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“My mom wouldn’t run,” Amanda lamented, gratefully pausing to sip the drink the waitress had brought. It was her third mixed drink in an hour, and she’d be regretting it in the morning, but right now she just needed the oblivion. She needed not to care. “She was never scared of anything.”
Margery swallowed and seemed unsure of what to say next. “You know that…”
“What? My mom put everything she had into her job at the Post. She was one of their most decorated reporters, and she helped find things that got a vice president impeached and imprisoned.”
“She also died under less than normal circumstances,” Margery pointed out. “You’ve said yourself a million times, what happened to her in the garage when you were nine never made any sense.”
“I know,” she said, her throat constricting at how much she missed her mother. Some things didn’t stop hurting even after sixteen years. They said her mom had committed suicide, but she knew for a fact her mom hadn’t been depressed and that people had been following both of them. A strange man had come up to her at the playground twice the week before. “But she did what was right. I know she’d be disappointed if I just nodded my head like a good girl and fled to Arabian wonders.”
“No one talks like that,” Margery said, chuckling. “It’s not retreating or running away. It’s just regrouping. You can get Jackson, but you have to be smarter about it. Look, if Harris didn’t believe in you and didn’t eventually want this scumbag to go down, then you really would be planning out your day tomorrow at the unemployment office. He didn’t do that. You just have to be smart.”
“Are you saying my mom wasn’t?”
“I didn’t know your mom. But no matter how good a reporter she was, she clearly made some enemies and she left you alone too.”
“Not because she wanted to,” Amanda objected.
“True. But intentional or not, the effects come out all the same,” Margery said. “You miss her and maybe…”
“What?”
“Maybe sometimes being smart is better than being right.”
“I owe those people, Margie. They told me all their stories, all their fears, and I swore on my honor I’d take Jackson down. Now they’re going to see that nothing got published and I’m on what looks like an all-expenses-paid vacation to the hottest resort in the world. It’s not just demeaning, but it’s frustrating as hell.”
“Or,” she said, sipping down the last of her drink, “you could give yourself a few weeks to take a mental break, relax, and then go at it again. There’s nothing wrong with admitting something didn’t work on the first try. There’s also nothing wrong with taking a breather.”
“Yeah, but the people Jackson hurts…the countries he’s destabilized…they don’t get to have a rest.”
“If you’re not smart about it, you’ll be blacklisted or worse.”
“Mom would have done it in a heartbeat.”
“And,” Margery interjected, her brown eyes serious, “your mom isn’t here anymore. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want is to lose my best friend. I’ll help you. Hell, I think Harris will help you or he wouldn’t have found a way to keep you on staff. Just go, relax, and stay safe. That’s what matters the most. You can’t help anyone without a platform, and you really can’t help them if you’re dead,” Margery finished.
“You’ve been holding that back, haven’t you?” she asked, biting her lip. “Not the part about keeping my head down and keeping my job…”
“I didn’t exactly say it that way.”
“No, but the part about being careful around Senator Jackson and about my mom’s death? You’re really worried about me.”
“I know the kind of man you’re dealing with as well as you do. I think one of the best things you could do is be half a world away and in a place with its own security staff. I want you to be a success, sure. I really want that jerk to get what’s coming to him, but I’m getting married in a year and where would I be without my maid of honor? Where will my kids be someday without a godmother?” Margery asked. “I mean, if anything happened, I’d never get over that impulse to pick up my phone to speed-dial you and realize I can’t because you’re gone. I need you in my life, Amanda, and the best way to do that is to help make sure you don’t piss off the great and powerful without a kickass plan.”
Amanda tried to ignore the pinpricks at her eyes. She and Margery were like sisters, but she’d never heard her friend talk about all the plans she had for both of them in the future. Frankly, with her looming marriage to Roger, Amanda was scared she’d be shoved to the wayside as the single friend. “And will I still be a part of your life while covering the grand opening of Ali Babba’s?”
“Yes. You never know, you try and have fun, and eventually, you might even have some for real.”
Chapter Two
“Would you do me a favor, Mafir?” Sheikh Amir Bahan asked, not even looking up from his spreadsheets as his assistant entered the room. The other man had been his executive assistant for the last five years and was practically psychic. Amir barely had to ask for anything. Still, sometimes even the best servants had to be prodded. “If it’s not too much bother.”
The other man bowed low and straightened the tip of his long beard on his chest. “It is always an honor, my sheikh.”
“Good then,” he said. “But I have a guest in my bedroom, and she’s overstayed her welcome. Please make sure she gathers up her clothes, give her one of the gold chain necklaces as a parting gift, and make sure she’s out in the next thirty minutes.”
Mafir nodded and stood back to his full height. He wasn’t very tall at barely five-foot-eight, but he was wiry and efficient, which Amir respected. “She doesn’t get a set of diamond earrings for her, ahem, troubles, my sheikh?”
“No, she was merely adequate,” he said, arching an eyebrow. “I save diamonds for those conquests that might at least be memorable. She, alas, was not.”
