The Senator's Wife Page 9

  Just as the beige dinner suit she was wearing had been recommended by some cohort of Quinlan’s. Polls showed that earth tones and pastels had the most appeal for Mississippi voters, he had told her.

  Well, hooray for Mississippi voters. Earth tones and pastels did nothing for her.

  But here she was, wearing them.

  No wonder she didn’t look like herself, Ronnie thought. She wasn’t herself any longer. She was some creature Quinlan and Lewis and the rest of them had conjured, the ultimate political wife, with everything from her clothes to her makeup to her remarks dictated by polls.

  They had turned her into a Stepford wife.

  No, Ronnie corrected, she had allowed herself to be turned into a Stepford wife.

  Bright, beautiful, ambitious Veronica Sibley, as she had been before she married, had been all but erased from existence. In her place was Mrs. Lewis R. Honneker IV, the Senator’s wife.

  Ronnie suddenly realized just what the price was for her place in the sun: Nothing less than her life.

  Mrs. Lewis R. Honneker IV was no more real than a Barbie doll. She was a plastic creation who could be manipulated at will to suit someone else’s needs.

  How long had it been since she had felt any kind of genuine emotion? Ronnie asked herself. How long since she had really laughed, or hugged someone and meant it, or had sweet, hot sex?

  Plastic creations didn’t need to feel.

  Ronnie realized that she did.

  She had had it with being a Barbie doll. She wanted to be real again.

  She wanted to feel.

  Ronnie stared at her reflection for a few seconds longer. Then she turned, bent, shut off the bathwater, and padded across tile and carpet to her suitcase.

  In anticipation of possible downtime while traveling, the staff at Sedgely had standing instructions to include a casual outfit or two along with her working clothes.

  Ronnie found a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and pulled them from the suitcase. She laid the clothes on the bed, then hesitated, looking down at them.’ She didn’t feel in the mood to wear jeans. She felt like wearing something—outrageous. For a moment she pondered. As the solution came to her, she searched her suitcase again for the sewing kit the staff invariably included. She located it, extracted a pair of scissors, and turned back to the bed, a small smile curving her lips.

  Fifteen minutes later, looking far different from the proper society matron who had entered the suite, she stepped out into the plush-carpeted hall and strode purposefully toward the elevators.

  The door to her suite shut behind her with a final-sounding click.

  Chapter

  12

  TOM DIDN’T KNOW what time it was when the phone beside his bed began to ring. All he knew was that it was somewhere deep in the foggy mists of night.

  “What the …?” As he was jolted awake, he cursed, grabbing for the source of the shrill sound and nearly knocking over both the lamp and the clock radio on the bedside table in the process. It was pitch-dark in his hotel room; he might as well have been blindfolded for all the help his eyes were as he floundered around for the phone.

  With one hand he righted the lamp and pushed the clock back onto the table—2:25 the time blinked at him as his other hand fumbled onto the phone, crawled over it, and at last snatched up the receiver. The blessed cessation of the shrill ringing was his reward.

  “Hello?” he growled into the mouthpiece.

  “You sleeping?” Kenny asked. Tom scowled at the familiar voice.

  “Not now,” he said, rolling onto his back and blinking up into the darkness. “What’s up?”

  “There’s a problem.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Tom sighed. “What is it? His Honor found himself another cutie?”

  “Nope. It’s the missus.”

  “The missus?” For an instant Tom was at a loss. Then his eyes opened wide. “Mrs. Honneker?”

  “She’s downtown at the Yellow Dog—a bar. Drinking like a fish and dancing with every guy who asks her. I gather she’s looking pretty hot too.”

  “What!?” Tom sat bolt upright in bed, wide awake now. He felt for the lamp, located its switch, and flipped it on. The room was flooded with light. Tom blinked. “How do you know?”

  “A reporter thought he spotted her and phoned the hotel here, trying to confirm whether or not it was her. When she didn’t answer, the call was put through to my room.”

  “Jesus!” A thought occurred to Tom. “Maybe it isn’t her. Did you check?”

  “I checked. She got in a taxi and headed out about half an hour after we arrived. Doorman heard her ask the driver about local nightspots. I’d say it’s about a ninety-nine-point-nine-percent chance that the redhead at the Yellow Dog is our gal.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Tom groaned, flinging back the covers and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “We’ve got to go get her. What in God’s name is she doing? What did you tell that reporter?”

  “That Mrs. Honneker is in her hotel room sleeping like a baby.”

  Tom groaned again, rubbing the bridge of his nose in an almost certainly futile attempt to ward off the Excedrin headache that threatened. “That won’t hold ’em for long. Give me ten minutes, and meet me in the lobby.”

  “Uh—Tom.”

  “What?” He was impatient now, on his feet, grabbing at the suit he had discarded just a couple of hours before. Draped over the back of a chair, it wouldn’t be too badly wrinkled, and anyway he didn’t care. The important thing was to get the pesky woman under lock and key fast, before anyone could prove it was her. Or worse, take pictures.

  The mere idea made him nauseous.

  “I—uh—I’m kind of busy.”

  “You’re busy? In the friggin’ middle of the night? When we’re dealing with a crisis? What in Jehosh-aphat’s name are you doing?” Tom balanced the phone between his shoulder and his ear and shoved one leg into his pants.

  “I’ve—got company.”

  “You’ve got company?” For a millisecond that didn’t compute. Then light dawned. Pants still only half on, Tom stood stock-still, rigid with shock. “A woman? Are you telling me you’ve got a woman in your room? What about friggin’ Ann?”

  Ann was Kenny’s wife, and a good friend of Tom’s. This just kept getting better and better. At the rate things were going, any minute now the Senator would come bursting into his room, his plane having been fogged in or something, demanding to know where his wife was.

  “Can we talk about it tomorrow?” Kenny sounded sheepish, as well he should.

  “Damn right we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” Tom recollected himself and started pulling on his pants again. “I can’t believe this. Any of it.”

  “Anyway, you don’t need me. The way I see it, this is a kind of delicate situation. It’d be better if you fetched the lady out of that bar alone. Less embarrassing all around. It’ll attract less notice if anybody’s watching, and in the morning everybody can pretend not to know what she got up to during the night.”

  “What do you mean, everybody? Never mind. I don’t want to know. Damn it to hell, Kenny, you’re a married man. With a bad heart. I’m gonna rip a strip off your hide in the morning.”

  With that Tom slammed down the receiver. Unbelievable. The whole thing was unbelievable.

  And it was happening on his watch, every unbelievable bit of it.

  Again.

  He was on the road in five minutes flat. Fortunately he didn’t have to fiddle around with cabs. In preparation for getting his client to her various appointments the next day, he had rented a car. It was coming in handy now.

  Not wanting to alert the hotel staff to his mission, Tom looked for an all-night gas station as he drove, found one on a corner a block away, pulled in, and asked directions to the Yellow Dog. A sleepy attendant had no problem directing him. It was the best-known bar in town.

  It was also, he discovered as he cruised past the darkened storefronts that lined Main Street, impossible to
miss. A huge yellow neon dog flashing off and on above a square, two-story converted warehouse was a dead giveaway.

  He pulled into the crowded parking lot just across the street. Ignoring a couple intertwined on a car hood in the parking lot and another groping each other on the sidewalk, he headed toward the glass double doors at the front of the building.

  The bass pulse of the music could be heard as far away as the street. When the doors swung open to admit him, the volume of sound almost made him take a step back.

  “Five-dollar cover.” The price of admission was shouted at him from a booth just inside the door by the attendant on duty, a beefy kid not long past college age who looked as if he could have made some money as a pro wrestler. A crowd of young women in miniskirts and their equally young-looking, jeans-clad escorts pushed past him on their way out the door as he extracted a five-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it over.

  “We close in an hour,” the kid mouthed over the music, his expression semiapologetic as he took Tom’s money and stamped his hand with a grinning dog in glow-in-the-dark ink. A glance over the kid’s head found a large clock. It was two-fifty A.M.

  At nine A.M. she was scheduled to speak to a women’s group; then there were the press interviews at noon.

  Jesus H. Christ.

  Tom nodded, and at last was allowed to pass through the narrow doorway into the dark, pulsing cavern beyond.

  “One?” A waitress, slim and blond with a bare, tanned midriff under a clingy little knit top, held up a single forefinger. She, too, had to shout to be heard over the music.

  Tom nodded, and followed her miniskirted backside into the snake pit of writhing, strobe-illuminated bodies that was the club. The dance floor, as far as he could tell, was in the middle of the room, and it was full. But that didn’t seem to matter a whit to anyone. Patrons were dancing everywhere, in the aisles, in front of the bar, even some on tables. The roving strobes zoomed around the room seemingly at random, as blinding and disorienting as photographers’ flashbulbs as they illuminated their victims for a second or two and moved on.

  Thank God, the place was so dark and weirdly lit that it was almost impossible to tell male from female at-a distance of more than five feet, much less recognize anyone. No wonder the reporter had to call to confirm it was her.

  Maybe, Tom thought with a last lingering trace of hope, it wasn’t. Maybe he was on a wild-goose chase, or was even the victim of a gag set up by Kenny.

  Please God.

  The waitress stopped before a tiny round table with a white marble top. For form’s sake, Tom sat down in one of the uncomfortable ice-cream-parlor-style chairs and ordered a Heineken, the single word bellowed at the top of his lungs and lost in the cacophony before it had so much as escaped his lips. The waitress, apparently adept at lipreading in the dark, nodded and took herself off.

  The sheer volume of sound was mind-blowing. Cliché or not, the phrase he couldn’t hear himself think was nothing short of the literal truth. Tom couldn’t.

  He shook his head to clear it, fought the urge to clap his hands over his ears, and began a methodical visual search of the place. Besides his errant client, he also sought reporters spying on her. Of course that only worked if the reporter was someone he knew; but just as likely it wasn’t.

  As he had already noted, it was almost impossible to recognize anybody. Tom gave up almost immediately on the reporters. After a couple of minutes spent squinting at first one slim young body and then another, Tom realized that in order to find his primary quarry he was going to have to go from table to table and from dancing couple to dancing couple, leaning close and staring intently into the face of nearly each and every person present. The only ones automatically disqualified were those obviously too heavy, or sporting a buzz cut. Even short haircuts could be misleading; she might have put her hair up. Or be wearing a baseball cap.

  Who knew?

  The waitress came back with his bottle of beer, placing it on the table in front of him on top of a tiny paper cocktail napkin. With a shouted “Thanks” Tom extracted his wallet and fumbled around for a bill, which he handed over with a wave indicating she should keep the change. She illuminated the money with a quick flash from a tiny flashlight, which dangled from a chain around her wrist. From the wattage of the smile she turned on him, Tom guessed the bill was a ten or twenty instead of the five he’d intended to give her. Blast it, he didn’t have that kind of money to throw away.

  But that was the least of his worries, Tom thought, downing half his beer in one gulp preparatory to standing up and starting his search in earnest. Finding out if—

  There she was. There was no mistaking that red hair as the light hit it. She was dancing, gyrating really, with a jeans-clad kid who didn’t look much older than Mark. Her head was thrown back, and she was laughing as she danced. Her teeth gleamed blindingly white in the blaze of ultraviolet light. She was wearing cutoff jeans, the real short kind with raggedy fringe around the thighs, a tight black T-shirt, and high-heeled sandals that made her legs seem two yards long. As Kenny had warned him, she was looking hot. The kid looked enthralled.

  Tom stood up, filled with a surprising degree of reflexive anger, as if she were betraying him. Which was stupid. She was his job, not his wife.

  Deliberately he gulped the rest of his beer, and considered his options. His first impulse was to go over there, wrap a hand in that too-red hair and drag her out of the club by it, but that had to be discarded. First, it would attract too much attention, and second, he could not manhandle the woman who was his ticket back into the political big time. It wouldn’t be good for business.

  He was going to have to use all his wile to get her out of there without attracting undue notice. The first thing to do, obviously, was to get rid of the kid whose hands were even now sliding around her waist. A minute or two more, and Tom had little doubt they’d be cupping her butt. And from all appearances, the lady seemed to be loving it.

  It didn’t require genius to figure out that Mrs. Lewis R. Honneker IV had come out tonight with every intention of getting laid.

  Sorry, darling, Tom thought with an ironic twist of his lips, and headed toward his quarry.

  By the time Tom reached them, she had her arms around the kid’s neck and was dancing against him in a way that would make a priest think dirty thoughts. And from the look on his face, the kid wasn’t even vaguely considering the priesthood.

  Tom tapped him on the shoulder. Not surprisingly, he was ignored. Tom tapped a little harder—more of a shove, really—and at the same time detached one of his client’s cool, slender hands from the kid’s neck and tugged her toward him.

  Over the kid’s shoulder she blinked at him in surprise. The kid turned toward him with murder in his eyes.

  Tom really couldn’t blame him. He’d want to murder anyone who broke in on that too.

  “What the—?” the kid began angrily.

  “My wife,” Tom yelled, flashing the huge square diamond and thin gold band on the lady’s left ring finger in the kid’s face.

  “Oh.” The kid’s expression altered ludicrously. His arms dropped and he backed away, holding his hands up in front of him in an age-old gesture of surrender. “Sorry, man. She didn’t say she was married.”

  Tom nodded as the kid disappeared. The slim hand he was grasping detached itself and slid around his neck, to be joined by its fellow.

  The faint scent of some expensive perfume teased his nostrils as she plastered herself against him. In his arms she felt slender, supple, feminine and very, very sexy. With a sense that he was somehow losing control of the situation, Tom set his hands firmly on either side of her waist and frowned down into a pair of come-hither chocolate-brown eyes.

  Chapter

  13

  “LIAR,” RONNIE MOUTHED, not missing a beat of the dance. Quinlan’s body felt hard and strong and headily masculine against hers as she moved against it; his neck was warm beneath her hands. Having him show up here was a surprise, but
not a bad one, she decided. From the first she’d considered her own personal political consultant to be a very attractive man.

  “There’s a reporter here,” he said into her ear. His breath smelled faintly of beer. “We need to leave.”

  Ronnie took advantage of the dip of his head to press closer to him. His chest felt good against her breasts. He was bigger than she was, wider, taller. His cheek as it brushed hers was rough with stubble. His hands on her waist were strong. He was wearing the same suit he had worn earlier in the evening, a dark navy pinstripe. She’d noted at the time that it emphasized his build, showing off his broad shoulders and flat stomach, his narrow hips and muscular thighs. The only fault she’d been able to find with his appearance at the dinner was that, all buttoned and pressed and unsmiling, he had looked uptight. Now he had five-o’clock stubble, his white shirt was open at the collar, and he wasn’t wearing a tie.

  Ronnie felt herself begin to tingle.

  “Did you hear what I said?” When she didn’t reply, his voice in her ear turned impatient.

  Ronnie shook her head and clung closer. “I want to dance.”

  He pulled back to look down into her face. She smiled sensuously up at him, rubbing her body against his as she moved with the music.

  His frown deepened into a full-fledged scowl, and he leaned forward to speak into her ear again. “You’ve been drinking.”

  It was an accusation, tinged with an undertone of outrage, and it made Ronnie smile.

  “You’re right,” she agreed, and tightened her hold on him. He swung her around, reflexively she thought, to keep from being bumped by the couple on their left. People were dancing all around them, close together, doing everything but making love on the dance floor.

  The procession of boys she had danced with earlier hadn’t done much to fire up her libido. She hadn’t really wanted to sleep with any of them. But Quinlan was something else again.

  How would he be in bed? she wondered. Just considering the possibilities was enough to send heat shooting clear down to her toes.