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Nealy’s stomach was in a knot, and her hands were freezing. Mat was here. Right outside her gate. She wanted to race from the house and down the drive, fling herself in his arms . . . only to be pushed away again.
It hadn’t taken her long to figure out why he was here. Even though he’d been kept informed about the girls, he’d wanted to see for himself. Mr. Responsible.
Her hand trembled as she reached for the telephone in the family room to call her attorney. Mat couldn’t simply breeze in and out of the girls’ lives at his whim. It wasn’t good for them, and it would be devastating for her. She had a campaign to concentrate on. A new life to build.
“Ma!” Button had already decided she didn’t like having Nealy on the telephone. She banged her plastic truck against the carpet and gazed at her with a mulish expression that looked so much like Mat’s it made Nealy want to weep.
She set down the phone, pushed aside the briefing book she’d been studying, and went over to sit cross-legged on the floor. Button immediately climbed into her lap, bringing along her truck and one of Andre’s tiny blue sneakers.
“Gah bleg flel ma.”
Nealy hugged her close to comfort herself. “Me, too.”
She kissed her cheek and toyed with a lock of her hair, which was longer now and beginning to curl. “How can Mat do this?”
“Da?”
It was the first time Button had said the word since they’d left Iowa. The baby frowned and said it again. “Da?” Filled those lungs. “DA!”
Nealy couldn’t let him in. She was barely getting through the nights as it was, and she couldn’t make herself start the whole grieving process all over again. Especially when she had the most important press conference of her life tomorrow.
Nealy kissed her hand. “Sorry, sweetheart. It’s not going to happen.”
Button stuck out her lower lip, and her eyes formed big blue circles. She rested her cheek against Nealy’s breast.
Nealy stroked her hair and wished the four of them were back on the road again.
Mat parked on the street outside the gates with a half-baked plan to intercept Lucy when she came home from school, but a snub-nosed Secret Service agent had other ideas.
Mat started to point out that this was a public street, then decided not to give the guy a hard time. He was only doing his job, and his job was to keep Mat’s family safe. The family Mat had walked away from.
As he headed to his hotel, he tried to think. But every insulting thing he’d said to Nealy, every order he’d tossed out, every complaint he’d made about being surrounded by women came back to haunt him. Nobody could ever accuse him of showing her his best side.
He was so caught up in misery that he drove past the hotel. What kind of jerk threw away something so precious? What kind of jerk threw away his family?
As he turned around, he decided he could spend the rest of his life beating himself up, or he could try to fix what he’d done his best to ruin. And to do that, he needed a plan.
Nealy exploded. “What do you mean, he’s going on CNN?” She gripped her cell phone tighter and sank back into the leather interior of her Lincoln Town Car.
Steve Cruzak, the Secret Service agent who was driving tonight, glanced at her in the rearview mirror, then looked over at his partner, sitting in the passenger seat. Beyond the tinted windows, the rolling hills of northern Virginia gleamed in the morning sun as they headed east toward the Arlington hotel where Nealy would make her announcement.
“He didn’t offer any explanations,” her attorney replied.
The heavy Chanel earring she’d tugged off to answer her phone bit into her palm. Normally her assistant would have been in the car with her, but she had the flu. Jim Millington, her new campaign manager, along with Terry and her key staffers, were already at the hotel mingling with the press as they awaited her arrival.
For three months Mat had refused to give any television interviews, but the day of the most important press conference in her career, he suddenly changed his mind. He was blackmailing her.
“Maybe you should talk to him,” her lawyer said.
“No.”
“Nealy, I’m not a political advisor, but the eyes of the entire country are going to be on your campaign. This guy’s a loose cannon. Who knows what he has in mind? It wouldn’t do any harm to sound him out. ”
More harm than he could imagine. “It’s out of the question.”
“I’ll try to talk to him.”
