The Belle and the Beard by Kate Canterbary (carter reed TXT) 📗

ought to continue putting all her energy into running the local campaign office when it seemed like my boss might not make it past the early primary races, I told her not to waste her time, especially not for the lucrative salary of zero dollars. I said he didn't have an ice cream cone's chance in hell but it didn't really matter because the presidential bid was primarily focused on raising his progressive street cred and elevating his status as a power player in the Senate." She tossed her hands up. "I spilled the house secrets live on-air. Before I fully understood what'd happened, the host informed me that the campaign tweeted out a statement and I was no longer on staff." She glanced at me, smirking as I struggled and failed to contain my laughter. "It's kind of amazing you had no idea about any of this. I'm a meme, a punchline, a cautionary tale."

"I don't watch television." I sobered a bit. "And social media is too noisy for me so I miss all that." I closed my hand around her wrist, drawing her to a stop. "But even if I hadn't missed it, I wouldn't give a fuck."

"I see we've returned to you manhandling me."

"Can you back up a few paces and explain what you do? You're on TV and you're briefing a chain-smoker in his underwear and there's enough dirt in your vent session to bring down a presidential candidate? Who the hell are you, Jasper-Anne Cleary?"

She gave a flippant little shrug, saying, "I'm the special advisor to Senator Tyson Timbrooks of Georgia."

"And…what does a special advisor do?"

"During campaign cycles, I drive the strategic agenda. In the off years, I fix problems. Basically, I play a really fucked-up game of chess."

"Yeah." I studied her for a moment. I never would've guessed any of this but it fit. Jasper was nothing if not unstoppable and I bet she fixed the hell out of those problems, but there was no missing the bitterness in her tone. The hardness. "Yeah, that sounds right."

"Once upon a time it did. No one in Washington wants to be within fifty feet of me right now. The campaign has blacklisted me everywhere. The only people returning my calls are reporters and TV hosts, and campaigns that want to pump me for free opposition research."

Now it all made sense. "That's why you're here. Why you're staying in Midge's cottage."

She reached down to run her fingers over a fern, again missing my eyes. "Only place left to go."

"What happens next?"

She looked up at the canopy, squinted at the dappled sunlight streaming in. "I meet with an attorney tomorrow morning to review the terms of the divorce and sign the papers so Preston can marry this new gal of his. After that, I keep fixing up the house and hope I'm freed from this exile eventually. I can't see the Beltway gang permanently banning me. That only happened to Nixon. Everyone else bounces back."

Fuck. I wanted to hug the stuffing out of her. What a fucking horrible time she was having—and I kept criticizing her baking. It was objectively terrible but she needed to catch a break somewhere. I could've faked it for someone suffering through this much personal garbage.

"Do you want to bounce back?"

Her head snapped up, her eyes hot. "Of course I do."

"If you say so." I gestured to the trees ahead as we walked. "How did you get this job in the first place?"

"I started working for Timbrooks in high school. My senior year U.S. government class required everyone to volunteer with a campaign, and since my family is flat-earth, dinosaurs-are-a-myth conservative, I chose the most progressive candidate in all the races."

"Nice." I chuckled. "Spite is an undervalued motivation."

"I worked on his first U.S. Senate bid that year and managed the local campaign office after graduation."

"Of course you did. Of course you went from intern to manager in—what was it? A month? Two?"

"Eight months," she replied, giving me her first true laugh of the afternoon. "But that only happened because he was a long-shot, no-name candidate and there was no support from the party."

"But he won."

"He did." I could hear the satisfaction in those two words. I could lick that pride right off her. "I worked for the senator through college. Mostly get-out-the-vote initiatives, voter registration drives, setting up small, community-based fundraisers, and organizing phone bank centers. Basic stuff like that."

"You ran a grassroots senate campaign while you were in college. That's a big deal. I lasted one summer as a bartender. That's what I did in college."

"It kept my family mad, so yeah, I kept doing it."

"As good a reason as any," I murmured.

"When I was finishing my last year at University of Georgia, the senator lost a bunch of his top staffers to other opportunities. It happens like that when an elected official comes in with a fresh new class of staffers. They lose a good chunk of them after three or four years because few people can handle the pace for much longer than a sprint." She pulled the sleeves of her shirt down over her fingers, closed her hands around the fabric. It was adorable. "I was hired as the deputy state director, which basically meant I kept the wheels turning in Timbrooks's office back home in Georgia. Scheduling appearances and coordinating locations, fundraisers and phone banks."

"Same things you did in college," I said.

"Yeah but you don't complain about it when you're working for an upstart underdog. You do whatever it takes to get the job done."

"When did you become the fixer of the problems?"

"When I started fixing the problems," she replied with that no bullshit, I can kill you with my words tone. "When the chief of staff in D.C. botched the handling of an event and I cleaned up the mess before it became a public-facing mess. I moved to D.C. that year and took over as deputy chief of staff. I've been fixing and cleaning for Timbrooks—and