

“Do you see a winner? Someone who could carry us all the way to the election?”

His question is a record skip in my mind, as he forces me to focus on the general election in November, rather than the real deadline I’m anticipating: April seventh, my due date.

“I … I don’t know.” It’s an honest answer, but from his growl and the aggression in his body language, I know it’s one Jared outright detests. He doesn’t want me timid—he wants me confident, resolute, ready to throw him a get-the-hell-out look at the drop of a hat.

He needs me to bring my A game and I’m barely slogging by with a C.

“Then we’d better figure out how to convince you.” Jared slows the pace of his hips, his hand finally releasing my hair to stroke my back and shoulder. “I see a woman whose unbridled passion in this moment is the most beautiful thing about her.”

I blink, painfully self-conscious, but I look for that woman in the mirror.

“And I want voters to see the same passion running through each of your speeches and appearances.” Jared’s hips twitch and his hands force my ass higher. It’s just the right angle that the head of his cock catches my G-spot, a ridge against my roughness, again and again, and my mind starts to spiral.

The noise of a million thoughts and doubts and items on my to-do list fades, replaced by a few absolutely clear truths.

I am meant to be here.

To do this.

To love him.

“I want…” Jared’s voice is hoarse and I feel him curling around me as his climax wrenches from him. “I want them to see the Grace I fell in love with.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

My hotel room is a wreckage of room service and newspapers, file folders of position papers, and tangled cords charging myriad devices: phone, laptop, tablet, e-reader.

“Did you even sleep?” I ask, pulling the belt on my hotel robe tighter. My hair is wound up in a towel from the shower I just took. Alone.

“Some.” Jared doesn’t even look up.

As close as we were last night, this morning the pendulum swings back to workaholic Jared, as he withdraws into a world of three-minute phone calls and furious tapping on his keyboard.