The Candidate (Romantic Suspense) (The Candidate Series) Read online

  Her moans drove him crazy. Or was it the way she teased his large, stiff cock with her fingers until he felt he would burst? He couldn’t tell…

  Then again, did it really matter?

  No, of course not. All that counted was that her sweet musky smell was beckoning him, letting him know that she was wet and waiting for him. He plunged deep inside of her, ignoring her as she cried out in pleasure.

  They were a tight fit, but he could tell she loved it too, by the way she immediately matched his rhythm, stroke by stroke. He tried to hold back as long as he could, God help him, but she shuddered as she came, and he couldn’t help but erupt.

  Then they laid there, their bodies tangled, soiled, sopping in sweat...

  But not for long.

  “My turn,” she gasped, panting, into his ear.

  Her eyes, deep jade pools, challenged him to explore every inch of her. Slowly, gently, he kissed the tiny mole over her left breast. Then he flipped her over so that he could admire her high firm ass, kiss that broken heart tattoo.

  That’s when he noticed some odd scars, a few burns, on her legs and her arms.

  “The Invisible Man left his mark, eh?” Suddenly, he felt a tightness in his chest.

  “Calm down, Sir Lancelot. No one went at me with a lit cigar.” She arched her back tauntingly. “I’m a sculptor. When you hack away at metal, there are lots of opportunity for cuts and blowtorch burns.”

  He could breathe again. “A sculptor? Well then, you should be honored to know you’re my first.” He stroked her slowly between her legs, enjoying how she shivered at his touch. “And I assume I’m your first political consultant.”

  “Is that what you are?” She laughed so hard that she almost rolled off the bed. Then, to steady herself, she took his fingers to her lips and kissed them. “Don’t tell me you work for Mansfield?”

  “Well, yeah, as a matter of fact. As of last night.”

  “Ha.” She shrugged. “From the looks of that adoring crowd, would you say he needs much help?”

  “All candidates have their acolytes. But if he’s going to knock Talbot out of the game, he’ll need a lot more of them. Believe me, it won’t be easy.” Nor was it easy for Ben to keep focused on their conversation.

  Not with her on top of him now, stroking him back to life.

  “You and I both know that these revival meetings are just for show,” she murmured between gasps. “His wife has enough money to pay off his election expenses without batting an eye. Andy Mansfield is the last guy who’s going to go hat in hand to the Feds for matching funds. But he’s still got to impress the old man, Alcott. That’s truly the only way to knock Clemson out of the box—”

  As hard as it was for Ben to do so, he pulled her off of him. “You know a hell of a lot, for a sculptor—”

  “I read: WaPo, Daily Kos, HuffPo, Politico, Andrew Sullivan. Hey, can I help it if I’m a political junkie?” She stroked his nipple, and placed his hand on her breast so that he’d take the hint that he could certainly do the same to her.

  “A junkie, or a groupie?” The thought of having his very own groupie made him hard again—but then he drooped at the thought that she’d be just as willing to jump in the sack with any of his Dem competitors, too.

  Or, God forbid, a Republican adviser. Since Ben had met her at a GOP candidate’s fundraiser, that was certainly possible—

  A fundraiser for the handsome, charismatic Andrew Mansfield.

  “So, have you met Mansfield?” He tried to keep his voice casual, but it cracked anyway.

  If she noticed, she didn’t show it. “Of course. But I know his wife better. So, yeah, he’s got my vote.” She nuzzled Ben’s ear. “If you’re asking, I can honestly tell you that you’re my very first political consultant. And certainly my last.”

  “Why? Was it that painful for you? Didn’t I do justice to my profession?”

  She stroked his face lovingly. “As long as you can satisfy me, you’ve got my vote.”

  In one swift move, she tore a strip from her ripped dress, yanked his arms up over his head and tied them to the finial at the center of the bed’s headboard, then mounted him. Just feeling her tighten around him sent shivers up his spine, made him rock hard and thick with desire—

  Until he couldn’t hold it back anymore, and exploded again.

  “—Mmmmm...yeah,” she whispered, “Like that...”

  Ben didn’t wake up until noon.

  The first thing he remembered was that he was now officially running Mansfield’s campaign. The second was that his new boss had told him that they’d all be taking off for New Year’s Day.

  Which led Ben to his third thought: how he could now spend that day off making love.

  But first he’d have to find Red Velvet.

  She wasn’t in his bed. And a quick search of his townhouse proved that she wasn’t in the shower, or kitchen or anywhere else within reach either.

  However, he did find her note. In it, she apologized for having taken one of his tee shirts and a pair of sweat pants, along with a belt so they’d stay up around her.

  It was signed Maddy.

  No last name. No telephone number. Nothing that could allow him to find her.

  So he forced himself to focus on creating a list of all that would have to be done quickly to build momentum for Mansfield, such as meeting and reviewing the current staffers the senator already had in place, calling in his own team of pollsters, webmasters, publicists and the likes, and of course vetting his candidate for any red flags—

  But then his mind’s eye envisioned Red Velvet Maddy dressed in his gym clothes and tottering home on those ruby stilettos, and he got rock hard again.

  Chapter 8

  “Here’s a first: Turns out your dude, Mansfield, is as clean as a whistle.” Kenny Lafferty juggled his Subway sandwich, a family-sized bag of Doritos, and a 32-ounce bottle of Jolt into one hand as he tossed Ben a computer memory stick with the other. By his grimace, it was obvious that Kenny was disappointed. The private investigator prided himself on digging up filth, no matter how microscopic. Kenny’s skullduggery allowed Ben to strategize how to handle whatever politicides needed to be spun—or buried even deeper. This time, though, he’d made a promise to himself: to walk away if in fact Mansfield proved too dirty.

  “Bullshit. No way.” Ben jammed the stick into one of his computer’s USB ports and opened the first of what looked like hundreds of PDF files containing every public document, military record, media profile, press interview, job review and senatorial action made by, for and about one Andrew Jackson Mansfield. “Jesus, you even found his high school yearbook! What the hell did you do, Kenny, steal it out of his attic?”

  Kenny almost choked on a Dorito. “You know I don’t do B&E. Besides, I didn’t have to—he donated it to his alma mater. All I had to do was pay the janitor to leave the trophy case open so we could ‘borrow’ it overnight, to scan.”

  “Unbelievable.” Not Kenny’s tactic, but Andy’s high school history: Captain of the football team, not to mention Most Likely to Succeed; JROTC; and Valedictorian.

  Ah, and the track team, too, just like me, thought Ben.

  He stared down at Andy’s senior picture. The face was thinner and unlined, but there was the same fierce determination in Andy’s eyes.

  “Yeah, and get a load of this,” Kenny muttered. “Every single cheerleader–on both squads–wrote in his yearbook! ‘Best kisser ever!’ ‘I LUV U 4-EVER!’ ‘I’ll never forget you, Dandy Andy! XXX’. Damn. I couldn’t even get a cheerleader to spit on me—”

  “Any way to follow up on this stuff? I don’t need another lothario on my hands.” Five times burned, finally shy, was Ben’s new mantra.

  “I’m already on it, boss. Little Miss I LUV U, 4-EVER here”—he pointed to a photograph of one of the cheerleaders—a comely redhead doing a split for the camera—“grew up to become the school’s principal. Unfortunately she’s now also as broad as a barn door, and a real chatterbox, especi
ally about her high school glory days. She says the senator kept his teammates in line, never picked on the nerds, and was always teacher’s pet. As for his bedside manner, she swears that he was Mr. True Blue with his steadies. For sure he knew how to round the bases, if you catch my drift; but for the most part, he kept his dick in check. Or at least, in a raincoat. Ain’t no li’l Dandy Andys gonna be poppin’ up out of the North Carolina backwoods.”

  Ben frowned. It was all too good to be true. “Keep going.”

  As Kenny chugged his Jolt he opened another file with the computer’s mouse, and clicked through its pages. “I’m telling you, the guy’s a veritable saint. No stupid investments, no gambling debts, no secret college initiations, no sex addictions. Pays his taxes. Contributes to charity. And no My Lai Massacre from his Marine days. Mansfield’s flyboy buddies sing tales of his derring-do. Hell, I was so hyped I almost enlisted myself. Then I remembered I’m afraid of heights.”

  With another click, the two-page spread from a fifteen-year-old Washington Post article on the Vandergalen-Mansfield wedding extravaganza appeared on the computer monitor. “After the Marines, Mansfield did his undergrad at UNC. Pre-Law, full scholarship; then law school at Yale, which is where he roomed with Paul Twist. Through Twist, he met his future wife, Abigail Jane Vandergalen. The rest is history.”

  The photo shoot had taken place in an elegant garden. Ben recognized it as Hillwood, the estate once owned by the wealthy Washington socialite, Marjorie Merriweather Post. Just off center in the spread was the loving couple. Abby, dressed in a frothy white wedding dress, faced the camera without her glasses. There was no joy in her blank stare. Was that the result of her myopia, or her shyness? From what he’d seen of her, Ben guessed the latter.

  The wedding party–ten groomsmen, in white tie and tails posed with ten bridesmaids, all pretty, in pale pink¬–was arranged casually on and around the white wrought iron benches that were scattered about the lawn, while the ring bearer looked up the dresses of the two tiny flower girls.

  Immediately Ben recognized the best man—Paul, although he was thinner, and sported a full head of hair. Ben scanned the faces of the others. One he recognized was now a judge in the Third Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Another headed a major investment firm. A third had cashed out from a Silicon Valley startup, and now ran a VC firm. Unlike Andy, all these men had come from money. Two other men were in Marine dress whites. The larger of the two, his flaming red hair cropped close to his scalp, was scowling.

  I guess he didn’t approve of his buddy’s choice, Ben thought, as his eyes roamed to the woman next to the Marine—a brunette, who leaned into him suggestively while standing on her tiptoes in order to whisper in his ear. Certainly having a stunner like her on his arm should have eased his pain—

  Damn she looks familiar…

  Then Ben saw the beauty mark beside her mouth.

  Maddy.

  Granted, she was younger, sans bangs, and with longer hair that tumbled in loose coils below her slim shoulders. But yes, hell yes, he’d know her anywhere.

  “—And best of all, no bimbo eruptions. If he’s not on the senate floor, he’s home with the wifey. Takes her to church on Sundays. Every Sunday, without fail. Go figure.”

  “Yeah yeah, great. Do we have IDs on everyone in this picture?”

  “Yep. They’re named there, in the photo credit. Except for the flyboys, they’re all society types for the most part.”

  Ben scanned the copy, but it was too small, or his eyes were too bloodshot. And he was too impatient, anyway. “What about this one? Who’s she?” Ben jabbed a finger at Maddy. “Zoom in so we can read it—”

  “No need. I already know who she is. Madeline Elaine Vandergalen.”

  A Vandergalen? Oh…shit.

  Ben took a deep breath. “She’s—what, Abby’s cousin or something?”

  Kenny spewed his Jolt, he was laughing so hard. “Try sister.”

  “You have got to be kidding me.” Ben wrenched the mouse from Kenny’s hand and zoomed in on her face. Definitely there was a resemblance...

  No, more than that. His eyes roamed back and forth between the two women, scrutinizing their chins, their noses, the slant of their cheekbones, those sad fathomless eyes.

  Kenny’s voice sounded a million miles away. “Seriously no joke. In fact, they’re—”

  “Twins.” Ben could see it now, so easily. He closed his eyes, disgusted. At himself, at his luck. Or lack of it.

  “Yeah. Hard to believe, eh? Though you wouldn’t know it by looking at them now.” Kenny clicked to another page, which showed a casual shot of the two, obviously taken last night, before Ben had arrived. They were seated at a table in the ballroom with Andy, Preston, some well-padded dowager whom Ben recognized as a renowned Republican donor, Paul, and a woman who must have been Paul’s wife because he had his hand on her arm.

  Abby smiled dutifully for the camera. But Maddy, unaware that her picture was being taken, looked forlorn. The chair beside Maddy was empty.

  Maybe there really is an Invisible Man.

  Chapter 9

  As soon as Ben could, he shooed Kenny out the door. After realizing who Maddy was, he had stopped listening to him, anyway.

  All he could think about was the fact that he’d fucked his candidate’s sister-in-law.

  And after being on the job, like, what—an hour?

  Granted, that wasn’t as bad as screwing a candidate’s wife.

  Yeah, just keep telling yourself that...

  There was a separate background file on Abby, just as thick as Andy’s. She and Maddy had been born into one of America’s wealthiest aristocratic families, which meant that every offshoot of the Vandergalen family tree had been documented in society columns from Newport Beach to Palm Beach, not to mention the numerous profiles in Fortune and Town & Country.

  Ben closed out the other files, and clicked through it page by page. The birth of the twins, to F. Bradford Vandergalen IV and his stately blond wife, the former Margaret “Missy” Alcott—Preston’s only niece—was heralded in a Washingtonian article. An accompanying photo showed a strapping pretty boy. Platinum buzz cut. Steel hinge jaw. A tow-headed baby cradled on each strapping bicep. Except for the beehive, his wife was the spitting image of Abby. She sat at his loafered feet and looked up adoringly at her bronzed Adonis. Doing the math, Ben figured out that they’d been married exactly nine months to the day prior to the blessed births and rolled his eyes at that coincidence.

  Another photo, taken at a charity Easter egg hunt, showed the golden-haired twins, now six, dressed in identical lace pinafores and white patent leather baby janes. Their arms were entwined and their smiles showed that each was missing two front teeth. The only telltale difference between them was the tiny dot to the left of Maddy’s lip.

  In a picture taken when they were eleven, the girls were thin, gawky, and wearing glasses. Still identically attired—albeit in the uniforms from the all-girl prep school, Ashcroft Academy—they wore their hair in similar chin-length pageboys. Clowning around, one leapfrogged over the other. Which was Maddy? He couldn’t tell.

  In the next picture they were fifteen. It was at the joint funeral of their parents, after a fatal automobile accident. The twins were mirror images: black reefers and wide-brimmed hats, their shoulders weighted under a mantle of grief. Apparently the photographer couldn’t tell them apart either because the caption labeled them “the Vandergalen twins.” A much younger Preston, with dark hair that had grayed only slightly at the temples, stood on their right, his face set in a stoic grimace. Beside him was a woman—younger, and with the same aquiline features. Ben presumed she was his sister. The accompanying article confirmed this: “The girls now reside with their great aunt, Phoebe Lavinia Alcott, at Asquith Hall, the Alcott ancestral estate, in rural Virginia.”

  By the time their high school graduation pictures were taken, the girls looked radically different from each other: The doe-eyed Abby had held onto her glasses and her g
awkiness, but now it was coupled with a grim sadness. The caption beneath the photo said: “Next stop: Sarah Lawrence, as an art history major.”

  Whereas she’d stayed at Ashcroft, Maddy, now kohl-eyed, raven-haired, and sporting rings in her brow and nose, had somehow ended up at Occoquan’s local public high school. A tight, white t-shirt, sheer enough to expose a black low-cut push-up bra, had replaced the staid school uniform. Her eyes, no longer shielded by glasses, pierced the camera with blatant defiance.

  And they were the same startling blue hue as Abby’s.

  She wears contacts now, thought Ben. It makes the transition complete. For whatever reason, she doesn’t want to be a twin. Or at least, she doesn’t want to be Abby’s twin.

  He could imagine why. Abby would always be the good girl.

  Chapter 10

  At first he tried to convince himself that he had nothing to worry about. It had been a one-night stand, nothing more. Otherwise she would have left him some way to get in touch with her. And so what if, somewhere down the line, they ran into each other. Hell, she probably wouldn’t even remember him...

  Fat chance. Even if the twins weren’t as close as they once were, one thing was sure: Maddy was still close enough to Abby to attend a big fundraiser in her brother-in-law’s honor. And if that were the case, then odds were she’d already boasted to Abby about her latest conquest: Andy’s new political consultant.

  And considering Andy’s true blue nature, Ben would be back out on the street.

  That thought made his skin crawl.

  You’re being paranoid. Of course she’ll keep her mouth shut. And if not, cross that bridge when you come to it.

  He worked until midnight, then flopped into bed, exhausted. He tried not to think about it, but Maddy filled his dreams.