Storm of Ambition, page 2
Think of it—an amputee marrying a senator’s daughter. His stomach turned as he pictured himself limping around the fringes of the charity balls or being forced to smile when men with strong, whole bodies chatted up his wife. The political arena was cruel with zero tolerance for weakness or vulnerability. He knew well that he would be shown a friendly face while people poured out pity behind his back. But that mortification wasn’t even the worst of it.
Like dry whispers in the halls, the horror stories were passed from veteran to veteran until they reached him. The whispers seemed drawn to him or maybe to the site of his injury. The blasted remains of his leg, missing a sizable chunk of calf plus some bone and tendon, had a way of drawing attention, so it seemed ugly tales could be attracted just as easily. He tried not to give them credit—the ones where women wept or screamed in horror when their amputee came to bed—and took, with a grain of salt, the relentless view that any marriage with a scarred veteran would end in resentment and divorce.
But he couldn’t deny the cold facts. Grace and he had announced their engagement over a year ago at a fashionable soiree hosted jointly by their fathers. Hers, a charming senator. His, a successful businessman and one of the senator’s staunchest supporters. A kingmaker, some said. All the dazzling people had been there, and the finest chef in the capital had been brought in to serve delicate hors d’oeuvres to the glittering people. It was like something straight out of a modern fairy tale.
But nothing about war belonged in fairy tales. It wasn’t right to force Grace to keep their engagement now that his life had changed so completely. He was quite literally not the man she’d gotten engaged to. And whether she realized that now or not, she would eventually.
A pending marriage wasn’t practical anyway. He needed serious medical care and wouldn’t be whole... well, probably ever. All the small indignities of his life now—from needing help using the bathroom (assuming the “bathroom” wasn’t a bedpan) to having doctors discuss his case over his head, as if he weren’t there, to the flashbacks and PTSD episodes that left him feeling like a raving lunatic—came with a mortifying emotional price tag. He couldn’t spare himself, but he could spare Grace from seeing his new reality and, in the process, avoid seeing himself become her family’s pity project.
Breaking it off was the best thing. He could live with the heartache—he couldn’t live with her regrets.
A soft rap at the door brought him from his thoughts, and Aaron sat up in his chair and tugged his shirt straight. He put on what he thought of as his reporting-bad-news-to-his-superior-officer face. “Come in.”
“Aaron?” Grace’s elfin face peeked nervously around the doorframe, the rest of her following a half second later.
One look at her and Aaron’s heart squeezed painfully, confirming that he’d made the right choice. Tall and slender but strong in the way of dancers, she was dressed in a cream sleeveless silk blouse and tailored skirt of some salmon shade that only a true class act like Grace could pull off. Her blond hair was shorter than he’d seen it but still feminine, with a casually windblown style that he was sure required hours in the salon to prepare. Her bare legs were lightly tanned and toned and looked great as she stood in some kind of fashionable sandals. She was every inch a future first lady or at least a general’s wife, plus the successful CPA he knew her to be. Seeing her felt like the bomb going off all over again.
He gasped and swore to himself he would make this fast.
Something in his face must have thrown Grace off because her big smile faltered. She lifted a pretty bundle of flowers. “I got these for you. Not really a guy thing, but I thought they’d brighten your room.”
Aaron’s throat tightened again, and his voice came out gruff. “You can put them there.” He motioned toward the cabinet against the wall.
Grace smiled again, with real warmth, as she crossed to the cabinet. “It’s so good to see you! And up too. I was a little worried when—”
“Grace, we need to talk.” That wasn’t how he’d meant to bring this up, but he had to stop her before she unwound all his determination.
“Okay.” Some emotion he couldn’t read flashed across her face. She quickly composed herself and waited patiently for him to go on.
But the words were stuck in his throat. The picture he’d kept beside his bunk in his base in Iraq came to his mind. He’d built air castles for the two of them, imagining the life they would have together when he got back, the parties they would throw for each of his buddies as they returned, the charities and benefits, the children they would have, and the way he would play with the kids and waltz with his wife. Now all of that felt like someone else’s life, no closer to his reality than walking on the moon.
The silence grew—but he couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t even find which words to say. As his heart twisted inside him, his anxiety flared, and he was struck by the horrible thought that he could have a PTSD attack right there in front of her. When he was stressed, even the tiniest sounds or motions could set it off.
Panic leapt higher, closing around his throat. He focused on breathing, but his chest was so tight, he knew delaying the attack was the best he could hope for. He gulped, forced another breath. He would rather stand naked before a firing squad than go into a full-blown attack in front of Grace.
Grace’s eyes were big and worried as they met his, and her right hand fingered her left. With an internal groan, Aaron realized she was touching her ring finger, where her engagement ring should have been. All these months, wishing she had a ring... he was already failing her.
She broke the silence, her voice kind. Courageous. “How can I help, Aaron? Can you tell me what you need?”
His determination came back as words burst from him. “I need you to leave.” Other words tumbled out, like a sluicing flood when a dam broke. “I need to end this and for us to not be engaged. I can’t marry you. It’s not what I want or what is right for you, and I need you to—” He floundered in the face of her pain, tried to shift the focus off her, onto him, so her eyes wouldn’t hurt like that. He scrambled after a phrase—wielded it. “I need to focus on my new life, not my old one.”
“But, Aaron, I can help!” She reached toward him, a tremor in her voice, her eyes pleading.
He couldn’t take it—couldn’t wrestle with this pain on top of the ever-present pain of his leg and his memories. His bruised psyche roared, the impending crash closing in. “Leave. Please.” He forced the words out, harsh and raw. “Just go.”
He whirled his wheelchair so he was facing the arrow-slit breaks between the window blinds. Gritting his teeth, he hung on, all his focus on pushing back the impending crash.
He heard her soft footsteps as she finally did as he asked. Her footsteps got faster as they moved away, then silence fell as the door shut. With the door’s thud, the nightmares of his mind broke loose. Once again, he lived through the bomb as his seat lurched and the vehicle lifted off the ground, then his world blew open.
Shivering and chattering, Aaron reached for the button to summon the nurse. His shaking hands missed. He tried again and again and finally managed to swipe it.
One thought rode the waves of his nightmare descent. Grace was leaving, running back to the life he’d left behind, a life with beautiful people bathed in sun. She was gone, and he was truly alone.
Chapter Two
Twenty-one months later...
Every highbrow politician’s child knew the rules: Never give in to extortion demands. Never let a blackmailer get the upper hand. Never try to handle it alone. Grace was breaking all three rules at once and was probably going to pay for that.
Pulling her car to the side of the road, she adjusted the built-in GPS screen. She squinted at the map, her breath huffing out. She had to make it to Willowdale before Handy Auto closed. Had to. She was taking too many risks as it was, and the dread she felt over talking to Aaron made her nerves over her blackmailer seem like icing on the cake. But her entire carefully constructed plan to foil this blackmailer, hinged on whether she and Aaron could come to some kind of agreement and show a united face in public, so she needed to talk to him first thing, before they could possibly bump into each other in town. But she’d hit traffic leaving DC and delays as she drove, and now she was lost —or mostly lost.
She tapped on the map again, searching for a quick route into town that didn’t use a nonexistent connecting road and wouldn’t take her all the way around the lake. It looked like she could make it—yes! She could see a way that connected with Willowdale’s main route into town, High Street, and would get her to the auto shop in minutes. In preparing for this trip, she’d hastily pulled up maps of the town and read old articles in order to find where Aaron worked—the gossip rags who’d blamed her for their breakup shared the sad news that he was now a lowly mechanic—so she wasn’t entirely dependent on the GPS.
Feeling confident again, Grace eased her car back onto the highway. She punched the accelerator, feeling a little reckless. This entire venture ought to have left her a puddle of quivering goo. Instead, she felt empowered, likely because she was taking charge of her happiness for the first time in her life—and that came with a certain reckless thrill.
Her father would have a fit if he knew. Her mother, a total meltdown. But she was reasonably confident she could handle this. After all, the video her mysterious blackmailer had texted of her dad and the man she assumed was some kind of admin with the veterans’ hospital was ugly but not the kind of thing that would get her father thrown out of office. She’d replayed it over and over in her mind as she’d made her hurried preparations and driven the long hours to get to Willowdale.
All things considered, it seemed safe to assume the disagreement between her father and the hospital, which the blackmailer’s video referred to, was just a difference of opinion on what level of support her father had pledged—and that kind of thing came up all the time. As for her father’s comments about not helping because he wouldn’t let his daughter’s ex roll around in the cash and laugh, that was much worse. And of course, all of it would make Grace look terrible and reopen the old wounds the media frenzy had left.
But as painful as these things would be and as badly as Grace personally wanted to keep them quiet, they weren’t something the blackmailer should expect would earn him a massive cash payoff. The funds Grace had access to in her own accounts and savings should be sufficient, if it came to that. And it was her hope that she could, instead, turn the tables on the jerk and unmask him. Moreover, if she could take the sting out of his ammunition concerning her relationship with Aaron in the media, she could free herself once and for all from any further hurt regarding Aaron.
The more troublesome problem was that it was possible her father’s motives for cutting funds for the hospital—assuming he did—were muddy. The greater public wouldn’t care if things were a bit distorted once mob outrage had been fanned to life, so she didn’t want to expose his possible monetary infidelity to the public just when he might have a run at the White House. She also needed badly to believe her father wasn’t hurting veterans and cutting the funding out of spite because she and Aaron had broken up. At the end of the day, she wanted to prove the blackmailer wrong on all fronts—and restore her father’s image in her own eyes.
She passed fields with big round bales of hay left over from last season, her eyes watchful for the first signs of Willowdale. She was eager to see it but hoped her presence there would go undetected for a few days so she could put her plan into place and do a bit of research on her own before the blackmailer set up the specifics for their meeting on the twenty-second, the day before the winter festival began.
Even after hashing it out over and over on the drive down, a part of her couldn’t believe she’d done this. It boiled down to her not trusting anyone, least of all her father’s people, to handle this situation the way she wanted, and she refused to suffer any longer because of public perception or mean-spirited people who took pleasure in harming others. So for the first time in her life, she’d tossed the rule book out the window and taken matters into her own hands. The smarmy PR team her father was forced to use had thrown her under the bus when she and Aaron first broke up, and now they could go hang. This was one Meredes who was doing things her own way.
Thinking of the shock and horror on the face of Mr. Richards, the family attorney and leader of the PR team, if he ever found out what she’d done made Grace chuckle. The wintery sun was shining. The roads were clear, and she was passing a pasture filled with fluffy sheep. In a world where winter pastures could grow sheep that looked like fat summer clouds, anything was possible.
Easing up to a blinking red light, she peered around at the buildings making up her first signs of the town. She glanced at the brochure beside her. Willowdale was reportedly one of North Carolina’s oldest and most charming towns. According to their tourism bureau, they were the county seat and boasted more than their share of galleries, with fun and festivals to spare.
But what she saw out her window was a typical Nowhereville intersection, with a seedy gas station on one corner and a run-down laundromat-plus-dry-cleaners across from it. She hoped it would improve as she got closer to the center of things. It was a silly feeling, but she wanted Aaron’s life to be happy, positive, even—obviously—without her in it. Only then would the pain and derision she’d endured seem worth it. She was still so raw, even after all those months. But maybe seeing that Aaron had found peace in his new life would allow her to move on. If she was being one hundred percent honest with herself, she’d come to Willowdale partly to meet the blackmailer and hopefully quickly and quietly nip that situation in the bud but also because she needed and wanted some degree of closure where Aaron was concerned. Given that she had no intention of telling him she was being blackmailed, it was a long shot, but she was here, so she had to try.
She turned left and headed down the curving road that would become High Street. The first couple blocks were a mix of bungalow-style duplexes, with a grocery store and strip mall peeking from behind them. Then she reached the beginning of the downtown district. The duplexes were replaced by colonial homes with enough charm to win over even the most jaded voter, and she caught snatches of a darling downtown before her GPS sent her off the main road onto a side street.
She felt her first tingle of hope that this madcap errand of hers would morph into a grand adventure. If only she could dig down to the truth about the hospital’s funding, convince Aaron to work with her to fix the PR mess, keep her presence here a secret until she could settle things with her blackmailer, then step into the media spotlight at the festival.
The GPS announced she’d arrived, and Grace rolled to a stop in the parking lot of Handy Man Auto and Tire. When she dug up Aaron’s place of work on the gossip site, she’d gagged over the article that quoted an “unnamed member of the family” as they discussed at length how disappointed they were that Aaron, a West Point graduate, was working as a mechanic in a small-town auto shop. It was typical of them because Aaron’s family hadn’t been terribly supportive of him even when he’d been on what they considered an acceptable life path. He wasn’t ambitious enough for their taste.
Now, from what her sister’s mutual friends reported, they were apparently all in mourning over what had happened to him but, aside from his grandma, seemed more upset by his loss of status than they were by any personal challenges he was facing.
His family’s flaky support was one reason Grace had forgiven Aaron for not pushing harder to convince his family that he’d done the breaking up and not her. They believed that it had been mutual but initiated by Grace, and sometimes they seemed to think the media was right in claiming Grace callously broke his heart, which hurt since their families had always been close, so they should have known her better than that. But she reminded herself they were upset, and she knew Aaron wasn’t talking to them much. He seemed to have walked away from everything in his old life. Besides, early on, Aaron’s sister admitted to Grace that Aaron had started to tell her some details of his hospital time, but when she’d seen how broken and emotional he was, she’d stopped him, so she never heard what exactly happened to Aaron or how things unfolded when Grace visited.
It was all a huge mess, made worse by pride and the sort of careful restraint they all practiced because they never knew what might get leaked to the media. And none of it was going to change unless Grace could pull off this Willowdale venture.
Grace eyed the auto shop. Now was the moment of truth. Her plan was to walk in the front door and claim that her car was acting oddly—which it was since she’d spilled oil all over the engine block so it would stink and smoke—then get Aaron alone so she could talk to him. Never mind that “getting Aaron alone” wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as the phrase made it sound.
A memory sliced through her mind. An image of the tight, tortured look on Aaron’s face when she’d seen him last, the day of her awful visit to his hospital.
She gently wrapped the memory in soothing thoughts and tucked it in the deepest, darkest corner of her mind. With it, she sent the emotions that particular memory always brought: pain that she’d failed him, hurt that he’d failed her, and guilt that she’d let him go so easily and hadn’t contacted him since.
She parked the car and gathered her things. Flipping down the visor mirror, she opened a tube of coral lipstick and touched up. Angling her face, she fluffed her hair. For the first time since puberty, she’d allowed her blond hair to mellow out, so it was more of a very light brown with blond highlights. Less DC, more California. Nothing major, but it felt like she was finally seeing her true self in the mirror again.
Best of all, it might keep her from being casually recognized. Shoulder-length, with lots of body and loose curls, it was nothing like the very stylized blond pixie hair of the girl who’d made the front page of The Dig nearly two years ago. It wouldn’t fool the paparazzi, but they had no idea she was here.
