Molly O'Keefe - The Scandal and Carter O'Neill

You will always be my little girl, Penny was fond of saying. And somehow she always made it sound like a jail sentence.

“Okay,” Zoe said, the words distorted by her squished face. “My last class is over at seven.”

“I’ll pick you up here at seven-thirty,” her mom said, and pecked Zoe’s pursed lips. “Remember,” she said, her eyes flicking over to Zoe’s kitchen counter, where a batch of ginger cookies sat getting cold. “Every pound you gain now is one you’ll have to lose after the baby gets here.”

Was it illegal to punch your mother? Zoe wondered, anger billowing through her. Or merely immoral? Because immoral she had no problem with. She was, after all, a political scandal in the making.

“Bye, honey,” Penny said before Zoe could even curl a fist, and then she was gone. The Craving-Goddess-turned-nightmare walked out the door, Zoe’s favorite scarf trailing behind her.

“Oh, thank God,” Zoe muttered and turned back to her cookies.

She cranked the lid off the jar of salsa and poured some into a chipped china bowl, because she wasn’t a heathen, and then dunked the nearest cookie into the tomato mixture.

It was still disgusting, not a good fit at all. Salsa required salt, not sugar. Seriously, what possessed her? She eyed the cookie in her hand and dunked it again.

And why couldn’t she stop?

A knock on the door practically shook the windows loose, and she quickly put down the cookie and slid the salsa into her fridge.

Wiping her hands and any stray crumbs from her face, she opened the door.

“Mom—”

But it wasn’t her mom.

It was Carter O’Neill, in a suit and tie, dwarfing her doorway, his hands braced on the frame as if he were holding himself up. Or back.

Lord, he was big. Those muscles filling out his fine gray suit hard to ignore. And so were the blue eyes blazing through the distance between them.

It was Carter, all right. And he was pissed.

He stepped into her apartment without a word and slammed the door shut behind him, turning her spacious apartment into a linen closet.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“TALK?” SHE SQUEAKED, because the look on his face said that what he really needed was to take her out back and chop her into pieces.

He nodded, curt and decisive. His jawline was like the marble bust of a Roman emperor—all he was missing were the laurel leaves in his hair.

The truth was—her secret, hidden truth was—that there was something about a man in a suit. She had a history with men in suits. And this man wore a suit like no one else.

She pulled her faded silk robe tighter around her ballooning waist, as if to compensate.

He didn’t say anything, didn’t even acknowledge that he had in fact barged into her apartment uninvited. He just looked around as if he smelled something far worse than ginger cookies.

Anger trickled down through her spine, but the baby fluttered against her hand as if to say, Hold on a second. He is Deputy Deadbeat Daddy because of you.

“How did you get in here?” she asked. Someone had to buzz him in the main door.

“I helped Tootie Vogler with some groceries.”

“I…ah…guess this is about the newspaper?” she asked.

His blue eyes burned like acid.

“Can I apologize again?” she asked. “I’m really, really sorry.” He didn’t respond, and her apology sat there between them like dog poop on a carpet.

“How…ah…did you find me?”

“Phone book.”

“Right.” Her laugh was awkward, and she wanted to take herself out back and end this misery. “Of course.”

The silence was awful. It pounded between them, pulling her skin tighter, sucking out every molecule of air.

He was terribly out of place in the middle of her chaos, a dark spot, leaking menace like a fog into the center of the glitter and beads, the embroidered silk and pillows.

“Would you like to sit down?” she asked, pulling a bunch of pointe shoes and one of her more salvageable tutus off the pink-and-green watermelon chair. It was this chair or the velvet couch, with the much-maligned scarf.

His sharp blue eyes made her so nervous, so aware of the frivolity of her home, that she actually patted the seat in enticement.

Carter O’Neill, the cold fish, didn’t even crack a smile.

“How about something to eat?” she asked. “I have ginger cookies. I just made them and there’s some salsa in the fridge. Not that you’d want that together, obviously. But I have some chips. Somewhere.”

He tossed the newspaper on the coffee table, carelessly knocking her favorite pig mug onto the rug. Luckily it was empty. She leaned over to pick it up and caught sight of herself, right there on the front page of the paper.

On a chair, a little blurry, but obviously pregnant. And frankly, the look on her face was pretty good, if she did say so herself. It managed to say it all—I loved you, but you hurt me so much that I can never forgive you.

All those acting classes her mother insisted on had really paid off.

Carter cleared his throat.

Right. Matter at hand. Political scandal.

“Are you involved with someone?” he asked.

“Involved?” she asked, yanked sideways by the question.

“Yes. Dating, or—” he heaved a big sigh, as if all this were a distasteful job “—whatever.”

“No,” she said.

“The father?” he asked, gesturing vaguely toward her stomach. “Is he around?”

“How in the world is that any of your business?” she asked, horrified.

“They’re calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” he said. “You kind of made it my business.”

“I know,” she whispered, guilt choking her. “I saw.”

“Papers in Houston, New Orleans and USA Today,” he said. “Did you see those, too?”

She blinked, her stomach in knots. She shook her head.

“All right, then how about you answer my question. The father—”

“Not…ah…” She got lost for a second in the absurdity of this conversation. “Around.”

“That will make things easier.”

Things like disposing of my body? she wondered. “Look, I didn’t know there was a photographer there. Or that any of this would happen.”

“Clearly,” he said, his tone dubious.

“You don’t believe me?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. Or what you thought when you stood on that chair like a child and made up lies about me.”

She gasped. She couldn’t help it, it just came out.

“Don’t you dare,” he whispered, his voice and eyes, everything about him so suddenly menacing that she collapsed backward in the watermelon chair. He was gigantic; his hands could palm her head. He could make mincemeat out of her in a second. Not that she thought he would, but still…

“Don’t pretend for a moment that you are in any way the injured party in this situation. You put us here.” He pointed to the front page of the paper. “And you’re going to do whatever I say to get us out.”

Her eyes narrowed. Whatever he said? Not likely. “I can write a letter to the paper,” she said. “Tell people that I’m off my meds, like you said. That I made it all up. Or we could just tell the truth, that someone paid me a thousand—”

“No,” he said, his laugh not sounding like a laugh at all. “We won’t be telling anyone the truth. Jim Blackwell is all over this like a dog on a bone.”

“So…ah…what are we going to do?” she asked, suddenly light-headed with nerves.

“You,” he said, pointing at her, pinning her to the chair, “are going to say nothing. To anyone. And we—” he waggled his finger between them “—are going to date.”

For a moment, his words didn’t make sense, and when they did she laughed. She laughed so hard she had to put a hand under her belly. And here she thought Carter didn’t have a sense of humor.