Free Presidential Deal by Les Standiford Page A

a cruise ship while exotic scents and tropical scenery glided past. She could still feel the giddiness born of the palpitating heat, the tang of cocoa butter everywhere, the faint grittiness of sand that clung to her skin no matter how many cool showers she took, the soft
crash-crash
of the coconut fronds above her head, and the easy smiles of the boys from coastal Carolina who danced in the sand, some slow jitterbug step they called the “Shag” that seemed to lend itself to almost any song.
    Truly odd, Linda thought, walking to the window of the waiting room to stare out over the hotel’s marina at the calm waters of the bay. Something about that visit she’d never really gotten over. Some vision of paradise born of a sheltered Missouri girl’s postadolescent experience, and though nearly a quarter-century had passed, and she had traveled the world, and taken degrees, and practiced law and married a man who had turned her from a career-driven attorney into the First Lady, she still indulged that improbable, exotic vision of a life under the cocoa-buttered palms.
    She turned to Leslie Blanding, who was standing nearby, studying her notepad. “Did you ever come here, Leslie, back in college, I mean?”
    Leslie gave her a curious glance. “To Miami?”
    “Well, you know, Fort Lauderdale, spring break,
Where the Boys Are
, all that.”
    Leslie smiled, shook her head. “I was a California girl, remember. We always had the beach.”
    “Right,” Linda said. “I’d forgotten.” Blonde, slender, self-assured, untroubled Leslie. She looked like she’d grown up in a place everyone else had pined for. No pent-up longing for a life in some far-flung paradise for her, Linda thought. No yearning to escape small-town life and small-town thinking. None of the Midwestern baggage of self-doubt, the Gatsby-like compulsion to prove yourself on the bigger stage. What must that be like, she wondered? No Calvinistic baggage of guilt, no innate tendencies toward self-denial. Leslie Blanding had probably had one of those mothers who took their daughters in for birth control pills as casually as Linda had been fitted for braces.
    She laughed then, chiding herself for her silliness. Good grief. Projecting all this on poor, sweet Leslie, who worked like a Turk and by all accounts idolized her and her husband, who never failed to mention how fortunate she felt to have such a job as this, attending to a million and one trivial details of protocol and public relations most hours of her waking life.
    “Something wrong, Mrs. Sheldon?” Leslie was staring at her uncertainly.
    Linda gave her a smile she hoped was reassuring. “Just thinking about the last time I was here,” she said.
    “I don’t remember that,” said Leslie. She was clearly puzzled now, obviously trying to reference some forgotten affair of state.
    “I was just a girl,” Linda said, and waved her hand in dismissal. “Now let’s see that speech that Frank was supposed to read. I’m sure there’s plenty of testosterone we’ll have to boil out before
I
can read it.”
    Leslie Blanding smiled then, and Linda thought she caught a glimpse of something cross the face of the Secret Service man who stood at attention just inside the door to their room, though whether it was amusement, amazement, or disapproval, she couldn’t tell, and it really didn’t matter. She had come to be who she was, and she was comfortable with that, she thought as she took the sheaf of papers from Leslie. Anyone who wasn’t, they would just have to vote for another First Lady, now wouldn’t they?

Chapter 8
    “This is really some
do
, isn’t it?” The voice rose over the din of conversation that filled the room.
    Deal shielded his face from the lights of a television crew panning the hospitality suite and turned to the person who had spoken to him, an ebony-skinned man in his late twenties wearing a cream-colored sport coat, dark brown slacks, checked shirt, knit tie. Despite what Driscoll