Dignity (Determination Trilogy 1), page 1
Table of Contents
Description
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also by the Author
Dedication
Author's Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Preview: Diligence (Book 2) - Chapter One
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About the Author
He wants it back…
My name is Kevin Markos, former star anchor for Full News Broadcasting.
I say former, because an exhaustion- and frustration-fueled emotional on-air meltdown of apocalyptic proportions means my previously dignified reputation and stellar career as a highly respected conservative TV news host and commentator lay in smoking, irreparable ruins. Only one person will hire me now, and it’s the last person I want to work for—Democratic Senator ShaeLynn Samuels, who’s determined to be the next president of the United States.
My reluctance isn’t because of her, but because of who’s working for her—Special Agent Christopher Bruunt, the head of her Secret Service detail.
A college spring break trip I thought was safely hidden in my past, even if it never strayed far from my thoughts, now comes back to haunt me. If I take this job and succeed, it could resurrect my career and put me at the right hand of the most powerful person in the United States.
But how much am I personally willing to sacrifice to claw my way back to the top? Because Christopher never forgot that spring break, either.
And he has a few agendas of his own.
Dignity
Determination Trilogy - 1
Lesli Richardson
http://www.LesliRichardson.com
Dignity
Determination Trilogy Book 1
Copyright © 2018 by Lesli Richardson
First E-book Publication: December, 2018
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This work may not be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form or by any means currently available or available in the future, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, for free or for sale, without express written permission from the publisher and author.
Distributing copies of this e-book to others is a violation of international copyright law and infringes the rights of the legal copyright holder. This e-book may not be shared, copied, sold, given away, offered as a contest prize, or otherwise distributed to anyone other than the original purchaser. Distributing this e-book as part of any collection, or with any type of resale permission, is also strictly forbidden and a violation of copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This is my livelihood. PLEASE do NOT share, upload, or otherwise distribute this book. When people buy my books, it pays my bills. Please don’t steal from me. If you want me to keep bringing you more stories, I need to be able to pay my bills. Thank you.
Also by the Author
Sign up for my author newsletter, where I post info about both my Lesli Richardson and Tymber Dalton pen names, and never miss a new release or update!
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Writing as Lesli Richardson:
The Bleacke Shifter Series
Bleacke’s Geek
Geek Chic
A Bleacke Wind
Bleacke Spirit
A Bleacke Christmas (Coming May, 2019)
The Great Turning Series
The Great Turning
The Great Turning: Into the Turn
The Great Turning: Future Ages
Governor Trilogy
Governor
Lieutenant
Chief
Determination Trilogy
Dignity
Diligence
Desire
Devastation Trilogy (Coming April, 2019)
Dirge
Solace
Release
Of Boardwalks and Bison
Cross Country Chaos
Poly (Coming February, 2019)
Jailmates (Coming April, 2019)
Lesli Richardson is better known by her more prolific Tymber Dalton pen name. Check out her website for more info on all her titles under both her pen names, including full book and series listings, trivia, character information, and more.
http://www.tymberdalton.com
Honest reviews are greatly appreciated and can help boost a book’s rankings on retail sites. Thank you!
Dedication
This one’s for Hubby, and for Sir. He knows why.
Also, a special thanks to Bree, who totally nailed the trilogy and book titles for me.
Author's Note
Politics are messy, nasty, sexy, brutal, funny, impossibly complex, and a lot of fun to write about. (Mostly because they’re messy, nasty, sexy, brutal, funny, and impossibly complex.)
Since the focus of this trilogy isn’t the politics so much as it is the people, I’ve taken certain liberties and simplified a few things here and there.
But the kinky shit is absolutely realistic.
The Determination Trilogy is a spin-off set in the same world as the books in the Governor Trilogy, Devastation Trilogy, and others. It is a standalone trilogy that can be read separately.
It is suggested the books in the Determination Trilogy be read in order:
Dignity
Diligence
Desire
Chapter One
Now
Wednesday, November 7th, the day after Election Day
“Thank you all for joining us this morning. It is my privilege to be interviewing Lieutenant-Governor Susannah Evans, who woke up this morning as the governor-elect of Florida. I know you’re busy this morning, Ms. Evans, so thank you for taking the time to sit down with me, and thank you for making us your first stop today.”
“You’re welcome, Kevin. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.”
Although I can see from the hard, cold glint in Susannah Evans’ blue eyes that she’s anything but happy to be sitting here talking with me. Especially in person. But we’re live, and we’re both on our best behavior.
Frankly, I can’t blame her. Not after my run-in with her friend and former running mate, Governor Owen Taylor, during his campaign for his first term.
I never should have let the producer in my ear override my good sense that day. It was a shitty question, a stupid question, and I knew better. I hadn’t meant to ask it, not really. But I was sick from food poisoning because of bad sushi the night before, was working on a migraine and couldn’t clearly read my notes, my head was screaming at me, my mom had literally just died of cancer the week before…
And because I was trying to listen to Taylor, and listen to the producer’s voice in my ear at the same time, with a miserably throbbing headache to boot, I stupidly parroted the question my goddamned producer dumped in my ear before I’d really thought about it and processed it.
Yeeeeaaah.
Admittedly, not one of my finer moments.
Add to that the mega-ration of shit I received later from my father over flubbing it and not hammering Taylor harder.
I finally got the bastard—the producer, not my father—fired by the network for that goddamned stunt. I’d been trying to get rid of him for months, and that was the last straw.
Hell, if I could get the network to fire my father from my life, that’d be amazing and worth every ounce of bullshit I put up with from them.
Worse? They still didn’t want to fire the guy, at first. The only reason they did wasn’t because of what he did, but because even our own viewers rightfully skewered us, and we were the laughingstock of every damn network.
Even Fox News clicked their tongues at us.
That’s when advertisers threatened to pull their dollars, and FNB finally caved and released a statement blaming him and terminating him.
It was cheaper than letting me go and paying out the remainder of my contract. Especially when the rest of my crew all publicly stepped forward to support me and verify my account of the events, and then some angel anonymously released the full tape that recorded the producer yelling at me.
Doubly especially since I’d tried to get another anchor to handle the interview, but the network brass insisted I do it despite how horrible I felt and my life circumstances.
All that was on the tape, too, which had been running before I sat down with Taylor.
When the public learned not only was I sick, and in massive pain, and grieving, to boot, the pendulum of opinion swung back hard and heavy in my favor.
I’d only been at Full News Broadcasting for a couple of years at that point, and was still naïve enough to think I could create positive changes there to shift their coverage back toward center and help boost ratings. Admittedly, it was a helluva scoop, landing an interview with Owen Taylor after that school shooting.
Until I flubbed it worse than the Buccaneers on any given Sunday. It was literally the only time I ever felt thankful that Mom died, so she didn’t see me do that.
She would have loved me regardless, I know she would have. She would have talked me through it, hugged me, offered me that limitless love and pride she’d always been imbued with.
I’m pretty sure it was Lou who released the tape with the audio from the producer on it, the one that saved my ass and my job. When I asked him if he did it, he smiled and shrugged, but would neither confirm nor deny.
Doesn’t matter who, I guess. They saved my career, as well as helped win me even more viewers.
Owen Taylor got me back but good, though, four years later. I thought all was forgiven and I was being handed a scoop when I got to be the first anchor to interview Taylor and Evans early the morning after Taylor’s re-election. The walk-and-talk wouldn’t be long, just a preliminary clip we could run until we tagged them later in the day for our scheduled formal sit-down.
A sit-down that had been delayed and rescheduled several times over the previous week by Taylor’s ball-busting chief of staff, Carter Wilson.
Who also happens to be Susa Evans’ husband.
I got my walk-and-talk, all right.
Except I was left slack-jawed, as well as lambasted by network brass just an hour later, when a widely smiling Evans and Wilson went on Tampa’s WFLA morning show, alongside Governor Taylor, and broke the news that she and Wilson were expecting their first child.
Oh, and she finally officially confirmed she’d be running for governor at the end of Taylor’s second term.
It gave the local NBC affiliate the political scoop of a lifetime. Especially considering that, only months earlier, Evans had barely survived a plane crash and shipwrecking that literally killed half the Southeast’s governors and lieutenant governors, cruelly and forcibly shuffling the political hierarchy in those states forever.
Also, considering it was a given Evans would run for governor at the end of Taylor’s second term, because term limits meant he couldn’t run again, it was still a scoop because she officially announced it there first.
Fuck me.
Yeah, I guess I deserved it.
I sent Dad’s calls immediately after to voice mail and deleted the messages without listening to them, because I knew he was blasting me, too.
I’d provided one more disappointment in a lifetime of them, I suppose.
I’m Evans’ first sit-down interview early this Wednesday morning in Tampa, following her landslide victory last night due to a lot of groveling on my part. She killed it, too, a fifty-five point victory that will rightfully shake both major parties to their foundations before pundits finish processing all the numbers. Independents such as Taylor and Evans can no longer be dismissed as lucky flukes. She and Taylor both have won incredible victories, especially considering they’re Independents.
Not that the idiots in either major party will take heed. They’ll wring their hands and revert to the same ole bullshit in four years.
I’ve interviewed Evans’ father several times in my career. He’s the former Florida state senator and state GOP bigwig Benchley Evans. The man is a ball-buster, and I was supposedly on his side, politically.
I can tell his daughter didn’t fall far from the same tree. If my balls aren’t crushed by the end of this interview, it’ll be a miracle.
Her friend and Florida’s current governor, Owen Taylor, is equally difficult to interview, although that’s mostly my fault because of how I bungled my interview with him following the school shooting shortly before he won the election for his first term.
I do take a little satisfaction from the fact that my former producer ended up having to go to Brazil and manage soccer game coverage because not a single damn network in the States would touch him once they learned what happened.
And Draymond Garcia, Evans’ chief of staff, is every bit as much of a bastard as Carter Wilson.
Garcia allowed me this interview under strict conditions, obliquely reminding me of the journalistic ratfuck they subjected me to four years earlier. He also hinted that I would only get this one chance to make a halfway decent impression with the woman and return to their good graces, or my network would all but lose our press credentials with this administration for the next eight years.
In other words, they were done putting up with our shit.
Again, I cannot blame them in the slightest. After eleven years stuck in this thermonuclear circus of a network, I’m just about done putting up with our network’s shit myself. Not that I can publicly admit that to anyone.
If I didn’t need the goddamned job so fucking much, I’d leave.
Unfortunately, I have a contract that says I’m stuck here for at least another two years, unless they fire me or decide to let me go early. The list of fireable offenses is a very short one, but also one that would guarantee I’d either end up in jail on the back side of events, or unemployable by any other network.
There’s not a snowball’s chance on the sun that they’ll willingly release me from my contract early. I have the highest-rated show on their network.
If I choose to leave before my contract’s up, I can do that, sure. Problem is, I have a non-compete clause that means until my contract’s term expires, I won’t be able to get an on-camera network job anywhere in the US, unless it’s for the Golf Channel or Animal Planet or something. Or, I’d have to take an anchor position at some little tiny backwater local independent TV station for a fraction of the pay.
Before I came to work at FNB, my previous agent died. The agency I ended up hiring for my first contract negotiation with FNB was competent. But the agent who’d repped me left and went independent before I was due for renewal. Since I was repped by the agency, I let them assign me someone else to negotiate the renewal.
How was I to know there’d be a difference in representation?
Guess I got cocky, but I was in the middle of covering a series of contentious midterm elections at the time and honestly didn’t want to focus on contract negotiations. By the time I realized what I’d signed, it was too late.
I drag my mind back to right now. I’m aware of Garcia positioned off to the side, out of the shot but in my peripheral vision. He stands with his feet shoulder wide, arms crossed, and a stony look on his face as he watches us that could easily be him channeling Carter Wilson. I know there’s a connection between the men, something about Garcia’s older brother having served in the Army with Wilson, but I haven’t had time to research that tie yet.
It’s on my to-do list. I want as much deep background on the man as I can get, in case there’s anything I can use to help me suck up to him, or possibly strong-arm him, either way.
At this point, I don’t care.
“Ms. Evans,” I say, “you’ve already stated you would continue down the same path regarding education reform as your predecessor, Governor Taylor, and enacting more programs that will help improve graduation rates…”
I sense her relax somewhat during our interview as she realizes I’m not going for a gotcha.
I’m no idiot. I want these people to like me. I’m not happy with this network, but if I can drag them kicking and screaming toward more centrist political views, even a little, I know our numbers will climb once more. That’s why I’m going out of my way to present the incoming governor in as positive a light as possible, finding points that even most hard right-wingers can agree on with liberals, like education, infrastructure, and emergency preparedness.
Right now, we’re hemorrhaging viewers, especially in swing-state Florida. If the results of this election—which resulted in wins for a record number of Independent and third-party lawmakers not just across the Sunshine State but across the country—don’t shake up the network, then nothing will. Especially when looked at from the perspective that more voters than ever are either registering with smaller political parties, or switching from D or R to I. So much so that, here in Florida, there is now a large and vocal non-partisan grassroots movement to end the state’s closed primary system. They have a good chance of getting a ballot referendum passed and adding it to our state’s constitution.
