The Scandal and Carter O'Neill

So she was trying to be polite.

“You sure you don’t mind if I take this?” her mom asked, looking down at the green-blue ends of the scarf. “It looks so pretty on you.” It did. It does. It was her favorite scarf, but Mom needed to leave so Zoe could dunk her fresh batch of ginger cookies into the salsa in peace.

There were parts of this pregnancy business that required privacy, and this newfound obsession with ginger cookies and salsa was her own little secret.

“Absolutely, wear it in health. It goes great with your new hair,” Zoe said, and as if cued, her mom smoothed a hand down the back of her new short silver bob.

“It does look good, doesn’t it?” she asked, preening slightly in the mirror beside the door.

Go. Zoe thought. Leave. Please.

“You look much younger,” she said instead.

Her mom beamed, tossing the scarf around her neck with a little flair, and Zoe smiled. “You don’t look like you’re about to be a grandmother, that’s for sure,” she said, feeling tubby next to her mom’s hard-won thinness. Seven years ago, Mom had sworn she wasn’t going to turn fifty in a size fourteen and she hadn’t. She’d put her mind to it and lost twenty-five pounds. But that was Penny Madison for you. Once her mind was made up, that was it. Done. Deal. The weight had no choice but to leave in defeat.

“Okay,” Penny said. “I need to get to work, but I’ll see you tonight? We can go get a new slipcover for that couch.”

“What’s wrong with the scarf?” she asked, pulling on the pretty black fringe of the Spanish-style scarf that was draped over the back of her blue velvet couch. It had been part of a costume from La Bohème adaption she’d done in Houston a few years ago.

“It looks a little trashy, sweetie. We’ll get you something in a nice tweed.”

Zoe didn’t get a chance to say over her dead body, because her mom clasped her hands over Zoe’s face, squeezing her cheeks just a little so that her lips pursed. An old routine her mom refused to let go of, despite the fact that Zoe was thirty-seven and five months pregnant.

You will always be my little girl, Penny was fond of saying. And somehow she always made it sound like a jail sentence.

“Okay,” Zoe said, the words distorted by her squished face. “My last class is over at seven.”

“I’ll pick you up here at seven-thirty,” her mom said, and pecked Zoe’s pursed lips. “Remember,” she said, her eyes flicking over to Zoe’s kitchen counter, where a batch of ginger cookies sat getting cold. “Every pound you gain now is one you’ll have to lose after the baby gets here.”

Was it illegal to punch your mother? Zoe wondered, anger billowing through her. Or merely immoral? Because immoral she had no problem with. She was, after all, a political scandal in the making.

“Bye, honey,” Penny said before Zoe could even curl a fist, and then she was gone. The Craving-Goddess-turned-nightmare walked out the door, Zoe’s favorite scarf trailing behind her.

“Oh, thank God,” Zoe muttered and turned back to her cookies.

She cranked the lid off the jar of salsa and poured some into a chipped china bowl, because she wasn’t a heathen, and then dunked the nearest cookie into the tomato mixture.

It was still disgusting, not a good fit at all. Salsa required salt, not sugar. Seriously, what possessed her? She eyed the cookie in her hand and dunked it again.

And why couldn’t she stop?

A knock on the door practically shook the windows loose, and she quickly put down the cookie and slid the salsa into her fridge.

Wiping her hands and any stray crumbs from her face, she opened the door.

“Mom—”

But it wasn’t her mom.

It was Carter O’Neill, in a suit and tie, dwarfing her doorway, his hands braced on the frame as if he were holding himself up. Or back.

Lord, he was big. Those muscles filling out his fine gray suit hard to ignore. And so were the blue eyes blazing through the distance between them.

It was Carter, all right. And he was pissed.

He stepped into her apartment without a word and slammed the door shut behind him, turning her spacious apartment into a linen closet.

“We need to talk,” he said.

CHAPTER THREE

“TALK?” SHE SQUEAKED, because the look on his face said that what he really needed was to take her out back and chop her into pieces.

He nodded, curt and decisive. His jawline was like the marble bust of a Roman emperor—all he was missing were the laurel leaves in his hair.

The truth was—her secret, hidden truth was—that there was something about a man in a suit. She had a history with men in suits. And this man wore a suit like no one else.

She pulled her faded silk robe tighter around her ballooning waist, as if to compensate.

He didn’t say anything, didn’t even acknowledge that he had in fact barged into her apartment uninvited. He just looked around as if he smelled something far worse than ginger cookies.

Anger trickled down through her spine, but the baby fluttered against her hand as if to say, Hold on a second. He is Deputy Deadbeat Daddy because of you.

“How did you get in here?” she asked. Someone had to buzz him in the main door.

“I helped Tootie Vogler with some groceries.”

“I…ah…guess this is about the newspaper?” she asked.

His blue eyes burned like acid.

“Can I apologize again?” she asked. “I’m really, really sorry.” He didn’t respond, and her apology sat there between them like dog poop on a carpet.

“How…ah…did you find me?”

“Phone book.”

“Right.” Her laugh was awkward, and she wanted to take herself out back and end this misery. “Of course.”

The silence was awful. It pounded between them, pulling her skin tighter, sucking out every molecule of air.

He was terribly out of place in the middle of her chaos, a dark spot, leaking menace like a fog into the center of the glitter and beads, the embroidered silk and pillows.

“Would you like to sit down?” she asked, pulling a bunch of pointe shoes and one of her more salvageable tutus off the pink-and-green watermelon chair. It was this chair or the velvet couch, with the much-maligned scarf.

His sharp blue eyes made her so nervous, so aware of the frivolity of her home, that she actually patted the seat in enticement.

Carter O’Neill, the cold fish, didn’t even crack a smile.