LITMIR.BIZ

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the woman’s name—Zoe Madison. It was right there in the caption, and Carter had spent most of the morning finding out what he could about her.

      Her address on a scrap of paper burned in his pocket, and he wanted nothing more than to go over to Beauregard Town and strangle her. Of course, that wouldn’t do much for his image. Maybe he’d be better off parading her around town and making her tell every single person they met that she’d lied about him.

      “He’s calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” Carter said through gritted teeth.

      “Actually,” Amanda said, swallowing and standing, as she gathered a stack of papers in her arms, “so are the Houston Chronicle, and the New Orleans Sentinel and—” She tossed the papers on the desk, each one hitting the mahogany with a flat thud like a nail in Carter O’Neill’s coffin. “The real kicker, the pièce de résistance, if you will—”

      “Amanda. We don’t need any more theater.”

      “Third page in USA Today. They’re all calling you Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.”

      He hissed as if burned. And it felt that way; his anger was so hot he had to stand up and walk to the window, looking down on St. Louis Street, quiet and slick with rain.

      This was going to be his legacy. He could clean up every neighborhood in this city, but he’d still go to his grave as Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.

      He was, at this point, the opposite of Bill Higgins.

      Bill Higgins, who came out of retirement last year after the previous administration was finally exposed in its corruption, and who was reelected Mayor-President. It was a quirk of Baton Rouge politics that the Mayor of Baton Rouge was also the President of the Western Baton Rouge Parish, but it hardly mattered. Bill Higgins was king in this city. Hell, in this state.

      And Carter wanted to align himself with such a man.

      He needed to, if he had any hope of becoming mayor in eighteen months.

      But he should have known better. He was an O’Neill, after all—scandal was practically his middle name. He thought that he could keep the dirty part of his life away from the clean part.

      But honestly, when had he ever gotten what he wanted?

      “You okay?” Amanda asked, and he realized he’d been silent far too long.

      “How do we fix this?”

      “Well—” Amanda leaned back in her chair “—we can get them to retract, but I’m not sure we can ‘fix’ what’s really the issue here, Carter.”

      “Of course we can fix this. Anything can be fixed.” He knew this for a fact. A lifetime of bribery and extortion, holding the worst of his family at bay like wolves in a storm, had taught him that everyone could be bought and anything worth fixing could be fixed.

      Amanda stared at him as if he was something wiggling under a microscope.

      “What?”

      “Sometimes,” she said, “you look like a different person. You get this expression and it’s like I’ve never seen you before.”

      “Don’t be ridiculous, Amanda.”

      “I’m not. I’m telling you, the mask you wear every damn day slips and the guy underneath it freaks me out a little bit.”

      He sighed. Amanda was great, but the frustrated novelist under her brittle public relations/press secretary exterior got a bit old. “What are we going to do about Zoe Madison?” he asked.

      “The pregnant lady?” She waved a hand. “I can fix that. I can fix that in my sleep. What’s got me worried is what’s happening with your family. The postponement of your father’s arraignment is hurting us in public opinion. And you didn’t tell me you testified for your mother ten years ago in a criminal case.”

      “Don’t worry about it,” he said, picking up the papers and dumping them in the recycling beside Amanda’s desk.

      “Worrying about it is kind of my job, Carter. I need an answer when those questions start coming up again, and they will if you’re going to announce your candidacy for mayor after Christmas.”

      The sentence hung there, unanswered.

      He was going to do that. That was the plan. The goal.

      Yesterday, before his mother’s resurfacing, it seemed like the fruition of years of hard work. The only likely outcome for his life.

      Today, it seemed ridiculous. Announcing his candidacy for mayor while his father went to jail, his mother was snooping around in the shadows, and there was a missing ruby kicking around somewhere?

      “That is still the plan, right?” Amanda asked.

      “Yes,” he said, because he still wanted it.

      “Then don’t put your head in the sand. We need a strategy and I need the truth.”

      “Our strategy,” he said in a tone designed to remind her that she worked for him, “is that you say ‘no comment.’”

      “The public—”

      “The attention will die down. It always does. We just need to stay the course.”

      “Stay the course?” She watched him dubiously. “This can’t be you talking.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “I mean, you haven’t backed down from a fight once since taking this office. And now you want to stay the course? You think that’s gonna work?”

      “When it stops, if it stops working, we’ll come up with a new strategy.”

      Amanda blew out a long breath, said, “You’re the boss,” and leaned back in her chair, kicking her feet up on the desk. “Now,” she said, her eyes alight, “about Zoe Madison. We’ve got three choices. We can issue a statement saying you’ve never seen the girl and you are not the father.”

      “Will that work?”

      “In time, but in that time, Blackwell’s going to be going through your family’s dirty laundry, of which there seems to be plenty. And sure, we can fight for some retractions, but it’ll be like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.”

      “We need a distraction.”

      “Exactly. We can dig up a whole bunch of dirt and annihilate her in the press.”

      “Annihilate?” he asked, liking the idea.

      “But she’s practically picture-perfect. If we go after her, it’ll make us look like baby kitten killers.”

      “Okay, what’s our second choice?” he asked, sorry to see annihilation off the table.

      “Well, I’ve got an idea, and frankly it should take the heat off your shady family.”

      “Good,” he said, ready for anything.

      “Don’t be too eager,” she said. “This might hurt a little.” There was something about Amanda’s smile that made him nervous.

      Very nervous.

      THE PREGNANCY CRAVINGS were not to be messed with.

      They were primitive and so strong they could last for days, taking Zoe places no sane woman should go.

      She’d learned that the hard way in month three when she’d left the house in need of ice cream and had systematically torn the head off every person that had crossed her path. She’d made a four-year-old cry for accidentally riding her bike over Zoe’s foot.

      A four-year-old! Zoe was going to be a great mother.

      Now, Zoe stayed home and rode the cravings out like she was tied to the saddle of a runaway horse. Or she called in reinforcements.

      “You sure you’re all right?” her mom asked,

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