“I don’t really have time to have this conversation right now,” Aaron said as he knotted his tie by feel and glowered over his desktop at Rick. He had a lot of nerve coming into his place of business unannounced and into his office without even so much as a knock.
“I would imagine you don’t have a lot of time for … ” Rick fixed his stare on Mandy who was standing behind Aaron’s chair at the moment and waved a hand in a dismissive fashion. “Diversions when you’re at the office.”
“It’s none of your business, Rick.” Aaron straightened his cufflinks and stood, pinching up the suit jacket draped on the back of his chair. Mandy stepped forward and grabbed the shoulders, holding it up so he could easily slip his arms into it. The gesture had seemed so automatic on her part, probably a leftover compulsion from working in a clothing store, but he appreciated the sweet gesture all the same. He offered her a small smile and was pretty sure there was a reddening of her cheeks before she turned her back to them. He turned his attention back to his father’s dear old friend, his smile already gone.
“Oh, but it is my business, you see. That’s my job, remember?” Rick pressed his palms onto the desk and leaned in close. “The public wants to know if your hands are clean, Aaron. Doesn’t matter if Charles is attached to this outfit or not. People assume he is, so they’re watching you. But you already knew that. Been good until now.” He drummed the desktop with his fingers and pushed himself upright before pacing in front of the guest chairs. “You have to be above reproach. Squeaky clean. So, if you’re screwing your staff, people are going to assume your sense of morality is a bit loose. Funny how the public is, huh?”
Aaron stared down at his hands for a moment, let his eyes blur on a spot where motor oil stained his cuticle, and took a deep breath. He wouldn’t get loud. Not with so many staff members in earshot. He chose his words carefully.
“I hired Miranda after we became personally involved, not before.”
Rick’s shoulders bounced upward into an elegant shrug. “I’m not certain that makes it any better. Nepotism and such.”
“It’s not nepotism if she’s the most qualified person for the job. And as you might have noticed, we’ve been quite discreet. Otherwise we would have had this confrontation before now, right?”
“I think your father is going to want to know about it.” Rick spun on his expensive Italian heel and walked toward the door.
Shit.
He’d obviously driven all the way out to Durham for a reason, and whatever it was still wasn’t apparent. Aaron hated to call him back, but …
“Rick, what did you want, anyway? I know you didn’t come all the way out to Durham to play hall monitor.”
Rick stopped, turned his gaze to Mandy briefly, then to Aaron. Aaron didn’t like the way he’d looked at her — like some game that needed hunting. When Rick spoke again his voice was, low. Sibilant, even.
“Nothing. It’s irrelevant now.” He made another flicking gesture with his hand and left.
Mandy slipped in front of Aaron’s desk chair and leaned her backside against the edge. He automatically wrapped his arms around her thighs.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
He rubbed her through the back of her skirt for a moment, then leaned back in his chair and slipped his pen out of his pants pocket. After threading it through his fingers for a while, he admitted, “I don’t know, sweetheart. And at this point, I also don’t care. Fuck it.” He pushed his seat back and stood.
She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms over his breasts. “You don’t care about what exactly?”
He bobbed his head in the direction of the closed door. “That.” He gave Mandy a gentle peck on the cheek and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Answer your phone when I call you, please.”
Her expression was wary but she nodded. “Yeah.”
Aaron left Mandy to the office where she appeared to be resuming her search for her thumb drive and he walked out to the reception area, thinking he owned Jasmine a stern talking to. For some reason, she always turned into a pile of goo every time that man walked into the office. What had he done to her? She was sweet, but usually don’t let people bowl her over.
He found the reception area empty. The out-of-office greeting light was activated on her phone, so he figured she must have stepped out for lunch.
Rick stood from the wingback chair he’d sat and crossed his legs in and gestured to the door. “Decided to stick around. Shall we talk over lunch?”
Aaron ground his teeth and leaned over Jasmine’s desk to pull a sticky note out of the dispenser. He clicked his pen and scribbled a note: See Mandy later about establishing protocol for reception back-up.
When he stood again, his impulse was to say “no” straight out, but hearing Mandy rustling in his drawers several doors down gave him pause. If he was going to have it out with the man, they might as well do it in semi-private. That’s what his mother would have had him do, anyway. She’d told him to be the captain of his own ship — the master of his own destiny. That if he didn’t want the press to control him, then he’d better start controlling them.
He gave a curt nod. “Fine.”
Aaron trailed Rick in his own car to a restaurant allowed the hostess to lead him and Rick to a back booth. Rick immediately put in an order for whiskey on the rocks. Given the early hour, Aaron abstained.
When Rick didn’t seem to be forthcoming with the expected haranguing, Aaron tapped his fingers against the tabletop and said, “Well?”
Rick cleared his throat. “As you’ve already been counseled, next year’s race is expected to be one of the tightest ever, even without us knowing who’s going to be on the ticket. People are ready for change. Bad news for us.”
“Yeah, I keep hearing that.” Aaron swirled the ice in his water around so it made a complete circuit in the glass.
“Shy of having everyone hold their breath, we need everyone to be on their best behavior.”
Aaron set down his glass and cracked his knuckles. “Say something new.”
“Fine, how’s this? I did some checking on your staff coordinator. Motley little family she has. Father was thrown out of the Army on his ear for insubordination about thirty years ago and now lives off the grid in the southwest. We’re looking into that. Her mother’s road to citizenship is a bit unusual in my opinion, if it’s even legal. I have my doubts. Her stepfather — ”
“I don’t give a shit about her stepfather. Why are you doing background checks on my girlfriend, anyway?”
Rick scoffed and took a long sip of his drink. “Until this morning, we weren’t aware of the exact nature of your relationship, not that it matters. We did a bit of checking on her because I was thinking about offering her a position with the campaign.”
Aaron balled his napkin up into his fist and tried his hardest to squelch the urge to rip it to shreds. “You can’t headhunt my people.”
“Why not? Isn’t that what you do? Swoop in to little ma and pa shops and steal their people? You did good. Looks and a brain. She’s a political wet dream.”
Aaron reached across the table, grabbed Rick’s tie and yanked. “Don’t you dare talk about Miranda like she’s some kind of object. You want me to behave? You damn sure better act like it. Pass that on to Dad if you want. I’m not playing puppet anymore.” He released the tie and stood. “And I pretty sure Miranda voted for the other guy three years ago.”
Rick made a choking sound while he loosened the noose. “I guess you’re not concerned about your funding for next year, are you Aaron?”
“You let me worry about the funding. You just worry about that contract you obviously signed with Mephistopheles, ’cause you’ll have to pay up your end eventually. Enjoy your bloody steak, you fucking vampire.”
• • •
“Tell me about these people and why I should hire them.”
Mandy sat in the conference room of CTW with the headquarters staff feeling slightly ill at ease at the seating arrangement. Aaron had pointedly followed her into the room on her heels and took the seat immediately adjacent to her. He’d even gone as far as to share her handouts. His behavior was an odd reversal to her.
Mike spoke up first. He really was good at being the volunteer. “Luciano Gurka. My old roommate from UNC-W. He currently lives down in Florence. He flipped houses until he became a millionaire then the market softened. He’s been living on savings for the past couple of years, but he’s ready to go back to work.”
“He’s motivated? He’d be in that zone all by himself.”
“Hell yeah. He’s got a new wife and a little baby. He’s the kind of guy if you give him a short string he’ll find a way to turn it into a sweater.”
“Great. Miranda, can you get him up here for an interview? You’ll need to jibe it with my schedule as well as yours.”
“Got it.”
“Anyone else?”
Mandy put up her hand, felt silly for doing it, then put it down. “My friend Chelsea expressed an interest several weeks ago. I thought perhaps she was pulling my leg, but she got in touch with me again last week wanting to know how to formally apply. She sent her résumé and some references over.”
Aaron gave her a warm smile that made her cheeks burn. She didn’t feel like she deserved it, especially not with the conversation she intended to have with him.
“What is she aiming to do? Screen?”
“Yes. She doesn’t have experience working with NPOs, but she has spent the past four years doing social work. She’s at the burnout point now.”
“I’m surprised she lasted that long,” Tina said from the opposite end of the table. “I only lasted two.”
“Well, if her background’s anything like Tina’s, bring her in. Is she willing to travel?”
Mike chuckled. “Oh yeah, I’ll answer that. I believe her exact phrase was ‘I’m single and ready to mingle.’ She has no attachments whatsoever and could spend days on the road if she had to.”
“Good. She’d need to meet with me and Tina. Schedule it?”
Mandy nodded.
“Anyone else?”
Several other people put names of friends and loved ones they thought deserved a chance forward. Aaron approved them all for an interview except one who hadn’t quite been released from jail yet. Once they’d run out of people to refer, he asked her to put up some ads.
“That’s it, folks. See you at next month’s meeting unless you need me before then. Miranda, thank you, sweetheart.”
Jasmine raised a brow for a fleeting moment, but busied herself with clearing away trash from the conference room.
Michael was the last to stand.
“Hey, Mirandy, you wanna go get some lunch? Don said he would be driving through on his way back from Asheville.”
Aaron piped up before she could answer. “Sorry, Mike. I’m taking her to lunch.”
She dropped the stack of papers she was holding and felt her stomach flop. “You are?” she asked from her crouched position.
What’s he doing?
“I think I owe my girl a hot meal. She’s shriveling up.”
She looked down at what she could see of her body. “I am?”
Mike was silent.
“You work too hard, sweetheart. Hey, Mike — why don’t you offer to buy Eleanor and Tina lunch? They’re always looking for someone to mooch off, and I think they consider you sucker enough.”
Mike shifted his weight to his good leg and managed a dry chuckle. “Do I get anything in return for my generosity?”
“Yes, they might let you control the radio station the next time you’re in the van together.”
Mike made a little whoopee do gesture with his hand, but smiled and picked up his cane. “I’ll see you at home, Mirandy.”
“Yeah, I’ll see you after din — ”
Aaron gave her ass a silencing pinch. “Sorry. She’s going home with me. Looks like you’ll have the apartment all to yourself.”
Mike furrowed his forehead.
She looked from her stepbrother to Aaron, who was giving the ginger a cool look. “Um … ”
“Wanna meet me in the SUV, Mandy? I’ll be out in a minute,” Aaron said with a cheerful voice.
She opened her mouth, closed it without saying anything, clutched her papers to her chest, and hurried out. The tension was so thick in the room that whatever was about to go down, she didn’t want to be within twenty feet of the fallout. They were big boys. They could take care of themselves whatever the problem was. She hoped. She hoped it wasn’t a car problem. She couldn’t help with that.
• • •
Mike leaned against the closed office door and crossed his arms over his chest. “Are you seriously fucking around with Mandy?”
Aaron put his feet up on his desk and crossed his legs at the ankles. “Whether or not we’re fucking is none of your business. Am I pulling her chain? From this moment forward, no. No, I’m not.”
“What exactly is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m not going to let anyone tell me how to live my life and who should be in it. I love Mandy and I intend to marry that woman. Do you have a problem with that, Mike?”
Mike’s bottom jaw ground left to right.
Aaron’s curled his lips into a smirk. “You carrying a bit of a torch for her?”
Mike scoffed, hobbled to the armchairs in front of Aaron’s desk and sank into one. “Let’s put it this way. I’ve known her since before our parents hooked up. I’ve had an awareness that she was a pretty girl and that I was a hot-blooded boy since middle school. Of course I had a crush on her. Everyone did. She’s just one of those people that others notice. But then Dad met Adriana and there was this hush-hush super-quick courtship, and boom. They were married.”
He cracked his knuckles and looked at Aaron over them. “She’s my best friend. She’s smart and funny and kind. She’s a truly decent person, and I couldn’t love her more even if were blood siblings. That’s why I’ve been steering boys away from her since I was in tenth grade.”
Aaron twirled his pen in his fingers then tossed it at Mike who caught it handily. “I’ve been carrying that pen around for about three years. It was from the first batch of bills my father signed into law after inauguration.”
“It’s a nice pen.” Mike stuck it into his own pocket with a smirk.
“Yeah. All these years I’ve been carrying it around as a reminder of who I’m supposed to be. How I should act.”
“You giving up?”
“On Miranda? No way. I don’t want to be some forty-year-old man who regrets the things he didn’t do ten years before because he was waiting for permission from someone who was never going to give it. Miranda may not be cut from the kind of cloth Rick and my father like, but I think it drapes me pretty well.”
Mike tented his fingers and nodded. “If you hurt her, I’ll fuck you up.”
“Is that what you told all the other guys? The ones that dumped her?”
“Yes.”
“And I take it you’ve made good on that threat before or else they wouldn’t believe it.”
Mike held out his hands and shrugged.
Aaron grinned. “Good to know. Really. Go buy Eleanor lunch. I think she likes you.”
Mike smirked. “Wow, you’re actually not afraid of me. You must be like King Arthur pulling that sword out of the stone. You pass the test.”
“I’m worried less about the gatekeeper than what it’s keeping me from.”
And it was true. Mike’s consent in the scheme of things meant nothing if Mandy wouldn’t have him.
“Go on,” he nudged. “I happen to know Eleanor has a Mike Leonard mini-poster taped inside her toolbox. She wouldn’t say no if you offered to buy her a meal.”
Mike stood with some effort. “Well, maybe I can show her some of my tricks.”
Aaron laughed and walked him to the door. “Godspeed.”