Page 42 of Where There's Smoke

And with the gubernatorial primary coming up fast, the campaign had accelerated to breakneck speed. Speeches, appearances, dinners, rallies, baby kissing, ass kissing, and sustaining life with coffee and Red Bull. Downtime? What downtime? Even when we found a few minutes of that mythical downtime, we were either around other people or too exhausted to move.

By this point, I’d written offsoonas something around the time of the discovery of cold fusion and the colonization of Mars.

“Doing all right?” Anthony’s voice made me shiver.

I opened my eyes. He sat across from me, his back to the privacy window separating us from the driver, with his cell phone in his hand and a notebook balanced on his knee.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You sure?”

“It’s a campaign.” I forced a laugh. “It’s supposed to be stressful.”

“Yes, that’s true. But there’s being stressed, and there’s being stressed to the point you can’t handle it.”

“I can handle it.” I glanced out the heavily tinted window, and my stomach flipped as the airport control tower came into view. Almost there. Oh fuck. Almost there.

“Jesse—”

“I’m fine.” I put up my hands. “I’m just—” I met his eyes and couldn’t pretend I was all right. Exhaling sharply, I let my shoulders drop. “I could use some downtime.”

He gave a quiet laugh that might have come across as obnoxious in the beginning, but I now recognized as a show of “I feel your pain” sympathy. “There will be plenty of that in November.”

“I’m sure.” I looked out the window at the rapidly approaching airport. “Just tell me it won’t be November before we…” I glanced at him again but quickly shifted my gaze toward the airport again.

Anthony unbuckled his seat belt and got up. He dropped onto the seat beside me, and holy fuck, I couldn’t make myself look at him. If I did, I’d pounce on him. And we’d have to pry ourselves off each other in a few short minutes. And that wouldn’t be nearly enough time, so I’d be even more frustrated, and the distance between now andsoonwould feel infinitely longer.

“Hopefully it won’t be November before we can get some time alone,” Anthony whispered. “But if it is”—he put his hand on my face andmademe look at him—“I promise it’ll be worth the wait.”

“I have no doubt about that,” I said and couldn’t resist leaning in to kiss him.

He didn’t object. His hand drifted into my hair, and his tongue parted my lips. The taste of the cigarette he’d smoked before we left made me shiver again, driving the point home that this wasAnthony.

God, this was so wrong. This was the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong everything. I needed him, I wanted him, but…

To hell with it. I wrapped my arms around him. It wouldn’t solve anything, it wouldn’t make me any less frustrated in the long run, and I’d probably regret it in a few minutes when I had a hard-on and couldn’t do a damned thing about it, but I wanted him. The whole fucking universe could just wait a minute while I indulged in Anthony’s deep, demanding kiss.

He touched his forehead to mine, and we both held on, panting and shaking. My mind told me to pull away and put an end to this before we got caught or had to get out of this car, but my body wanted more. Way more than we could even dream of indulging here.

“I’m hanging by a fucking thread,” I breathed. “I don’t know… I don’t…”

“I know.” He stroked my hair with a shaking hand. “I am too, believe me. But I’ll take what I can get. And right now—” He cut himself off with another kiss.

The limo slowed, and we broke the kiss to look out the window.

“Shit,” Anthony muttered.

I scowled at the airport, which loomed at the end of a strip of pavement that was much, much too short.

We separated, clearing our throats and straightening our clothes andnotlooking in each other’s directions. I took a few deep breaths and willed myself to calm down at least enough to hide my very visual response to Anthony’s touch. And that worked.Reallywell. The driver pulled up and stopped under the ARRIVALS sign, and I was still aroused. Still hard. Still losing my fucking mind.

Shit. Shit.Shit.

“We’re waiting outside Arrivals,” Anthony said into his phone. “Five minutes? All right, he’ll be there.” He hung up and looked at me, lips parted like he was about to speak. Instead he paused, cocked his head slightly, then reached for his notebook. “I meant to tell you about this earlier. Latest polls are in.”

Really? Seriously? You think I can focus on this shit right now?

Evidently he did. He flipped to a page in his notebook, and after about forty-five seconds of poring over dry, confusing numbers that made absolutely no sense, at least my body temperature and heart rate had come back down to something close to normal. Talk about a mental cold shower.

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