Page 9 of Swerve
They were old tobacco money. The South Carolina family home had been built when slaves were still used to harvest the crops. The first time Savannah brought him home with her for a long weekend, he’d felt as if he were walking around in a dream. He’d never met anyone who actually lived in such a setting. The house looked like a set forGone with the Windwith the enormous white columns spanning its front and the four century-old-oak trees marking its entrance.
Until that weekend, he’d had no idea her family was in politics. She’d never talked about it, and he’d had no reason to ask. As it turned out, her father had been a senator for the state of South Carolina. The seat he himself now held. That weekend had been a defining point in his life, although he certainly hadn’t realized it then. He’d encouraged Savannah to make amends with her family, and he supposed that was what had made her father take note of him when he had apparently been dismissive of the other boyfriends she’d brought home.
They’d actually nearly broken up over her father’s approval of him. But in those early days, there had been something real and hard to find between them. And for the first few years of their marriage, they had stayed hungry for each other. They’d moved back to her hometown of Greenville, opened a law practice with her family’s support and approval. And for a good long while, life had mostly been everything he’d once dreamed about.
He wonders, not for the first time, what would have happened if he’d never gone to work for her father, never agreed to run for the senator’s seat when he’d been forced to retire because of his health. Would he and Savannah have stayed in love? Would he be less tarnished in her eyes?
Maybe.
How many times during his early years in Washington had she accused him of letting it change him? And how many times had he denied it?
She’d been right, of course.
It had changed him.
Power does that.
He’d resisted at first. Tried not to be influenced by the doors that continued to open for him, doors behind which he found things offered to him that he’d never thought to imagine. Temptations he’d proved to weak to resist. Savannah was no fool. She recognized the changes in him. He denied them at first, but eventually, there was no point in denying it. He didn’t want to go back. Not even for her.
He opens the top drawer of his desk, reaches to the back and pulls a cell phone from a hidden compartment at the back. He turns it on, hits Contacts, scrolls down to Hotel California and opens it. He stares at the number, his finger itching to tap the screen. A late-night visit would certainly even the score. But the proprietor frowns on impulsive appointments, prefers a certain restraint in her clients.
And he likes being at the top of her preferred client list. She believes in rewarding those who go by the rules, and the bonuses are worth the good behavior.
So, no, not tonight. Let Savannah have her fun. He’ll make sure the guy doesn’t get a repeat performance.
Mia
“Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality.”
—Alexis Carrel
YOU KNOW THAT little voice that pings inside you when something doesn’t feel quite right? The signal that goes off deep in your gut like a smoke detector just before you smell the smoke?
Mia had that feeling.
It was the second time she’d seen the Range Rover circle the street right beyond the festival limits. Maybe it was noticeable because there was so little traffic. Most people were still inside the cordoned-off area, dancing and eating cotton candy, buying T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Grace had eaten too many of her favorite things and didn’t feel well. She wanted to head home. And they had a standing rule that they stayed together when they went places.
It was something Emory had made her promise she would always do, and Grace’s parents had been equally pleading in their insistence that she do the same.
Mia and Grace, even though they’d arrived at their county elementary school without ever having met, had an amazing amount in common where their families were concerned. Emory had raised Mia, but no parents could ever out-parent Emorywhen it came to Mia’s well-being, and the rules she thought necessary to keep it first and foremost.
As much as Mia hated those rules, she made a decent effort to stick to them because Emory had no problem taking her phone away when she crossed lines or neglected to remember some piece of safety advice that her sister had drilled into her.
And she mostly did remember. Except for the Range Rover and the little voice that made her wonder about it.
She saw it again as she and Grace left the festival and walked in the direction of the parking lot, a temporarily converted field. They could have avoided it by veering off to the right andwalking through the crowd.
But they didn’t.
Grace was talking about a boy from school she liked and had seen in line at the concession stand. She couldn’t decide whether he liked her back and wanted Mia’s opinion. Part of Mia’s brain focused on her question, but another part was assessing their proximity to the car and how many steps they would have to make in getting past it. A dozen. She picked up her pace. Grace followed her lead, still talking.
Just then, the back of the car popped open in a single instant, the way light floods a room at the flick of a switch. A man appeared out of nowhere, pointing a gun at them, his expression blank in a way she’d never witnessed in another human being. It was as if he didn’t see them as human beings at all, his eyes flat and lifeless, like maybe he’d been dead once and forced back to existence through no choice of his own.
“Get in,” he said in a low, flat voice, moving the gun to the center of her forehead. “Get in now, or I will shoot you both and leave you here to bleed out.”
That was their mistake, of course.
