Mr. President

  I bite my lip.

  Matt’s eyes darken.

  I release it.

  “I wouldn’t say no to a big vanilla coffee.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  I feel myself flush because—it sounds too much like a date.

  “We can’t!” I laugh. “I can’t even stay here for more than a few minutes for fear of them watching us even more.”

  He sits, and his thick thighs are revealed by the towel. “I’m sorry. I can’t really blame them for being obsessed with you,” I add.

  He looks at me.

  All I can think of are his hands on me. My hands creeping under the towel. Fingers touching his chest. And that big, heavy cock of his.

  Wow. Did I just think that?

  What is happening to me?

  “Come kiss me.”

  Matt seems to read my mind.

  Startled by the command, I laugh and bite my lower lip. “What?”

  “I said, come kiss me. I’m the one who should be nibbling on that lip.”

  I take one step forward, Matt’s eyes darkening as he watches me.

  There’s a knock on the door. Followed by the sound of a room key. I quickly take back the one step forward I took.

  Carlisle and Hessler join us.

  Carlisle dives straight into business after a brief, “How’s our American prince today?” and a wink in my direction. Matt heads into the bedroom, to change I suppose.

  “I should go.”

  Matt steps out in slacks, buttoning up a blue shirt. “No. I’ll take you home.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m meeting a friend actually for a croissant and a catch-up—it’s three blocks away. And her birthday is coming up; I promised to make it. I’ll be home later. Call if you need me.”

  I hurry outside, then check the time and head to my favorite coffee bar near Women of the World. I wait there for my friend Larissa. She arrives ten minutes late, and all that time, I’m sort of mad at myself for physically responding to Matt as hard as I do.

  I’ve tried so hard to be focused on work and my career. Why do I need to be falling for the man I work for?

  I exhale when I spot Larissa hurrying across the restaurant, trying to push America’s Prince off my mind.

  We end up doing coffee, then shopping, and then drinks.

  “So what’s it like working for that god?” she asks me, lowering her voice as we sit at the bar of one of our favorite cafés. “No. Really. Tell me—I’m dying to know.”

  “It’s exhausting,” I say.

  Please, god, don’t let my expression give anything away.

  That I want him.

  That, miraculously, he wants me.

  That we’ve slept together.

  That I still don’t want it to end and I’m pretty sure because of the proprietary way he looked at me at his hotel room, neither does he.

  As I sit there lying through my damn teeth, I realize that for the first time in my life, I’m doing something that I shouldn’t.

  I realize how uncomfortable it is to have a secret. To want to scream something to the world but at the same time, want nothing more than to protect it. Have the world never, ever touch any part of this precious secret of yours.

  For nobody to ever know your weakness has a name, and a heartbeat, and a very famous face.

  “I would kill for just one day in that campaign, Charlotte. I mean, Matt Hammy! Is he as gorgeous in person as they say he is?”

  “More so,” I groan, rolling my eyes.

  I divert the attention to her new boyfriend, and thankfully, that’s the end of my Matt Hamilton conversation.

  If only it were that easy to steer him out of my every thought.

  By the time I reach my apartment that night, I’ve had too many coffees mixed with alcohol. The exhaustion is weighing on me and there’s a pain in my temples when I step off the elevator to my floor. A figure sits by my door, a large figure. In a blue cap.

  Matt.

  Scrumptious.

  Hamilton.

  “I needed to get away. Mind if I crash here for the night?” A devilish light glimmers in his eyes, and his lips tug at the corners when he notices the shock on my face.

  Inside, I’m babbling and stumbling.

  How did he shake off the press?

  I’m pretty sure Wilson must have kept the coast clear for him to escape unnoted, but . . . oh my god, Matt is at my apartment door.

  My mother would die that he’s at my “shitty” little apartment.

  I open my door with shaking hands, letting him inside, worrying she might be right. He’s looking around with a frown, and suddenly my worries multiply, and I grab his hand and try to distract him.

  “I have a big bed. Come on,” I whisper.

  “You really shouldn’t live here all alone,” he says, frowning deeply at me.

  I smile and tug him toward my room—swaying my hips until that catches his attention.

  He follows quietly, his eyes taking me in now, instead of my apartment.

  I kick off my shoes and lie down on my bed, wondering why he’s not at The Jefferson Hotel with a do not disturb sign on the door. Why he’s here. I catch him glance around my bedroom and at my window, a look of protectiveness in his eyes, but when his eyes return to me and he sees me here—lying in my bed, sort of panting, waiting—his gaze shifts. It becomes partly tender, partly hot, and that alone gives me a hint of why he’s here.

  Plus knowing his staff never really lets him rest, I suspect the moments with me are his only rest times—the only times he truly disconnects.

  “Was your place really swarmed tonight again?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but it always is.”

  He speaks casually.

  He kicks off his shoes, tosses his cap aside, and stretches out on the bed next to me, both of us on our sides, up on one elbow, facing each other. He smiles and reaches out to run his index finger down my cheek. “Couldn’t stay away. Wanted to see if you got safely home.”

  “Or just wanted to see me,” I whisper.

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly, he shifts over me, and I’m on my back, with Matt’s big body on top of mine.

  He’s stroking his hand up my arm, his thumb caressing my skin, his weight the best feeling in the world next to . . . sex with him.

  “Do you really want to spend the night here?” I ask, breathless, rubbing my toes along the sides of his bare feet. “I’m sure your bed is so much more comfortable. Or the one at the hotel. I’m babbling, aren’t I? I just . . .”

  He’s nodding slowly, looking at me.

  “It’s surprising to see you here,” I finally admit.

  “A good surprise?”

  It takes me a while to admit it, but I do. Nodding. “A good surprise.”

  “Are you done?” he asks, curling his hand beneath my hair to lift my head up a few inches. His eyes are impossibly dark as I continue to nod.

  I swallow, then smile and raise my head a little higher. I don’t have to lift it too far. Matt closes the distance between his lips and mine, and I’m being kissed for the first time on my own bed. Little as it is.

  “We should get you a safer neighborhood, and a better apartment,” he says, nibbling my jaw.

  “No,” I say, canting my head back to give him access.

  “Why?” He eases back.

  “Because there’s no we here. I’m not your kept woman.”

  He pulls back and his eyebrows pull together. “You work for me.”

  “I’m underneath you right now, Matthew.”

  He smiles, shakes his head chidingly, then eases back to eye me as he smooths a hand to brush my hair back.

  “I like how real you are, Charlotte. The way you stand up for yourself, and the way you stand up for others. I like how honest and hardworking you are. How sweet you are.” He captures my lips between his, brushing his hand along my forehead again, looking into my eyes.

  “Can you blame me for wanting to protect you? I never thought I’d
meet a woman like you. That pushed all of my buttons like you do. I want you against any hard surface available and I want to shield you from everything at the same time. I never expected you. And I didn’t expect you now.”

  It takes a few seconds to find my voice. “Did you really believe you’d never meet anyone who would be herself with you?”

  “Most worry too much about putting up a front they believe matches mine.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know. Which makes you rarer than anything to me. So precious.” His voice thickens as he expresses his appreciation.

  I grab his jaw and kiss him, and Matt grabs my hands and pins them over my head, kissing me, softly but with an underlying urgency and force. And then I’m getting disrobed and taken, in a bed I’ve always slept on alone, by the only man I’ve ever really wanted and the only one I can’t really ever have. Not if he wins this.

  But I take what I can get, moaning softly beneath his kiss as his roaming hands move over me.

  25

  THE LAST PRIMARY

  Charlotte

  The next weekend, Matt visits his grandfather in Virginia.

  I’m sort of glad for the distance. We’re sinking too deep. Though a part of me wants to get in deeper, deep enough to drown, I know that’s not the best for him, for me, for anyone.

  Matt is a stallion in bed. We spent all night touching, coming, and talking at my place. Neither of us slept, and neither of us seemed to want to sleep. I didn’t want him to go.

  I am addicted to the times we spend together.

  I keep wanting more.

  But at this stage in the campaign, we’re not playing with fire. Our secret, scandalous affair is a nuclear bomb, and any slipup in keeping it hidden will be the match that sets it off.

  My parents have me over for dinner one evening and grill me on the campaign. I know, ever since growing up in their household, that in politics, discretion is a must. The last of the primaries are tomorrow, and Dad says he heard Matt had been courted by both parties but had declined.

  “You’re doing a good job combating decades and decades of power shifts between the two parties, but is it going to be enough, Charlotte? What’s Matt plan if they attack, find some scandal in his past?”

  “Dad, I’m not his shadow and I’m not a mind reader, either—I’m busy helping organize his schedule and that’s that.”

  “Will we be invited to the fundraiser for literacy he’ll be holding near campaign close?” Mom asks.

  “You’re on the list. Everyone’s on the list, even the whole of Hollywood and Nashville; Matt loves music and he loves, loves scientists and tech geeks. The campaign has had endorsements so far from nearly six dozen public figures. Even Mayweather posted on his social media with an image of piles and piles of money and a note that read ‘Floyd Money Mayweather doesn’t do two-hundred-dollar checks, I do cash, and it adds up to a couple more zeroes.’”

  I realize how fantastical it all sounds once I hear myself talk about it. How does Matt sleep at all?

  How does anyone carry the expectations of a whole country on his shoulders, and carry it well?

  “We’re not sure we can attend the gala, though,” Dad warns me quietly. “You do realize my appearance at such an event would be an endorsement too?”

  I meet his gaze and nod quietly, wanting to ask him to please, please endorse Matt, but I respect him too much to ask what he’s waiting for. I simply know he’s afraid that no matter the people, the parties will make sure the one who ends on top won’t be Matt Hamilton.

  Later that same night, I check in with my friends at the same bar where I celebrated my birthday months ago. “Hamilton for the win,” Kayla says over dinner. “He has my vote. And I know he has yours!”

  I laugh, saying, “Of course.”

  She frowns. “Wait. What? Does he have more than your vote?”

  I laugh it off, but, oh god, it’s not at all funny.

  How could I let this happen? I’d been afraid it would, and I admit to myself that was primarily the reason I was hesitant to join his campaign.

  But . . . you can’t control who you crush on.

  Except a part of me believes that you can, that it was wrong of me to fall the way I’ve been falling, that I know it can go nowhere. But still I want him. And I think of him. And despite wondering if I’ve let things go too far, if maybe I should quit before they get worse, I’ve stayed.

  Craving to make a difference. Craving . . . to be with him.

  I look at Kayla, and she has a good guy; she’s the one being taken home tonight, who has a job she loves and parents who didn’t care if she was a teacher or a guitar player (she’s actually both).

  I have a job that’s temporary, a man I can never truly have, and if my mother realizes that I’m dangerously attracted to Matt, she’ll worry. They wanted me in the arms of a promising politician, true, but not the candidate for the presidency, who every woman in the country believes belongs to her.

  I swore I’d never be a politician’s girl—they either cheat on you with another woman or with their jobs, or the truly sleazy ones cheat the voters who put them on their thrones.

  But no matter how distasteful I find it all, I live in D.C. I live and breathe politics. Politics has fed me my whole life, put me through a career. Politics is now my job.

  Politics is in every pore and cell of the man consuming my dreams.

  The fact that he’s driven and the most uncorrupted person in the political world as of now only adds to his appeal, to my admiration, to my respect. My desire to remain at his side until the end is too great, no matter how much it hurts the girl inside me who just wanted a guy to love and for him to love her back.

  That night I climb into my bed in my little apartment, realizing how lonely I really am when all around me is quiet. Campaigning is exhausting. It’s also invigorating and enlightening.

  We’ve met with hundreds of thousands of people. You get to see all the varieties, all the ethnicities that now make up Americans. You get to see courage, suffering, hope, politeness, rudeness, anger, despair—all of that is America.

  Sadness is when you don’t listen to those in pain until they’re crying. You don’t listen to those suffering because sometimes they’re the ones most silent.

  ***

  The next day, we’re all gathered at the bunker preparing to watch the primary results. And I miss him.

  I miss his energy and the passion I feel when I’m around him. I miss traveling with him, him asking me for favors, like getting him coffee, and I miss the focused looks he wears when he puts on his glasses and reads the schedules I bring or the files he asks me to print out.

  Tonight, nearly a hundred members of our team are here, watching the flat-screen TV in one of the media rooms as we watch the last primary. The two men in the lead for the parties are the Democrat President Jacobs, and the Republican Gordon Thompson.

  President Jacobs. The only good thing he’s done for our country he has yet to do, which is step out of office and let someone more competitive with better ideas step in.

  Gordon Thompson. He wants to increase the military budget while cutting spending on social programs. He seems really pro-war.

  And clearly interested in the ratings Thompson seems to garner, the media has been nonstop replaying what he’s been blogging, Facebooking, and spouting on TV—when Matt arrives.

  He meets my gaze. Our eyes seem to lock for an eternity.

  Matt stops staring only when everyone begins to greet him. He greets them back amicably and then sits to my right.

  The lights are lowered—and then they’re out.

  The TV flashes and everyone is silent, watching and listening to the speculations about who the Democratic and Republican nominees will be.

  And I’m trying to keep up, except that I’m hyperaware of Matt sitting exactly two inches away. I am aware of the warmth of his body. And amazed at the crackling trail of fire in my veins because he’s so close. His clean, manly sce
nt makes my lungs ache. An overpowering urge to get closer won’t leave me. I lean back a little instead. I breathe, and then realize he just turned to look at me.

  He’s staring at my face as if he’s branding it to memory, and it seems to frustrate him because he runs a restless hand over the back of his neck.

  He stands and goes to get himself coffee, then he stands a few paces to my right, staring at the TV, frowning very hard.

  He looks so good.

  We’ve been in a blur of campaigning in reception halls, high school and college gyms, sprinting towards Election Day. Things will get even more intense after today—I’m sure we’ll spend another few months away from D.C.

  And suddenly I don’t know if I can do this. If I can live with this relentless little ache while I travel with him, watch him kiss those babies and genuinely, truly hold them because he wants to, not because it’s good press.

  As the news continues, he flashes on screen. Full head of tousled sable hair with highlights. The entitlement reflected in his informal dress only makes him stand out more. “Matthew Hamilton’s good judgment, drive, and discipline are going to be strong weapons against the Republican and Democratic nominees,” the newscaster is saying before they head back to tallying the results.

  So here we are, watching the early returns as the presumptive nominees of the opposing parties are named.

  No surprises there—Jacobs and Thompson. Though Hessler is still surprised, it seems.

  “What the ever-loving crap. One is about as old-fashioned as a goddamn priest. And don’t get me started on the other. There aren’t enough bullpens in the country to hold all the bullshit he spouts,” Hessler groans of the opponents.

  We all seem to glance at Matt for his opinion.

  Matt runs his hands over his neck, frowning thoughtfully. “Our government will keep whoever wins in check. That’s the beauty of our system.”

  Hessler huffs. “As long as they don’t cozy up to the idea of issuing a ton of executive orders.”

  Matt smirks at that, then stares thoughtfully at the TV, obviously weighing his opponents’ virtues and flaws.