“No. I’m not meeting Charlotte’s bridesmaid. I’m in no mood to be hooked up with anyone.”
“Aiden…”
“No, Mother.”
Irritation flashed in his mother’s eyes, but she didn’t let it change her expression. They were in public, after all. The ballroom teemed with the most influential men and women in DC. Everyone who was anyone—or knew anyone—was here tonight. Aiden really should be using his sister’s engagement party to network, but after the week he’d had he wasn’t sure he’d make a decent impression on anyone. Especially not the woman his mother seemed to want to be the next love of his life.
“I don’t see how it would do you any harm to meet the girl,” his mother argued, before flashing a blinding smile past his shoulder. “Senator! How lovely of you to come!”
Aiden took advantage of her distraction to slip away, navigating his way through the crowds of tuxedoed power-players to the long mahogany bar in one corner.
He didn’t need to look to know that Charlotte’s intended would still be holding court on the opposite side of the ballroom. Tug Newton, of the Providence Newtons, was a large man, with the physique of an athlete who had gone soft and the air of a man who expected the world to adore him as much as he adored himself.
Charlotte certainly seemed to be doing her part to lavish him with adoration. She’d been hanging on her fiancé’s arm all night, beaming the smile of a devoted disciple—but maybe that wasn’t fair.
Aiden had met Tug for all of two seconds, when the man had blustered, “You must be the brother!” as if Charlotte didn’t have two brothers before calling over Aiden’s shoulder, “Mr. Secretary! When are you going to let me beat you at golf again?” Aiden had hung around in the circle around Tug and Charlotte for a few more minutes, until it became readily apparent that Tug wasn’t going to send any more conversational gambits toward Charlotte’s family—he was far too busy talking about himself.
Then his mother had cornered him.
Aiden ordered a scotch, hoping that would put him in a more hospitable mood. His instant dislike of Tug probably had nothing to do with the man himself. He’d been in a shitty mood all week.
It had started out well enough, with a lovely idyllic Sunday with his girls, but then that damn snow storm had hit and everything had gone to hell. He’d left the house early on Tuesday in a futile attempt to get to the office before the roads were too much of a mess. Only half of the staff had been able to make it in—but none of the deadlines for their filings had been moved back so everyone had been stressed and overworked trying to pick up the slack. His drive home had been white-knuckle terrifying, his tires slipping more than once. He’d barely avoided sliding into a ditch to join the dozen cars he’d passed that had already met that fate.
Then he’d gotten home to his girls, just wanting to unwind, and Samira had informed him that her own crap day with the girls was squarely his fault because he’d screwed with their routine by skipping breakfast. Which made him feel like the lowest kind of shit. With Chloe gone, he was all the girls had and he wasn’t enough. He couldn’t be.
He wasn’t as present at home as he wanted to be. His hours were too long and the girls needed more stability. But when he didn’t put in the long hours, his work—which was important damn it—suffered for it.
He tried to be what everyone needed—the best father, the best son, grandson, brother, lawyer, employer—and no matter how much sleep he shorted himself there were never enough hours in the day. It was never enough.
He couldn’t even be mad at Samira because she hadn’t told him to make him feel bad. She’d just been informing him of cause and effect—all businesslike and distant. Which, frankly, pissed him off.
Ever since the snowstorm, she’d retreated into herself again, all the progress he’d thought they’d made toward friendship in the last few weeks evaporating into one word answers. He didn’t know why that bothered him so much, but with everything else that had hit this week, it was just the icing on the freaking cake.
He’d won a case, a major case, one they’d worked on for months, but the damages awarded to his clients were laughably small. Too small to do the victims any good or penalize the corporation in the wrong enough to be effective as a deterrent. The win had been bitter—leaving the clients angry and Aiden frustrated for them even as he cursed the fact that all his time away from the family—fighting through the freaking Snowpocalypse—hadn’t even been able to do any good.
He wasn’t making a difference.
Was his grandfather right? Was there more he could be doing in public office than he was managing as a private citizen?
Right now all he wanted was to hit the reset button on the entire freaking week and figure out where the hell he’d gone wrong—not play nice with the sharks of DC at his sister’s engagement party.
He wasn’t in a state to be here. He shouldn’t have come. But his mother would never have let him forget it if he hadn’t made an appearance. He would have been Just like Candice who always skipped everything but the most crucial family events, thanks to her job three thousand miles away in California.
California was starting to look pretty damn good right now—but he knew that wasn’t him. He’d never run from a responsibility in his life and he didn’t want to run from them now. He just wished one damn thing in his life would go well right now.
Aiden leaned against the bar, signaling to the bartender for another drink when he found his own empty.
“Have you had the pleasure of meeting our future brother-in-law yet?” his brother Scott said by way of greeting as he appeared at Aiden’s side and held up two fingers for the bartender to double the drink order.
“I have,” Aiden answered without turning—and without enthusiasm. It really was a shame Tug was such an asshole.
“I take it you aren’t a fan,” Scott said. He swirled the amber liquid in his glass before lifting it for a sip. From the loose, boneless way his brother was standing, Aiden had a feeling it wasn’t his first.
I thought you were back on the wagon, he almost said, but good sense kept his mouth shut.
Scott was ten years his senior and they’d always gotten along well enough, but Scott tended to treat him more like the family mascot than a peer. He wouldn’t appreciate having his latest fall from grace pointed out by his baby brother. And if he didn’t appreciate things, he had a tendency to fall even deeper into the bottle as a consequence.
The eighteen-year-old scotch in Aiden’s glass suddenly tasted bitter on his tongue.
He wasn’t usually in the habit of drinking to make himself feel better—he’d seen from far too early an age what drugs and alcohol had done to blow up Scott’s life—but he’d gone for the bar without a second thought tonight. Needing a drink like he hadn’t let himself since Chloe’s death.
Bad habits. Apparently, they were in the blood. He set down his glass without taking another drink, wishing he could set aside his own bad mood as easily.
“The jury’s still out,” he answered on the topic of Tug, trying to keep an open mind.
“The jury will have more time to deliberate. Dad invited Tug to join us on the spring turkey shoot since the old man wasn’t able to get back from whichever country he’s in these days in time for the engagement party. Luckily Tug was very sympathetic regarding Dad’s difficult schedule because he knows all about the demands of the State Department, given that he himself is so incredibly important there. Certainly not shy about praising his own accomplishments, that Tug,” Scott commented dryly. “I wasn’t expecting to hear some of the things Charlotte has said about him coming out of his own mouth verbatim. At least we know where she gets her facts now.”
“Charlotte seems happy,” Aiden said neutrally, trying to focus on that fact.
“She’s definitely drunk the Kool-Aid.” Scott snorted—but Aiden couldn’t laugh. Cult-like devotion was a little too close to what he was seeing on Charlotte’s face whenever she looked up at her beloved.
Scott waved for a refill of his drink, which he’d somehow managed to drain already—and Aiden tried not to stare too judgmentally at the gesture.
“What are you doing to keep busy these days?” he asked—again in that carefully neutral tone.
“You mean since I torpedoed my career?” Scott asked cheerfully.
Scott’s tenure as a Congressman from the Great State of Maryland had ended rather abruptly when he lost his second re-election campaign thanks to a scandal involving a couple of his staffers and an impressive quantity of cocaine. He’d been out of court ordered rehab for a while now, but the brothers rarely talked and their mother wasn’t in the habit of passing on family news until she had something positive to be announced.
“Mom wants me to run again,” Scott declared cheerfully. “She thinks I can pull off the reformed sinner found Jesus thing, but I doubt Eleanor will play ball. My darling wife decamped to her parents’ place in Pennsylvania with the kids and she’d probably have filed for divorce already if she weren’t hoping for Grandpa Dalton to kick the bucket and leave me something big in the will.”
All of this was said with a smile—but that was Scott. Drugs and smart ass remarks. Sad eyes and snarky grins.
“Do you want to run again?” Aiden had never gotten the impression that Scott liked politics very much, but as the first-born son of the Montgomery-Raines line he hadn’t been given much choice in the matter.
“Not particularly,” Scott took another swallow of his drink. “I’ve been doing some lobbying lately and I might stick with that. Turns out I’m much better at wining and dining and leading the naughty elected officials to sin and temptation than I ever was at being the virtuous public servant.” He snorted. “You should run for office. Boy Scout like you? I’m surprised Mom hasn’t already commissioned your campaign posters. Saint Aiden for Congress.”
Aiden’s jaw worked as his irritation bubbled up to the surface again. “I’m not a saint.”
Scott snorted again. “Sure you aren’t. I bet you’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket.”
“Just because I’ve never had to bribe a public official to get my license back after it was revoked for driving under the influence doesn’t mean I’m a Boy Scout,” he snapped, and then immediately regretted the words.
“Oh yeah. You’re edgy all right. When was the last time you did anything even remotely scandalous? I bet you don’t even cheat on your taxes.”
Aiden glared at his brother, rejecting the ridiculous urge to drag out all his faults to defend himself. Sure, he’d never been involved in scandal and he liked to play by the rule book, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have just as many demons as the next man. Just as many regrets. He had wants and needs and if he happened to be better than most at controlling them he wasn’t going to apologize for it just because Scott was riding his own devils hard tonight.
“Boys!” Their mother detached herself from the crowd to approach, arms spread like an orchestra conductor. “Come take a picture with the Speaker before he has to leave.”
His mother was never one to miss a photo op, but in the past it might just have been Scott she corralled into smiling for the camera. Aiden didn’t miss the fact that she included both of them in the demand. Had she been thinking about a potential bid for office in his name? Had his grandfather said something to her? Or was this just Regina Montgomery-Raines being Regina Montgomery-Raines?
Aiden moved to shake hands with the older man, someone he knew well thanks to his grandfather’s widespread campaign contributions. They posed with hands clasped for the cameraman who’d been roving around the engagement party, catching more of these moments than he was romantic vignettes of the bride and groom.
They said their goodbyes to the Speaker and began to circulate through the crowds of DC power players. Scott made a comment about the dog and pony show, but Aiden didn’t respond. He was too busy thinking about how much influence was in this one room. How much good these people could do, if they only stirred themselves to do it.
He could be one of these men. The dog and pony show wasn’t distasteful to him, as it seemed to have been to Scott. He could do this dance. In a way, it was what he’d been raised for.
Politics had changed in recent years—his grandfather had bemoaned it in many of his lucid moments—but they could change again. For the better. Aiden could do that. He understood the giant unwieldy beast of governance better than most.
Maybe it was time to put his Boy Scout reputation to good use.