LITMIR.BIZ

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their piece of flesh.”

      “Sounds like you have your hands full,” he commented with a trace of sympathy.

      “This isn’t—” Another call came in and she repeated her movements from a moment ago, lifting and then dropping the receiver into the phone’s cradle, this time a little more sharply than the last. “—what I signed on for,” she concluded.

      It did sound like a zoo in here, he thought. The sooner he got his information, the sooner he would be able to leave. “Do you know where my father is?” Dylan asked again.

      “If the two of you have been so out of touch,” Cindy pointed out, “why do you want to know where he is?” Another phone call had her losing her temper and she disconnected the phone from the jack in the wall.

      Decisive woman, he thought. “Because the senator needs help, and right now, I might be one of the few people interested in actually getting him out of this hole he’s dug for himself.”

      She wasn’t buying this so easily, Cindy thought. “Because you love him so much.”

      “So pretty and yet so cynical.” He laughed, shaking his head. “No, not because I love him so much. Because he’s my father, and the bottom line is, much as I might think he deserves it, I don’t want to see him torn apart in public. If anyone’s going to tear him apart, it’ll be me and it’ll be in private,” he concluded. “Now, do you or don’t you know where my father is hiding out?” he asked one last time, looking at her pointedly.

       Chapter 2

      Cindy looked at the senator’s son for a long moment, not saying anything, not volunteering the information he was asking for. But there was a reason for that. She was not one to be cowed by an authoritative voice, at least, not anymore. And not ever again.

      “How do I know you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do, Mr. Kelley?” she challenged.

      Miss Warmth-and-Charm had lost him. He wondered if everyone who worked in the realm of politics eventually became proficient in a form of double-talk through diligent practice, or if it just came naturally to some, that in turn led them to believe they had a future in the political arena.

      “Run that by me again,” Dylan requested.

      Okay, she’d approach it differently, Cindy thought. “You’re saying you want to help the senator.”

      Wasn’t that what he’d just told her? “Yes, that’s the general idea.”

      And he wasn’t going to do it by standing around in his father’s Beverly Hills office if the man wasn’t to be found in it as well, Dylan thought impatiently. At this point, it would take very little for him to throw his hands up and walk away from the whole thing. He hadn’t wanted to be involved in the first place, and if he had to jump through hoops, well, that was asking a bit too much in his opinion.

      Rather than immediately volunteering an address, his father’s petite guard dog engaged him in another annoying round of rhetoric.

      “How do I know that’s true? How do I know you’re not going to take the information I give you and sell it to the highest tabloid bidder just to get even with the senator?” she wanted to know, assuming, for the sake of argument, that this man was in a bad way when it came to finances and was doing it for the money. For all she knew, the designer suit he was wearing could have been a gift—or borrowed. “By your own admission, your father-son relationship is far from the kind of stuff that they like to immortalize in myopic memoirs.”

      He stared at her. Well, that certainly was a mouthful. There was no way anyone would get her confused with an empty-headed bimbo, which, he’d come to learn extremely quickly, was what his father’s mistresses all had in common. Beyond their glamorous, carbon-copy looks, they all had the IQs of dormant peanuts. Maybe his father had decided to add an intelligent one to the body count for variety’s sake.

      “So what you’re telling me is,” Dylan said, just to make sure he understood what she was saying, “barring some kind of divine intervention, you’re not going to give me the address of his ‘safe house.’”

      Her smile was tight. “Finally,” her eyes seemed to say. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

      Okay, if she wanted divine intervention, there was only one way to go. He might not be on a first-name basis with God, but he was, so to speak, with his father. And, he had a hunch that in this case, a word from his almighty father would have the same effect on this overly protective woman.

      “Could you at least call my father and let me talk to him?” Dylan requested, doing his best to sound patient. “We can let him decide.”

      Cindy paused, thinking. The man standing before her did seem sincere, but that was obviously something that, whether he liked it or not, this bright young lawyer had inherited from his father. The senator was the type of man who could persuade a survivor of the Titanic to book a three-week cruise to Alaska and make the person believe it was his own idea. She’d never met anyone so convincing.

      It apparently ran in the family. But she had had her shots, thanks to her ex, and it took a great deal to sway her from her position once she took it.

      Determined to get this woman to come around, Dylan tried again. “Look, wouldn’t you hold yourself accountable if you do keep us apart and the senator winds up getting nailed to the cross for his transgressions?” On his way over to the office, he had done a little calling around to various sources. The picture that had emerged of his father’s immediate future did not look good. “Right now, everyone thinks he’s guilty of everything, including starting both world wars. If I don’t at least try to help him, there’s no telling where this is going to end up.” He pinned her with a penetrating look. “You want that on your conscience?”

      This time, the silence was a great deal shorter. “You’re good,” she told him grudgingly when she spoke. “I will give you that.”

      “What I am,” he countered, “is right. Now, what’ll it be? The new address, his phone number or an eternally guilty conscience?” He laid out her three choices and waited.

      “You know, there is always the possibility that the public will come to their senses, the investigation will find him not guilty of misappropriation of campaign funds and those women will all admit to lying for the purposes of blackmail.” She looked at him. He was the personification of skepticism. “You’ve got to admit that’s a possibility.”

      He congratulated himself on not laughing in her face. Talk about a cockeyed optimist. He wouldn’t have thought it of her, not after first seeing the other side of the woman.

      “Sure it is. Right after pigs fly. They’ll not only fly,” he added, “but they’ll have their pilots’ licenses, pilots’ jackets with little gold wings pinned over the pockets and they’ll all be speaking French. Fluently,” he concluded.

      He was mocking her, she thought angrily. Why was it all the good-looking men thought they had a God-given right to put everyone else down and act as if they were the only ones who mattered? The only ones who were allowed to have an opinion—and that opinion was always right.

      Her eyes pinned him. “You’re a pessimist, I take it.”

      Actually, he saw himself as the reverse in most cases. But in this case, it was neither. “What I am is a pragmatic man who is trying to help the head of his family save face and not go down for the things he hasn’t done, however little that might turn out to be. Now, for the last time, can you at least give me his phone number and let me talk to the man before it’s too late?”

      She didn’t like the way this man kept refusing to refer to the senator by his title, but used either a pronoun or something equally as anonymous. To her, that was a sign of how little he thought of his father. She still couldn’t reconcile the notion that he was willing to go out of his way like this for someone he held in such contempt. Was there an angle

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