The Senator's Wife Read online

  HIGH PRAISE FOR KAREN ROBARDS

  AND

  THE SENATOR’S WIFE

  “AN EXCITING AND SOMETIMES

  HUMOROUS PLOT, interesting characters,

  and a hot romance combine to make this a

  delightful story.”

  —Library Journal

  “Ms. Robards continues to cement her

  position as one of the genre’s premier

  authors. The Senator’s Wife is filled with

  juicy scandals, passionate affairs and

  deadly motives.”

  —Romantic Times

  “KAREN ROBARDS REACHES NEW

  HEIGHTS WITH THIS SIZZLING

  NEW NOVEL!”

  —Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, S. Dak.)

  “It is Robards’s singular skill of combining

  intrigue with ecstasy that gives [her novels]

  their edge.”

  —Lexington Herald-Leader

  “Karen Robards’ characters catch you from

  the start and hold you until the end … you

  will hate to say good-bye to them.”

  —Book Rack

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “You Take My Breath Away” Music by Stephen

  Lawrence, lyrics by Bruce Hart. Copyright © 1978

  The Laughing Willow Company, Inc. Used by

  permission. All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Karen Robards

  Excerpt from The Last Victim © 2012 by Karen Robards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent

  and Trademark Office.

  This book contains an excerpt from The Last Victim by Karen Robards. This excerpt has been set for this edition only, and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80151-7

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  v3.1_r2

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In this book, the date of the Neshoba County Fair has been moved up, simply because I attended the fair, loved it, and wanted to include it.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Last Victim

  Chapter

  1

  Thursday, July 10, 1997

  “HONEY, THAT SURE AIN’T NO HOT DOG. Looks more like one of them Vienna-sausage things to me.”

  The girl was drunk. Crazy drunk. And high as a kite on coke and God knew what else. She was so far out in la-la land she didn’t know what she was saying. He reminded himself of that even as he unwillingly followed her gaze to the object of her amusement. He’d just told her that he was going to stick his hot dog between her buns.

  What they were both looking at was small and shriveled. Vienna sausage. Not hot dog.

  “Pee-wee, pee-wee.” She giggled, peering over her shoulder at him as he stood at the foot of the bed. “If that’s not your nickname, it oughta be. Pee-wee.”

  It was a party, and this was a gang-bang for pay. The girl tied to the bed had been worked over twice already and seemed to be loving it. The faint light from the Biloxi casinos on the not-so-distant shore drifted through the porthole to gild her body from the base of her spine to her feet. Her eyes gleamed at him through the curtain of her black hair. Her teeth were very white. Like him, she was buck naked. She was lying on her stomach, spread out in an X shape, her hands and feet secured to the bed frame with the silk scarves she had brought with her. Her round white buttocks, marked with the love-bites one of the others had given her, wiggled at him encouragingly. From all indications, she was one of those rare whores who really liked sex. Strangely enough, the idea that she was eager for what he was about to do to her was unappealing. It seemed to shift the balance of power from him to her. How she had squealed when Clay had put it to her! He’d heard her through the closed door of the cabin as he’d impatiently waited his turn. Her shrill cries of seemingly authentic pleasure as flesh smacked against flesh had made him hard as a rock.

  He wasn’t hard now.

  “You just plannin’ on lookin’, lover?” she asked. “Or are you gonna do somethin’ about it?”

  “Shut up.” Leaning over, he slapped her ass with his hand, hard.

  “Ow!”

  She writhed, acting like the slap hurt a lot more than it did. He slapped her ass again, watched her wriggle, and felt himself start to get hard.

  Then she spoiled it all by giggling.

  “Shut up,” he said again, climbing onto the bed between her spread legs and trying to mount her.

  “Honey, I sure hope you can get your jollies by just lookin’, because that thing ain’t gonna work tonight. It ain’t no harder than a marshmallow.”

  She was giggling like a lunatic. He found himself suddenly conscious of who might be listening on the other side of the door, just as he had listened with lascivious attention to the two who had gone before him. Anybody out there in the hallway who wanted to could hear.

  One thing he hadn’t heard was giggles.

  “Quit laughing,” he growled, pushing her face down into the pillows and pulling another pillow over her head to muffle the sound. It helped, a little, though he could still hear her faint gurgles. But at least now the sounds she made should not be audible beyond the cabin.

  Ignore it, he told himself. Concentrate.

  Taking himself tenderly in hand, he
worked at it. Nothing.

  It wasn’t him, he told himself. It was her. It was her giggling.

  “I said quit laughing!” He laid on top of her, his big body covering her much smaller one, pressing down hard on the pillow covering her head. It worked. She wasn’t giggling anymore, or if she was, he couldn’t hear it, which amounted to the same thing.

  Good. He maneuvered around until he found a position in which he could both keep her quiet and get his business done. It took some effort with her squirming as she was, but at last he managed.

  He liked going in the back door.

  As he did it to her, she bucked beneath him as if he was giving her the ride of her life.

  “Stupid broad,” he muttered, but her frantic squirming did the trick. Praying a stray giggle wouldn’t erupt from beneath the pillow to destroy his concentration, he pumped. A couple of minutes, and his business was done. He collapsed, lying on top of her while he regained his breath and his dignity.

  It was over, and he’d managed to acquit himself respectably one more time.

  Maybe, he thought, in the interests of getting it up more easily, he ought to quit the booze. Or the coke. Or both. Or neither. Hell, they were more fun than riding a woman anyway.

  If he took away the pillow, would she start giggling again? He would kill her if she did. Out in the hallway they could hear.

  Finally he got to his feet. She didn’t move. He put his clothes on, his movements unsteady from some combination of the substances he had consumed and the sex he’d just had and the pitching of the boat.

  Someone banged on the door. “Hey, stud-muffin, you ’bout done in there?”

  “Keep your pants on,” he called back with restored good humor. He had done the thing, done it right, she was still lying there limp as a spaghetti noodle, he had worn her out.

  He could go back out there with his head held high, a man among men. Thrusting bare feet into deck shoes, he flicked the pillow away from the girl’s head, pinched her ass, and turned away to open the door.

  “Next,” he said with a grin, exiting into the narrow passage that was darker than the cabin. Ralph staggered past, so zonked out he could hardly stand up.

  “She any good?” Ralph asked over his shoulder from the cabin doorway. He was already unzipping his pants, a frat-boy’s leer on his face.

  He shrugged, feeling on top of the world again. The rest of them were partying up on deck, and that’s where he was headed. The music was festive, the girls naked, the booze chilled, the drugs free.

  Who could ask for anything more?

  Behind him, muffled by the now-closed door but still audible in the close confines of the interior of the boat, he heard Ralph say, “Sweet Jesus.”

  Then, “Shit. Shit! Shit!”

  Chapter

  2

  Monday, July 14th

  JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

  “HEY, I’VE GOT IT! HOW’S about we get her pregnant?”

  Leaning back in his chair, Tom Quinlan didn’t immediately reply to his partner’s semiserious suggestion. Instead he watched the slender red-haired woman on the TV screen in front of him with frowning concentration. It was a scouting tape, of the sort sports coaches used to prepare for a contest, of a speech she had given the previous week to a dinner audience of car dealers and their wives.

  When it was possible, Tom always liked to assess his clients in action prior to actually meeting them. He felt it helped keep his judgments impartial.

  The woman was not what he had expected. The Senator’s choice of a second wife had clearly been influenced by parts of his anatomy far removed from his brain. She was a little taller than medium height, slim, young, beautiful. Which should have been an asset in the age of television, but in this case almost certainly was not. There would be the jealousy factor from the female constituents to contend with, for one thing.

  Tom’s frown intensified as he watched her give her cut-and-dried stump speech. She wasn’t a good speaker; her delivery was wooden, and her hands clasped the sides of the lectern as though it would run off if she let go. Tom saw the hand of a previous consultant at work there: Someone had obviously drummed that stance into her.

  Speech, canned; delivery, canned, was his judgment. Message, dry as dust. Nothing he couldn’t work with, though. Appearance—for his money, she got ten out of ten, but that was not a plus under the circumstances. For optimum results she needed to be brought down to a six or seven, just a little above average. And maybe made to look a little older.

  Tom pondered, his hands templing under his chin as he watched her performance. Her shoulder-length hair was a deep wine-streaked auburn, not carroty in the least, but indubitably red. A color du jour, he wondered, or natural? Whatever, it needed to be toned down. Red was forever associated in the public’s mind with Jezebels, which she in particular did not need. Her clothes were all wrong too. Her suit was black, the neckline scooped in front but not indecently so, with silver trim and large rhinestone buttons down the front. Worn with black hose and heels, it should have been an appropriate choice for an evening appearance by a politician’s wife. The problem was it showed too much of a body that, admittedly, deserved to be flaunted. The material was some kind of clingy knit, and the skirt, at four inches or so above the knee, was way too short. To add insult to injury, the suit looked real expensive, like it had cost the equivalent of maybe a couple of months’ salary for the average voter.

  Plus her heels were too high, he saw as the camera moved to a side view; the shoes themselves, strappy and pointy-toed, were too sexy. And her jewelry, which he had no doubt went perfectly with the outfit, could only be a negative in the view of the audience she needed to win over. The dime-sized baubles in her ears and the glittery necklace around her throat not only looked like real diamonds, they almost certainly were real. More to the point, the audience would assume they were real. No costume jewelry for the second Mrs. Lewis R. Honneker IV, wife of His Honor the multimillionaire senator, no sirree.

  Or so the voters would say to themselves.

  There, basically, was the problem, summed up in a nutshell. She looked like what she was: a trophy wife, bent on enjoying all the perks that came with her marriage to a rich man twice her age. Tom’s job was to soften up her image, tone down her looks, and get her to talk about the kinds of things dear to the hearts of the ladies whose votes her husband needed: kids, jobs, husbands, getting supper on the table. Think working women, he told himself. Soccer moms. Make her over until she came across like one of them.

  That was the key to getting the Senator’s poll ratings up.

  Initial assessment completed, Tom relaxed a little.

  “Getting her pregnant’s an idea,” he said. “Women love that kind of stuff. They’d surefire warm up to her if she waddled like a duck and her tummy stuck out so far she couldn’t see her feet, wouldn’t they? Get to work on it, why don’t you, Kenny?”

  His partner snorted. “You get to work on it. I’m a married man, remember? Besides, she looks like the type that wouldn’t give you a sideways smile if you didn’t have at least a million big ones in the bank.”

  “Yeah, well, that lets both of us out, doesn’t it?” Tom said with a wry smile. His bank account at the moment ran into the low three figures, and Kenny’s was in similar shape. It was a lucky thing this job had come along when it had. Everything else they had in the oven—low-profile, behind-the-scenes stuff, all of it—paid peanuts compared with this, and offered zero exposure. “The lady’s image needs some work, no doubt about it. The red hair’s definitely got to go. And the jewelry. And the clothes.”

  Kenny grinned. “See there, you’ve got her naked already.”

  This attempt at humor made Tom shake his head with a rueful grin. “Okay, let’s can that right now. R-E-S-P-E-C-T is the key word here. The lady’s our client, don’t forget.”

  “Yeah, I know. And no client, no money. And I like to eat.”

  “Don’t we all.” Tom glanced at the screen again. “Any c
ute kids to trot out?”

  Kenny shook his head. “Just stepkids. From his first marriage. All older than she is. And the word is they don’t much like her.”

  Tom grimaced. Knowing the players as he did, he wasn’t surprised to hear that. Though a lot of things could have changed, in eighteen years.

  “Dog?” he asked, then as Kenny shook his head, he continued on a note of declining hope: “Cat? Bird? Hamster?”

  Kenny shook his head again. “Nope.”

  “So basically we got nothing to work with, right?”

  “Basically,” Kenny agreed. “Except the lady.”

  “Life ain’t ever easy, is it?” Tom sighed.

  “Which brings us back to getting her pregnant.”

  “Getting her a dog would be easier,” Tom said. “A mutt, from the pound, that she saves from being put to death by the kindness of her heart. Big, clumsy, and adorable. Or little, scruffy, and adorable. Adorable’s the key.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Kenny said.

  “So get on it. Check around, find us an adorable pound mutt she can save.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Because I’m the senior partner. Because I’m going to deal with the lady while you’re out finding the dog. Because it was your idea.”

  “My idea was to get her pregnant. The dog’s your idea.”

  Tom ignored this. “We’ll do some ads with her and His Honor and the dog. Walking through fields, throwing sticks, that type of thing. Warm and fuzzy stuff.”

  “You’re serious about the dog.”

  “Yup.”

  “Think the Senator will agree?”

  “The way he’s dropping in the polls? Sure.”

  “The dog can always go back to the pound after the election, right?” Kenny’s voice was dry.

  “Now that’s cynical. Methinks you’ve been in this business too long, my friend.” Tom smiled, linking his hands behind his head and leaning back in the cushioned comfort of his leather desk chair. Like the rest of the furnishings of his new office, the chair was rented. He was on the comeback trail, and the trappings of success were important. Appearances were everything in this business. In politics, as in life, winning was the name of the game. Nobody wanted to know a loser.