Solace (Devastation Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  I stare at him, certain I’ve misheard him. “Sir?” I can’t help it—it feels so damned natural to call him that.

  All this would be infinitely easier if it didn’t.

  He takes the laptop from me, sets it on the coffee table, and takes my hands in his. “Marry me, Declan. I love you, and I need you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  His words take a moment to filter through my brain. “But…what about the kids? Accepting me as your boyfriend is different than accepting me as your husband.”

  “They love me, and they want me to be happy.” He stares at me with those blue eyes that penetrate the darkest depths of my soul. “You make me happy. At a time in my life when I genuinely thought I would never again know what happiness feels like, you make me happy. Every time I’m with you I realize that you are my happiness.”

  A lot of things flash through my brain. A childhood of pain, crushing loneliness.

  With my humiliation-fueled rage spent and extinguished, I know I do love Casey, and I think in her way she loves me, too.

  Except she’s full of fear and while I know she finds her own form of solace in what we do, it feels like nothing I do with her actually…helps her.

  The way what I do with George helps him.

  Heals him.

  When I think about George, and what we do together, I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t help and heal me, too. He quiets the ever-present thoughts in my head so I can simply breathe and be.

  Plus…

  I love him.

  Not just love him, but I’m in love with him. I love Casey, too, don’t get me wrong. But there’s something different in my heart for George now that surpasses what I feel for Casey.

  “You’ll still be able to see Casey,” he adds. “I’m not taking that off the table. But I need you, Declan. Please. I can’t lose you. If what you need is for me to resign so we can be together publicly, then I will. If you want me to stay in the race and try to get re-elected, I will. If I get re-elected, and you want to keep working for me and helping me run the state, we’ll do that and wait to get married until after I’m out of office. But whatever we do, you choose.”

  “But…” I stare at him. “You’re in charge,” I lamely say.

  He shakes his head. “This is your choice. Outside of my kids, what I need is to make sure you are happy. I’m sorry I’ve done such a shitty job of it so far. I take full responsibility for that. Tell me what you need from me.”

  Fear of some sort has governed a large portion of my life, and I don’t mean only when I was a kid. Although, yeah, that, too.

  Isn’t this what I always wanted? Someone to love me for who I am? Who unflinchingly looks at me and sees me and not my past?

  Except…George doesn’t know everything about my past.

  He doesn’t know about the long game.

  Or I can turn away from that path, always hate myself for not getting retribution, and I can have my career and the man I love. “If I ask you to withdraw, you mean marry you after you’re out of office next January?”

  “No. I mean now, if you tell me to send that letter. I know what’s important in life. My kids, obviously. I’ve survived hell, and you’ve shown me another heaven I never knew could form from the ashes.”

  I suck in a sharp breath at the imagery his words conjure.

  I can’t…think. I wasn’t expecting this. I mean, we successfully hurdled the kids accepting whatever this is between us and agreeing to cover for us.

  My brain can’t process…this.

  “H-how are you even here?” I ask.

  “Casey covered for me and gave me her keys.”

  That’s going to piss off a few officers in the EPU. “What’d she tell you happened? Between her and me?”

  He smirks. “That you two had some words. That she’s not sure what happened to trigger it originally, but she unintentionally made it infinitely worse. She said she was worried about you when you wouldn’t respond to her texts, so she sent a trooper after you because, as she put it, she overreacted and thought worst-case scenario, that maybe you were kidnapped or something.”

  His smirk fades. “That she thinks maybe we overwhelmed you last night with the kids and by not telling you first or giving you a choice about it, when that wasn’t my intention. She theorized that maybe instead of planning that with her, I should’ve planned it with you. And she accepts responsibility for not stopping me and bringing you into the process.

  “I was trying to show you we can be a family. I wanted to tell the kids about you because I love you and I’m tired of not being able to tell anyone about you or my love for you. And I’m sorry if you’ve felt ignored today. That wasn’t my intention, either. I was busy and I didn’t reply to your good-morning text, and I’m sorry. I need to do a better job of showing you how much I love you outside of what it is that we do together. Because I do love you.”

  I stare into his eyes. It feels like I can’t breathe. “But what about our agenda? About all the things Ellen wanted to accomplish?”

  His eyes go too bright and he blinks a couple of times. “I can’t bring her back,” he quietly says. “Nothing I do will bring her back. She’d tell me to not be a dumbass and drive away the one person who finally made me want to live again instead of killing myself a day at a time.”

  “It’s my choice?”

  He nods. “You tell me to send that letter, we can be married Monday morning as soon as the clerk’s office opens. You’d have to resign from staff, but you could go back to work at the law firm, we could live openly as a couple, and you’d be the First Gentleman of Tennessee until next January.” He wryly smiles. “Or you can let me make you a kept man and you can do whatever it is the First Spouse is supposed to do. Unless the General Assembly recalls me, and Dick Cailey gets to be governor again.”

  “Fuck that guy,” I mutter. I take a breath. “What did Casey say when you ran all this by her?”

  He shrugs. “I haven’t told her. This is between you and me, not her. She came to me immediately after you two talked, and she told me what happened. I told her to clear my schedule and give me her keys so I could come here and talk to you.”

  He sighs. “Either way you decide, you can still see her, be involved with her. I know how much she loves you, and how much you love her. I can share you with her, but no one else. I’ll also tell her if she decides to get involved with someone besides you, that it puts an end to her being able to be with you. Or, if she decides she wants to be with both of us, and you’re okay with that, then maybe we can have a triad. It’s her choice whether or not to be with us.”

  I can’t take my eyes off his laptop now.

  The letter can be copied and pasted into an e-mail and sent in under ten seconds.

  In ten seconds, I could have the relationship, the house, the career, the life I always thought I wanted.

  The public recognition—good or bad—but at least I’d no longer be a dirty secret.

  In ten seconds, everything we’ve worked so hard to accomplish can be transformed into dreams I never knew I wanted before.

  And Ellen’s legacy will be set aside forever.

  I think about that day in Casey’s office, when she received the call about the plane crash.

  The grieving woman who, for the first time, I saw completely unguarded and vulnerable.

  The woman who softly sobbed in my arms and begged me to tell her it was a nightmare.

  Who begged me to tell her she’d wake up to find me holding her in bed and that Ellen and George were safe and on their way home to us.

  The sound of her tears on the phone that day when she called me after confirming Ellen’s identity.

  How she cried in my arms the night she returned home with Chase. How she’d held Ellen’s urn cradled in her arms as she walked off the plane, and how she’d sobbed later, alone with me, her fist wrapped tightly around the new pendant she wore that she hadn’t had when she left.

  I suspected then what it
was, especially since it matched the urn.

  Her joy upon finding out George was alive.

  How desperately she struggled to keep him alive after he returned to us.

  Her work sustains her every bit as much as her hidden pain fuels her. If that rug is suddenly pulled out from under her, honestly?

  I don’t have the slightest clue how to keep her alive.

  Regardless of her ulterior motives, I am who and where I am because Casey was there to pick me up and help me, every step of the way.

  She never gave up on me.

  She never gave up on George.

  And, in some ways, good or bad, right or wrong, she never gave up on Ellen.

  I lean in and delete the document. After I close his laptop, I spot the Rolex on my wrist. I take it off and set it on the coffee table next to the laptop, then I turn to him.

  “You need four more years in office,” I quietly say. “We need to try to get as much of Ellen’s legacy passed as we can. And we need to do it together. If it means four more years of pretending I’m only your deputy chief of staff… Well, I guess we’ll figure it out as we go.”

  He pulls me into his arms for a kiss that erases every last vestige of my earlier rage and makes me believe in miracles. Somehow, we end up in my shower. From there to my bed, where George slowly, tenderly makes love to me. This isn’t a Master and his boy, or a sadist and his slut. There’s no teasing and denial, no pain, no bondage.

  It’s a man in love with me, telling me he loves me with every ounce of his soul and every whisper of his lips across my skin.

  I think he’s going to get up and leave when we finish, because it’s getting late, after six now, but he doesn’t. He tucks me against him and falls asleep with me in his arms.

  That’s when I realize as hard as the past week’s been on me, it’s probably been doubly difficult on him because he hasn’t been able to sleep.

  I close my eyes and breathe in deeply. He smells like me, my body wash, our sex, my clean sheets.

  In this moment, he belongs totally to me—not to the state, or his kids, or memories of the woman whose soul was ripped from her body even as he held her hand.

  With me he sleeps, he finds contentment.

  With me he finds solace.

  I guess I find my own kind of solace in him, too.

  Chapter Twenty

  It’s after eight when George finally awakens. This is heralded by a long intake of breath and his arm tightening around my waist, where he’s spooned along my back and molding his body against mine.

  When I spend the night with Casey—which hasn’t been for a while—it’s usually me curled around her. Soft, rounded curves, her body cooler than mine, smooth skin without coarse hair along her legs or chest.

  George is firm and warm, hard planes and angles, caging me in with his arms and legs and making me feel like he could keep me safe from the world. This isn’t the same man who left Nashville with his wife that morning nearly two years ago, my boss and friend and mentor.

  That man had been a middle-aged father of three, a friendly guy who smiled all the time. The man who liked to take me out for lunch at the pizza place not far from the law firm, when we didn’t have to be at the capital. A guy who was in decent shape for his forty-four years, but soft around the middle and couldn’t always keep up with me when we hit the gym together. Who got winded a lot sooner than me if he tried to keep up with me on a run.

  A man who would’ve died for his wife. Who I never so much as heard him make a joke about at her expense, or even look at another woman like that.

  The man who stepped off that charter plane in Nashville almost two months later was practically unrecognizable. Emaciated, physically weakened, but emotionally and mentally tempered and hardened.

  Stripped bare of bullshit and pride and ego.

  Forcibly re-centered.

  That man had survived a literal Hell.

  That man had also hugged me with surprising strength. I’d nearly cried with happiness upon actually seeing him in person, although I was terrified I’d break him when we embraced. I could feel every single bone in him. The irony didn’t escape me that now he was stronger and harder than ever.

  He smiled less.

  He was more honest, more intense.

  More…there. And he would go on to physically rebuild himself leaner, harder, stronger than he’d been. A man who can now easily keep up with me and run my ass into the ground during a workout.

  But on that day, his miraculous return, Casey had stepped off the plane and hugged me, then whispered in my ear. “I love you so fucking much. Never forget that.”

  I attributed it to what she’d just went through, losing Ellen and regaining George. I didn’t completely understand the rationale behind her intensity.

  I do now.

  Because knowing how much Ellen was George’s reason for living, Casey already suspected she might have to sacrifice me to keep him alive. I don’t know if she’ll ever admit that to me, but part of me feels that is the truth.

  George’s face nuzzles the top of my head and I hear him inhale, feel the warmth of his breath as he exhales.

  “Do you want me to back off on the boy and Sir stuff?” he quietly asks.

  I roll in his arms to face him. “Why?”

  “Case didn’t give me a verbatim replay of what happened today, but I’ve never seen her that rattled. She said I might need to take things back a few steps, to clarify them with you.”

  I close my eyes and press my face against his chest. “I unloaded a bunch of stuff on her that wasn’t fair of me to hit her with.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “No, I don’t want to stop our dynamic. I guess I felt…”

  There are things I can’t tell George without talking about them with Casey first. I mean, sure, I could spill the tea about the long game and probably drive a damn wedge between the two of them, but I won’t do that.

  Because I am a greedy slut, and if there’s any way to have both of them and my revenge?

  Well, fucking hell, why not?

  But we have to survive the growing pains first.

  “I didn’t know my father,” I say, carefully feeling my way through this so I don’t give too much away. “My mom had a green card and barely spoke any English. My sister and I were born here. My father was a rich white guy who apparently liked screwing around with young hotel housekeepers he could keep in line by threatening to call ICE on them. He wasn’t in the picture while I was growing up.

  “The trooper rolled into the parking lot today with lights on, and I held up my hands and thought shit, I’m about to get shot. Then, when I realized Casey sent him, I felt humiliated because all these people were watching me get loaded into the back of his marked unit. They didn’t know who I was, or that I wasn’t under arrest. They didn’t know that I work for the governor. They didn’t know the Rolex on my wrist was given to me as a day collar. They didn’t know I drive a Jag and have probably made more money since I graduated law school than they have in the past ten or maybe even fifteen years. It brought back a lot of shit from my childhood, kids picking on me.”

  I take a breath. “I owe Casey an apology.”

  “She seems to think she owes you a pretty big one of her own.”

  “I’ll talk to her when I take you back to the office.”

  “Why don’t you drive me home and spend the night?”

  I think about it.

  I think about it long and hard.

  Time together that’s just us and starting out on a new, even footing without Casey between us?

  Negotiated between us and not by her?

  “Because EPU will chew my ass out, thinking I’m the one who snuck you out of the office.”

  “I’ll tell them you weren’t.” He gently holds my chin and tips my head back so he can look me in the eyes. “Or is there a reason you don’t want to spend the night with me? I thought that was part of the problem, that you weren’t gett
ing enough time with me?”

  “Part of the problem is feeling like I’m a dirty secret. First to her, then to you. Childhood trigger, but necessary evil right now, because I’m not letting you drop out of the race.”

  Those blue eyes stare into mine for a long, quiet moment. “I’m not the fricking president,” he says. “Paparazzi aren’t sitting outside the front gate.”

  “Anymore.” I lean in for a kiss, to nuzzle noses with him. “It was crazy when you first got back.”

  “No one’s going to know if you ride to work or home with me every day.”

  “People notice more than you think they do. Everyone has cell phones. All it takes is for one disgruntled trooper to drop an anonymous tip to a reporter, and they start watching your neighborhood’s front gate and the office. Or, if a General Assembly aide gets a whiff of impropriety and feeds it to their boss to leverage against you. You’ll never get anything done if you’re too busy fighting a scandal.”

  “Then we tell them the truth.”

  His nonchalance floors me. “George. Seriously? Have you met Tennessee? We aren’t New York or Colorado. We’re California and Washington state’s worst fricking nightmare. And it would mean I have to quit or get fired.”

  He rolls me on top of him, my hands braced on either side of his head, me staring down at him. “There’s another option,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I resign. I walk away, effective immediately.”

  I know he’s not kidding, and that’s what fucking terrifies me. “You can’t resign. There’s too much to do.”

  “And she’s dead.”

  “But you’re not. You’re not dead, and there’s a lot of fucking good we can still do. If you quit now, maybe in the short-term you’ll feel relieved, but a month or a year from now, you’ll kick yourself in the ass that you did that, and that’ll transfer into resentment. Resentment that’ll taint whatever we have. I can’t handle that guilt and I’m not willing to be another emotional experiment for a sadist trying to throw shit at the wall to see what fucking sticks.”