President's Girlfriend 06 - The Sins of the Fathers (10 page)

And although
he was already nearing the time for his meeting to begin, he stepped out onto
the terrace of the presidential suite anyway, hoping to get a glimpse of that
woman of his.
 

And there
she was.
 
Out in the privacy-fenced off
area of the White House lawn designated as Little Walt’s play
area.
 
She and Little
Walt were raucously playing catch football, with their staff of nannies, led by
the head nanny, looking on.
 
But just
seeing his wife and his child warmed his heart.
 
He even forgot about his meeting and took a seat on the terrace.
 
He crossed his legs and eagerly watched them
at play.
 

Gina would
throw a child-sized football to Little Walt and Little Walt would attempt to
catch it.
 
He, of course, would miss it
every single time, but then he would pick it up and attempt to throw it back to
his mother.
 
The boy was smart for his
age, but he wasn’t exactly athletic.
 
His
aim would miss the mark badly every time.
 
But Gina, in her cute pink warm-up suit, her short hair in a gorgeous
free-flow, would jump up and down and applaud his effort and make him feel like
the most beloved child in the world.
 

And Dutch
sat there staring at her.
 
She was such a
special person to him, a woman with a heart of gold.
 
She was strong, and opinionated, and
sometimes angered him in ways very few others ever could.
 
A weak man couldn’t be her man.
 
She’d run all over a weakling.
 
And although many people were certain that
Dutch had Gina well in hand and that there was no way she could ever run over
him, he knew better.
 
He knew, unlike
anyone else knew, that Gina was his weakness.
 
His strength, which was legendary to every world leader on the face of
this planet, was mush when it came to Gina.

And then it
happened.
 
Little Walt actually caught
one of Gina’s passes.
 
Forget that she
was practically standing toe to toe with him when he caught
it,
the fact that he caught it was definitely cause for celebration.
 
And Gina was celebrating, jumping up and down
again and giving Little Walt a high five that knocked him on his rump.
 
Dutch laughed so loud that Gina somehow heard
it and looked up.
  
When she saw that
Dutch was sitting there, she pointed to him.

“Look,
Daddy’s here,” she said to Little Walt, who was asleep when Dutch arrived home
early this morning.
 
Little Walt saw his
daddy waving at him on the terrace and he took off, with football in hand,
running like a pint-sized sumo wrestler.
 
Gina, laughing herself now, took off behind him.
 
The nannies took off behind them.

Little Walt
held the rail, but was able to waddle his way up the side stairs that led to
the second-floor terrace.
 
Gina was right
behind him, in case he slipped, but allowed him to
make
 
the
journey all by himself.
 

When he made
it onto the terrace, he dropped that football and took off toward his father,
his little arms outstretched.
 
Gina took
note how Dutch, thrilled to see him too, remained in his seat with his arms
outstretched.
 
Any other time and Dutch
would have been out of that chair and would have run to hug his son.
 
He didn’t this time, Gina suspected, because
he didn’t have the energy to do it.

But he did
lift Walt into his arms as soon as he made his way to his chair.
 

“Daddy!”
Walt said as Dutch lifted him up.
 
Dutch
had his eyes closed as he felt the bones of his son, inhaled the sweet smell of
his son.
 

“I missed
you,” he said as he looked at Walt, at his thick brown hair, at his stunningly
adorable green eyes.

“
Me
and Mommy miss you too.”

“Bet I miss
you more.”

“We miss you
a lot.
 
Mommy says you were in hell.”

Gina
laughed.
 
“Hel-sin-ki, Walter.
 
Not hell.
 
Helsinki.”

“Which
amounted to the same thing,” Dutch said, considering the zero results those
three intense days of talks netted.
 
He
looked at Gina.
 
Gina was leaned against
the rail staring at him.

“You okay?”
she asked him.

“I’m sure
the papers this morning are ravaging the summit and my lack of influence
there.”

“They are,”
Gina admitted, “but who cares?
 
Are you
okay?”

Dutch
smiled, the lines of age appearing on the side of his eyes.
 
Only Gina bothered to ask.
 
“I’m okay,” he said.

Then, coming
up the side stairs, was Allison, Dutch’s former press secretary and new chief
of staff.
 
“Good morning, Mrs. Harber,
Mr. President.”

“Good
morning, Ally,” Gina said.

“Good
morning,” Walt said.

Allison
smiled, bent slightly down.
 
“And good morning to you, too, Mr. Harber.
 
How are you this morning?”

“Fine,” Walt
said.

Then she
looked again at the president.
 
“Your
cabinet has assembled in the Situation Room, sir,” she said.

Gina saw a
look of drain appear in Dutch’s eyes.
 
“Thank-you, Ally,” he said and then patted Walt on the hip.
 
“Up, you,” he said.
 
“Daddy has
work
to
do.”

“Daddy working?”
Walt asked as Gina lifted him off of Dutch and held him in her
arms.
 

“Yes, babe,”
Gina said.
 
“Daddy’s working.”

“Daddy
always working,” Walt said.
 
And although
it was cute and funny and Allison grinned, neither Dutch nor Gina cracked a
smile.
 
It was one of the worse aspects
of their life in this DC fishbowl.
 
It
was hardly funny to them.

Dutch
reached over, kissed Walt on the forehead, and kissed Gina on the lips.
 
“You two stay out of trouble,” he said, and
then proceeded to leave the terrace.
 
Allison proceeded to follow him, but Gina stopped her.
 
“Could I see you for a moment, Ally?” she
asked as Dutch kept going.

“Of course,”
Allison said.
 
She knew she was chief of
staff today because Gina had fought for her promotion.
 
She, in truth, felt just as much loyalty to
Gina as she did to Dutch.

Gina
motioned to the head Nanny, who immediately began to come.
 
“Go with Nanny, Walter,” she said to her
son.
 
“Mommy has to go to work, too.”

“Mommy working?”
Walt said as the Nanny took him from Gina.

“That’s right,”
Gina said.

“Mommy not
always working,” Walt said and Gina and Allison laughed.

“That’s
exactly right, too,” Gina said.

When the
nannies and Walt left the terrace, Gina invited Allison to a sit down.
 
After they both sat down, Gina didn’t waste
any time.

“I want you
to clear the president’s schedule for the remainder of the day,” she said.

This request
threw Allison.
 
The First Lady had never
interfered this way before.
 
“Clear his
schedule?”

“Clear his
schedule.
 
I can’t just sit by and let
this happen.
 
He’s dead on his feet,
Ally, couldn’t you tell that?”

She
could.
 
“I understand, ma’am, but he has
ten more meetings today alone.
 
And I’m
talking meetings with a lot of foreign dignitaries.”

“I
understand that.
 
Every day when he’s in
town he has tons of meetings with all kinds of people, I get it.
 
But I saw that look of drain in his eyes,
Ally.
 
He can’t keep going like this, I
don’t care who he has to meet.”
 
Gina
then stood up, which prompted Allison to stand, too. “Clear his schedule,” she
said again.
 
“Y’all aren’t killing my
husband.”

Allison had
never seen Gina so determined.
 
And she
suddenly realized if Dutch was her man she’d feel the same way.
 
Ten meetings in one day practically every day
of the week was ridiculous anyway.
 
“Yes,
ma’am,” she said.
 
“Consider his schedule
cleared.”

Gina
smiled.
 
She knew she could count on
Ally.
 
And then she left the terrace,
determined to plan just the right getaway for Dutch.

CHAPTER FIVE

Marcus Rance sat on the sofa at the Osgood mansion and looked
at the tall, straight back of his host.
 
He looked over further, at a tall man in a wheelchair, paralyzed from
the neck down.
 
He had not been
introduced to Marcus, but it was obvious that he was Dr. Henry Osgood, Jade’s
ex-fiancé who supposedly attacked her, prompting Dutch to attack him.
 
In fact, the guy’s father, Marcus’s host, was
treating the one-time big shot surgeon as if he wasn’t his son,
but
 
nothing
more than
another piece of the furniture.
 

This was
awkward as hell for Marcus, and if Dutch and Gina would have acted right he
wouldn’t be here at all.
 
But the way
they treated him.
 
The way they said he
couldn’t stay at the White House.
 
Oh,
no, he wasn’t good enough to stay there.
 
Not around their precious little boy.
 
Dutch even put it more bluntly than that:
 
they really didn’t know him from Adam, Dutch
had said.
 
He wasn’t having a stranger
around his wife and child, he had added.
 

A stranger.
 
That was the way he had put it.
 
He called Marcus a stranger.
 
It was
true,
they
really didn’t know the character of the man, just that he may have been wrongly
imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit.
 
But Gina was his half-sister.
 
How
the hell was he some stranger?

And Dutch
kept going.
 
He said he would be more
than happy to bankroll him a little house in the city of his choosing, and to
help him find employment.
  
But even that
sounded like an insult to Marcus.
 
It
sounded as if the big-shot Dutch Harber was telling him that he’d help him out,
but only on a small scale.
 
He’d help him
find a little house and a little job.
 
Like hell, Marcus thought at the time.
 
His half-sister was the First Lady and his brother-in-law was the POTUS,
and their talking
little
?

He squirmed
around on the sofa just thinking about that shit.
 
A little house?
 
A little job?
 
Were they fucking kidding?
 
This was his chance to make it big, to
capitalize on their monumental success, and he wasn’t going out like some chump
idling away the rest of his days in some little row house on some little job
somewhere.
 
He wanted big and
bigger.
 
To hell with little!
 
If it wasn’t for
Jade
coming to his rescue and asking him to come stay with her and Christian until
he could decide what he wanted to do, he would have went off on that Dutch
motherfucker right then and right there.
 
He didn’t like his ass anyway!

He and Jade
would talk about it for hours on end, especially while Christian was gone to
work.
 
But Marcus had to play it cool
with her too.
 
She loved that daddy of
hers.
 
Loved him to
death.
 
But she hated Gina.
 
So Marcus played up that distaste for Gina
angle whenever he was talking with Jade.
 
She wanted Gina out of her father’s life, and her own mother in his
life, from what Jade was telling him.
 
So
that was what he focused on.
 
He didn’t
have any great love for Gina anyway, or anybody else if truth be told, but it
was Dutch he couldn’t stand.
 
It was
Dutch’s ass he wanted to kick.