7.
Three days later the confirmation of Barb’s appointment as Ambassador to the Commonwealth of Providencia was still languishing in the Senate, where a powerful southern Senator was holding up the process in committee. She’d spent two of those days sightseeing and trying hard to avoid any further carnal encounters with Leo McIntyre. This, she had done out of a mixture of guilt and repentance … guilt over having cheated on Roger and repentance in the sense that she wished to wash the guilt away by being loyal to her husband going forward.
Unfortunately, Leo was a hard man to avoid or deny. She wasn’t sure why he could get his way with her so easily. He was at least twenty years older, a declared womanizer, and more than a bit full of himself … all of which would have normally been a turn off for her. But, he was also quite handsome, stylish, mannered and powerful, not to mention the fact that he could let himself into her hotel room at will. And, sure enough, after two days he turned up in her room unannounced around midnight and crawled into bed with her.
She couldn’t remember how many times, and in how many ways, they had ‘done it’ that night. But what had surprised her was the fact that when he announced suddenly, after a particularly intense coupling, that he wanted to punish her for trying to avoid him over the past couple of days, she had actually liked being punished.
Not that it didn’t hurt like hell. It did! She was still sore that morning and sitting rather gingerly on her bottom while eating breakfast alongside him down in Edgar’s.
Her punishment had consisted of him ordering her out of bed to stand naked in the middle of her hotel room, bent over and gripping her ankles while he administered a dozen of what he referred to as “disciplinary strokes” with a big leather strap. And every time she let go of her ankles to straighten up and grab her flaming ass cheeks, he had announced that she would be required to endure an additional penalty stroke.
In the end, he gave her not twelve but nineteen!
And then, oddly, the sex they had after that was even more intense than the sex they had before. They had gone after one another with a wild abandon she never thought possible. The orgasms she had experienced after the strapping were so over the top … so unimaginably good … they simply couldn’t be described.
But this morning he was all business. He told her that her confirmation was still held up in the Senate and declared that it was high time they did something about it. Which meant he had invited Josh Handelman, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and campaign political strategist to join them for breakfast. Tall and lanky, with a certain lovable boyish charm, she liked Josh immediately. As professional political organizers she and he spoke the same language.
Over waffles smothered in maple syrup, serious amounts of which ended up on his tie, Josh scoped out the current nomination situation for Leo and Barb. It turned out that the ‘hold up’ on her nomination was due to the machinations of one Senator, a Republican from Texas by the name of Mo Fink. Old Mo, according to Josh, was a ‘good old boy’ Southern politician who was always adept at creating procedural problems. He’d been in the Senate a very long time and could pull in enough favors to stop any nomination from ever getting out of committee.
“But why would he oppose an ambassadorial nomination to Providencia, of all places?” mused Leo. “No offense. Barb, but why would anyone care about an out of the way place like that?”
“Word has it, Leo, that Mo cares. I’ve checked into his travel logs. Seems he goes down there several times a year to visit a longtime pal … a mysterious billionaire friend who owns a whole island in Providencia called Pirate Cay.”
“So, he has a buddy down there. What has that to do with Barb’s nomination?”
“Maybe nothing more than he and his buddy don’t like Democrats. But I’m doing some checking.”
“That could take some time,” interjected Barb. “Isn’t there something we can do in the short term? Throw him a little home state pork, a photo op with the Prez, or something like that?”
“Well. I was coming to that,” replied Josh, signaling to the waitstaff for a refill on his coffee. “The Senator has a notorious eye for attractive-looking women. Congressional interns avoid him like the plague. They say no one gets on an elevator with him without being groped or pinched, or worse!”
“In this day and age?” remarked Barb incredulously.
“So here’s my suggestion,” continued Josh, slopping coffee on the table and mopping it up with his suit jacket sleeve. “We outfit Barb here in something very provocative … as revealing as possible … and send her up to the Hill to meet Mo personally in the hope that he might take one good look at her and decide it would be just fine and dandy to have a little piece of Yankee cotton candy down there in Providencia to look up whenever he pays a visit to his billionaire pal.
“I resent being likened to cotton candy!” exclaimed Barb indignantly. “Hello? What century is this?”
“You do look great in an itsy-bitsy string bikini,” grinned Leo.
Barb punched him hard on the shoulder.
“Am I missing something here?” asked Josh, eyeing the two of them quizzically.
Leo rolled his eyes.
Barb punched him again.
“Okay, we have a plan then,” concluded Josh. “I’ll phone Mo’s people and set up a meeting between him and Barb for later this afternoon. Leo, see if you can find her something suitably alluring to wear other than a string bikini, okay?”
“No problem. Josh. Barb and I will go up to her room right away to check and see what she has to wear that will fill the bill. I’ll have her model a few options for me, and if none of them suffices, I’ll have my Secret Service detail take her out shopping,”
Barb punched him a third time.