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“Seriously, Alistair?—”
“You too, Taylor,” I mutter, shooting her a look. “I don’t love it either, but she scored off the fucking charts with the focus group.”
“Hold another audition,” Alistair grunts. “Find?—”
“There isn’t time.”
That’s only half true. If I had to find a better candidate for this absurd plan, I’d make it happen. But Meredith and I have already gone over this, a million times.
This whole thing is about making myself as appealing a candidate as I possibly can when I go up against the well-loved, well-established, Governor Hall.
Yes, I have a secret nuclear weapon in my back pocket to use against him. Or at least, I will soon. But modern politics are fucked, and as insane as it is, old sexual assault allegations alone against the incumbent aren’t enough for me to win. And yes, I’m aware of how disgusting, that is.
I have to use my secret weapon and be the most likable candidate the voters of New York have ever seen. And the only way I do that is by being married to a woman who shores up whatever deficiencies I have with the public. A woman who tests well with them. Whom they view as my “perfect match”.
Like it or not, that woman appears to be Fumi fucking Yamaguchi.
Yes, she cheated…in a way. She used what she knows about me to paint herself as my goddamn soulmate on that stage. She also had the luxury of going last, which means I’d bet money she was peeking out at the audience during every other woman’s turn on that stage, remembering what went well and what didn’t for each candidate.
She used all that to win.
I’d be even more impressed if I wasn’t so ticked the fuck off.
It’s not that I don’t like Fumi. She’s a very good lawyer, and a huge asset to the firm. Yes, she did use what you could call insider information about me, and a lawyer’s ability to assess the jury—in this case, the focus group—in order to best appeal to them. Taylor’s not wrong: Fumi used every available resource, and her own intellect, to win.
The lawyer in me wants to say who cares how she got the win. She got it, and if that makes her the best candidate to give me the best shot of winning this race, then so be it.
But what irks me about it isn’t that she won in a sneaky way.
It’s that she surprised me.
I didn’t see it coming.
But if I go with another woman, the focus group and Meredith’s computer models give me a thirty fucking percent lower chance of beating Governor Hall.
The same computer models have me beating him by twenty points with Fumi at my side. And those are metrics I can’t ignore.
That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.
My nose wrinkles as I step out of my Porsche 911 Turbo. I glance around, my brow furrowing even deeper as I lock the two-hundred-thousand-dollar car.
What the fuck.
Annually, Fumi makes over what my Porsche costs. But her neighborhood is a dump. I mean, it’s not a slum, but it’s a far cry from the sort of place any other twenty-something equity partner at a firm like Crown and Black would choose to live.
I step over trash and a pile of what fucking better be only dog shit before I open the—unlocked—door to her no-security building on Avenue C. It smells like piss when I walk in, and there’s an “out of order” sign on the elevator.
I’m suddenly concerned that Fumi has a secret drug or gambling problem, if this is where she lives on her quarter-million-dollar salary.
My scowl only deepens when I see the splinter marks and the shitty repair job on the door to her apartment, and what look like hastily installed new locks.
What the actual fuck.
I wipe my knuckles on my jacket after I knock. A few seconds later, various locks undo with assorted clicks before the door opens.
“Yes?”
I frown at the middle-aged Japanese man with piercing dark eyes and silvering hair looking coolly back at me.
