THE PRESIDENT'S GIRLFRIEND (13 page)

She arrived at the hotel that Saturday night in a limousine with Christian.  And the ruse was on.  The decision apparently had been made that he would pretend that she was his date.  He even put her arm on his and walked her through the lobby of that fancy palatial hotel as if nothing in this wide world was wrong with that.  The fundraiser was being held in the ballroom of the hotel, and the president, Christian said when he deposited her in the penthouse suite, would be with her shortly. 

     Gina was ready for him this time.  She wasn’t about to take this cruel treatment lying down.  If she gave him her body, what would she get in return?  That was how they did it in Washington, wasn’t it?  One hand washes the other one?  You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours?  She was loaded for bear.  If she was to sleep with him, she was leaving with his commitment to veto any budget proposal that included cutting funds to programs like hers.  Simple as that.

     Only it wasn’t that simple, Gina thought as she sat on the sofa of the luxuriously appointed room.  She was reducing herself to the president’s whore.  Yeah, that would make her a high class whore, certainly higher than she was back in Miami before his foray into politics, but still a whore.          

     Tears came to her eyes as she realized her life pattern.  After her parents died, she felt as if her education was all she had.  And she put her everything into it.  But on her first real job, as a public defender, she was fired before she even got started good.  All because she wouldn’t prostitute herself to some young, hot shot attorney with connections.  Then she turned to BBR.  It became all she had.  And now, once again, she had to prostitute herself to save it.  Although she knew, deep down, that it would be taken from her, too.

     She stood quickly, and hurried for the front door.   She couldn’t do this.  She couldn’t allow herself to have to go down this dark, dingy road.  She would beg every business she could find, plead with every foundation that would see her, before she allowed herself to become somebody’s whore.   Even the president’s whore. 

     She could hardly believe that she had even come.  Dutch Harber wasn’t interested in anything but her body.  That was why he didn’t invite her to the hotel fundraiser as his guest, but to his hotel room, as his whore.  All of her life she had to deal with this.  Never quite good enough.   Everybody else gets to walk through the front door, she gets in through the rear.

     She flew open the door of the suite and ran out of the room, determined to never be so desperate again, and she ran right smack into a tall, steel frame.  When she looked up, she realized the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, was holding her in his arms.

EIGHT

He handed her a glass of wine, and then sat on the sofa beside her.  Not a word had been spoken since he brought her back into his suite from the corridor, other than assuring the secret service, who had begun to move in when Gina first ran out, that there was no threat at all.  He unbuttoned his suit coat, this one a light brown, and crossed his legs. 

     He looked at her in full.  He had missed her terribly.  But his days began early and ended, oftentimes, after midnight, especially with so many critical issues on his plate.  And besides, he still wasn’t certain that any of this, some major relationship, would be in the best interest of either one of them.  But he missed her terribly and knew he wasn’t about to come to her hometown and not feast his eyes on her again.  Where it was headed, he didn’t know.

     “Where were you going in such a hurry?” he asked her.

     “Why wasn’t I invited to the fund raiser?” Gina asked him.  She wasn’t playing any games with him tonight.

     “I didn’t know you were interested in an invite.”

     “You didn’t know if I was interested in some roll in the hay in your hotel room, but you asked me anyway.  Or, correction, your flunky asked me.”  She hated referring to sweet Christian by such a name, but seeing Dutch again, looking so gorgeous and so full of himself, a man who never in his life had to degrade himself to get anything, and she was getting angry.

       Dutch sipped from his wine.  He could see her anger, could feel it.  “I prefer to keep my private life private,” he said.  “Allowing my woman to be seen at a fund raiser would only feed the gossip mill and I’ve got enough on my plate than to add another course.”

     “Your woman?”  Gina said. 

     “That’s what I said,” Dutch said, although he wasn’t certain why he’d said it.  They hadn’t established anything yet.  But seeing her again made him suddenly feel a sense of possession, of protectiveness. 

     “For a minute there,” Gina said, “I thought you were going to say your whore, because that’s exactly how I feel.”

     Dutch frowned.  “My whore?” he said.  “Don’t you ever call yourself that!  Why would you say such a thing, Gina?  How could you say such a thing?”

     If he didn’t know that, Gina thought, she certainly couldn’t school him.  “That’s how I feel,” she admitted.

     Dutch quickly sat his glass of wine on the table behind the sofa, and moved over to Gina.  His face looked so serious, so alarmed that he began to alarm her.  “Oh, sweetheart,” he said, putting his hand on the side of her face, “why would you feel like that?”

     “Why?” Gina asked, amazed he didn’t know.  “You make passionate love to me and send me on my way.   I don’t hear from you for an entire week, an entire week, and then you phone, Christian phones, and invites me, not to have dinner with you, not to attend the fundraiser with you, but to have sex with you.”

     “To have sex. . . Chris didn’t put it that way.”

     “He didn’t have to.  Your invitation put it that way.  Come, not to eat, not to party, come to go to my hotel room.”

     “I wanted to see you again.  I can’t come to your house, and you know as well as I that going out in public would only invite the kind of scrutiny neither one of us need right now. I’m still, we’re still trying to figure this out.”  He studied her.  Unsure now more than ever if she could handle the scrutiny when it eventually came.  “You do understand that.  Don’t you?” 

     Gina looked at him.  She was blown away by how serious he looked.  “I understand, but--”

     “No buts, Gina.  You have got to understand that.  This isn’t just some relationship.  I can’t take you to the club or out to dinner on a whim.  We’re considering a relationship while I’m still president.  You have to understand what that means.”

     Oddly enough, it wasn’t until he said it, did she understand it.  On some level she already had, but in her heart she had no clue.  She nodded, felt surprisingly relieved somehow.  “I understand,” she said.

     “Since last week, after our night together, I haven’t thought about any other woman but you.  But we’ve got to be cautious here.  You have got to understand what you’re getting yourself into if we decide to go down this road.  I probably shouldn’t have ordered Chris to call you.  You don’t need this life, trust me, you don’t.  But I had a moment of selfishness and told him to make the call, anyway.  I’m sorry.” 

     He apologized so heartfelt that Gina felt like the villain.  Which astounded her.  “I was just wondering what happened,” she said.  “I thought we had made a connection.”

     “We did.  Of course we did.  But there’s so much more we have to consider.”

     “I know you’re a public person, Dutch, I understand what you’re saying.  But I knew that when I, when we slept together, I knew that going in.”

     Dutch continued to study her.  If she only knew what she was getting into, what life in a fishbowl was really like, she’d run away from him as fast as her feet could propel her.  He tried to keep her at bay, a sweet girl like her didn’t need this aggravation.  He tried for an entire, agonizing week.  Every day he thought about her, every night he wanted her in his bed, filling her with his love.  But she didn’t need this.

     But he told Chris to phone her, anyway.  His only solace was that she would at least have some general idea of what life would be like under the microscope.  She, after all, lobbied Congress enough to have some idea about life in DC.  But now he was beginning to wonder if she had even grasped the general notion.  She had intellectually, he was confident that she understood theoretically.  But on an emotional level, he wasn’t so sure.

     He placed her glass on the back table and moved closer to her.  He put his arm across her shoulder and pulled her to him.  “Let me hold you,” he said, wrapping her into a bear hug.  He closed his eyes as he held her, as he thought about how badly he wanted her, maybe even needed her, and he thought about how tough this journey would be for her, for both of them. 

     He pulled back slightly, and looked at her.  She opened her closed eyes too, and looked at him.  His breath caught at the beauty, the humanity he saw in her eyes.

     “You can run now, you know,” he said with a smile that seemed to Gina to be more regretful than joyous.

     “I know,” she said.

     “You can tell me now that this is not for you and I’ll leave you alone forever, Gina, I promise you I will.”

     Her throat almost constricted at the thought of never feeling his touch again, of never seeing his face or those lines on the side of his eyes up close and personal again.  “I know,” she said.

     “It will be brutal, honey, you understand that?”

     Why was he harping on that again, she wondered, and looking so concerned about it?  “I told you I did, Dutch.”

     “They may bring up your time as a public defender, and the fact that you were fired.”  He looked her squarely in the eye.  “Including what happened that led to the firing, and who you may have been with.”

     Gina’s heart dropped.  “But how will they know, about who I was with that night I mean?  You didn’t tell anyone?”

     Dutch frowned.  “Of course I didn’t tell anyone.  But the scrutiny is the point, Gina.”

     “And I’ll deal with the scrutiny.  I was fired, yes, I was.  But I don’t see why anybody would judge me based on what happened a decade ago.”

     He rubbed her hair, and her back.  “I know, sweetie, I know,” he said.  “I’ll never judge you, not ever.” He exhaled.  “But I just want you prepared when others do.  And they will, I don’t care how trivial, because people can be vicious, Gina.  They can tear you down with glee in their eyes.  They can’t take it, nobody really can, but they can easily dish it.”