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Private Justice. Marie Ferrarella
Читать онлайн.Название Private Justice
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781408977408
Автор произведения Marie Ferrarella
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Серия Mills & Boon Intrigue
Издательство HarperCollins
She nodded, as if she understood. The smile on her lips this time around was neither mocking nor cynical. It was, he caught himself thinking, rather sweet. The next moment, he pushed the thought aside. The last thing he needed right now was to be having any sort of sensual thoughts about one of his father’s women.
“So you’re the family crusader?” she was asking.
He didn’t care for labels. Nor did he welcome any false notions about who or what he was. That was strictly his father’s purview.
Shaking his head to negate her assumption, he told her, “I’m just a guy who doesn’t want to see his mother and his brothers and sister have to endure any more than they already have.”
Feeling suddenly woozy, Cindy leaned her hip against the desk, needing a little support as a vague dizziness threatened to intensify. Her head didn’t feel right. Wouldn’t that be just perfect, fainting in front of the senator’s son?
She struggled to find her way out of the fog. A moment later, much to her relief, the strange dizziness receded. Cindy concentrated, focusing on what Dylan had just said. She wanted to draw attention away from herself.
“And what was it that they—and you—have already endured?”
He shrugged. He wasn’t trying to make her think that his family life was unique, just that it was very far from the perfection his father had purported it to be.
“Nothing that a lot of other families of public personalities haven’t had to put up with. A husband and father who was never there. Who only took an interest—or pretended to—when it suited his need to appear to be an involved husband and parent.”
He shrugged again, but his tone belied this attempt at casualness. “I resented being used,” he confessed.
The next moment, Dylan caught himself. What the hell was he doing? Since when did this become true-confessions time? He was usually a great deal better at keeping things to himself. He was gregarious, but schooled in the art of appearing to say much while really saying very little.
Something, he supposed, he’d actually picked up from his father.
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe that was the only way the senator could relate to you and your siblings?” Cindy suggested.
He didn’t see how she got from point A to point B. There was an entire river between them. “You mean by using us to pad his résumé, to make himself look like a genuine walking, talking family-values kind of guy?”
He had been severely hurt by his father’s inattention, Cindy thought. He just wasn’t about to admit it to anyone, even himself. Sympathy stirred within her.
“I mean, he had to relate to you within the only realm where he felt comfortable,” she said. “The political arena.”
He’d concede that she might have a point. “That could be true about us—he never got to know any of us. We were all just little kids when he won his first election and went off to Washington. But what about my mother?” he asked. The answer, as far as he was concerned, was a foregone conclusion. “She knew him before all this political smoke-and-mirrors garbage came in to distract him. If it wasn’t for her,” he pointed out, “he never would have been able to become the U.S. senator from California. It was her money, her inheritance, he used to fund his campaigns.”
She was aware of the anger in his eyes and would have backed away, but something he’d said had caught her attention. It didn’t add up. He’d said that he and his family had stayed on the home front while his father had gone to Washington. But she’d had the impression that they’d gone with his father.
She asked him about it. “I remember seeing a photograph of the senator with his family with the White House in the background. I got the impression that you weren’t playing tourists.”
“No, we did live there. For a while. Mother was determined the family would stay together, but the social whirl, the long hours, the constant campaigning—official and covert—got to be too much for her.”
He remembered those early years. Remembered wanting to do something to make his mother smile again. Remembered resenting his father for doing this to her. For not giving them a normal life.
“And besides, she hardly saw my father anyway. He was always working late on some committee or other.”
Was that when it started, Dad? Did you connect with your first mistresses there, while using that old chestnut on Mother about having to work late? Was it a woman you were “working on” and not a bill?
There was no point in wondering about that, Dylan decided. The time for mending family fences was long gone. He’d meant what he said about doing this just for his mother’s sake. If she weren’t around, if all this wouldn’t take a toll on her pride, he’d let his father twist in the wind, hanging from a rope that the old man had fashioned out of all his failings and shortcomings.
The woman with the expressive eyes was still looking at him. Was she expecting some dramatic revelation to be forthcoming? He had already said far more than he should have.
“He really hurt you a great deal, didn’t he?” It was in the form of a question, but he sensed that his father’s Chief Staff Assistant wasn’t asking, she was confirming. He didn’t like being backed into a corner, didn’t like being deposited into a labeled space. It wasn’t the way he operated.
Instead of answering, he picked up his briefcase. “I’m going to take off,” he told her. “There’s no telling what I’ll run into, even just trying to get near the senator’s house.” He and his siblings had grown up there, but it had never been much of a home to him. More like a museum with a tennis court and sauna.
She nodded, about to turn back to what she’d been doing before he ever walked in. And then she stopped abruptly.
There was absolutely no point in manning the office or getting the senator’s files in order, not until she knew whether things were going to change drastically. There was also absolutely no reason to organize files that would ultimately wind up being shredded. Or to draw up schedules that weren’t going to be followed.
Looking at the senator’s son, she made up her mind quickly. He was probably not going to like this, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t doing it for him. “I’m going with you.”
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