Campaign For Seduction (20 page)

That sleek hair had slid over one eye again, and she glowed with some secret inner light that put a tiny smile on her parted lips as she towed him down the hall to the bedroom, never breaking eye contact.

Her spring garden scent fogged his brain almost to the point of insanity. By the light of a single nightstand lamp he stared at her, unable to believe his enormous good fortune and ready to jump on her in a frenzied mating that would make a stallion with a mare in heat look like a G-rated peck on the cheek.

He’d never thought there was anything sexier than a woman’s bare skin, but Liza in that black dress standing in front of that enormous bed gave him a whole new perspective as he shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it to the floor. The silk hugged her plump breasts and dipped low, flared over curvy hips and butt and fell away over juicy thighs.

Liza in that black dress was lethal.

As though she knew what she did to him, she beckoned him with the slightest tip of her head and widening of her smile.

“Come here.”

But John hesitated, not entirely sure the dream had become a reality. “I pictured you like this. The first time I saw you—every time I saw you—I wanted you like this.”

“What will you do with me, Senator?”

He had more than a few ideas.

They came together with his hands in her hair and hers gliding under his shirt, unhurried and gentle. Angling her head the way he needed it, he caught her mouth and drank slow and deep, trying to catch her elusive tongue, to hold it, to suck it.

But she slipped away, teasing him, a Mona Lisa smile curling her lips.

John wasn’t sure he could play, not tonight. Running his hands up over her hips and butt, he cupped her heavy breasts, weighed
them and enjoyed her shiver. A tremble rippled through him, and his aching erection leaped and strained for her. He pulled her close again, to bury his face in her neck, to breathe her in.

“You’re so sexy.” He barely recognized his own hoarse voice. “So sexy.”

She didn’t answer, and that inflamed him even more because she was just out of reach and still in control when he was already gone. Holding his gaze, she put her hands to her hips and gathered the skirt of her dress up, revealing inch by slow inch of legs and then a patch of black satin that covered what he needed, what he meant to have and keep.

Hurrying out of his clothes, getting rid of the heavy layers that kept his skin from hers, the pain in his neck all but forgotten, John watched that dress rise past skimpy panties…a taut brown belly with just a hint of softness…a slim waist…and then the generous curve of breasts tipped with nipples pointed like Hershey’s Kisses.

John watched those breasts bounce back into place and his mouth went dry and his head felt light.

When she stared him in the face as she shimmied out of that scrap of satin, lounged across the edge of the bed, planted one foot on the duvet and spread herself like a banquet, inviting him to gorge until he was sick, he groaned, dropped to his knees before her and feasted.

She glistened with honey, intoxicated him with her delicious musky scent and tasted like ambrosia. He lapped her up, his crooning mingling with her cries as they both palmed her breasts. When her body went rigid and she spasmed against his mouth, he suckled, wrung every last drop of pleasure from her and felt like a king.

Sliding up over her body, he hurried out of his underwear, ran his tongue over her torso, dipped into her navel and latched onto each breast. Liza clung to his head and arched for him, offering everything.

He was just reaching between them, thinking that now was the time, now, when, with a surprising burst of strength and energy, she flipped over, straddling him.

John panted, his heart thundering.

Crouched on all fours over him, her breasts dangling like ripe
fruit that needed plucking, she gave him that knowing, enigmatic smile, the one that was driving him right out of his freaking mind.

“Sit up,” she murmured. “Watch me.”

John broke out into a fine sweat and adjusted a pillow behind his head even as he shook his head, told her no. He could hardly speak.

“Not tonight. I can’t—”

“I think you can,” Liza said, and laughed.

He watched, mesmerized, as she closed her eyes and moved for him, stretched for him, reached sleek arms high overhead and displayed those round breasts for his hungry eyes. Then she ran her hands down through her hair, rolled her head back and showed him her neck, the arch of her spine.

Her hands slipped through the valley between her breasts, stopping to squeeze each one, to press them together from the sides, to let those dark nipples peek through her fingers and taunt him.

When her hands ended their journey buried between her thighs, stroking, he had to rein himself in and squeeze his penis, hard, just under the swollen head, to keep from shooting off like a Fourth of July rocket.

Her eyes opened, and they were bright with purpose.

“Don’t, Liza,” he gasped. “I’m already dying here. Don’t…don’t…ahh.”

She did.

Crept up over him like a cat, licking first one of his sensitive nipples, then the other, then eased lower, pressed her tongue into his navel, cupped his tight sac and took him deep into her mouth.

John’s hips rose up and off the bed, and he nearly jackknifed at the hot suction. There was no way to hold back his astonished cries, to keep her name from pouring out of his mouth.

The last thing John saw before his eyes drifted shut was her round butt stuck high in the air, her shining hair in her face and her lush berry lips wrapped tight around his hard length. Then he clamped his hands on the sides of her head and let her bob at will, because she didn’t need any guidance.

A few seconds of this torture was all he could take. When he was close to bursting, he gently pulled her hair and she let him slide out of her mouth with all the reluctance in the world.
Crawling back over him on all fours, her lips swollen now, she stared down at him and he stared up at her and neither one of them could speak.

Stunned, John struggled to find words, to tell her how she’d changed his life, what she meant to him. Nothing in his life had ever prepared him for this moment—not marriage to his first wife, dating other women or running for the presidency.

There was only Liza. His world began and ended with her and would until he died.

Turning her onto her back, he smoothed her hair away from her face with one hand, reached between them with the other and entered her with a long thrust that had them both moaning. She was tight, hot, wet and everything he needed.

“I love you, Liza,” he told her as his hips began their slow circles. A big word but way too small for this moment. “Love you. Love you—”

“I love y—”

The rest of her sentence died on her lips as her eyes rolled closed, her beautiful face twisted with ecstasy, and she bowed and tensed beneath him.

Waiting only until she went limp, he flipped her to her belly and bit her on the shoulder hard enough to get her attention.

“Oh, God,” she breathed.

“You didn’t think we were finished, did you?”

He grabbed her hips, pulled her up on all fours and drove into her from behind. She was so slick his vision faded with the pleasure.

He could never get enough of this.

Not if he lived a million more years.

Increasing his tempo, he pumped his hips until their cries drowned out the slapping sounds and the small of his back began to ache.

More. He still needed more.

Sweat trickled down his forehead and into his eyes. It was all over both of them, his and hers, mingling together, as primal, earthy and sexy as sunbathing nude on the beach. Good. He wanted her marked because she was his and he was hers.

Reaching down, he squeezed her dangling breasts, one and
then the other, until her spasms began again and she nearly bucked him off onto the floor.

With her inner muscles clenching hard around him, sucking him even deeper inside her body, he came with a hoarse cry that went on forever.

Chapter 18

L iza woke facedown on the bed with the sheets tangled around her hips, weak sunlight filtering in through the blinds and John’s lips pressed to the small of her back. Even though the clock flashed the ungodly time of five-forty, she smiled and stretched like a cat.

“Wake up, sleepyhead.”

Oh, man. His husky morning voice was sexy beyond belief.

She looked up and was surprised to see him dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, a soccer ball anchored to his hip by one muscular arm.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Go? You need to come back.” Propping her head on one arm, she bent one leg into the sheets, rolled her shoulder back and gave him her best sex-kitten pose.

John blinked. Viewed. Swallowed hard and cursed.

“Don’t do this to me, darlin’. I had to sneak back up to the house, change, and sneak back down here. Now I’ve got to sneak out for my soccer game. I’m already late.”

Liza pouted even though she was deliciously sore and could use the reprieve.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You needed to sleep.” He stared down at her, a shadow dimming the bright happiness in his eyes. “We need to decide how we’re going to work this.”

“I know.”

“Today.”

“I know.” She loved him all the more for his patience. “I need just a little more time.”

He nodded. “Rumor is, my staffers are already sending out their résumés. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them try to get on board with Senator Fitzgerald—”

Liza scowled at this outrageous disloyalty.

“—so if I’m going to suspend my campaign, I need to do it.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see you on the plane?”

“Yeah,” she said.

Satisfied now, he smiled and leaned in to kiss her goodbye. “I love you.”

Liza, who’d never been one for flowery words when she could help it, especially in the cold light of day when there was no liquor involved, flushed and cleared her throat.

“Me, too.”

“What was that?”

“Me, too.”

“I can’t hear you, Liza.”

Burning with mortification and grinning like an idiot, Liza dove under the sheet. “I love you, too, okay? Happy?”

Judging from his chuckle as he left and shut the door behind him, he was.

Surfacing, Liza climbed out of bed. By the time she’d emerged from the shower, she could hear the whoops and yells of several male voices and, opening the blinds on the far wall, she saw John and his staffers charging across the green clearing at the bottom of the hill, the black-and-white ball flying between them and a huge smile on John’s face.

Her heart contracted.

What should she do?

She thought about her career and the fifteen-million-dollar offer. She thought about the money she’d already earned and
saved and the fact that she was burned out by the lifestyle and the travel and had been for a while. She thought about John’s candidacy, her absolute belief in his chances of winning and the country’s need for his leadership. She thought about using her platform as first lady to attack the terrible problem of Alzheimer’s.

Most of all, she thought about how John was nothing like Kent and how she’d felt yesterday when she thought he was going to die. She thought about building a life with him and having children with him.

There was no decision to be made.

With one eye on the time and the other on John’s exuberant face outside her window, she picked up her cell phone and dialed her agent in New York to tell him that she was turning down the network’s offer for the anchor’s job and would be resigning from her position as senior Washington correspondent.

Takashi met up with Liza on the tarmac a couple hours later. The expression on his face, which was some combination of anger and worry, jolted her even before he grabbed her by the elbow and steered her a few feet away from the other waiting journalists. Everyone was vibrating with an excited buzz that told her something big had happened, something bad.

“Where the hell have you been? Why haven’t you answered your phone?”

Liza, who, following the difficult phone call with her agent, had all but floated through her morning and was still basking in the glow of John’s love, felt the first prickling of alarm.

“I slept late,” she lied, feeling a nasty twinge of guilt for having ignored the persistent chirp of her phone. “What is it?”

“Nothing good.”

Her mouth dried out. She didn’t like the warning in his voice or the way worry now seemed to edge out anger as his predominant emotion. This, whatever it was, was nothing she wanted to hear, but she’d never been a coward and she wasn’t going to start now.

“Tell me.”

“Well, the first thing’s that we’re going to Richmond, not Washington.”

“Richmond? Why?”

“They haven’t said, but I’m thinking that the good senator wants to nurse his wounds with his sister.”

“What wounds?”

“He was caught on camera engaging in a little hanky-panky last night at Heather Hill—”

Oh, God. Did they have shots of her and John and their heated discussion in the middle of the crowd? She knew they should have been more careful.

“—when one of the caterers snapped these with her phone. They’re grainy, but they’re authentic—we’ve checked. Now she’s shopping them around, trying to get the best price. We told her no, obviously, but she’ll find someone who wants to buy them. Probably a tabloid.”

He offered the pictures to Liza, whose reeling brain felt as if it was spinning in all directions at once. Swallowing hard, her arm leaden and slow, she took them and, with dread, looked down at the one on top.

It was a dark, grainy photo—the pictures had obviously been taken with a poor quality camera and without a flash—but there was no mistaking the people in it, and she had to stifle a cry of outrage and surprise.

It was John. With Adena. His senior adviser and a married woman.

They were all over each other.

No. It couldn’t be.

Hands shaking again—would her hands ever stop shaking?—Liza flipped through one sickening image after the other, all of which seem to have been taken over Adena’s shoulder.

John and Adena, in their formal clothes, sitting inches apart on a stone bench in a garden at Heather Hill, talking urgently. John, his face dark and intense and his arm around Adena’s waist as she buried her face in his neck.

Those two were bad enough, but then it got exponentially worse.

John, standing now, holding Adena in his arms.

Exactly the way he’d held Liza later that very same night. Last night.

And the most painful of all, the slash of a knife right through her heart:

Adena tenderly cupping John’s face in her hands as she kissed him on one corner of his mouth.

No.

John could not have passionately held another woman in his arms on the very same night he made love to Liza. It just wasn’t possible.

A thousand times no.

Yes, said a sly, cool voice in the back of her mind.

Why else did Adena dislike her so much?

These pictures sure explained that behavior, didn’t they?

Here’s the proof that John never loved you any more than Kent loved you, said the sly voice. Believe it.

It all came rushing back to Liza in that one horrifying moment: her husband’s betrayals, magnified a million times. The stunned disbelief. The bottomless despair. The overwhelming rage.

Takashi was staring. She tried to speak, but the pain was so unbearable she could hardly even breathe.

“Photoshop?” Yeah, she was grasping at straws, but she had to.

“No.”

The pictures were authentic. Of course.

Liza almost fell to her knees then, almost wished for death so she wouldn’t have to endure this pain again. Not again.

All these years later and boy, she could still pick them, couldn’t she? She was still as blind and foolish when it came to men as she’d ever been.

Worse, everything she’d experienced with John last night was a lie. Everything he’d told her, the loving whispers, the pleading for her to consider the possibility of them having a joint future—it had all been a fairy tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm.

Liza wasn’t special, after all. And she was a fool for thinking she was.

No doubt the good senator, like countless politicians before him, had mistresses in every far-flung corner of the country. Because that’s what Liza was, wasn’t it? A mistress? One in what was probably a collection of many.

Bewilderment fueled her rage and added to her sense of betrayal. What about all his endless talk of their callings and
being together? What about his offer to quit the race for her? What about his legendary moral code?

“Liza?”

“I turned down the anchor’s job for him,” she whispered.

Takashi’s golden skin paled to chalky white. “Jesus, Liza.”

“He offered to quit the campaign for me.”

His jaw dropped. It was obvious he couldn’t believe Liza had fallen for such a sorry line, and Liza felt so foolish now that her humiliation was complete.

You’re the most important thing to me, Liza.

What’s your sign, Liza?

She’d heard both pickup lines in her lifetime—which one was the smarmiest? What kind of colossally stupid woman fell for either one? Pressing a hand to her throbbing temple, she swayed on the spot and tried not to pass out.

After a minute, an unstoppable hysterical laugh bubbled up to her lips.

“I thought we were going to get married.”

Takashi watched her with utmost pity and concern, especially when her ugly laughter continued and a couple of their colleagues looked around with open curiosity in their eyes.

Taking her arm, he pulled her a couple more steps to the side and passed her a handkerchief from his back pocket. “Pull it together, Za-Za. There’s more.”

“More. Great.” Choking back what was going to be a sob rather than a laugh, Liza dabbed her eyes.

“This isn’t his first go-round with Adena, apparently.”

What?

“I’ve made some calls to a couple of staffers from his first campaign. None of them were willing to speak on the record about the affair, but they were together then, too. This was before Adena was married.”

The world swam out of focus, and Liza clutched Takashi’s arm for support.

“But…he was married then.”

Takashi said nothing.

It didn’t matter. There was nothing he could say that would repair the mutilated remnants of her personal and professional
lives or change what she was: a woman so criminally stupid that she’d given up her life’s ambition and actually thought she’d marry a man who had another mistress and had cheated on his first wife. She’d actually thought John would be faithful to her.

She turned away, unwilling to let Takashi or anyone else see the bitter tears in her eyes. Inside her head, she heard her father’s voice.

You always screw things up, don’t you, girl?

Yeah. She always screwed things up.

“Have you seen the pictures, Senator?”

“Senator, do you have any comments about the cheating allegations?”

“When will you issue any additional statements, Senator?”

John paused at the end of the aisle, stepped aside so the flight attendant could shut the door behind him, stared into the blinding lights of what seemed like a thousand cameras and waited for the uproar to die down, which took quite a while.

He did his best to keep his face serene and unconcerned as the sharks circled around him, but it was no easy job. His press corps had never been quite this frenzied, not even yesterday after the botched assassination attempt.

One shark in particular held his attention. Liza was in her regular seat at the back of the plane with Takashi. Staring at him with shattered eyes that told him how hurt she was, how shaken.

He had to explain to Liza. Screw the rest of these vultures.

Resisting the urge to grab Liza, throw her over his shoulder and sprint with her into the restricted section of the plane, where it was safe, he raised a hand for silence.

“I’m not having an affair with Adena Brown, nor would I ever have an affair with a married woman. That’s all I have to say right now. I’ll issue a more detailed statement later.”

This lack of information, naturally, pleased no one. Chaos erupted again as soon as he paused to catch his breath, and one detached voice rose over all the others.

“Where is Adena Brown today, Senator?” Liza stood, the better to address him over the heads of all the people in the rows in front of her. “We haven’t seen her get on the plane. Is she still on your staff?”

John’s gut contracted into a painful knot. Every inch of ground he’d gained with Liza last night was gone, every ounce of trust destroyed. His head spun with how quickly he’d lost his greatest prize—how easily she’d slipped away from him when he hadn’t seen any danger coming.