Rough Hand (Bad Boy Fighter Romance) Page 25

  He steps back through the door and back into his apartment. She follows him inside and he shuts the door, and then the tone of the conversation shifts automatically.

  "Is everything okay?"

  "What were you doing at that party, Linda?"

  Her face goes red and her eyes widen, but they turn away from him. "Is that what this is about?"

  "I don't doubt that Tom wanted to know, too. Is that right?"

  "I don't see—"

  "Did you tell him?"

  "No." She's squirming. It's a look that Adam likes. There's a little part of him that can't quite refuse that little desire to see her nervous.

  "That's good." He steps closer to him, and for a moment he can see her relax, as if something threatened for an instant to overwhelm her nerves, and then she tenses back up and gets herself back under control.

  "What's good? Why?"

  He's right on the edge of her personal space. Intrusive, but not quite in her face. Not yet.

  "You didn't tell him."

  "What's that mean?"

  He steps closer again. There's no more question of whether or not he's inside her space. He is, and he likes it. She doesn't move away, even though she's far from cornered.

  "It means he doesn't get to have you," Adam says softly. "Not that I'd let that stand."

  "What?"

  "Don't lie to me," Adam says. He steps closer again, his body touching hers, his face only inches away from her own. "Don't play coy. You were there because you wanted something, and you left because you found out what it was. And you knew you weren't going to get it."

  She looks up at him. He can see the force of will that it takes to stay still, her jaw tight as she holds herself still.

  "And what's that?"

  "To be taken," Adam answers. His tongue runs along the edge of his teeth again. They feel wrong in his mouth. They should be biting into a woman's soft throat. Her throaty breaths coming hard into his ear. "To be possessed by someone. Someone who takes what they wants. And now, I'm going to give that to you."

  She takes a sharp breath and his lips find her neck, and she can't stop her voice from coming out just a bit as he finally takes what he wants.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Adam can feel the moment that she gives into him. Her body, suddenly pliable in his arms, like putty. And then she seems to find herself again, out of the blue. She stiffens and pushes back. Not to stop him, per se, but a fire lights inside and her mouth starts to move as well, wrestling for control of the kiss.

  He smiles a grin that's full of teeth and scrapes them against her neck, biting down hard enough to pull a gasp from her lips, close to his ears. He shivers hard, the threat of growing arousal that's already well past the point of creeping down his spine.

  It runs through him, his cock twitching painfully. He leans into her and his arms wrap around her hips, pulling her closer as his knee slips between her thighs and spreads them. She lets him, he knows. He can feel the heat, pooled at the place where her legs meet, as she presses herself down onto him, trying to take what she wants.

  Adam starts to lean, pressing her back into the sofa behind her. She acquiesces. The older man continues to press his advantage, his hand finding her breast and squeezing down on her sensitive nipple. Another gasp, hot and moist, inches from his ear. He lets his eyes close as another shiver of need runs down his spine.

  It's been far, far too long. He'd like to take his time, but the fire inside him is burning too hot. There will be time later, to take it slow. To explore every inch of her body with his lips, with his fingertips, with his teeth and his tongue and to show her exactly what he wants from her.

  For now, his fingers dig into the soft skin of her hips and pull her down, laying her out as flat as she can be laid out on the seat of the sofa.

  Her skirt rides up her hips easily when he pushes it. She's wearing tights that tear easily. He's got the money to replace them, and she doesn't fight him. Her hips press up to meet his exploring fingers. He pushes her panties aside. They're already moistened by her arousal.

  His fingers only probe her for a moment before he's working the zipper on his pants, freeing his hardness from the confines of his trousers. Her eyes go a little bit wide and her hips open a little wider, knowing what's going to come next.

  There's no gentleness in the way that he takes her, rough and fast in a single swift motion that pushes all the way inside. She gasps and her legs wrap around his hips before she can stop herself.

  He pulls back and thrusts again into her, the searing heat and tight grip forcing his eyes to flutter shut. His hands don't slacken, though. His hips move, hard and fast, his thumb between them working as fast as it can on her hard clit.

  Linda's hands grab at the air, trying to find something to grip on, until her hands land on the cushion of the sofa. It wouldn't be the first time that a hole has been torn in it. If he works very hard, then it won't be the last.

  Adam can feel the edge approaching. Can feel the temptation building to take what he can, as fast as he can. To wrench every ounce of pleasure. His hips do the thinking for him, his rhythm speeding up, the teasing of his fingers between them moving to match.

  Her body tenses around him, her ankles crossed on the other side of his hips and locking him in as deeply as possible. He doesn't need any more permission than that, as his own orgasm rips through him. He can feel her milking him as he cums. His breath comes in short, sharp gasps as the need leaves him.

  He's not a teenager any more, he thinks. He may need twenty or thirty minutes before he can go again.

  But he's never let that stop him before.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Linda Owens settles into her couch again. It's late. Too late. Any sleep she might be able to get would only make things worse, and besides that, in a few hours, they'll be dropping the equivalent of a fifty megaton nuclear bomb on the unsuspecting news media.

  Who could sleep when somewhere out there, Tom Delaney is cackling like a madman over the possibilities that are sitting in front of him? Who could sleep with the question of how Adam's going to snake his way out of it on their mind?

  There had been other clients before him who had worries about a scandal of this proportion. They'd done everything they could to fight it. They'd worked their asses off to pretend that it was nothing, and in the end, some of them failed to contain it.

  Those candidates crashed and burned, like Icarus too close to the sun. She laid back and stared at the crack in her ceiling, wondering if they were going to ever fix it. It wasn't ruining her life, so she didn't force the issue. But eventually, one day, the crack would turn into something ugly, and then her landlord would have to deal with it or deal with the damages.

  Other people had tried to navigate the tangle that she was about to walk into before. She'd done it, too, and like anyone else she had failed.

  Adam Quinn gave off an air of absolute confidence. Confidence that had taken him from the sort of kid in high school you would expect to get a C average at Brown—on the back of his father's generous donations, of course—to the sort of man who had school buildings names after him.

  The sort of man who gave commencement speeches to schools he didn't even necessarily attend, so they give him honorary degrees to give him an excuse to speak there.

  If it were anyone else looking at the mine field and acting as if there were an easy way through it, then Linda would assume that they were crazy or stupid or more likely both.

  Somehow, Adam Quinn didn't inspire that sort of worry. Whatever he was, he wasn't crazy, and he wasn't stupid.

  Aggressive and dangerous? Sure. Demanding? Definitely. And he took whatever he wanted. He'd wanted her, he'd taken her, and she'd let him. And to top it off, not an un-gifted lover. Her hips still hurt, and she had to wonder how she was going to look walking into the office the next day. Maybe it would be best to get there early so nobody saw.

  There was more to it, though. There were plenty of people out there
who were all of those things. None who were all of them at the same time, and all of them toward her, but it was not an uncommon list of traits.

  Self-made men tended to have a certain bragging nature. They wanted everyone to know just how much of an ass-kicker they were, and they made damn sure that they told as many people as possible.

  They were as numerous as the stars and they were about as useless. Adam, on the other hand… he had a way about him. A way that convinced people that he had a handle on things. Which was what upset her so much.

  She should have been scared to death. Worried sick over the news about to drop. It should have kept Adam up at night, and Tom Delaney should have been the one pushing hard to release. He was the one who had off-the-wall ideas. Candidates trusted that he knew what he was doing, but they should have apprehensions about it.

  Linda wasn't the one with crazy ideas. She was the one with a proven track record. The one who covered up other people's risks and mistakes by being damn careful with the campaign. It wasn't lost on her that for a man running Democrat, Adam Quinn had chosen her because she was, in a completely apolitical way, quite conservative. A voice to be balanced against Delaney's.

  She swallowed hard. There was going to be hell to pay if this went sideways. Tom Delaney got a certain amount of leeway with mistakes. He suggested risky options, and they were risks. You knew that things could go sideways when he said them.

  She wasn't that kind. She presented the sane options. None of them were bad, or even potentially bad. Because that was her role in the campaign. To avoid risks.

  Something in her gut told her that Adam wasn't afraid of risks. If he was, then… well, he shouldn't have run. He had a past that was as colorful as anything. Motley. Then there was the fact that it was impossible to make money without stepping on someone. There were thousands of people whose backs he'd stepped on to get to the top.

  Those people should be coming out of the woodwork any day now. There were more than enough and they no doubt had something damning to say about him. There would be one eventually who would say something that would stick, and it would be a rush to figure out how to get it to go.

  Instead, though, there was a whole lot of nobody showing up. Nobody even trying to come out as far as she could tell. What caused this?

  What was it about him that led to it?

  What was it about him that had led her to him?

  There was one thing that she knew, now that they'd already slept together: It couldn't happen again.

  Because of all the stories out there that could hurt him, that was the one that would ring true, that would damage people deep down. It would remind them of every political scandal of the past twenty years.

  A politician fucking his female subordinates? That had already gotten one President impeached. There was no way they could elect someone who had already done it before even becoming President.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There was something awful about watching the interns field calls from journalists. Watching them give half-way denials and refuse to answer the questions. The only feeling that Linda could really compare it to was being on a roller coaster, getting to the top, and staring down the first big drop knowing what's about to come but not being able to do anything but go along for the ride.

  Then you hope to hell that the carts don't go flying off the tracks and lift you back out of it. Even then, though, everything moves so fast that you barely have time to react. And that was what was about to happen. Everything up to this point had been like going up the hill.

  Slow, methodical, and with the sure knowledge of what was going to come next. Come eight o'clock, they'd be on every news station for miles. They'd been given a script to read, just about. And everyone gave the sort of 'I don't know' denials that don't keep stories off the news.

  So far, everyone had avoided giving her the phone. That was intentional, but it was only a matter of time before Linda had to respond. Mr. Quinn's response would come later, of course. Adam had to keep himself distant from it, or the eventual denial in the interview with Ellen Holden would either be old news, or would be unbelievable.

  It had to come then. The forceful, real denial. Which meant that he had to weather the storm without talking to anyone for another forty-eight hours. For many men, it wouldn't be any sort of challenge. They did all their talking to the press through intermediaries and surrogates in the first place.

  When you talk to the press through a surrogate, they are basically the same as the candidate coming on television. They get to say everything you believe, they get to project absolute confidence in the candidate and in the campaign.

  On the other hand, when they fuck up, and when they say something that offends half your constituency, you get to claim that they were just saying what they thought, and your opinions don't align at all on that issue.

  It's beautifully easy to stay safe that way.

  Adam Quinn, of course, didn't do any of that. He liked giving the interviews himself. He liked to field phone calls when he could. He liked to do his talks face-to-face, even if it meant that they'd get a cut-up video package of him looking stupid. That sort of media manipulation isn't unknown.

  So for Adam, unlike anyone else, there was a good chance that he wouldn't be able to keep himself from talking to the press without it looking quite conspicuous. Two days might be little enough time, and with the way that Ellen's been advertising, there's some hope that they won't have to worry about anyone asking why he's avoiding anything that could be misconstrued as an interview.

  What worries Linda, though, is when she finds Adam sitting at his desk with a phone in his hand. Not only is he on the phone, but he's clearly on the phone with a reporter, assuring her that Adam Quinn would never be caught dead in a place like that.

  He's trying to hide his voice, and he's toned down his particularly noticeable word choices, but it won't take long for the speculation to begin. He turns and looks at her absently, before turning back to the phone a minute later.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, Miss Owens is, uh. She wants to talk to you. Thanks."

  He hands her the phone and turns back to his computer as if he had never been doing anything.

  "Miss Owens?"

  "Speaking."

  "I'm calling from WXKB for comment on a story we've received from very reliable sources—we'll be running it this evening. We've heard that your candidate was found in some sort of… 'sex party?' Care to comment?"

  "That's absolutely disgusting," Linda answers flatly.

  "Can we quote you on that?"

  "You can. Have a good afternoon, ma'am."

  Linda sets the phone down in the cradle and leans over.

  "Adam? What was that?"

  He looks at her out of the corner of his eyes. Then he shrugs. There's a curious confidence about it. If anyone else were doing it, they might be acting like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. After all, that was the case. He couldn't help himself, the idea of talking to the press was just too tempting.

  But instead, he was acting aloof. Almost blowing her off. Part of her burned at it, and yet another part revved up at the challenge.

  "Don't do it again."

  He shrugged again, a sign that he would absolutely be taking calls. Linda hadn't expected any different. Tom Delaney will be proud when he hears about it, no doubt.

  But right now, it just means another mess to clean up.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Adam Quinn had a reputation as a man who'd never told himself 'no.' It was a reputation that in many ways was well-earned, and yet in many other ways, it could not have been less accurate. There had been a thousand times that he told himself no. A thousand times a day.

  They were just in the less-public parts of his life. And of course, the reputation of being a bit of a playboy had served him well up to this point. Even in politics, it had been serving him well the past few days, getting him impressive press coverage since the very first announcement of his candidacy.

/>   Of course, there were more than enough people who had asked him to run the past thirty years that he wasn't particularly afraid of anyone suggesting that he wasn't a serious candidate.

  To his great surprise, though, it had happened. Now it was time to be himself a little more. To play to the press corps's fears. It was a magical formula for press coverage that worked just about every time: give them something surprising, then stir the pot a little, and wait for it to bubble over.

  The press will supply their own heat, after all, and they'll boil over at the drop of a hat. It's in their best interests to do so; every time that something exciting happens, ratings go up.

  Every time ratings go up, they get to go back to their shareholders and tell them that they're increasing in popularity. The shareholders and the board give them more money to play with, and then they wait for the next chance to get everyone riled up and watch the cycle continue.

  It made Adam sick to his stomach. Rank dishonesty at its best. In his mind, it was what was wrong with investing. What was wrong with America. Everyone was doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, and they managed to get away with it because there was no other system.

  Well, he was ready to shake things up. If nobody else could sit at the table of a rigged game and try to play straight and honest, then at the very least he could do it. He had the popularity, he had the name recognition, and he had the friends to make sure that he got on long enough.

  The only other thing that he really had to worry about in the end was that a scandal would appear out of thin air that would ruin him before they could recover. There was always a recovery after a scandal, but you had to weather the storm first.

  This would be his first real test. Of course, it was also very nearly the worst thing they could throw at him. That meant very good things for him, if he was actually able to avoid getting hurt too badly.