Campaigning for Christopher (17 page)

“I
am
young,” she said, wetting her lips nervously.

“You’re usually more dressed up.”

“I’m usually playing the role of a congressman’s girlfriend. Today I was just flying solo to Washington. What are you doing here?”

“Change of plans,” he said, turning away from her and hefting her suitcase into the trunk. “We’re driving.”

Her eyes widened as she looked anxiously at the snug cab of the sports car. “Just you and me? To, um, D-DC?”

“You stutter when you’re nervous,” he said matter-of-factly, opening her car door and leaning his elbow on the top of it. “Why do I make you nervous?”

“I . . .” She looked up at him, chin high. “Because you d-dislike me so much.”

“I told you I don’t hate you,” he said.

She nodded. “But you don’t like me either.”

“I never said that,” he said, his eyes losing a touch of their playful sparkle. “Come on, get in. We need to hit the road.”

“Why aren’t we flying?” she asked, unmoving on the sidewalk.

He shut the car door and leaned against it, crossing his arms and facing her. “I respect the fact that you couldn’t make it last night, but it doesn’t change the fact that we need to talk, Jules. We have several engagements this week that are very, very important to my campaign, and once we get to DC, time will be scarce. Not to mention, I’d like to know more about the man who lied to you.”

Business. All business.
Something inside her deflated, but she nodded, taking a step closer to him. “Okay.”

He took a deep breath and sighed, cocking his head to the side. “And maybe I just want to know more about you. Who you are. How you ended up in the middle of my life. And why I can’t stop thinking about you now that you’re here.”

Oh, my heart. You’ll kill it dead if I’m not careful.

“I won’t let you play with me,” she said softly, with all the conviction she could muster. “I will help you. I will reverse the wrong I did to you. I will appear in public with you and let you touch me as I would if I was precious to you. But I won’t let you p-play with me, Chris. We need to b-be clear on that.”

He nodded, his eyes soft with understanding as he opened her door again. “Clear.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding at him gravely before ducking into the car.

***

It had taken half an hour for her to loosen up, but Christopher couldn’t help thinking that it was well worth the wait.

She laughed beside him, a low, intoxicating rumble that was about three million times sexier than any other laugh he’d ever heard.

“So you’re telling me you
don’t
bathe in Champagne?” she said with the mock seriousness of an investigative journalist.

“I can’t believe you didn’t grow up in a tepee,” he said, shaking his head as though crestfallen.

“And there were no special servants hired for the sole purpose of wiping your ass?”

“Your skin isn’t actually red, you know. It’s tan.”

She giggled, looking down at her arm. “It
is
pretty tan, isn’t it?”

“Tan? Yes. Pretty? Absolutely,” he said, winking at her before turning his eyes back to the traffic jam before them. Never before had Christopher been so okay with a massive traffic jam. Then again, he couldn’t remember ever having such interesting company either. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What’s the story with your dad?”

She opened her Diet Coke and took a swig before screwing the cap back on, and he got the feeling she was buying time, so he let her have as much as she needed without pushing.

“I didn’t have a dad. My biological father was my, um, my m-mother’s high school boyfriend.”

“And . . .?”

“You’re not, um, you’re not very good at sensing when someone d-doesn’t want to talk about something, are you?”

“How about you tell me about your father and then you get to ask me a tough question? Deal?”

“Fine,” she said, sighing softly. “His name is Mato Watakpe, which means Running Bear. Or D-Dan. Dan Running Bear is how he’d say it for, um, someone like you.”

“Like me?”

“Someone who isn’t an Indian.”

“Ah. Okay. Go on.”

“The running p-part was right enough. He got my, um, my
Ina
p-pregnant and couldn’t run away fast enough.”

“Your
Ina
?”

“My mother. D-Dan was no good. Not then and not now. I see him from, um, from time to time. He still lives on the res. Like a lot of the others, he drinks way too m-much. I doubt he’s been sober in, um, years.”

“So you know him?”

“I know who he is.”

“Does he acknowledge you?”

“Like with Christmas p-presents and birthday cards? Not my world, Winslow,” she said, leaning back in her seat and putting her bare feet on the dashboard. They were tan, with sparkly, gold-painted nails and a tiny tattoo of a sun near her ankle, and oh, how Christopher longed to press his lips to that sun and see if it was warmer than the rest of her. “Yeah. He knows I’m his, um, his d-daughter. He comes around every so often and, um, m-makes a racket. Then he goes away for another few m-months.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” she said. “My
Ina
was all I needed.”

“Your turn,” he said, easing into the middle lane, where the traffic was moving just a little faster. “Ask me something awkward.”

“What was it like to have four siblings and to, um, lose your father?” she asked, taking another sip of her soda and staring at him.

His memories sluiced with precision back to the day of his father’s heart attack at Westerly. One minute, he’d been standing on the patio, laughing his gregarious laugh, holding a stogie. The next minute, he’d clutched his chest and fallen. An hour later, he was gone.

“Hard,” he said softly. “Sad. World ending.”

She nodded, her eyes compassionate. “Yeah.”

“My brother Brooks is six years older than me, and he really tried hard, you know? He headed off to college a few months after it happened, but he’d come home whenever Jessica or I had an activity that called for a father figure. He was good to us. The best big brother I could ever ask for.”

“Are you still close to him?”

Christopher nodded, thinking about Brooks, who had been a surrogate father to him as a child and was now one of his closest friends. “I’m close to all of them. You don’t live through a common loss like that only to lose each other.”

“Some people would have,” she pointed out.

“Not us,” he said resolutely. “They’re everything to me. Family is the most important thing in my world.”

“I would have thought politics,” she said.

“No,” he answered. Though he was pretty sure she was teasing him, he wanted her to know his priorities. “Family first. Always.”

They were silent for a few moments, experiencing the communion of two souls who had, in completely different ways, known the same devastating loss, but had been comforted by the loving family that remained.

Finally he said, “We need to talk about the black-hatted man.”

She drew in a sharp breath and sighed, nodding once. “Okay.”

“What did he look like?”

“Um, shorter than me. Light hair. It was covered by the, um, the hat, but I could see it over his ears. His eyes were d-dark.”

Blond hair. Dark eyes. Shorter than five-foot-ten. Not much to go on.

“His voice?”

She shrugged. “Unremarkable.”

“Did he smell any particular way?”

“I d-didn’t get that close to him, Chris.”

“Anything, Jules? Anything?” he asked with exasperation. “He tried to
ruin
me!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sitting up straight and sliding her feet to the floor. “We exchanged a . . . a handful of words. When I went b-back, I, um, I handed him the phone, and he faded into the night.”

Which pretty much made the black-hatted man a dead end. It grated on Christopher, since it would have been useful to know who had gone to such extreme attempts to sabotage him.

“How much did he offer you? How much money?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“It matters to me.”

“Five hundred dollars,” she said softly.

“I guess that’s what it costs to ruin a man’s life,” he said tightly. “Why didn’t you take it?”

“I already told you.” She took a deep breath and released it carefully. “Because that wouldn’t have been right.”

“But sabotaging my campaign was,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.

“I didn’t
want
the money,” she said.

“I’ve seen your apartment,” he countered. She stiffened beside him, and he felt like an asshole. He didn’t mean to hurt her feelings by saying this, but he needed to get to the bottom of her motivations once and for all. “You could have used it. Why didn’t you take it?”

“Because I have integrity. It might not seem like it to you, but I do. I
try
to be a good person, Chris.” She nailed him with angry black eyes. “And for the righteous price of ruining the political campaign of a sexist bigot, I couldn’t take a dime.”

“Just ridding the world of another racist scumbag, right?” he said, his fingers tightening on the steering wheel.

“Exactly,” she snapped. “I mean, that’s what I
thought
I was doing.”

“Based on his word.”

“And . . . and he had this video of spliced sound bites from various speeches you’d given. It didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t legitimate. It made you look so bad. The words were so ugly!” she cried. Taking a deep breath, she placed her palm over her heart, and he felt her eyes on him as he stared at the road, clenching his jaw until it ached. “Oh God, Chris, I wish you could see my heart. I wish you could know that I thought—I really
believed
—that I was doing something for the greater good.”

He started to interrupt her, but she spoke over him.

“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen, Chris,” she said in a tired, broken voice. “Indian men beaten to death, their murders unsolved and forgotten. Kids bludgeoned by other kids. Alcohol purveyors in border towns making a fortune by selling liquor to my tribesmen. Making
money
while they systematically kill my people and contribute to the dissolution of a once-proud society. I thought I was seizing a chance to right those wrongs, to balance the karmic scale. I didn’t believe, not even for a moment, that I was hurting an innocent man.” She paused. “But I am
sorry
. I will be sorry for the rest of my life.”

It was the most passionately and personally she’d ever spoken about her home, and she’d done so without stuttering once. And suddenly he realized that, despite her pride over having enough food and a mother who had kept her on the straight and narrow, Julianne’s childhood had probably been terrifying. Likely she had lived in a state of constant fear—of her drunken father’s visits, of something happening to her mother, of not having food or electricity or water like the other families she knew, of unsolved murders, of bigotry, of the outside world.

Christopher had lived his childhood in a state of perpetual comfort and plenty, with two parents who adored him, servants who catered to his family’s needs, elegant dinners, private schools, horseback riding, sailing and musical lessons. Stories at night. Down comforters that magically appeared every October on his bed. A badminton net that appeared on the lawn every June. A closet full of clothes. A bathroom that was all his.

Though he had every right to feel angry for what she’d done, he had no right to judge her. He couldn’t begin to understand where she came from and how it informed her views of the world.

And yet, despite the chasm that separated their childhoods, he felt a close kinship to her. They’d both lost their fathers—in wildly different ways, of course—but the result was essentially the same: they’d been fatherless for all or part of their childhoods.

But it was more than that. The more time he spent with her, the more he realized that they had something very important in common. She was a fighter for what was right—he could feel it in the strength of her narrative and even in the decisiveness of her actions to sabotage him—and it resonated so strongly within him, visceral and familiar in its zeal and strength, it almost felt like coming home.

“You care about justice,” he said.

“Of course.”

“And righteousness.”

“Always.”

“Honesty.”

“Even when it hurts.”

“Integrity.”

“Yes.”

“Strength.”

She turned to him, her dark eyes serious. “Above all things.”

“That is who you are,” he said softly, realizing that they might have been born and raised worlds away from one another, but their hearts were cut from the same cloth. Her principles were just as solid and robust as his. She was, in the simplest possible terms, a rare and kindred spirit to Christopher’s.