Take a Chance on Me(102)

A fine sheen of sweat spread down her back. She punched down the air-conditioner button in her understated Mercedes sedan and let the cool air wash over her face.

“Paul did an excellent job.” After years avoiding the small truths, the evasion was smooth as silk.

“Since you were unavailable, Miles and I had final approval,” Nathaniel Riley said, in his polished, politician’s voice.

“Of course.” While her tone rang with a practiced strength, her stomach rolled. What was wrong with her? She needed to get it together. This was the price her dream demanded. She wasn’t losing anything really important. Nothing that mattered.

Life in politics was all she’d ever wanted. When other little girls had been pretending to be princesses in faraway lands, she had played president in the Oval Office.

She’d been content putting her own career aside for her father’s aspirations, but that had ended when his scandal broke. She’d sat at her kitchen table reading that dreadful headline and seen her whole world crumbling under her feet.

The young woman who’d attempted to blackmail the senator had eventually been caught and her schemes exposed, but not without damage. Cecilia had managed the fallout to perfection, minimizing the whole sordid affair, publicizing how he’d been a victim of greed. It had worked—the senator was well on the road to political recovery. But she couldn’t shake the worry.


This wasn’t the first mess she’d helped him escape. At some point his bad decisions would have to come back and bite him. And where would that leave her?

It had been a slap in the face. A wakeup call delivered by a five-alarm fire truck.

“I’m proud of you, Cecilia,” Nathaniel said, and she could practically see him sitting there in his office in Washington, scotch in hand, smug in his oversized, leather chair.

Six months ago she would have lapped up his approval like a grateful puppy, but now she recognized the lie. He wasn’t proud of her. This plan helped him. How, she wasn’t sure and didn’t care, but it had nothing to do with her.

It never did.

The truth only made her more determined.

A speed-limit sign whipped past and she checked her speedometer to see the needle creeping past eighty-five. Easing her foot off the pedal, she started to say thank you for his sparse compliment but instead blurted, “Don’t you have any reservations?”

“We talked about this,” he said in a patient tone that grated on her last nerve. “This is your best shot.”

Clammy sweat broke out on her forehead, forcing her to turn the air down to arctic levels. Wasn’t thirty-three too young for a hot flash? She swallowed the taste of the bile clinging to the walls of her throat. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“Why would it?”

Because I’m your daughter? The truth pained her. That he hadn’t noticed made the cut that much deeper.

She shook her head. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting out from under his thumb. She squared her shoulders. “Never mind. Is there anything else?”

A moment of silence fell over the car, filled with nothing but dead air. She prayed for a dropped connection one would expect in farmland Illinois, but the squeak of Nathaniel’s desk chair quelled her hope.

“Are you almost there?”

Her jaw tightened and her ever-present headache beat at her temples. “I’m about fifteen minutes outside town.”

“And your mother?” The question was clipped.

Part of Cecilia still wanted to believe that under all his bluster and power trips he genuinely cared for his wife of forty years, but she had no more delusions. “She’s already there.”

The green mile marker sign came into view. Revival. Twelve miles.

She hadn’t been to the small town since her grandma’s funeral.

A sudden, unexpected tightness welled in Cecilia’s throat, and she swallowed hard.

“I see,” he said, and another silence descended.

She dreaded spending the next two weeks in a house filled with strangers, watching her brother fawn all over his bride-to-be. Not that she begrudged Mitch his happiness. She didn’t, but witnessing it caused a strange yearning she didn’t want to contemplate.

She gripped the steering wheel, tight enough her knuckles turned white. “I still think a couple of days before the wedding would have been plenty.”

“Cecilia,” Nathaniel said, in his patient tone. “Voters love a wedding and we need the family solidarity. This will help your image.”

The logic couldn’t be refuted, but she tried anyway. “And two or three days doesn’t accomplish that?”

“Under normal circumstances, yes, but with Shane Donovan already at his sister’s side and that football player on his way, it doesn’t look good if we’re not there.”

An image of Shane snapped through her mind like the lash of a whip. He was one of Chicago’s corporate giants, and his sister’s impending marriage to the senator’s notorious son had been a hot topic on a slow news day. If it weren’t for him, she’d be home where she belonged.

“So you get to stay in Washington, but I have to play nice,” Cecilia snapped.

“I’m in committee,” her father said.

The whole situation annoyed her, and she spoke without thinking. “And God forbid the voters find out your wife and son aren’t speaking to you.”