Indecent Proposal (8 page)

“Ryan?”

“No. I picked up a few shifts at a bar down the street, but once I started getting sick I was late too many times and the manager let me go.”

“So, no job? Tell me you filed for insurance—”

“I did. I’m covered.”

“Savings?”

“A few months’ rent.”

“That’s it?”

“Wes—”

“You need to go home, Ryan.”

She bristled. “No, I don’t. I don’t need to go back to Nora, pregnant, with my tail between my legs, so she can say I told you so.”

“You realize you are a thirty-two-year-old woman? This sister fight with Nora is getting ridiculous.”

“Tell her that,” she muttered. “She’s the one keeping me in exile.”

But he already had. Wes had been trying to get them to make up for years, but the hurt Ryan had caused Nora was too bad. Too big. It wasn’t a forgive-and-forget kind of thing. It was a carry-the-hatchet-to-the-grave kind of thing.

“There’s a lot of money in pregnant modeling,” she said, grasping at straws. She’d looked in the mirror, and what she saw there didn’t say Happy Pregnant Woman About Town. She looked like she had barely survived the zombie apocalypse. “My agent says I’ll probably be able to get some catalog work. Maybe some national spots.”

“Right, as soon as you get off the bathroom floor.”

“Morning sickness doesn’t last forever.”

“Then you don’t remember when Mom was pregnant with Olivia.”

The memory of her mother, shuffling around the house,
gray-faced and miserable during the entire pregnancy, gave Ryan’s stomach a slimy twist, and she looked away from her brother’s damning eyes.

“Women have babies by themselves in New York City all the time. I’m hardly alone.”

But she felt it. She really did. So alone her entire life was just an echo chamber, her mistakes bouncing back at her.

Outside in the hallway, someone yelled and a metal tray was dropped. The noise was so loud she flinched.

“I can help,” he said. “But even I can’t support you and a baby in New York City. I don’t have that kind of cash.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Don’t yell at me, Wes,” she cried. “You can’t demand access and answers from me when your whole damn life is a secret.”

“This isn’t about me! It’s about you and your baby.” He threw his hands up in the air. “Day care. Schools. That one-room closet you call an apartment. You need help. Point-blank. End of story. And I know you’ve been living your life on your own terms for a long time, but if you plan on having this baby you’re gonna have to get over yourself.”

Get over myself
, she thought, and nearly laughed. He said it like pride was a luxury when it was all she had left. The only thing that her family, her ex-husband, her life hadn’t taken away from her.

The vague upset in her stomach that she’d gotten used to was suddenly eclipsed by head-to-toe chills, her skin breaking out in goose bumps.

The price of the baby
, she thought, putting her hands over her stomach,
will be my pride
.

She’d known after the night with Harry that there would be more to pay.

Her brother’s glowing intensity was suddenly too much and she looked away, staring blindly toward the silent news on the television.

Behind the dark-haired anchor with apple cheeks, the words
Kidnapped by Somali Pirates
flashed red and yellow.

Wes grabbed the remote from the bedside table and turned up the volume.

“What is this?” she asked, happily jumping on the distraction.

“You haven’t been following the news?”

“Been busy, Wes. Puking my guts up.”

The screen changed to a picture of a pretty woman with curly brown hair and a wide smile.

“That’s Ashley Montgomery,” Wes said. “She was kidnapped by pirates, rescued, and then vanished again.”

“And I thought I had it bad,” she muttered, pleased when Wes smiled at her.

“The worldwide media search for Ashley Montgomery has finally ended,” the news anchor said. “Montgomery has turned up in a small town in Arkansas, where she’s been recuperating after surviving three weeks in a Somali pirate camp. Apparently she’s been busy organizing a series of senior citizen initiatives in the small town but has said that she will be stepping out occasionally to help her brother’s congressional campaign.”

A man, blond-haired and smiling, radiating a kind of poise and confidence that one would expect from a guy running for office, was shaking hands with people in a huge crowd as he walked toward a podium.

The crowd was holding signs that said
Harrison Montgomery for Congress
and
A New Hope
.

“Two months ago, Harrison Montgomery’s run for Georgia’s Fifth District seat in the House of Representatives
seemed like a sure thing. But Republican candidate Arthur Glendale is giving the Montgomery Golden Boy a run for his money.”

“Ryan?” Wes asked. “What’s wrong?”

Harrison Montgomery
.

Harry
.

“I’m going to be sick.”

Chapter 7

Sunday, August 18

Ryan was proud of her apartment. It was an engineering/small-space lifestyle marvel and it had taken years to get it just right, to come up with all the clever space-saving tricks. The key was sparseness. Absolutely no clutter or mess. Having no attachments to things helped, too. No pictures in frames, no mementos to keep in boxes that took up space. Living this way required a certain ruthlessness, but she was suited for that.

The books were her only luxury.

Which wasn’t to say her apartment was dour. No. She’d painted the kitchen part of the studio yellow to go with her red teacups, which went with her blue rug. The walls in the living area were lined with shelves filled with books and jewelry, along with some of her prettier shoes that she’d collected over the years. Her clothes were nestled in there, socks and underwear in a shelf basket. Her laptop was tucked under the couch.

After the divorce and selling the house in Jersey, she’d moved to this Queens apartment, thinking it was only temporary, hopeful she’d get some more bookings, maybe a national spot, and make some money that would let her move someplace else.

Someplace without water stains, and with a real closet and—dare to dream—an oven. Maybe a one-bedroom in Brooklyn.

But the big contract didn’t come, and she’d stayed in Sunnyside and made her little apartment work for her.

“This place is worse than a college dorm room,” Wes said as he walked in behind her.

“Like either of us has ever seen the inside of college dorm room,” she muttered. She hung her keys on the hook beside the door and collapsed onto the couch underneath the loft bed she’d made with her own two hands last year.

Upstairs, her neighbor was screaming in Spanish at something on the TV.

And the smell of someone cooking cabbage seeped through the walls.

Home, sweet home.

“We need to talk about this,” Wes said, pacing the four steps from her kitchen area to the bathroom door.

“There’s not much left to say.”

“Harrison Montgomery knocked you up and there’s not much to say?”

Ryan sighed and rested her head in her hands. “You make it sound like I’m a victim, Wes. And I’m not. It was more than consensual, we used protection, something happened, and I’m pregnant.”

“You’re pregnant, broke, out of work, and sick as a dog.”

She glared at him. “You don’t have to stay. You can leave if this is so damn troubling to you.”

“You know, maybe I
will
leave, and I’ll head on down to Atlanta and let Harrison Montgomery in on what’s going on with you.”

“Don’t, Wes.” She stood, because these were not idle threats with her brother. Not at all. He would do just that and feel as if his actions were totally justified.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t?”

“Because I need some time to think!” she cried. “Because this is my life, and I just realized that the father of
my unborn baby is running for Congress. Maybe I don’t want him involved in it!”

“You’ve got to be realistic. He is in a financial position to help you.”

“I don’t give a shit, Wes. He’s in the middle of a campaign—this could seriously mess that up for him.”

“You’re kidding me, right? You’re pregnant, alone, and broke and you’re worried about his fucking campaign?”

Ryan sat back down on the couch, suddenly exhausted. By everything. The baby growing in her stomach, her tiny apartment, her brother.

Harrison Montgomery.

That explained the gravitas.

And the complicated family.

In fact, details of that whole night rearranged themselves into a different order. A different reality. She had a very hard-won sense of her own worth and it took some great weight to crush her, but Harrison Montgomery lowering himself from his lofty heights did it.

Harry had been slumming.

But even as she thought it, even as the proof seemed irrefutable, she didn’t want to believe it. He had not been in that bar looking to score. Drinking away the pain of his sister’s unsure future at the hands of Somali pirates had been his objective.

Christ
, she thought. Amazed anew at how he’d kept his shit together that night.

There was not a chance in the world she would have had that kind of poise in the face of something that terrifying. She’d have been running down the streets of New York like a lunatic, not sitting so still in the corner of a bar like he was the axis upon which the world spun.

“Can we just take a break for a while?” she said. “You can go back to telling me how impossible my life is in a little bit. Okay?”

Wes braced his hands on his lean hips, his burgundy tee shirt worn and thin over black jeans and work boots. The Wes Kaminski uniform. She wondered if his secret job paid him at all.

“Fine,” he sighed. “Take a nap. I’m going to go to the store.” He opened the fridge and took quick stock. “You’ve been living on milk?”

“And oranges. Get lots of them. And sometimes I want peanut butter. Crunchy.”

“What about meat?”

She gagged at the thought.

“Got it,” Wes said with a smile, and she felt all her defenses get wobbly. Everything was wobbly, and she pulled the chenille blanket—red to match her teacups—from the back of the love seat over her tired and sore body.

“I’ll be okay, Wes. I always am. I just need some time to figure this out.”

“You don’t have a lot of time, Ryan.”

“I’ve got nine months.”

Her eyes drifted shut and she didn’t hear her brother whisper, “You’ve got until Friday.”

Friday, August 23
The Governor’s Mansion

Harrison’s BlackBerry was getting hot in his hand, nearly burning his ear.

“We have got to do something, Harrison,” Wallace was saying. “Glendale is killing us in the press. You look like a Boy Scout. Like literally, an earnest little boy in shorts with a stupid sash and knee socks.”

“I get the idea, Wallace,” he said, pacing the front porch of the Governor’s Mansion in the bright noon sunlight. Inside, the bullshit was thick on the floor as
his mother was telling the
Southern Living
staff writer all about her heritage recipe for Georgia Caviar, a black-eyed pea salad his mother had never made in her life.

And his father was pretending that these family meals had been a tradition for as long as he’d been in the mansion. There was even a baseball game playing on the television.

When Ted had been running for the Senate the first time and Harrison had been six or so, Mom arranged a press conference at a park so newspapers could get pictures of him and Ted playing catch. They’d had to send staffers out to buy baseball gloves because they didn’t have any.

One of Ted’s bodyguards taught him how to throw the ball, because Dad tried but got frustrated too fast and started drinking from the flask he always had in his pocket.

Mom had been furious. At Harrison. At Ted. At the world that was always so willing to disappoint her.

But no matter how awkward and truly false the event Mother was orchestrating, she used these little vignettes as a way to get work done. Today she was in there talking about Harrison’s VetAid initiative to provide veterans returning home from war and their families much-needed legal aid.

You just had to wade through a lot of lies to get to the truth of his family.

“Ashley is coming to the fundraiser next week. That will help, won’t it?” he asked. He’d finally gotten his sister on the phone and she’d agreed to do three events to help his campaign, on the one condition that he come to Bishop, Arkansas, to get her.

Have you ever in your life been just Harrison?
she’d asked.
And not Harrison Montgomery?

Once
, he’d answered, thinking of Ryan Kaminski and that night that seemed more dream than real.

“Maybe we need another photo of you with your shirt off,” Wallace said, pulling Harrison’s thoughts away from tattoos and one-night stands. “Or a trip down to Manuel’s Tavern to get your picture taken behind the bar.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You are the new generation’s JFK Jr.—let’s not shy away from the sex appeal.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch.”

“I’m getting worried, Harrison.”

“Yeah, I get that. But I’m not going to take off my shirt. If we stick to the message: education, family—”

“Community, yes. The message is good. But Glendale has the same message and way more money. And his dad is dead.”

And my dad is alive and still making mistakes
.

Behind him he heard the scuff of footsteps on the brick porch and turned to see Noelle standing just outside the doorway.

“They’re ready for you,” she said, and he nodded at her.

“I’ve got to go,” Harrison said to Wallace.

“Is Noelle there?” Wallace asked.

“Of course.”

“What’s she wearing?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What? I like her.”

“You have a serious thing for inaccessible women.”

“Wait … why do you think she’s inaccessible? I could totally—”