Fixer: A Bad Boy Romance (3 page)

"Eh, you get used to it." Freddie shrugged. "Now, what sort of fun did you have last night, while the rest of us were in bed like normal people?"

"It eventually ended up in a bed," Tanner said slyly, and Freddie punched him lightly in the shoulder while rolling his eyes. "But I just went to Billy Martin's and tracked down Senator Waltz. Send a few ladies his way, plied them with some champagne, and snuck a few photographs. Easy job."

Freddie shook his head in admiration. "You say that so casually, but you're playing with people's careers! One of these days, you know that you're going to get burned by this."

"Not me," Tanner disagreed. "And when I confronted Waltz this morning, he gave in right away. Look, Freddie, this is just the way that politics really works in this town. It's all about leverage."

"The realist in me knows that what you're saying is true, but the optimist inside me, battered and beaten, keeps hoping that you'll get your comeuppance at some point." Freddie swallowed the last of his beer, dropping the pint glass down heavily onto the wooden bar rail. "You know, that bartender's sure taking a while with your drink. Maybe your flirting game isn't as good as you think."

"Worked on the girls last night," Tanner replied. "When it turned out that Waltz didn't quite have the... energy to perform, shall we say, they were happy to accept me as a substitute." He grinned. "And while the brunettes put in a good effort, the blonde stole the show. She could fit both her legs back behind her head, and still use her arms to-"

He stopped, seeing that Freddie had raised his fingers and plugged both his ears. "Enough, stop torturing me!" he burst out, wincing good-naturedly. "Come on, I know that you're a god at pulling in slutty women, but you drive me crazy with these stories!"

"Then why do you keep wanting to hear them?"

He shrugged. "Torturing myself, maybe? Or maybe I'm just eagerly awaiting the day when the great, all-powerful Keegan Tanner finally meets his match and gets taken down a peg, knocked back down to the level of the rest of us mortals."

"May that day never come," Tanner added, lifting his empty hand as if holding a wineglass for a toast.

"Your drink, sir - sorry that it took so long."

Both of the men glanced up as the bartender reappeared, placing a glass of scotch in front of Tanner. "Again, I'm sorry that there was a wait," she repeated, leaning forward with her elbows on the bar and giving the two men a clear look at her expanse of creamy white cleavage on display. "But I'm done with my shift, now, and I feel awful, just awful. Please, let me know if there's anything at all that I can do to make you feel better." Her lazy wink at Tanner left no ambiguity as to the hidden meaning behind these words.

Next to him, Freddie groaned as he leaned away from the bar. "God, man, it's like the gods blessed you with some sort of pheromones or something, and I just have to sit by and watch."

Tanner smiled back at the bartender, leaning forward so that their faces were less than a foot apart. "That's very generous of you..."

"Courtney," she filled in, blinking her long lashes back at him.

"Courtney," he repeated. "And what do I owe you for the drink?"

"Let's call it on the house - but you can find a way to repay me for it," she purred, squeezing her eyes into slits for a moment. Her gaze flicked over to Freddie, losing a bit of its seductiveness. "Your total is fourteen dollars, by the way."

Freddie grumbled and reached for his wallet, but Tanner laid a hand on his friend's arm. "Let me cover his bill," he said to Courtney, standing up. "After all, what are friends for?"

"What a nice man!" Courtney said, her eyes never leaving Tanner, watching with a satisfied smile as his own gaze drifted down to her expansive chest before returning back up. "So thoughtful and generous."

Tanner smiled back at her, his eyes not moving from her face even as he took a sip of his scotch. Perfect. "Very generous," he agreed, already thinking of how he'd undress her, claim her soft body with his own hard one, make her scream out his name as he used her ruthlessly for his own pleasure.

Chapter Three

*

"Ah, Tanner! Good of you to make it, sorry for the wait. Come on in."

Tanner rose up from the black leather couch, tossing aside the tattered copy of The Economist that he'd been idly leafing through. He hadn't been waiting long - the receptionist at the desk had not yet returned with the coffee he requested, although he readily admitted that this delay was, at least in part, his own fault. He'd been flirting with her hard enough to make her stammer and blush, and she insisted on jotting down her phone number for him before darting off to fetch his beverage.

Still, it wasn't as if he'd turn away a summons from Richard Pribus, head of the Republican National Committee and the closest thing that Tanner had to a direct boss. Pribus had managed the RNC for years, now, and although he put on a kind and patrician face for the public, the man acted like a ruthless killer behind the scenes. He showed no hesitation in resorting to underhanded methods to pursue the RNC's goals when more overt and bipartisan measures failed.

And when he decided to go in a sneakier direction, Tanner was usually the first one to get a call.

Tanner buttoned his suit as he stood up from where he'd been waiting. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the receptionist finally returning with his coffee, and he relieved her of the steaming cup with a peck on the cheek. She blushed as she settled back down behind her desk, and Tanner breezed into Pribus's office as he lifted the cup to his lips.

In his expansive office, Pribus was already settling in behind his massive wooden desk, sighing a little. "You know, I'd prefer if you didn't flirt with the help," he complained as Tanner took the seat in front of the desk. "We go through enough accusations of sexual harassment as it is."

"Hey, I stop whenever they ask," Tanner pointed out.

"Yeah, but with you, they don't ask you to stop," Pribus countered.

Tanner smirked at him. "I don't see the problem."

"The problem," his boss elaborated, "happens when they all start talking to each other, and they realize that they've all gotten the same treatment from you."

"Hey, I never told them that we were exclusive!" Tanner kept up his smirk, knowing that Pribus wouldn't stay on this issue forever. Not when he clearly had an actual assignment for Tanner to undertake.

Sure enough, after another sigh, Pribus dropped the issue. "At least don't do it so blatantly, okay?" he groaned. "But that's not what I called you in here for today."

"Is this about any issues with the Waltz thing?" Looking over the crowded stacks of paper and other items that littered the top of Pribus's massive desk, Tanner spotted the envelope that he'd handed off to Charlie the night before. Looks like the old security guard came through for him again, he thought happily. No issues there - not that the pictures even proved necessary, given how quickly Waltz had caved and capitulated.

"No, no, that went fine." Pribus flicked his eyes briefly towards the envelope, then back up to Tanner. "Nice job with that, by the way. You always make these jobs seem so easy."

Outwardly, Tanner just grinned, pretending that the compliment didn't warm him on the inside. Inside his head, however, he couldn't help preening, just a little bit. Not even halfway through his career, and already considered as the top fixer for the RNC!

"And that," Pribus continued, "is why I think that you'll be perfect for this next little issue that we're tackling." He reached for a manilla folder, but paused, looking back at Tanner. "It's a particularly tricky one, but we think that you've got the right skills to handle it."

Tanner just held out his hand. After a moment longer, gazing across the massive expanse of burnished wood at him, Pribus handed over the folder.

With a flip, Tanner opened up the folder on his lap. The name and picture of his target greeted him on the very first page, staring up at him with intense focus.

"Alicia Stone?" he read off, frowning slightly.

"That's right," Pribus confirmed. "She's the freshman senator from Colorado. Just arrived here, but she's already aiming to shake things up in a major way - one that doesn't exactly flow with our goals."

That was a hell of an understatement, Tanner knew. He'd watched as Stone, a young upstart with no prior political experience, managed to somehow sweep the election in Colorado, winning her Senate seat in a landslide victory. Of course, Colorado had always been a largely blue state, so Stone's victory wasn't impossible to imagine - but she cleared away the incumbent, Gary Gardener, with a strong message of empowerment and change. Despite her youth and inexperience, she was already attracting attention on the national stage.

Of course she'd pose a concern for Pribus and the Republicans, Tanner knew. Not only was Stone a largely unknown factor, without much of a voting record to be used strategically against her, but she also seemed to have a natural gift for public speaking. Her strong, passionate, firebrand style never failed to energize a crowd - and that energy seemed to persist long after she left the podium. She'd spoken out strongly in favor of gun control, and several Republican congressmen reported receiving record numbers of calls to their offices over the following week.

"Tell me more," Tanner said to Pribus. He knew that there was more information in the packet on his lap, but he didn't want to sit and read it. He'd pore over every detail in the folder later on, but not now, not here.

"Well, our biggest concern is her newest project, the one that got her elected. This American Quality Education bill - you've heard of it?"

Of course Tanner had heard of it. The American Quality Education Bill had been one of the biggest planks in Alicia Stone's platform when she ran for Senate. She pointed an accusing finger at the education system in general, and Republicans in particular, as the source of many of the country's ills. She promised to divert many more millions of dollars to education spending over the next few years, and swore to make this her number one priority during her time as senator, even going so far as to say that, if she failed at this goal, she wouldn't bother attempting to seek re-election when her term was up.

Pribus gave Tanner a brief recap of the bill, just in case he'd somehow had his head under a rock for the last election cycle. "This thing is going to look very bad for us," he finished, shaking his head back and forth. "I mean, wasteful spending, on public education no less, is totally against our principles - but if we take a stand against this, we're going to be absolutely battered by this thing, over and over, you know?"

"Sure," Tanner agreed. "You support this, and our supporters will accuse us of wasteful spending. We stand against it, and we'll get blamed for mortgaging the future of our children."

Pribus pointed across his desk at Tanner. "Nailed it, right on the nose. This thing gets us either way. And that's where you come in."

"Me?"

"Yep. Your newest job is to kill this thing. I don't know how, don't know what it will take to get rid of it, but I want it gone. And I suspect that the easiest way to kill it is to cut off the head." He pointed over his desk at the folder sitting in Tanner's lap. "That means getting to this freshman and showing her that, just because she charged up the yokels back in Colorado, it doesn't mean that she'll be able to have her way here in Washington. Understand?"

Tanner looked back down at the still-open folder in his lap. This time, instead of reading through any of the enclosed documents, most of which contained information on the bill and what it might contain, he focused his attention on the picture of Alicia Stone.

Pretty, he thought to himself. That, just by itself, was a rarity among the Washington elite. Oh, sure, most of the men did their best to look esteemed and handsome, but the women who ran in high powered circles didn't go for pretty. Pretty suggested vulnerable, suggested weakness, suggested that they could be exploited.

No, most of the women who held office, or held positions of power behind an office, dressed for authority. They usually wore smart pantsuits that hid their curves, loose outfits to try and make them look more like their male counterparts. They generally eschewed makeup, wearing the wrinkles on their faces as badges of honor, cutting their hair short or pushing it away in no-nonsense haircuts. In short, they did everything possible to hide the fact that they were female.

But not Alicia, Tanner thought to himself as he studied her picture. Either she didn't yet understand the Washington power culture enough to change her look, or she didn't care.

Instead of pulling her hair back in a bun, or cutting it short in a bob, she let it spill out and cascade down the sides of her head, falling in waves over her shoulders. The photograph was taken only from the shoulders up, but her suit looked well fitted, tighter than the baggy outfits that most female politicians chose. Her face reflected her youth - Tanner knew that she was only in her late twenties - but gleamed with determination, confidence, charisma.

If he saw her in a bar, even not knowing who she was, he'd be more than willing to give her a smile.

And that would be his way in.

Glancing up from the photograph, Tanner saw Pribus still looking at him, waiting for a response. "Well?" the head of the Republican National Committee asked again, looking a little more worried and haggard than he usually appeared in public. "Are you going to be able to make this problem go away for us?"