LITMIR.BIZ

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in his own crisis, Rocky hadn’t thought of her since then.

      Now he did.

      Her name had been Sarah Mariah Jones the first time he’d ever seen her. It had been at a fund-raiser sponsored by a couple of Hollywood celebrities. She must have been about fifteen years old at the time. He’d been a green reporter and she’d been a gawky kid trying hard to look as if she weren’t dying to be someplace else. Anyplace else. He remembered reading somewhere that her mother had died recently. The senator’s habit of using her for photo ops, then shoving her into the background had been pretty well established. Rumor had it that years ago he had forgotten and left her at a town hall meeting in a school gymnasium for about six hours before he’d remembered to send someone to pick her up.

      It had occurred to him that day at the fund-raiser that she’d been painfully aware of her own role in her father’s struggling reelection campaign. She was there to be used the way he used everyone else, then shoved aside until the need arose again. The old pol had played the family card for all it was worth, ever since his opponent, a married man with three children, had been caught in a compromising situation with an aide.

      It had been the standard celebrity bash. Only those journalists who shared the senator’s ideology had been invited to meet and mingle with the glitterati. Rocky, who had considered himself politically unbiased at that early stage of his budding career, had been on his way out when he’d spotted the girl.

      In a dress that was obviously expensive and painfully unflattering, the young Sarah Mariah had watched her father buttonhole another major contributor, clasp his hand, slap him on the arm and then proceed to apply the thumbscrews. Something about her expression had caught his attention. It reminded him too much of children he’d seen with eyes far too old for their tender years.

      Which was probably why, from a mixture of boredom and sympathy, he had collected a cup of tea and a finger sandwich—asparagus and cream cheese, he remembered distinctly—and made his way over to the potted palm where she’d gone to earth.

      “Hi. My name’s Rocky and I’m a truant officer. Do you have your parents’ permission to be here?” Silly stuff, but hell—she was just a kid.

      “How do you do, Mr. Rocky. My name is Anonymous Jones, and if you blow my cover I’ll be deported at the very least, beheaded if the king’s having a bad hair day.”

      “Yeah, I figured as much.” They’d both stared at the senator’s trademark silver pompadour. “Brought you a last meal just in case. Asparagus sandwiches. They looked like a safer bet than those small brown things.”

      “The barbecued loin of weasel?”

      “Those were all gone. There were a couple of the guppy filets left, but you know what they say about seafood.”

      “No, what do they say?”

      He’d shrugged. “Beats me.”

      She had smiled then. A quick, spontaneous smile that was gone almost before it appeared. They had talked for a few minutes and then she’d reached for the tea. Her hand had struck the saucer, and in trying to catch the cup before it spilled, she’d managed to dump the sandwich onto his shoes. Cream-cheese side down. Smack on the laces, where it couldn’t easily be wiped off.

      The poor kid had looked stricken, so he’d forgotten his own irritation and made some crack about asparagus being a known insect repellant. “It’s the scent, you know? You ever sniff an asparagus? Whoa. Really bad stuff.”

      She’d looked so grateful he’d been afraid she was going to do something gauche, like kissing his hand. Mumbling something about an appointment, he’d left before she could embarrass them both.

      Even then it had occurred to him that she had vulnerable eyes. Far too vulnerable, considering the circles she moved in. He remembered thinking that with a crook like J. Abernathy Jones for a father, she’d be in therapy before the year was out, if she wasn’t already.

      Sarah Mariah Jones Sullivan, he mused now. Daughter of Senator J. Abernathy Jones, who had been reelected by the skin of his teeth shortly after their one and only meeting.

      Wife—make that widow—of Junior Congressman Stanley Sullivan, the senator’s protégé and handpicked puppet. Despite his reputation as a latter-day John Kennedy, the jerk had been nothing more than a dirty, womanizing lightweight who had barely managed to escape the tail end of the scandals that had put an end to his father-in-law’s career, if not to his ambitions.

      As it turned out, Rocky had been back in the States after a stint in Kosovo when Sullivan had gone down in flames. Still immersed in his own private, personal immolation, he had not joined the pack, choosing instead to watch the coverage from the privacy of his barren apartment. Looking calm, pale and emotionless, Sarah Mariah had been there each day beside her husband and his lawyers. Comparing the grown-up woman to the teenage girl he remembered, he couldn’t help but wonder how much it was costing her. God knows, she must have already suffered enough when her father’s sins had come home to roost.

      Under the most trying circumstances imaginable for any sensitive young woman, she had never, to his knowledge, lost her dignity. Rocky watched as day after day she’d be caught outside and surrounded before she could escape. Head held high, she would face down her tormentors with that same disconcertingly direct gaze he remembered.

      “Miz Sullivan, did you know at the time…?”

      “No comment.”

      “Mrs. Sullivan, is it true that you’ve already filed for divorce?”

      “No comment.”

      “Hey, Sarah, is it true that you were at some of those Georgetown parties your husband threw? Is it true that a Hollywood director supplied the talent and the—”

      “If you’ll excuse me?”

      Someone—Rocky learned later it was her father’s housekeeper—usually rescued her by pulling her bodily away when she would have stood there with that startled-doe look in her eyes until she ran out of no-comments.

      After a while the two scandals had run together in his mind: the senator’s illegal fund-raising, aka influence peddling, arranging for the bypassing of certain sanctions to sell classified materials to terrorist nations, and the offshore bank accounts; followed only a few years later by Sullivan’s sordid little sex, drugs and booze peccadilloes. The consensus was that the man was incredibly stupid to have continued his activities right on through his father-in-law’s investigation.

      But then Rocky had been immersed in his own private hell while it was all going on. About the time the first scandal was making the nightly news, Julie’s kidneys had begun to fail. Dialysis had held her for a while, but under the circumstances, she had not been a candidate for transplant. After one last quick overseas assignment, he had handed in his resignation, needing to spend as much time as he could with the woman he’d once loved.

      So it was all mixed up in his mind—the end of his shell of a marriage, the Jones-Sullivan affair, and the end of his career. A man could run only so far, so long, before life caught up with him.

      He did recall wondering more than once how the shy, intelligent girl with the wry sense of humor, the haunting little half smile and the marked lack of physical coordination, could have married a lightweight like Sullivan in the first place. The guy was smooth. He had the kind of face the cameras loved, but Rocky had once heard him on a radio talk show when a caller had asked if he was worried about the Chi-coms controlling both ends of the Panama Canal.

      Judging by his response, the poor jerk had never heard of the Panama Canal, much less any possible political ramifications. He had stumbled around in search of a response and ended up parroting the day’s talking points about campaign finance reform. By the end of the program he’d been batting 0 for 4.

      Still, the guy must have had something on the ball. Sarah Mariah had married him. And just as she had stood by her father during the Senate hearings, she had stood stoically beside her husband as, one after another, all his tawdry little secrets had been exposed.

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