14. Charlotte

Charlotte

While she couldn’t dismiss that both Leonard and Dr White were present and listening, Charlotte could no longer repress the desperate anxiety that was threatening to overwhelm her.

“It’s Charlotte,” she said quietly. “Grace, I fucked up. Like really fucked up. Like I make you look like a demure kind of lady, fucked up.”

The only sound down the line was masculine moans and the slapping of flesh on flesh. Damn, couldn’t they stop for just five minutes?

“I’m gonna mute you for a minute,” Grace said, crackling on the line telling her the woman had failed to do just that. “It’s Charlotte, and for once she needs me. Make this a fast one boys, and then get me something to eat and drink. I’m parched and I’m starving.”

“Come on guys,” a male voice replied. “If she wants to come fast, then it needs to be a group effort. Don’t hold back, either. I think little Gracie needs to remember who’s in charge during her heat.”

Oh. Em. Gee.

Quickly Charlotte punched the button to mute the call, looking at the two men beside her with wide eyes. “Who the fuck is she with?”

Leonard smirked. “Three fox shifters. They’re triplets, actually. She said it makes it easier, because she can switch between dating the three of them in public, and nobody is the wiser. It means she can date multiple men, something her wolf wants since she can’t have her mate, and yet still keep it all under wraps.”

Without even having to think about it, Charlotte had an image of the guy, or guys as it turned out. Even she hadn’t noticed there was more than one of them. Grace had used him, well them, as her ‘arm candy’ as she liked to call it, on more than one occasion.

“But how does she hide that they have different names?”

“It’s surprisingly easy, and probably another reason she settled with them. Grayson, Grady, and Graydon. They all respond to Gray.”

She squinted at him, noting the amusement on his face. The man was far too smug about this, and also far too knowledgeable. “How do you know so much about it?”

“Grace is a very old friend of my family. I’ve known her all my life. When she fell apart after her mate rejected her, her parents came to me for help. After all, I was the president, and she was the elected representative to humans, we were seeing each other on a daily basis anyway.” He sighed, lost in memories for a moment. “I think they hoped we would get together.”

Her owl sat up straight, clearly pissed at the comment. The trouble was, somehow, Leonard knew.

“It was never in the cards,” he reassured her, only embarrassing her further. “Grace is too dominant for me. Don’t get me wrong, I want my mate to submit, but I want to have earned that privilege too. I also don’t want a submissive mate in general. Grace would have torn my head off with some of the stuff my lion pushes me to do. Like this whole scene just now? She would have ripped me a new one already.”

Okay, that was true. Not only did he not smell like a lie, but she knew her boss well enough to verify it. Still, it rankled that people wanted him to look elsewhere for a mate, no matter how inappropriate the match. Bonny Kelsing was only the beginning when it came to the lion shifter community too. Lionesses would pressure him, a strong leader, to spread his genes far and wide amongst the available females — fated mate or not.

The phone in her hand flashed, then flashed again, catching her attention.

Incoming call: Grace Diaz. Accept? Decline?

“You’d better answer that,” Leonard told her.

Suddenly more nervous of talking to her than ever before, Grace stared at it for a moment longer, before Leonard’s long fingers once again took the choice from her, hitting accept before she could decline it.

“Start talking,” Grace said without preamble.

“How long since you’ve seen the news cycle?” Charlotte asked her.

“I’ve got CNN on right now,” Grace said in a flat voice. “You’re pregnant? Because you sure as fuck weren’t when we worked together. I would have scented it. And to the president of all the fucking people.”

Charlotte groaned. “David Carlington-Jones.” It was all she had to say, Grace knew what he was like.

“What did that little cunt do now? I swear by all that’s holy, as soon as my heat is over, I’m going to go out there and rip his fucking nuts off—” her voice cut off with a choked cry. “Someone shot a child? I haven’t been out of the loop for even a day, and the world falls apart?”

Yeah. That was the crux of the whole matter, wasn’t it? Everyone was talking about the wrong thing.

“She was six, Grace. A domestic house cat, and the bigoted bitch next door practically set it all up, only she’s senile, should have been in care a long time ago, and now she’ll never have to face the consequences for what she’s done.”

“Oh god,” Grace moaned. “And the cop too?”

Watching the news ticker across the bottom of her own screen, with the sound turned off, probably like Grace was, as she couldn’t actually hear the television, Charlotte watched as sensational headline after headline scrolled across the screen. They’d wanted the attention of the media and the world for sure, just not like this.

Her boss moaned again, and then finally sighed. “Alright, now give me your version of today.”

So, Grace did. She started with her sense of betrayal after Grace blew the opportunity, knowing for once that her boss was actually listening. She went through everything, fainting, the offer, her growing sense of confusion and being increasingly overwhelmed, the speech writing, moving house, the press conference, and then the sneak attack as they departed, including the gaffe of all gaffes. Finally she ended up with her exact situation, sitting on the floor in the large conference room, a still very naked president hovering nearby, and Dr Watson keeping an eye on them both.

“Is he still hard for you?” Grace asked, snickering.

Unable to stop herself from looking, Charlotte flushed when she saw the dick in question twitch and start to rise again.

“Oh god,” she muttered.

“I’ll take that as a good thing. Either he’s been listening to this the whole time with a painful hard-on — which serves him fucking right, the moron — or he’s reacting to you looking.”

“That,” Charlotte whispered.

Grace howled with laughter. “Girl, you gotta own it, and I’m not just talking about the dick waiting to pound you into next week. You’ve got to own it all. Your mistake, your heartache, your disappointment — all of it. You’re going to have to go out there and show your belly to these people, and if they stab you, you’re going to have to take it like a champ.”

Yep, that sounded just like how Grace would handle it too, except there was one problem with that. She wasn’t Grace.

"I can't do this,” Charlotte whined. “I can't be you. I'm not wired like that."

Grace growled down the line. "Don't try to fucking be me,” she snapped. “I’m fucking fabulous, but there’s only one of me. Besides, they won’t respect you for it.”

“That doesn’t make sense, I don’t have a way. I’m not the front person, I’m the one who comes behind you and clears up any confusion.”

“Charlotte,” Grace said, her tone deadly. “If the roles were reversed, if I had done something like this, fuck, take this morning as an example. I fucked up. What would you do? What would you have me do in an ideal world where I could get over my own shit and be a responsible leader. How would you roll this back?”

She thought about it for a moment. “I would have you do a solo press conference. Make a simple series of statements defining your current medical condition, or lack thereof. Announce that you had only found your fated mate the night before, and have witnesses to the fact. Then I’d let both barrels fly at how poorly the press has behaved, and where is their dignity and respect? I’d apologise profusely to the families inundated with trivia, while the very real issues facing them, were intruded upon by matters of no importance. I’d highlight how tragic the events of the night before were, and how shifters across the country grieved for them, even as they thought about how they could protect their young, vulnerable, and innocent children from ever experiencing anything like it. Finally I’d make an appeal to the nation, to ignore the lies, and focus on what really mattered — the safety of children. Then I’d call on Dr Watson to back me up with a statement saying that I am in fact not pregnant, nor have I ever been. That I have been under an incredible amount of stress for months, and that a single mistake should not be allowed to define what has thus far been an exemplary career.”

“Sounds pretty fucking perfect to me. That's what I'm telling you. You know this shit, you know what to do. So do it, but do it your way. Be you."

In a moment of clarity, Charlotte suddenly understood the woman on the other end of the line. Grace was a bulldozer, a hurricane, a natural fucking disaster. Yet she got shit done. She used bluster and bullshit to cover what she felt needed covering, and drew attention to what she knew needed to be discussed. She pushed constantly for reform, practically daring the human government to keep bumbling along. Grace was a woman doing the best she could in a world where despite all appearances to the contrary, women were still not equal. Women of colour even more so, and shifters? They barely registered as worth consideration.

Charlotte might not like how she did it, but Grace ensured her voice, and thus the unheard voices of countless people like her, were heard. She sighed, accepting the role she had to play tomorrow. Not Grace’s way, but her own, and with that acceptance, everything else seemed to fall into place.

This was the piece she had been missing. That acknowledgement of her own ability, the confidence in her willpower, and the means to stand up and make her voice heard. She couldn’t go back to being Grace’s assistant now, she knew that. Today, she had made a massive leap forward in her own journey. To what, she wasn’t sure, but she’d outgrown the life she was leading.

“It sounds to me like you have a speech to write, Charlotte,” Grace said gently. “And there’s one more thing you need to know before you write it.”

“Oh?” Charlotte asked.

“I’m not coming back. If today has taught me nothing else, it’s shown me that it’s time to move on. That the life I’ve been leading is not fulfilling enough for me anymore, and I need to look at what my wolf and I need. I think it’s time for me to move past my grief and start living my life for me. I want a mate, Charlotte, I want babies and a family, and it might not be a traditional one with fated bliss, but I reckon three cocks are a pretty good place to start.”

Charlotte chuckled as a timer went off in the background somewhere at Grace’s end.

“Time’s up, Gracie,” a deep voice said. “I can see you start to squirm with need. How about you say goodbye to the nice lady, and sink that pretty pussy onto my cock.”

“He’s not backwards in coming forwards, is he?” Charlotte said drolly.

“He thinks it’ll make you uncomfortable and hang up sooner,” Grace told her.

She could hear the amusement in the other woman’s tone. “Fat chance. I’ve dealt with the likes of David Carlington-Jones. I also yelled at the world that I haven’t had sex in over a year. I don’t think anything he could say to me would embarrass me more than that.”

“I could put you on video chat and give you a front row seat to your boss getting hammered by three mighty fine cocks?”

“Meh, if you’ve seen one gang-bang on PornHub, you’ve pretty much seen them all. Besides, I think Grace would be more embarrassed by that than me, and I wouldn’t do that to her.”

“Too fucking right,” Grace growled.

“Stop yapping and get that mouth on my cock, woman,” another male said.

“Now listen here, Gray, I think you’re the one forgetting— ohhhhhh. Oh my god that’s good,” Grace moaned.

Charlotte hung up before they got a front seat to anything else. The woman deserved some privacy after all.

“How are you feeling?” Dr Watson asked, before she could switch lanes in her thinking of what she had to do next.

“Determined,” Charlotte replied. “I know where I’m going, what I’m doing, and how it’s going to happen. I know what I’m going to say, in a roundabout way, and I know how to word it to get the reaction I want. Tomorrow morning is going to suck, but then it will be over, and we can start to turn this conversation around. I’ve got the right team at my back, and all the resources I need to hand. I’ve got this.”

“There’s one thing you’re missing,” Leonard told her. “Something Grace made an effort to ensure you understood.”

Missing? What could she possibly be missing? She knew what to do, knew how to do it, she even knew her own voice.

“Grace isn’t coming back, Charlotte,” Leonard said patiently.

“Yes, I understand that,” she said impatiently.

“What she was hinting at was that you could make this speech the beginning of your campaign.”

Her campaign? “There’s a disconnect here somewhere,” Charlotte said. “We’ve been campaigning for shifter rights for years, Leonard.”

“He means,” Dr Watson interrupted, “your political campaign. Grace knew the president was listening, which means she knew he would hear her resignation. She was also letting you know, before everyone else who might be considered, that she wasn’t coming back. Charlotte, that was an endorsement. Grace thinks you’re the right person to pick up where she left off. She wants you to replace her.”

“But I’m already replacing her?”

Both men rolled their eyes at her. “Permanently, Charlotte,” Leonard said, a slight tone of exasperation in his voice. “You have to stop thinking of yourself as an assistant. I told you that already. I also told you that leadership looks good on you. I too think you would be a fitting replacement. You’re a known factor, a voice of reason, you have on the job experience now, and you’ve got valuable institutional knowledge of the position, albeit from a subsidiary role.”

“You could use this speech not only to set things straight, but as an informal launch of your campaign for the position,” Dr Watson explained. “There are enough aides here to get you started, even before the official announcement. Young Fitzgerald will know who can be trusted. Your speech for the president was perfect for it. It’s time for change. You’re the change Charlotte.”

“Who knows, in three years time, you might be running for my job,” Leonard teased her.

“Like you’d allow that,” she snarked.

“Oh, I don’t know. It might be fun to be the submissive partner to my all-powerful mate. You could keep me tied to the bed, torture me with sex for days, and only allow me out of the room to be your arm candy when you’re out there wowing the world.”

Charlotte giggled. “In your dreams!”

He smiled and shrugged. “Who knows?” he replied whimsically. “You’re my fated mate, Charlotte, which means we have forever to work it all out.”

She stilled, the fact finally punching through her haze of denial. Oh, she’d said it, but now she knew it was real. That ache? It wasn’t an ache. It was an abyss. One that only Leonard could fill. She knew that now. And forever? It sounded kind of nice.

Yeah. She could do forever.

THE END