been?” Daniel asked, stalling for time.
If Brian was calling him now, that only meant one thing. The man had been hired to run yet another political campaign and he wanted his right-hand man by his side. Never mind that Daniel Lee had walked away from politics and made it clear that he was never going back.
“I’ve got a job for you,” Brian said, sounding sure of himself.
It was hard to surprise Daniel Lee. He made secrets his business. So he wasn’t all that surprised that Brian was reaching out to him. What did surprise him was his own physical response. Daniel—a man who was rumored by his political enemies to not even have a soul—felt an anxious coiling in his stomach that was only dimly recognizable as guilt. “I have a job, Brian.”
“Doing what? Running a marketing department for a beer company? Come on, Lee. We both know you’re wasting your talents.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. Brian didn’t know the first thing about business—or loyalty. Daniel wasn’t just running a marketing firm for a beer company—he was running a family business. His last name might not be Beaumont, but he was one all the same.
Every time he thought of his position here at the Beaumont Brewery—second-in-command to his half brother, Zeb Richards—he almost wished his grandfather, Lee Dae-Won, could have lived long enough to see Daniel take his rightful place in a family business—even if it wasn’t Dae-Won’s business. “I told you I was out.”
As he spoke, he started searching. Who was Brian working for now?
“Yeah, yeah—that’s what you said. But you and I both know you didn’t mean it. This one’s going to be fun—carte blanche.” There was a pause. “You find it yet?”
Damn. Of course Brian knew him well enough to know Daniel was already looking. “You could tell me,” he said as he found it.
Missouri Senator Resigns In Disgrace; Male Escort Tells All.
Missouri? The hairs on the back of Daniel’s neck stood up. Brian couldn’t seriously mean...
“Clarence Murray wants to hire you to work on his campaign for a special election for the Missouri Senate seat recently vacated by the disgraced Senator Struthers.” Somehow, Brian managed to sound enthusiastic.
It took a lot to surprise Daniel but for a moment, he was truly stunned.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” It hadn’t even been two years since Daniel had destroyed Clarence Murray in a bid for the Missouri governor’s office. “Murray is insane.”
“However true that may or may not be, he has a lot of well-funded campaign donors.” Brian’s voice had leveled out, which was not a good sign.
“After what we did to him two years ago, you still think he’s electable?” But even as he asked, Daniel knew how Brian would respond.
“It’s not my job to decide if he’s electable or not. He and his donors think he’s electable, so it’s my job to assemble a team and get him elected. That’s where you come in.”
Daniel kept searching. Murray, it seemed, had spent the better part of the last two years lying low and rebuilding his supporter base. Clarence Murray was a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He played well across the Bible Belt and had a solid evangelical base. But his beliefs were extreme and would never have a crossover appeal.
“No,” he told Brian.
“Come on, Lee—it’ll be fun. I’m already hearing whispers that Democrats think they can win this seat.”
And then, there she was—halfway down the list of search results. Daniel recognized that headline—he had written it himself. He had chosen the picture of her because the angle was horrible and she looked like she had three extra chins. Seeing it again hit him like a punch to the gut.
Murray’s Daughter Pregnant—Who Is The Baby Daddy?
Clarence Murray might have delusions of grandeur about being God’s chosen politician. But in the end, it had been his pregnant daughter who had cost him the election. His pregnant, unmarried daughter.
Christine Murray.
Because Daniel was the one who had made her a campaign issue.
All was fair in love and war—and politics. For years, Daniel had played the game as well as anyone. Sometimes his candidates lost. More often than not, they won. Each time Daniel had worked a campaign, he’d gotten better at ferreting out secrets. And if candidates had few secrets, then Daniel had...well, not invented them. But he had always found some kernel of truth that could be stretched into something resembling a scandal. Nobody was completely clean.
Not even Daniel.
He read about Christine Murray, that anxious pit in his stomach coiling more tightly, a snake getting ready to strike. It didn’t seem possible that he felt bad about what he had done. He never had before. But as he looked at the images of her online—and the headlines that he had not written about her—he had to face the fact that he had done a terrible thing to an innocent bystander.
“You know they’re going to come after his daughter again.”
As odd as it seemed now, it appeared that, at the advanced age of thirty-four, Daniel Lee had developed a conscience.
Christine Murray had been twenty-four years old when her father had run for governor. From what Daniel had been able to dig up, she hadn’t lived at home since she’d gone to college at the age of eighteen. She’d had a wild youth after the death of her mother—the stereotypical preacher’s daughter—but by all appearances she had quickly settled down. She’d gotten a degree in finance. By all accounts, she had very little to do with Clarence Murray. Instead, she had gotten engaged and then gotten pregnant. By itself, there really wasn’t anything scandalous about that.
Except that her father was running on a faith-and-family-values platform and having an unwed, pregnant daughter was exactly the sort of ammunition Daniel had needed to knock Clarence Murray out of the race.
Daniel had dragged that woman through the mud. When her fiancé had dumped her, Daniel had made hay while the sun still shone.
“I wouldn’t worry about her,” Brian said, sounding smug. “I have a plan. But I need you by my side. What do you say to one more—for old time’s sake?”
Consciences were messy things. Daniel’s stomach turned. No wonder he hadn’t had one for so long.
Christine Murray stared at him from dozens of photos on his computer screen. Blonde, petite, curvy, with huge blue eyes—absolutely beautiful, except that, in all of the pictures, she looked like a wild deer that had been cornered by a pack of hungry wolves.
“Can’t help you,” Daniel told Brian. Because he couldn’t. He hadn’t felt bad about working to defeat Clarence Murray. The man was not fit to govern.
But Christine Murray?
“Lee, quit joking around. It’s going to be a bloodbath and I need you by my side. No one can uncover secrets like you.”
“Good luck with your candidate,” he said. “But I’m out.”
Brian
