Read Online DUTCH AND GINA: A SCANDAL IS BORN by Mallory Monroe - Free Book Online

She looked up at Dutch, her eyes now troubled too.   “Why didn’t I just ignore that reporter? Why didn’t I just ignore him when he asked me that ridiculous question?   I know how they are.   I knew I was probably walking into a trap.   But I answered anyway.   Even had the gall to jokingly answer.   I mean, I was laughing for crying out loud, Dutch!   I was laughing as I answered.   But they still took my answer and ran with it as if I was as serious as a heart attack.”
    “What did you expect them to do?” Dutch asked.  
    Gina looked at him more closely.   For the first time in a long time she could see that her antics , as the press enjoyed calling them, was beginning to take a toll on him.   And she realized, to her horror, that while she was beating herself up, he was probably inwardly beating her up too.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked him.
    Dutch removed his hand from her butt and laid flat on his back.   He was disturbed, and she knew it, and she was dying for him to be straight with her.
    “What?” she asked, anxious for him to just spit it out.
    “You said it yourself.   You know how they are.”   He looked at her.   “I need you to understand that, Gina.”
    “I do understand it.”
    “No, you don’t.   You keep saying you do, but you don’t.   Not the way you have to understand it.”
    “Dutch, what are you talking about?”
    Dutch sat up and on the edge of the bed, his feet once again touching down, his naked body barely covered.   He ran his hand through his silky black hair.   Gina had never seen him so agitated.  
    “What is it, Dutch?”
    He turned to face her, moving so swiftly that his penis whipped against her thigh.   “You can’t keep doing this, you understand me?   Every time those vultures ask you a controversial question, you can’t keep answering it.”
    “I was joking, Dutch!”
    “Yeah, you were joking.   But that joke, Gina, just got our child exposed!”   He stood up, as if too agitated to sit any longer, and then moved toward his underwear drawer.  
    Gina, surprised by his display, sat up in bed, her hands around her legs, her chest beginning to pound.   She looked at her husband.   He wasn’t the kind of man who angered easily, especially when it came to her, but his anger this morning was almost life-like.
    “It’s just one photograph,” she said in a conciliatory tone.
    “It’s exactly what we said it wasn’t going to be,” he said as he grabbed a pair of boxer’s and angrily slipped them on.   “I agreed to stay in this fishbowl of a town, with my family by my side, only on our terms, Gina, not the terms of some gotdamn press corps!”
    “But why are you acting like I have a say in what the press does?”
    “Because you keep giving them the hammer to hammer you with!” he said explosively.   “I told you to keep your answers on point, didn’t I tell you that?   If you’re attending a ribbon cutting ceremony, you answer questions only related to that ceremony, not about our child, Gina, geez!   Not about our son.   I can’t believe you did that!”
    Gina was floored.   She had never seen Dutch so animated.    She stared at him, as he ripped open the new dress shirt that was laid out for him each day.   Watched him as he slung on his dress pants, zipped, and then buckled his belt.   Stared into his stormy green eyes as he sat on the edge of the dressing table chair and put on his shoes.  
    Where in the world all of this emotion was coming from, she wondered.   He was angry, there was no doubt about that.   But she was detecting something else, too.   Something just as palpable.   She almost wanted to call it fear, although she couldn’t imagine what a man like Dutch, the strongest man she’d ever known, would be fearful of.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked him.
    Dutch stopped fumbling with his shoes and looked at Gina, the disappointment in his eyes paining her.   “You have got to learn to