Smoke and Sin (The Perfect Gentlemen 4)

So Zack was back to mooning over his press secretary. Little surprise. Roman tried to refocus his friend. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means Liz is driving me to drink.”

Roman sighed, searching for patience. “That wasn’t what I was asking.”

Zack slanted him a challenging stare. “Tell me you ever felt an ounce of true passion for Joy.”

“Of course I did.”

“Bullshit. You had a hard-on for the idea of her, not the woman herself. And even that’s a crock of crap.” Zack tossed his hands in the air and resumed pacing. “God, how are we still here? How are we still stuck staring into our Scotches with long faces, denying ourselves everything our hearts want?”

Roman tried to hold on to his temper. Zack didn’t understand. He probably never would. “You might be. But you’re wrong about my feelings for Joy. You don’t really grasp what I want.”

“Is that what you think?” Zack scoffed. “You want a marriage that’s the polar opposite of your parents’. You want a wife who won’t fight with you, who never turns your gut inside out. You want to spend your life with a woman who’s incapable of making you wish you hadn’t met her one minute, and then forces you to realize that you can’t live without her in the next. You, my dense friend, want to feel nothing. You want a housekeeper, hostess, and cook you have sex with, one who wears your ring on her finger like a trophy and doesn’t tug on your heart at all.”

“That’s pretty fucking hypocritical coming from a man who chose the same path.”

“I did, and you know what? I regret it. I didn’t wait long enough. I wasn’t patient, or maybe I just didn’t believe in love. Life is all about perspective, isn’t it? I know you hated the seemingly endless cycle of your parents’ breakups and makeups. Their fighting and the resulting upheaval. But I saw something different. I saw passion. I saw two people who loved each other so much they were willing to fight every day and never give up the struggle to make their marriage work. My parents never did that. My father was the head of the household and when my mother became a problem, he decided she was no longer an asset. So he sent her to a mental ward. Tidy and clinical. Cold. Ruthless.”

Roman conceded that Zack’s father had been downright arctic where Constance was concerned, but his friend didn’t understand what it was like to grow up with constant bellowing and shrieking rattling the walls. To this day, he had recurring nightmares about the stairs vibrating under his feet with the thunder of his parents’ shouted obscenities and slurs while he sat praying they wouldn’t kill each other. The next morning, he’d often creep from his room, expecting another bloody battle in World War III, only to find them sharing a kiss so fiery they’d forgotten he even existed.

“You and Joy were never chilly strangers.”

“No, we were friends. We cared deeply for each other and shared common interests. We were compatible because we had one mutual goal to bind us together: the White House. That was all we talked about, all we planned for. We had sex maybe twenty times our entire marriage.”

Roman felt his jaw drop. They’d been married for six years before her death. “Are you kidding me?”

“I’m pretty sure you and Gus went at it more than that the first week you started sleeping together. You can discount that kind of passion all you like, but I can’t live without it anymore. I can’t be this hollow on the inside for the rest of my life. I need Liz to come back.” Zack cast an agitated glance out the window again.

Roman watched numbly. Oh, his first week with Gus. He remembered those golden days with perfect clarity, as if they had just happened yesterday. The two of them had gotten into a horrible argument about politics. One minute she’d been calling him a blind nationalist who couldn’t see the future because his head was too far up Zack’s ass…and the next he was tearing off her clothes and thrusting as deep into her as he could manage on the kitchen table.

He’d been so desperate. He hadn’t wanted sex with Augustine. He’d needed it. He’d had to have it or he would fucking die.

And that had scared the shit out of him.

Roman stood. “I didn’t know about you and Joy.”

Zack took a deep breath and turned. “I didn’t want anyone to know. I went into the marriage knowing exactly what it would be. I expected peace. What I didn’t expect was the emptiness. I truly loved her, but I was never in love with her. Then, when I met Elizabeth, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.”

“Augustine isn’t Elizabeth,” Roman insisted.

“And you aren’t me. But Elizabeth drives me crazy.”

“The way Gus makes me insane,” he admitted.

“But in a good way…if you’d let her.” Zack shook his head. “I see you making the same mistakes over and over. It damn near kills me. What the hell are you doing with Darcy Hildebrandt? A woman like that would put you to sleep for the rest of your life.”

“I’m not doing anything with her except working and being polite. Why does everyone assume there’s something going on between us?”

“Because I watched you with her tonight.”

Roman couldn’t BS Zack—or himself. He’d paid careful attention to Darcy. The woman had been nice to a fault. She never raised her voice and she knew how to make a man feel as if he was in control, powerful. She checked a lot of the boxes on his list.

Damn it. Even listening to his own thoughts, he sounded like he needed therapy. Or a swift kick. He didn’t want to be this asshole.

“Are you going to date her?”

“No.” Roman couldn’t. While he admitted that Darcy interested him on some level, she didn’t intrigue him. She didn’t tie him in knots and make him sweat. She certainly didn’t make him hard, like Augustine, who was so close he could almost taste her. “I want Gus. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t seem to stop myself.”

“Why the fuck should you stop yourself? I understand the past. We were all young and stupid and ambitious, but I’m going to ask the only question that matters now. Are you happy?”

“Of course.” Wasn’t he? He’d accomplished everything he’d promised his ladder-climbing twenty-something self he would. He’d reached the pinnacle of power.

“Well, I’m not. I’m done. When we get back to the States next week, I’m going to announce that I won’t seek a second term. Maybe if the Russians figure out I’m not going to play these games anymore, they’ll let up.”

Roman stopped, his whole world tilting askew. All of their lives, they’d worked to be here. When other kids had dreamed about being baseball players or rock stars, he and Zack had dreamed of the White House. Now Zack intended to throw it all away without a fight? “How could you make a decision like this without consulting me?”

Zack slumped back on the couch. “I don’t know what to do, Roman. Some moments I think that’s the right move. Others…I’m not sure if announcing I won’t seek a second term would launch the conspirators’ plans into more rapid motion. The not knowing is killing me.”

Roman sat beside him. There was zero chance he would allow Zack to give up his second term. They still had a lot of work to do for the people, policies to implement that would make a difference in Americans’ lives. Zack was a popular president who knew how to get things done. And Roman would protect his friend’s legacy, as always. That meant dealing with the situation they found themselves mired in now.

“I’ll figure this out and take care of everything,” he promised Zack. “I leave for Homewood Sanatorium the day after tomorrow. I’ve got myself set up at a B and B. It’s way out in the country. I doubt anyone there will know who I am. I’m going to figure out what happened to your mother. Maybe then we’ll know who’s coming for you.”

“And why. I want to know why.” Zack looked older than his years, a deep crease of worry furrowing his brow. “I want to know why all these people around me had to die. What do these assholes want? Why did they put me here? Roman, what if I’m not Zack Hayes?”

His stomach flipped. He’

d looked at the problem from all angles, and this was one of the ugliest scenarios he’d considered. “You are. I don’t care what happens or what comes out of this investigation. You’ve got to be Zack Hayes.”

“What if I’m really Sergei?” He finally voiced the question, his tone strained and hollow.

This was the possibility they’d all begun to fear. “You’re Zack.”

“Natalia Kuilikov gave birth to a son around the same time I was born. Her child died, according to all the records. And yet when Connor and Lara talked to her, she still spoke fondly about her Sergei, as if he was still alive.”

This was the most compelling evidence they had to support the conclusion that Zack was actually the son of his former Russian nanny, but it was all circumstantial. With one bullet, the Russians had ensured that Natalia would never talk to anyone ever again.

The only other way to know for certain, comparing DNA samples, was impossible. The president of the United States couldn’t demand the genetic material of a dead Russian citizen who’d cared for him as an infant without raising brows and setting chins wagging. And since Franklin had given away everything of Constance’s shortly after her death, Zack had no hairs from a brush or the like with which to compare her genetic material to his. Nor could he exhume her body for answers since she’d been cremated. Even if he could, turning up graves wouldn’t go unnoticed—either by the press or his enemies. “We don’t know for certain if that was her son’s name.”