Dirty Little Secrets Page 5

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “So? How was it?”

  Jackie didn’t even wait until Samira had taken her seat at their usual bench before she fired the question at her. Maddie and Stella charged across the playground to join Jackie’s trio of troublemakers and Benjamin Franklin whined softly at their abandonment before flopping dejectedly in his usual spot beneath the bench. Cold rain had kept them inside for the last several days and now the girls greeted Brexley, Tamsin and Cornell as if they’d been separated for decades. Samira pretended to supervise the reunion from afar and fussed with a tangled spot in Benjamin Franklin’s leash to buy time to think about how to answer Jackie.

  “Brian liked you,” Jackie gushed eagerly.

  She should be excited. The guy she’d gone out with—a good guy—had liked her. But instead of butterflies in her stomach, all she felt was the sinking sense of dread. She didn’t want to see him again. She didn’t want to put herself through that. “I don’t think I’m cut out for dating, Jackie.”

  “What?” her best friend asked in alarm. “What’s that supposed to mean? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. Brian was perfect. But if I can’t enjoy myself when the universe hands me the perfect guy on a silver platter, don’t you think that says something about my capacity to date?”

  “No one likes dating. Dating is awful and awkward. You’re auditioning for someone to love you. But with the right person, it won’t feel like work. Everything will just fall into place. So maybe Brian wasn’t the right guy for you, but that doesn’t mean you stop looking. You’ve gotta kiss a lot of frogs to find Prince Charming.”

  “I don’t think this is a case of if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.”

  Jackie frowned at her. “Well how are you going to meet someone if you refuse to put yourself out there?”

  Samira arched a brow. “I’m not the one who thinks I need to meet someone. You are.”

  “I just want you to be happy.”

  “I know.” She caught Jackie’s hand and squeezed it. “And I love you for it. But I am happy. I like my quiet little life exactly the way it is.”

  Jackie’s expression telegraphed her doubt.

  “What?” A bitter wind kicked up and Samira caught her scarf before it could whip free. Jackie reached up automatically to adjust the pin on her purple paisley hijab.

  “Is this really all you want from life? No family of your own? Spending your nights with Olivia Pope and Nalini Singh when you could have a man in your life?”

  “There are worse people to spend my nights with than my favorite character and my favorite author. And if I ever need to talk to an adult, there’s always Aiden.”

  “Aiden Raines of the Montgomery-Raines family?” Jackie asked skeptically.

  “He’s really very nice.” Samira kept her expression carefully neutral, making a show of watching the girls, but she still saw out of the corner of her eye as Jackie’s brow pulled down ominously.

  “Oh no. Samira. Tell me you know better.”

  “It isn’t like that.” She felt her face flushing, but kept the neutral expression in place.

  “Oh?” Jackie folded her arms. “What exactly is it like?”

  “He’s just a nice guy, okay?”

  And that was all he was ever going to be. Even if there had been that moment last night, that shock of awareness that had blindsided her out of nowhere. All at once the room had been filled with him and she’d wanted to run, but only because it felt so nice. So warm and lovely and full of potential.

  “Uhn-uh,” Jackie said. “That is not a my boss is just a nice guy face. That is a smitten face.”

  “I’m not smitten.” Samira wiped the memory off her face, but something made her confess, “But there was this one moment last night. He was still up when I got home from my date and we talked. Then… I don’t know. Nothing really happened. I went upstairs and that was it.”

  Jackie glowered. “Did he say something?”

  “No. Of course not. Aiden would never be inappropriate toward me.”

  “At least one of you is thinking clearly,” Jackie said with her trademark frankness. “You know you can’t get involved with him, Samira. Even if he weren’t your boss, he’s one of those Raineses.”

  “I have no intention of getting involved with him, but he’s not like you think. He’s not involved in politics like the rest of them.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s one of them. He’s practically American royalty and you’re an Iranian-American nanny who’s one controversial comment away from ending up on a watchlist for no good reason. Not exactly the pedigree a political dynasty is looking for.”

  “My pedigree doesn’t matter because nothing happened and nothing is going to happen,” Samira insisted.

  But Jackie wasn’t saying anything she hadn’t already thought herself. It was another reason why she’d run last night. Because she knew all the way down to her core what a bad idea anything with Aiden Raines would be.

  Even if he was the kind of guy she could have almost let herself like, if things had been different.

  But they weren’t. He was all different kinds of off-limits and she was happy exactly as she was. Perfectly happy.

  Jackie folded her arms tightly, glowering. “Just be careful. I don’t want you turning into another DC statistic.”

  “I won’t,” Samira assured her.

  Not if she could help it.

  *

  “Aiden, my boy! Nice of you to finally grace me with your presence.”

  “Hello, sir.” Aiden crossed the library and gripped his grandfather’s shoulder for a moment before settling in the wingback chair opposite him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it last week.”

  For the last six months, his ritual every Saturday when Samira had the day off had been to pack up the girls and bring them to his grandfather’s estate, where his mother would entertain them for an hour while he visited with the indomitable Dalton Montgomery. Last week a protest march had clogged traffic and Stella’s motion sickness had acted up in the stop-and-go driving so he’d spent his Saturday cleaning his daughter’s puke out of his upholstery instead.

  Dalton frowned querulously at him. “See that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  His grandfather grunted, his gaze tracking around the room which looked like a relic from another era, from the rich Turkish rugs to the massive wingback chairs. Like a library from a great country estate—which it essentially was. The shelves rose to the ceilings, packed with leather bound volumes, though Aiden knew there were more modern spines concealed behind a heavy drape to his left.

  Dalton Montgomery may have inherited the library, but he’d often boasted that he’d read every book in it and Aiden believed him. His mind had been a weapon, honed at an early age for one purpose—political mastery. He kept extra copies of The Prince and The Art of War at his bedside and re-read Animal Farm and Catch-22 every year. He’d been known to quote passages from everything from Common Sense to The Communist Manifesto when it served his argument.

  Dalton Montgomery was a man renowned for his wit as much as his wisdom, and now he frowned at his shelves, as if trying to recall which one of the thousands of books he’d been reading.

  Aiden’s throat tightened, but he swallowed past the lump and slapped on a smile. Reassure him, his nurses advised. He’s ashamed of the gaps in his memory. Try not to call attention to them.

  The great man couldn’t read anymore. He got confused, forgetting what he’d read from one chapter to the next. The man who had once done the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle by filling in only the vowels because writing every letter wasn’t enough of a challenge now struggled to follow an episode of Friends.

  He didn’t touch the books anymore, but his nurses guided him to the library every morning because it was familiar enough that he would settle there and not go searching for his office, driven by some formless need to work. They’d had to remo
ve the computer and the land line in his office after the first time he’d called the former Speaker of the House’s personal line, convinced they were in the middle of a Cold War crisis. He could be lucid for hours or even days on end, but then a bad day would come, as they always did, and he would be storming through the house, demanding the nurses return his computer, accusing them of espionage and striking at anyone who approached him.

  The Kingmaker, the man who had once been the unseen hand behind hundreds of political maneuvers, now sat in his library and frowned at a copy of Plato’s Republic as if he knew he ought to be able to place it but couldn’t quite make his brain cooperate.

  “Did mother tell you Charlotte’s getting remarried?”

  Dalton looked away from the books and for a moment Aiden thought his grandfather’s glower was covering his confusion, then he growled, “Of course she told me. Wedding’s happening here at the house, isn’t it? Can’t very well keep it a secret.”

  “I haven’t met her fiancé yet,” Aiden commented, reminding himself to speak normally. His grandfather hated it when he could tell people were anticipating his confusion—and getting him upset tended to make the lucid moments all the more brief.

  “Charlotte always did rush into things. Not a thinker, that one. I never did understand how your parents managed to beget three feelers before they had you. I thought cunning was in the Montgomery DNA, but your father managed to dilute it to an amazing degree.”

  “Scott’s cunning.” Aiden absently defended the eldest Raines child.

  “When he isn’t high,” Dalton grumbled. “And I know you’ll say his addiction is a sickness and all that balderdash, but a true thinker doesn’t have that weakness.”

  “What about Candy?” he asked. He didn’t want to argue with his grandfather about his brother’s reliance on chemically-induced euphoria, and he didn’t have an argument to make for Charlotte—she’d always led with her heart—but Candy was about as cerebral as they came, a tech genius and security specialist who pushed her emotions beneath an iron wall.

  “Candice never comes to see me,” his grandfather grumped. “I don’t want to talk about ungrateful grandchildren who never come to see me. I want to talk about you. What cases are you working on? Have they given you anything high profile yet? Anything you can make your name on?”

  “I’m not interested in making my name. I’m too busy trying to change the world.”

  Dalton narrowed his eyes, bushy grey brows lowering. “And how’s that working out for you? Idealism is cute when you’re in college, but twenty-five is time to grow out of it.”

  Twenty-eight, Aiden silently corrected, his heart sinking. Even when his grandfather seemed lucid, the details were slipping. “Justice is a never-ending task,” he said lightly. “Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus. Like all I ever do is work, but no matter how many hours I put in, I can never move the needle.”

  “Rock. Not needle. Don’t mix your metaphors.” His grandfather eyed him. “Sounds like you have two options.”

  “Oh?”

  “One—keep pushing the boulder forever, or two—find a more efficient way of getting it to the top of the hill.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Dalton made a frustrated gesture. “Haven’t you figured out yet that class action lawsuits only serve to make lawyers rich?”

  “I’m fighting for people’s rights and you make it sound like I’m an ambulance chaser.”

  His grandfather shrugged as if to say if the shoe fits. “If you’re going to be an idealist, at least be an effective one. You want to make a difference in how people treat one another in this country, you make the laws tougher. A lawyer can only operate within the law. That’s the limit of your power.” He huffed out a scoffing breath. “I never liked my power with limits, personally.” He sank back deeper into his chair. “Do you really think working in some Podunk law firm is the way you can have the most impact on the world?”

  “Messenger-Washington is hardly a Podunk firm.”

  Dalton waved that assertion away with a dismissive hand. “You know what I mean. Sometimes the fastest way to get the boulder to the top of the mountain is to inspire others to push for you. You can do that. You’re compelling. Like your father. Born politician.”

  “I like the work I’m doing,” Aiden protested, but the words felt hollow. The vague dissatisfaction he’d felt for the last few months seemed to reach toward his grandfather’s words.

  “You worry whether you’re doing enough. You never see your girls. Look at you. Handsome. Well-spoken. Educated. Intelligent. A widower with two lovely daughters. Incredible under pressure. Argues well. You’d be a titan in debates.” Dalton smiled, shaking his head. “You were born for this, my boy. Just like your father. Just like, ah…” His voice trailed off and he frowned.

  “Thomas,” Aiden provided softly. Dalton could remember the Sisyphus myth, but the name of his son-in-law of forty years evaded him.

  “What?” Dalton asked, brows pulling down irritably.

  “Thomas. My father. Thomas.”

  “I know that,” he snapped. “I’ve met your father.” But his expression was frustrated and he sounded like he thought Thomas was a man he’d had a meeting with once, not the son-in-law he’d enjoyed arguing with for the better part of fifty years. Another memory slipping away.

  Aiden changed the subject and they spoke of anything and nothing for the rest of the hour, the topics of politics and family never coming up again. Aiden said his goodbyes, gripping his grandfather once more on the shoulder, as one of his nurses entered the library to usher him upstairs for his nap.

  In the hallway outside, his grandfather’s butler waited to speak with Aiden—always with that uncanny ability to be exactly where he was needed. “Walters.”

  “Sir.”

  Aiden had been sir since he’d first come to live at the estate on a school break when he was twelve.

  “How has he been?” Aiden asked, as he did every week.

  “As you see. Good days and bad days.” Edward Walters—a Polish immigrant born Edek Walczynski—spoke with only the softest trace of the accent he’d brought with him when he’d fled the concentration camps as a boy. He’d come to work for the Montgomery family when he was twenty-two and worked his way up until he was running the estate with flawless efficiency. Other than that, Aiden knew very little about the man.

  His once-dark hair now grey, Walters was a slim, pale figure who excelled at being invisible in plain sight.

  “How have you been doing, Walters?” Aiden asked.

  The older man smiled ruefully. “Good days and bad, sir.”

  Aiden knew his grandfather and the man who ran his house had not started out as pals and Walters seemed to draw a kind of quiet dignity from maintaining the distinction between employee and friend, but Aiden knew the two men had an indelible bond. They’d lived their lives in tandem for too long not to have become incredibly close in their own way.

  “I used to think you were my grandfather’s spy master when I was a boy,” he commented.

  “What makes you so sure I wasn’t?” Walters deadpanned without blinking, before nodding toward the terrace. “Mrs. Montgomery-Raines and the children are on the back terrace. I believe there were cartwheels planned.”

  “Thank you, Walters. For everything.”

  Was that the future for him and Samira? A carefully maintained distance even as they became the most important people in one another’s lives? The idea felt somehow incredibly wrong.

  Aiden went in search of his mother and daughters and found the girls doing somersaults and lopsided cartwheels across the grass as their nana supervised. Regina Montgomery-Raines looked up as he approached, a fine, elegant woman of a certain age who had stepped gracefully into her role as a political matriarch at a young age and only grown into herself more over the years.

  She read the expression on Aiden’s face and her own tightened fractionally. “Not a good day?”

  “Not a bad day
,” he commented, standing beside her at the railing to watch the girls. “I thought he was starting the new meds?”

  “Walters says the medications are keeping him on this plateau. That’s the best we can ask for, apparently.” She shrugged, as if his illness was a minor inconvenience, but he saw the minute pursing of her lips, the attempt to hold everything in.

  His mother was not a feeler, as his grandfather had reminded him, but Aiden never made the mistake of thinking that meant she didn’t feel. He looped his arm around her shoulders, tugging her smaller frame against his side. She didn’t soften against him, but he heard a muffled sniffle before she gave his chest a pat. “You’re a good boy, Aiden. How did I end up with such a sweet kid?”

  “Good genes.”

  She snorted, pulling away—apparently having reached her affection quota for the day. “I don’t think your father or I possess the sweet gene.”

  “It must be recessive.”

  “Nana watch me!” Maddie shouted and tumbled into a clumsy somersault.

  “That’s wonderful, darling!” his mother called out and they watched the girls for a moment before she murmured, “Walters says he’s been watching M*A*S*H, if you can believe it.”

  “The TV show? He can follow it?”

  “He remembers it. Sometimes the older memories stick around. He’s started calling all the nurses Carol.” Her mother’s name. The grandmother that had died before Aiden was born. Before Regina even met her husband. “He spoke of her so infrequently I used to wonder if he even remembered her name, but I guess we have the answer to that now.” She looked up at him, her gaze intent. “You talk about Chloe to the girls, don’t you? Even when you don’t want to?”

  “I try to. Their nanny makes sure they remember her too. And we have the pictures around the house.” That had been one of Chloe’s last obsessions. Framing photos of herself when she was young and healthy and beautiful and hanging them in nearly every room. His house wasn’t a shrine, but it was impossible to forget that Chloe had been there.

  The pictures in every room had been hard to look at, at first, but somewhere in the last two years that had changed. Now when he looked at them he was glad for the reminder. When had that happened? When had the memory of her gone from being bitterly painful to something he wanted desperately to cling to, afraid it was fading too fast?