Special Interests by Emma Barry

Author:Emma Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

“No, that isn’t okay. As I’ve explained, the signs are for a rally. They need to be delivered before ten on Monday morning. Work on that, will you please? Get back to me today.”

Millie hung up the phone and moved on to the next item on her to-do list. She was organizing rallies in five different states involving a phalanx of details: sites to be reserved, permits to be obtained, speakers to be arranged, members to be mobilized and, yes, signs to be ordered.

Because she’d finally had a good night’s sleep, she felt up to all the tasks. Maybe her nightmares had run their course. Maybe Parker Beckett was a miracle worker. Regardless, she had slept—thank the Lord—and could attack the things she needed to do.

While the budget negotiations were taking a different direction than they had been a few weeks earlier, Millie’s organization was still concerned that Congressional Democrats were demonstrating insufficient concern for the needs of working people. The rallies were designed to remind some powerful and vulnerable House members who kept them in their jobs.

These were the latest entry in her larger revival-of-American-labor project. In college, she had studied philosophy, becoming concerned about how personhood and property ownership had become entangled starting in the eighteenth century. The citizen had been coded bourgeois, making the working man and woman different and lesser. To engage in wage-earning work, particularly with one’s hands, was to be marked.

It wasn’t just a philosophical problem. In the struggle between capital and labor in American history, the deck was almost comically biased toward capital. Her work was a way to even the playing field. When she hadn’t been able to find a job as a labor field organizer, she’d happily accepted this gig as a way to support the union cause and to ensure that a range of voices, including working people’s, were represented in policy debates. For six years, she’d chipped away at projects like this one.

If anything, getting to know Parker had strengthened her resolve. She didn’t know what to make of his ruthlessness. Part of her respected it. American labor used to be so strong, almost frighteningly so. Couldn’t they find a medium? A way to get a seat at the table that didn’t involve sacrificing values or partnering with criminals? Did strength always have to be scary?

But she couldn’t pretend that some of her concern about Parker’s tactics wasn’t personal. If he could callously disregard the very people who got Democrats elected or abandon their core commitments, what would stop him from walking away from her whenever their...liaison proved inconvenient? But he had invited her to his sacred family dinner. Whatever else he was willing to sacrifice, his family was sacrosanct. And he wanted her to meet them.

Millie pulled together some things for an impromptu staff meeting and chastised herself. She’d been on two dates with the guy—there was no need to have everything spelled out.

In the conference room, she found Paul and several of her coworkers huddled around a phone, reading something.

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