Read Whitewash for Free Online Page A

couldn’t quite imagine why a noisy and empty minifridge wasn’t quite the same as a well-stocked minibar. Jason straightened his tie and gave his shirt cuffs a tug as if the altercation had included more than a tongue-lashing. He wanted to hit the guy. In the past he would have. He knew his boss would be okay with the room, but Jason wasn’t okay with it.
    He balled up his fist around the key card to the pathetic suite and jammed it into his back trouser pocket. His job was to ensure that the senator got only the best and that he would be well taken care of. A particularly difficult task this morning since none of the goddamn hotel staff—not a single one with English as a first language—even knew who Senator John Quincy Allen was. Okay, so it was one more good reason to support his boss’s stand on immigration, which pretty much supported sending the whole goddamn lot back and building a wall.
    Earlier Jason had considered pulling up stakes and going to a different hotel, but it probably wouldn’t make much difference. There wasn’t a decent four-star hotel in the entire city. Now he wished the senator hadn’t been hell-bent on staying overnight. Maybe he could convince him to take a flight back after the tour. If nothing else, he could at least save the senator from the head chef’s runny omelet. Jason could still taste the damn thing. The grits had been runny, too, not that Jason understood why every breakfast in the South had to include that stuff, anyway. Again, the omelet wouldn’t matter to the senator. The grits would, though the man wouldn’t complain. There’d be only that drop of the eyes and a slight nod as if to say, “So this is the best you could do.”
    God, he hated that look of disappointment, a look that said, “So this is how you repay me.” Sometimes he’d rather the man chew him out instead. Jason’s uncle Louie used to say, “It ain’t healthy for a man not to say what’s on his mind. You keep it all bottled up, eventually you blow up.” Uncle Louie wasn’t much of a scholar, but he knew a thing or two about common sense, which was certainly one thing Jason discovered to be lacking in D.C. big-time.
    But Jason also knew the difference between people who inherited good manners and discipline and those who had to learn it from scratch, the difference between Senator John Quincy Allen and Uncle Louie. It was the difference between Jason walking away from that stupid-ass manager instead of slamming the bastard’s smug face into the wall.
    He rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck, but knew the tight ball of tension was there for the day. He flipped open his cell phone as he reached the bank of elevators and punched the Up arrow. While he waited he scrolled down his phone’s call list. The elevator doors opened to two chattering maids and Jason held the door open, standing back. When they noticed him their conversation stopped immediately in midsentence—pretty obvious even if he didn’t understand the language. The older one bowed her head as she passed by while the younger woman smiled at him, a wonderfully coy smile as though she had no clue she had a nice ass. But then she glanced back over her shoulder as if to make sure he noticed the tight ass. It only reminded him that this discipline thing pretty much sucked and it certainly couldn’t be healthy for a twenty-six-year-old male.
    It wasn’t like there was some chief of staff how-to-behave manual or that anyone had ever come right out and told him what was and wasn’t acceptable behavior for a senator’s chief of staff. No, that much he’d figured out for himself. It didn’t take long for Jason to realize that politics were constantly one major innuendo after another whether you were making deals or breaking balls. They even gave the insinuations fancy names and phrases like “the politics of personal destruction.” But where Jason came from it didn’t matter what you called it or how polite you did it,