Against the Wind by Anne Stuart Read Free Book Online Page A

to, from his wife to his father-in-law to his party to his constituents. Everyone wanted him to but his sixteen-year-old daughter.
    She’d heard the results of the primaries up at herboarding school in Massachusetts. She’d watched her father make his speeches on television and hadn’t even noticed the ever-present shadow of his mandatory Secret Service protection hovering behind him. Her brother, Stephen, was in his first year at Harvard, and the two of them would meet on weekends with a pact to ignore the old man’s political aspirations.
    “Besides,” Stephen had said, running a nervous hand through his shaggy hair, “you know this is Mother’s idea more than it is Dad’s. If it were left up to him he’d probably be working in the Peace Corps down in San Pablo or some god-forsaken place like that.”
    “Maybe he feels he can help them better as President,” Maddy had offered.
    “Maybe. But I know that I sure as hell don’t want to end up in the White House,” Stephen had said bitterly. “And I don’t want to be part of this damned campaign. I’d better warn you right now, Maddy, I’m not coming home this summer to be part of this circus. If he wants to make it to the White House he’ll have to do it without my help.”
    And all her protests couldn’t move him. He’d ended up traveling cross country with a couple of his friends, out of reach of his parents’ demands, and by the end of the summer their lives had changed past recognition.
    Maddy could never think back to that summer without a pang of pain and longing, a longing for a life that was no more, pain for all the waste. And a wry reflection that there was nothing like being almost seventeen and in love for the first time.
    She first saw him in June. She’d been home for ten days, alone in the big old house in McLean, with only the household staff to keep her company while her parents were out in California, drumming up votes. Her motherhad ordered her to fly out and join them, a perfect family for the delectation of the American voting public, but Maddy had refused. The last thing she was going to do was be put on display like a great gawky overgrown schoolgirl. After miserable years of skinny flat-chested jealousy she had just begun to develop, and she was even more self-conscious than usual. She welcomed the solitude of the big old house in early summer, dreading the return of what Stephen had rightly called a circus. Complete with omnipresent reporters, Secret Service men, her mother’s army of social secretaries, and the myriad of other human detritus that filled her parents’ life. She could only hope she’d get lost in the shuffle.
    She’d heard them come in the night before. How could she have missed it? The glare from the television camera lights on the front lawn penetrated the darkness of her third-floor bedroom, and the babble of voices filtered through the pillow over her head. She turned on her radio to drown out the noise with music, but it was the hourly news report, full of Senator Lambert’s return to Washington, triumphant from his good showing in the California primary.
    It was early morning when she woke up, hours before her family would awake and she’d be called upon to be The Candidate’s Daughter, hours before her life was no longer her own. She climbed out of bed, pulling on her moth-eaten old one-piece bathing suit that her mother had threatened to throw out more than once. She was straining the previously flat expanse of the top of it, and she pulled on one of Stephen’s outsized shirts and drew it around her. Wouldn’t you know, she told herself wryly, that after years of longing for a figure it was now a source of continual embarrassment?
    Not that there was even that much to be embarrassedabout. No one would have noticed, if it weren’t for her mother’s constant, seemingly sadistic delight in calling attention to it. Maddy leaned down and peered at her reflection in the mirror that was set too low for