Free Indecent Proposal by Molly O'Keefe

Montgomery in on what’s going on with you.”
    “Don’t, Wes.” She stood, because these were not idle threats with her brother. Not at all. He would do just that and feel as if his actions were totally justified.
    “Tell me why I shouldn’t?”
    “Because I need some time to think!” she cried. “Because this is my life, and I just realized that the father ofmy unborn baby is running for Congress. Maybe I don’t want him involved in it!”
    “You’ve got to be realistic. He is in a financial position to help you.”
    “I don’t give a shit, Wes. He’s in the middle of a campaign—this could seriously mess that up for him.”
    “You’re kidding me, right? You’re pregnant, alone, and broke and you’re worried about his fucking campaign?”
    Ryan sat back down on the couch, suddenly exhausted. By everything. The baby growing in her stomach, her tiny apartment, her brother.
    Harrison Montgomery.
    That explained the gravitas.
    And the complicated family.
    In fact, details of that whole night rearranged themselves into a different order. A different reality. She had a very hard-won sense of her own worth and it took some great weight to crush her, but Harrison Montgomery lowering himself from his lofty heights did it.
    Harry had been slumming.
    But even as she thought it, even as the proof seemed irrefutable, she didn’t want to believe it. He had not been in that bar looking to score. Drinking away the pain of his sister’s unsure future at the hands of Somali pirates had been his objective.
    Christ , she thought. Amazed anew at how he’d kept his shit together that night.
    There was not a chance in the world she would have had that kind of poise in the face of something that terrifying. She’d have been running down the streets of New York like a lunatic, not sitting so still in the corner of a bar like he was the axis upon which the world spun.
    “Can we just take a break for a while?” she said. “You can go back to telling me how impossible my life is in a little bit. Okay?”
    Wes braced his hands on his lean hips, his burgundy tee shirt worn and thin over black jeans and work boots. The Wes Kaminski uniform. She wondered if his secret job paid him at all.
    “Fine,” he sighed. “Take a nap. I’m going to go to the store.” He opened the fridge and took quick stock. “You’ve been living on milk?”
    “And oranges. Get lots of them. And sometimes I want peanut butter. Crunchy.”
    “What about meat?”
    She gagged at the thought.
    “Got it,” Wes said with a smile, and she felt all her defenses get wobbly. Everything was wobbly, and she pulled the chenille blanket—red to match her teacups—from the back of the love seat over her tired and sore body.
    “I’ll be okay, Wes. I always am. I just need some time to figure this out.”
    “You don’t have a lot of time, Ryan.”
    “I’ve got nine months.”
    Her eyes drifted shut and she didn’t hear her brother whisper, “You’ve got until Friday.”
    Friday, August 23
The Governor’s Mansion
    Harrison’s BlackBerry was getting hot in his hand, nearly burning his ear.
    “We have got to do something, Harrison,” Wallace was saying. “Glendale is killing us in the press. You look like a Boy Scout. Like literally, an earnest little boy in shorts with a stupid sash and knee socks.”
    “I get the idea, Wallace,” he said, pacing the front porch of the Governor’s Mansion in the bright noon sunlight. Inside, the bullshit was thick on the floor ashis mother was telling the Southern Living staff writer all about her heritage recipe for Georgia Caviar, a black-eyed pea salad his mother had never made in her life.
    And his father was pretending that these family meals had been a tradition for as long as he’d been in the mansion. There was even a baseball game playing on the television.
    When Ted had been running for the Senate the first time and Harrison had been six or so, Mom arranged a press conference at a park so newspapers