Knight (Political Royalty Book 1) (11 page)

“Maybe we should forget about campaigning, and just do a documentary with you sitting in the car, driving across country and talking about farming,” said Justin, echoing what she’d been thinking.

“Between me talking and the car ride, I’d put them to sleep,” said Walker.

“You’re probably right.” Justin glanced in the rearview mirror to the backseat.

Haven saw the senator flip him off and then smile.

“It doesn’t boil down into a tidy soundbite,” said Walker after a moment.

“Not necessarily,” she said. “We just haven’t found it yet. It’s also a cause everyone can get behind. What’s controversial about feeding people?”

“You obviously haven’t met my party,” said Walker. “I don’t mean that,” he said after a few seconds. “We’re not the ogres the left makes us out to be. Not all of us, anyway. We just have to figure out how to inspire people to remember the
only as strong as our weakest link
argument. Or the
I was hungry and you fed me
thing. Pick your cliché. There are more than enough to go around.”

Haven glanced over her shoulder at him, taking in the concern in his dark eyes. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t true.”

M
ATT SLIPPED INTO HIS CUBICLE and grabbed the clean shirt from his bottom drawer. He’d showered at the redhead’s place—with her, which still counted—but he hadn’t had a chance to swing by his apartment to change clothes. Jen, his pain-in-the-ass editor, would notice if he showed up for their meeting in the same clothes he wore yesterday and she’d hold it against him.

It was worth it
, he thought, glancing around to make sure no one was looking before he stripped off his T-shirt and slid on the clean shirt. His bed mate had been a natural redhead and a firecracker in more ways than one. He might be willing to break his own no-more-than-three-dates rule for her. Probably not but the fact that he’d even considered it served as a testament to the woman’s skill.

He grabbed his tablet and hustled down the hall to Jen’s office. When he knocked on her open door, he was still within five minutes of their meeting time, which by his reckoning, counted as on time. She motioned him in with her hand without looking up from the screen in front of her and then kept him waiting for a few minutes. It was her way of punishing him for not showing up exactly when she said. He didn’t care. It gave him a couple of minutes to collect his thoughts and if he seemed penitent when she turned around, she’d be more inclined to give him what he wanted. Which was still a slot covering the Walker campaign.

It wasn’t quite the cherry spot it had seemed before Collins’s announcement, but he still wanted it. He grew up on a dairy farm in the Midwest. It didn’t work out for his family, he thought, glossing over the memories he didn’t want to examine. There was no way in hell he’d ever turn farmer. That hadn’t been in the cards for him even before his family lost the farm, but even after all these years, it was still part of him. Part of him couldn’t believe Walker was making a run at the presidency with agriculture at the center of his platform, but if he intended to do it, Matt wanted a front row seat to watch.

Jen finally spun her chair around to face him. Instead of pouncing and asking if she’d made her decision, he waited and tried to appear contrite.

“Give it a rest, Newman,” she said, shaking her head. “The assignment’s yours if you still want it. Check with accounting for meals and lodging allowances and don’t get your hopes up. I wouldn’t take anything you want to keep so you don’t risk bringing bed bugs home with you when Walker drops out.”

Matt had no intention of staying in crap motels. He’d just have to find someone to share the room and the room costs with. Hardly a problem, considering.

“You seem sure he won’t go all the way.”

Jen gave him the half grin he’d learned really meant
you dumb shit
. “You’ve seen Collins, right? The Southern white boy running with his daddy’s money doesn’t stand a chance. The general is going to eat him for lunch.”

“Maybe,” he said, walking the line between pissing off his editor and capitulating to something he didn’t really believe.

“Don’t let that stop you from digging up every juicy story you can while you’re trailing the senator. There have been rumors about his father’s penchant for pretty secretaries swirling around for years. I doubt the apple falls far from that tree. Drag a couple of mistresses out of the woodwork and I’ll give you front page above the fold.”

“Why do we care about who he fucks?” Maybe it was a kindred spirit thing but Matt always figured a person’s sex life should be their own business.

“We care because he’s a holier-than-thou married Baptist whose daddy has made it his personal mission to turn sexual politics back to the 1950s. The thumpers are always the ones with the deviant sex stuff hidden under their beds. Find it and it won’t matter how long his campaign lasts; you’ll get your by-lines.”

“Haven Graham’s handling his campaign. I had a meeting with her right-hand guy. She did amazing things in Virginia,” he said, still unwilling to concede Walker’s candidacy was doomed.

“It won’t matter. The Pope himself could be handling the campaign, complete with a handful of saints, and Collins would still win.”

––––––––

“F
ARMERS ARE GOING to become more important to the security of our country than soldiers. The military is irrelevant in this situation.” The wariness in Walker’s eyes telegraphed through the TV screen. Haven could tell he recognized his mistake the second he made it, but it was a second too late.

“Surely you don’t mean to say the US military has no role to play in combating terrorism,” said the moderator, looking like a lion that’d just had a side of beef dropped in front of him.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Walker. Even watching the replay on the small screen instead of live, Haven could see his expression shift to slightly panicked. It was as painful the morning after as it had been in real time.

“If I may,” said General Collins, not waiting for permission. “While I understand the senator’s desire to
promote
something he feels so passionately about, I can’t help but think his opinion is a dangerous combination of untested idealism and inexperience. I’ve been to the parts of the world we’re talking about and seen both the devastation of the innocents and the hatred of the West by the jihadists. We cannot afford to ignore the blatant threat organizations like Al-Qaeda and ISIL present to our way of life.” She met the camera with a look of such determination in her eyes, Haven felt certain the same expression spurred legions of troops into action. “And we can’t trust our future security to someone who doesn’t understand the problem, no matter how well-intentioned he may be.” Collins finished to an explosion of applause and the image on the screen shifted from the previous night’s debate to the talking heads seated around the table ready to dissect and destroy Walker’s performance.

“It gets worse every time I see it,” said Haven. “He opened the door, and Collins managed to make him look like an out-of-touch idealist while at the same time implying he might be in it for personal gain. What was he thinking?”

“I don’t think he
was
thinking.” Turning off the volume, Justin dropped onto the bed next to her and slung an arm over her shoulders. “I think he just got caught up in the moment. Hear me out,” he said when she opened her mouth to protest. “The dude is a natural politician, maybe the best one I’ve ever seen, but he’s still relatively new to the national stage. We all are.”

She didn’t like being reminded that this was her first national campaign too. They’d had trouble for weeks getting traction in Iowa. All the progress they’d made on their previous visit seemed to have evaporated. She hadn’t screwed up the logistics of the events, none of them had, but Walker’s crowds were a fraction the size of the general’s. She couldn’t help thinking if she knew more, she might have figured out a way to get better results.

“Cut him some slack.”

“We’re going to lose Iowa,” she said, trying out the words and hating the taste.

“Quite possibly. That doesn’t mean he won’t be president. Hell, with the way the Iowa caucus works, history predicts he stands almost the same chance of becoming president if he doesn’t win.” Justin gave her shoulder a squeeze. “What matters is what happens now. He’s got a full day of events planned and the caucus isn’t for two days. If you’re feeling this discouraged, imagine how he’s feeling. Don’t let him stay in the hole he fell in.”

She leaned into him, turning her head to press her lips to his cheek. “You’re not smarter than me.”

“I love you too.” He kissed the top of her head, and she grinned for the first time since the previous night’s debate ended in the catastrophe that the morning news shows kept broadcasting. “Go find our guy and talk him off the ledge. Assuming he’s still alive. That wife of his looked ready to murder him last night.”

She felt Justin shudder. He was right. Mrs. Walker and the children hadn’t spent any time in Iowa. The kids were so young and had school. Both Walkers had been adamant about keeping their schedule as normal as possible, but they’d flown out for the debate.

Sandra managed to stand on the stage beside her husband and smile when it ended, but as soon as the cameras stopped rolling, she turned from adoring wife to ice queen. If Haven hadn’t been so pissed at his misstep, she’d have felt bad for the guy.

“I’ll see you on the bus.”

“Not if I see you first,” he said, as she rolled her eyes and closed the door behind her.

The only ones on the elevator so early were people heading to or coming back from the exercise room. She rode down two flights with a woman wearing barely enough spandex to be considered legal and a dude with arms bigger around than her thighs. It made her want to stop by the hotel breakfast bar for a glazed donut in protest.

No one answered when she knocked on the senator’s door. She doubted he was sleeping but his family might be and she kicked herself for not thinking of it sooner. Instead of knocking again and risking waking anyone who wasn’t already up, she sent him a quick text, asking him where he was.

GYM

Of course he was. She’d have put money on him being one of those guys who worked out wherever he went. He didn’t get that kind of body on lunches out and too much stress. Snagging the elevator, she rode down to the first floor and followed the signs to the exercise room. It was a decent size. There was a pool with a woman swimming laps and Haven wondered if she could get into that. Swimming didn’t seem like exercise exactly and she couldn’t spend six months eating crap and living on a bus and emerge unscathed. Better to start the habit sooner rather than after the donuts she planned to eat found her ass.

Skirting the edge of the pool, she stopped in front of the glass door leading to the exercise room. She could see the elevator couple in the corner, lifting weights. His were larger than hers but both were bigger than anything Haven ever intended to pick up. It wasn’t the weightlifters who had her stalling with her hand hovering over the keycard swipe. It was Shepherd Walker on a treadmill.

He wore athletic shorts, the short, loose kind with compression shorts underneath that showed off every contour of his very muscular thighs. Sweat soaked his plain gray T-shirt, making it cling to his strong back. It dripped off the hair at the back of his neck as he pounded the rubber tread with his feet like it had done something to personally wrong him. The TV screen in front of him stared back at him like a black eye, and he seemed lost in his own world. It didn’t take ESP to read his thoughts. Justin was right; the senator was in worse shape than her. But she had a hard time thinking of him as the senator while he ate up the miles on the treadmill, testing a body even better than the one she’d imagined he had under those custom suits.

Shaking her head to clear it because nothing good could come from that line of thinking, she slid her keycard into the reader and opened the door. The humidity was on par with the air around the pool but generated this time by sweaty bodies instead of chlorinated water. She waited a second for her nose to adjust to the scent of clean sweat and antiseptic and then went to lean against the treadmill next to the one Walker used. She could try walking on it, but she had no idea how to work the buttons and the odds of her falling on her ass felt too high. She didn’t want to finish out the rest of the primaries in a cast.

He knew she was there. He couldn’t miss her, but she didn’t see a good reason to push. Not yet anyway.

“I know I fucked up.” He sounded miserable, and she reconsidered the tactic she’d been about to take. He was plenty hard on himself. He didn’t need that from her.

“Yeah,” she said, trying to make the word sound as offhand as she could. “It’s probably not the first time, right?”

Without breaking his stride, he turned his head to face her and then turned to the center again. “No.”

“Good.” She nodded her head, but she couldn’t tell if he saw her or not. “You obviously survived before. How long are you planning on doing that?” She had difficulty concentrating on what she needed to say to get him motivated again when he seemed intent on beating the treadmill into submission.