Fixer: A Bad Boy Romance (19 page)

In fact, it was probably making things worse. Even now, if he closed his eyes, he could almost convince himself that he heard her voice from the entrance to the American Tap Room, over his shoulder...

Wait. That wasn't just his imagination.

Tanner sat up in shock, this time not managing to keep his drink from slopping over the side and splashing across one knee of his suit as he craned around. Sure enough, he wasn't having some sort of bad dream - there was Alicia, standing just inside of the entrance to the restaurant and looking around expectantly!

Quickly, Tanner tried to throw himself back in his chair. He prayed that the tall back of the winged armchair would shield him. A moment later, he heard footsteps behind him, approaching, but didn't let himself turn around.

"Tanner?"

Shit. God fucking dammit. Tanner swallowed, tried to take a deep breath, coughed instead as the air didn't manage to make it down his windpipe. He sat forward, and Alicia's hand patted him on the back between his shoulder blades.

"Tanner, are you alright? Just try and breathe."

After a minute, he managed to draw in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. "Alicia?" he asked, turning and looking up at her beautiful, concerned face. "What are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here? You texted me," she answered, frowning a little deeper at him.

What? "I didn't," he protested, reaching for his pocket.

"Yes, you did," she insisted. She waited, rolling her eyes mildly at him as he unlocked his phone. Sure enough, Tanner saw with a surge of horrified embarrassment that, instead of sending a text to Freddie with his location, he'd instead sent it to Alicia's number!

"Oh. Shit."

"Not sure why you're so set on getting drunk so quickly," Alicia said, pushing his feet gently off of the ottoman in front of the armchair and sitting down delicately on the cushion instead. "But I was sitting around the office, Duecent was harping on me about something, and I figured that hey, there's nothing more I can do for my education bill tonight. Honestly, we've done just about everything that we can, haven't we?"

"Uh huh," Tanner nodded, grunting as an invisible knife twisted in his guts, reminding him that he'd betrayed this woman just hours earlier. He retrieved his drink from her hand, swallowed the rest of it. The attentive waiter immediately darted forward to take the empty glass from his fingers.

"So I thought that I might as well come enjoy a drink as well," Alicia went on. "Maybe it's a bit of a jinx to think about celebrating before the bill's been called to the floor, but I think that I've earned it." She smiled at Tanner, a smile that sent another crack lancing through his already shattered heart. "Who would have guessed that being a senator could be so exhausting?"

"You didn't notice the white hair on all your peers?" he replied, his mouth operating on autopilot as his brain tried to squeeze itself to death and his heart slowly fractured further. "It's not that they're all old - they've just picked up twenty years in the last decade from trying to please the American public!"

Alicia laughed, high and clear and agonizing. "It does make a horrible kind of sense, doesn't it? Anyway, let me go get a drink from the bar, and I'll be right back."

"I'll be right here," Tanner called after her, unable to resist plunging another knife into himself by watching her cute ass swing back and forth as she walked away. She wasn't the hottest woman in the world, he tried to remind himself.

But the words didn't mean much when he wanted her desperately, more than any other he could imagine.

Tanner's waiter showed back up, fresh scotch in hand. "I brought you a double," the man disclosed, instantly earning himself another ten percent on top of his tip in Tanner's mind.

"Thanks." Tanner swallowed a big slug, not even tasting the complex flavors of the scotch. His mouth still felt dry as ashes. "Keep them coming."

The waiter nodded, and Tanner tried to paste his fake smile back on as Alicia turned and smiled back at him, giving him a little wave from the bar. His heart ached, broke, came back together only to shatter once again.

And it was at that moment, looking at this infuriating woman who wouldn't get out of his mind, that Tanner knew beyond a doubt that he'd made a terrible mistake.

Chapter Twenty-One

*

The rest of the evening flew by in a haze of smiles on the outside, matched by Tanner's growing self-loathing and hatred inside his own head.

Somehow, Tanner managed to keep up a happy appearance for Alicia. He matched the female senator's happy tone, trying his best to keep the conversation away from talk of the education bill that would come up for a vote the following morning. Thankfully, Alicia also didn't want to spend the whole night talking about the bill, and he managed to keep most of the conversation on lighter topics.

Even with other topics of conversation, however, Tanner kept feeling the agonizing pain growing inside his chest, eating away at him from the inside. He smiled at Alicia, matched her flirty comments, leaned in as she ran her hand over his leg, while repeating to himself that he was absolute scum. He needed to just tell her the truth, break it to her before she discovered the full extent of his betrayal tomorrow.

He tried, several times, to summon up the courage to come clean. But each time he opened his mouth, he looked at Alicia, felt his heart break again, and knew that he was too much of a spineless coward to do it.

What the hell was his problem? He'd broken up with dozens of girls before Alicia, some of them with incredible callousness. None of them ever so much as disturbed his sleep the next night.

But none of them were Alicia.

"Hey," the woman said, cutting into his anguished thoughts. "What's going on with you? Your thoughts are all tied up with something, and it's not me."

"Right. Sorry." Tanner shook his head, wishing that she'd stop smiling at him, stop looking at him like he was the most special person in the world. "I guess my mind's just distracted. Maybe I ought to call it an early night."

"You sure it's not the dozen shots that you've put away?" Alicia asked, her eyes dipping to his glass, once again almost empty (Tanner caught a glimpse of his waiter, hovering on the periphery and ready to lift the glass out of his fingers as soon as he took the last gulp). "I didn't see how much you had before I got here, but if I had all that alcohol inside my body right now, you'd have to drag me home by slinging me over your shoulder."

"Yeah, it's probably the booze," Tanner said, glad of the excuse. He swallowed the last bit of liquid and handed his credit card off to the waiter when he stepped forward. "Just add thirty percent on for yourself," he added to the man, who nodded with a growing smile.

"Generous," Alicia grinned at him. She reached down and caught at his hand, tugging him up from the chair. Tanner staggered on his feet, the scotch making his vision spin and blur, and she quickly ducked forward to help hold him up. "Easy, now."

"I should probably go home alone," Tanner groaned out, but Alicia just ignored these words as she walked him towards the door.

"Nonsense," she insisted, as the waiter returned and accepted Tanner's illegible scrawl across the bottom of the receipt before passing back his black card. "You'll probably not even make it up to your apartment if I let you go off alone. Trust me, I'm used to caring for drunken idiots - you should have seen some of my brothers, growing up."

"Brothers?" he repeated, feeling like the entire conversation was out of his control.

She nodded. "Two older ones. Three and six years older, respectively. They used to show up at my college dorm room, wasted off their asses, and crash on my couch and floor. I got really good at cleaning up after them." She smiled up at him, as Tanner gloomily pictured how two large men might show up and beat him into a pulp after they found out how he betrayed their younger sister.

Outside, Alicia called a car and bundled a still-protesting Tanner into the backseat. Leaning forward, she gave the driver Tanner's address, and then curled up against him, nestling into the crook of his arm as the car pulled away from the curb.

Back at his apartment, Alicia once again easily resisted Tanner's efforts to convince her to go home, that he had everything under control. "I'm not going to be able to fall asleep tonight anyway, thinking about the bill's vote tomorrow," she told him, not seeing him wince in the darkness outside his building. "And I'm sure that you feel the same way. So we might as well not sleep together, don't you think?"

Any other time, the idea of a girl - especially sexy, gorgeous, perfect, wonderful Alicia - practically dragging him into bed with free reign to do whatever he wanted to her would have seemed like a perfect fantasy. Tonight, it just stabbed another blade into Tanner's gut. Still, he couldn't manage to convince her otherwise, and instead watched with horror as she helped him up to his penthouse apartment. He felt a bit like he was having an out of body experience, stuck watching as his life came apart in slow motion.

"I need to talk to you," he finally managed to croak out as he sat, drunk and helpless, on his couch inside his apartment.

Alicia, standing up and wandering around looking at the scattered knickknacks on his shelves, glanced curiously over her shoulder at him. "Sure, go ahead. Going to tell me some of your history, now that I've revealed most of mine?"

"My history?" Tanner repeated, distracted and confused.

"Sure." Alicia picked up a picture of Tanner with a few of his college buddies, examined it, put it back on the shelf. "How'd you end up working as a fixer? For the Republicans, no less?"

Tanner grimaced. Maybe, he thought wildly to himself, he could drive her away if he gave her the real, unvarnished truth here. Then, the betrayal tomorrow would just be one more rock to add to the pile.

"They had more money, more desperation, and fewer morals," he answered honestly. "I majored in political science at Georgetown, didn't really pick a side at first. But I saw that, while all of the Democrats had these crazy ideals that wouldn't work in the real world unless every single person cooperated fairly, the Republicans were at least realistic about how fucked up everything was. I figured that, as long as there were some Republicans around, I'd need to be selfish if I wanted to get anything for myself. Might as well learn from the best."

"That's rather cynical," Alicia commented, but she was still listening, a little smile still flickering around the corners of her mouth.

He shrugged. "I figured that I wanted to be rich and powerful - who doesn't? If it meant that I had to fuck over a bunch of poor people to get it, well, that's how the world works." He knew that his words were harsh, cruel, but he kept going.

This time, his barbed insult flew true. He saw Alicia wince for a moment. "Well, cruel as it is, at least you're not trying to disguise it as help, like some of your comrades-"

"That's because they still need to pander to the idiots that keep on electing them," Tanner cut her off. He hated these words, hated saying them, even though they were all true. "I don't have that problem. This is how the real world works, anyway - people lie, cheat, cut all sorts of scammy deals in order to further their own ambitions. Even if it fucks over others, people that they love."

Another wince from her. "But you don't have to-"

"I lied." It came bursting out of him, louder than he intended.

He saw Alicia frown, not understanding. "Yes, I know. I saw through it, remember?"

"No, not that." He had to tell her. She deserved to know, even though it would hurt her more than he could imagine. "Tonight. Today. I wasn't out sick."

He waited, watching her face. He expected to see suspicion appear, her realization that he was still a liar, always a liar, that he could never be better than what he was. But instead, she kept on looking at him, still open, still trusting him. She believed in him, and he was about to destroy her using that belief.

"What were you doing?" she asked, her voice still not shaded by the hatred that he knew would come soon.

Here it came. "I was meeting with some of the Senators. I killed the education bill."

Nothing. She didn't believe him. He saw her eyes flick back and forth, trying to determine whether this was some sort of cruel, unfunny joke. He kept going.

"That was my job, Alicia. From the beginning. Richard Pribus, the head of the RNC, hired me to kill the education bill. To stop you. The Republicans are scared of you, and they wanted to shut down your agenda right away. So they hired me, told me to find a way, any way, to make sure that this education bill didn't pass, without it looking like a purely Republican attack against American education."

Finally, it was starting to sink in. Her eyes held pain, now, betrayal even worse than he'd imagined. He plunged on, knowing that, as bad as this was, he had to say his piece.

"All of our time together - I was searching for weaknesses, ways to crack through your support. I did it today, the day before the bill goes to the floor of the Senate for a vote. I called in favors, leaned on Senators, didn't follow the rules. I killed it. It won't get nearly enough votes tomorrow to pass. Both Republicans and Democrats will vote against it."