Rook (Political Royalty Book 2) (16 page)

I
t took fifteen hours of driving, five rest stop breaks, and a gallon and a half of coffee to get to Orlando, but it had been worth every bit of it to see Becca’s face when they walked through the huge stone gates of Hogsmeade. Taking her to Universal to play for the day before the Florida primary had been a gamble that paid huge dividends in the way her eyes lit up when she saw her favorite books brought to life. Personally, he’d been a movie guy, not a reader, and even he was impressed with the massive replica of Hogwarts rising above them.

He wasn’t trying to plaster over what happened to her with ice cream and amusement parks, but there wasn’t a lot he could do. He still had his tech buddy looking for photos, but so far nothing had surfaced. It was a double-edged sword. He wanted his sister’s privacy protected, but it left him without leads or a course of action. Not until he had a clear idea of who he was going after. For now, if it meant she got to lose herself for a couple of hours in a fantasy world, then it was worth the dent the tickets put in his credit card.

“Oh look!” she said, sounding a decade younger than her twenty-one years. “Ollivander’s!”

She grabbed his hand and dragged him across the cobblestones and through the doorway of the deliberately, oh-so-artfully designed slightly crooked building. There was a kind of kiosk in the middle of the room and boxes of wands lining the wall.

“Can I help you find a wand, sir?” asked a young man dressed like a wizard, in robes with a soft pointed hat.

“Not for me, but she needs one.” He motioned to his sister and she looked at him, her eyes wide.

“Don’t be a goof. I’m an adult,” she said, but he could tell by the way her gaze kept drifting back to the display case full of resin made to look like twisted wood that she wanted one. And he wanted to get her a little bit of magic if he could.

“One of the ones that does stuff,” he said to the dude in the robes.

“The interactive wands are over here.”

The guy led Becca to a wall of dark-green boxes and Matt went back to staring out the window. People roamed up and down the street, chasing kids and laughing, but at this time of the year, there were hardly any crowds. He was giving himself another silent pat on the back for his genius when he saw a man he thought he recognized scanning the area. In his windbreaker and chinos, he was hardly remarkable but the way he moved screamed security. Matt might not have noticed if he hadn’t been watching the guys covering Walker for the past two months.

There was no way Walker was campaigning at an amusement park. It would be just like Jess to forget to tell him something like that. She might not care about him leaving her to sleep alone, but she was a ball buster when it came to getting the scoop on a story. While Becca tried to decide between willow with a unicorn hair and oak with a dragon’s heartstring, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and sent Jess a quick text asking where they were campaigning today.

JACKSONVILLE NOW FSU LATER. NOT YOUR SECRETARY, ASSWIPE. WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK?

He grinned at the phone. She was nothing if not consistent.

BE BACK TOMORROW

On impulse, he snapped a picture of his sister brandishing her new wand, a huge cheesy smile splitting her face and sent it to Jess. Her reply was swift and concise.

FUCK YOU.

“Jess sends her love,” he said, tucking the phone back in his pocket and pulling out his abused credit card to pay for the wand. The wizard in the kiosk told him the total and he caught himself before he let a
you’ve got to be fucking kidding me
fly. He’d pay a hell of a lot more to keep that smile on his sister’s face.

He handed Becca her skinny Ollivander’s bag and followed her back out onto the street. There was no sign of the guy he thought he recognized and he chocked the whole thing up to hooky-induced paranoia. Like when he used to skip school to hang out at the park and thought he saw his dad every time a pick-up truck went past.

“So is there something going on between you guys?”

“With Jess? No, we’re just fuck buddies.” The answer slipped out before he thought it through and he glanced around, hoping there weren’t any kids around. His sister whacked him hard on the arm.

“Ow.”

“Language,” she said, but she was smiling. “So no long-term plans?”

“Not even short-term ones. What’s with the questions?”

“Just curious.” She pulled her new wand from its long, skinny box and stood behind a brass medallion set into the cobblestones. Glancing back and forth between the shop window in front of her and the small plaque at her feet, she raised her wand and swished it like an orchestra conductor. “I just wanted to know how badly I’m cramping your style,” she said, repeating the motion.

On the third try, the tiny snowman on top of the layered cake started to skate around the edge of the frosting.

“Cool,” she said, hurrying to find the next medallion. She moved from window to window, making plants move and the Quidditch balls jump, but when she gave him a turn with the wand, he couldn’t get anything to work.

“Are we going to screw around with shop windows all day or can we go get on one of the rides?” he asked, handing the wand back to her.

“Muggle,” she said, shaking her head. “Come on. I want to see Hagrid’s place and then the castle.”

She darted up the hill to a small rickety-looking roller coaster and he had to hurry to keep up. She exclaimed over the hut and the animatronic hippogriff sitting on its nest, and even he had to admit it was pretty cool. He had no idea about the books. There was no way he had patience to wade through thousands of pages of a kid’s book, but it looked just like movies.

They cut under the ropes for the normally winding lines and hurried to the coaster loading area without having to wait. When they were seated under the safety bar and net, Becca turned to him and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

“Thank you for this.” Her blue eyes looked serious and for a moment everything fell away and he was back in the hotel room, holding her in his arms while she broke apart.

“I didn’t mean to make it seem like this would fix everything. Like it could fix anything,” he said, uncomfortable but needing her to understand. Words were what he did for a living. They didn’t usually fail him, but he was at a loss.

“It’s okay.” She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head hard enough to move her sandy-blonde hair. “I want to pretend for a while. Just play with you, like when we were kids, and I used to bug the shit out of you and your friends.”

“You did bug the shit out of me. I don’t know how I survived it.”

While they’d been talking, the car had clicked its way to the top of a tame-looking hill. The replica of Hogsmeade spread out below them, its snowcapped roofs at odds with the warm spring morning. He turned to face her, intending to reiterate his awesomeness when the car let go and the screaming started. For a kid’s coaster, it packed a decent punch and by the time they hit the spiral turn, Matt was laughing and whooping while Becca screamed her head off in the seat beside him. He caught his breath by the time they reached the top of the hill and watched as the stone blocks of the castle got closer. As the car started to drop, he saw a small group of people clustered around the base of Hogwarts. It looked like a couple of bodyguards with Mrs. Walker and her daughters.

“Is that...”

“I think so...” He squeezed the words out as the coaster sped down the hill.

The ride emptied them out by the benches at the base of the castle and the senator’s family. Matt was working out the pros and cons of going over to say hello or trying to squeeze by unnoticed when Mrs. Walker saw his sister and waved them over.

Feeling like a kid who got caught doing something he shouldn’t, Matt reminded himself to throw his shoulders back and smile, a tactic that served him well in the past. Mrs. Walker looked uncharacteristically disheveled and her girls looked miserable, which was weird considering they were wearing wizard robes and standing in the middle of every Potter fan’s wet dream.

“Mrs. Walker, it’s nice to see you,” he said, bumping up the wattage on his smile.

“Call me Sandra, please,” she said, sounding impatient. “It’s nice to see you again, Rebecca.” She nodded to his sister, and he realized she might be as good a politician as her husband. She met dozens of people every day. The fact she remembered Becca’s name meant something. “Are the two of you enjoying your day together?”

“Very much,” said his sister. “Gryffindor, cool. Awesome choice.” She pointed to an emblem on the little girls’ robes. “I’d want to be in Ravenclaw, but Gryffindor would be cool too.”

“Anything but Slytherin,” said the older girl. Beside her, her little sister nodded solemnly.

“Exactly. So did you guys do the castle ride already? We’re going there next.”

While his sister talked to the girls, Matt watched Mrs. Walker’s reaction for any sign she was uncomfortable. Politicians and their families gave up their privacy to be in the public eye but they could justifiably be touchy about people getting too familiar with their kids. The senator’s wife didn’t look like she minded. If anything, she looked slightly hopeful.

“It’s so cool,” said the younger girl. “We want to go again, but—”

She stopped herself at the start of what Matt was pretty sure was going to be a whine.
What kind of kid had the presence of mind to do that?
Hell, he was an adult and even he had a hard time controlling his mouth.

“I’m afraid I get motion sickness,” said Mrs. Walker. “And the girls are uncomfortable riding with just the security.” She motioned to the two men standing like a wall on either side of the small party. He’d bet the guy he saw earlier was around somewhere keeping an eye on things.

The youngest daughter grabbed Becca’s hand and pulled her down to her. “They’re muggles,” she said in a whisper that carried clearly over the sounds around them.

He could have sworn he saw the corner of one of the guys’ mouth twitch up but it was gone just as fast.

“They could go with us?” Becca phrased it as a question, glancing between Matt and Mrs. Walker. The girls perked up and the senator’s wife looked relieved. The security guys looked like they’d swallowed something unpleasant.

“I couldn’t impose on you like that,” she said, sounding like she’d love to impose.

“It would be fun,” said Becca. His sister glanced at him again, her expression almost as pleading as the girls’.

“We’d be happy to.”

“Ma’am?” The unsmiling body guard interrupted, but Mrs. Walker waved him away before he could voice his objections.

“Mr. Newman is part of the press detail traveling with the campaign. You should already have his credentials,” she said, dismissing any concerns the guards may have.

“Matt Newman with the
Tribune
,” he said, smiling at the stoic men. “This is my sister, Becca. Now which one of you muggles gets to go with us?”

––––––––

M
ATT ALMOST FELT bad for the poor dude covering them. Once they’d entered the dark castle, he’d tried to steer them past the employees dressed as Hogwarts students and into the faster single rider lane but the girls grabbed his sister’s hands and set their heels.

“We’ll miss half the castle that way,” said Sarah, the younger and more vocal of the Walker daughters.

“Please,” they said in unison.

Becca glanced at the bodyguard and when he didn’t verbally object, set off on the longer path through the castle. Matt gave the guy his best
I feel your pain
look and followed after them. They raced down the almost empty lines, the girls chattering happily to each other and Becca as they passed the moving pictures and the door to Snape’s office.

It was too early in the campaign for most of the candidates to have more than a normal level of security for their families. He suspected the security traveling with the senator and his family was personally hired by him and not much more than the girls were used to. That would change in a couple of weeks when the Secret Service got involved. If their father won the presidency in the fall, it would change forever. The little girls laughing their way through Hogwarts would never have that kind of freedom again. They’d grow up under the spotlight of a constant media presence just waiting for them to screw up. For a moment, Matt almost felt bad for them. He couldn’t imagine facing early adolescence under that kind of scrutiny. It made any of the perks associated with the fame and notoriety pale a bit.

When they got to the moving walkway, the bodyguard ushered his small charges onto the ride with Becca in the seat between them, taking the last seat for himself. This time Matt knew the corner of his mouth twitched up.
Well played, muggle
, he thought as he got into the next car. The ride took off through the castle, swooping and dipping and by the time they reached the Quidditch pitch, Matt’s sympathy for Mrs. Walker had grown considerably. He closed his eyes for the last couple of minutes to avoid embarrassing himself. Becca would never let him live it down if he hurled.

In what he was sure was an attempt to get every last bit of his money, the ride emptied out into the gift shop, but he didn’t see any sign of Becca or the girls. He found them waiting for him outside the castle, but Mrs. Walker and the other bodyguard were gone.

“Momma said we could spend the rest of the day with you,” said Sarah, reaching for his hand.

“Did she?” He arched a brow at Becca, but she just smiled at him.

“She didn’t ask—not exactly. I offered. You don’t mind, do you?”

“I don’t if he doesn’t,” he said, motioning to the big guy standing behind his charges, looking a little green himself.

––––––––

T
HEY SPENT THE day riding the Hogwarts Express back and forth between Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley. Claire, the Walker’s older daughter, was sweet and much too grown-up for her tender years. Neither girl whined about anything. They were polite and grateful and by the end of the day, Matt was charmed in spite of his normal cynicism. When Sarah took his hand on the Gringotts ride, his heart may have Grinched it up a couple of sizes. But best of all, Becca laughed all day, playing with the girls, riding the rides and exploring the world of her favorite childhood books.