From Devious Love

Copyright 2025 RayGregory

 

Wife and Heir

Senator Rawlston’s full head of salt-and-pepper hair was perfectly coiffed as he stood on the front stoop of his Washington brownstone. He hugged his twenty-nine-year-old Latina wife Tendra to his side and kissed her to a crescendo of shutter clicks. Then he set his granite jaw and stepped to the lectern his staff had set up. When he tapped the microphone, a Texas-shaped platinum cufflink gleamed in the camera flashes. “Evrabody hear me?” he drawled.

Rumors of homosexuality had dogged the fifty-eight-year-old Brant Rawlston throughout his three terms in the U.S. Senate. But the sordid tales of hushed encounters with other men had only nipped at the popular senator’s heels. In his hand-tooled western boots, he kicked them aside without breaking his stride. “Smear tactics,” he called them with a tired smirk. “Mere testaments to the desperation of my political enemies.”

To his staunchly conservative Texas constituency, tall, craggy Brant Rawlston — a face fit for Mount Rushmore, his supporters liked to say — was as manly as they come. Though he was a prominent member of the Dallas elite, under all the polish and glamour, from Armani suits to Gucci loafers, he seemed as all-Texan, and all-man, as they came. In his campaign ads, riding high in the saddle in rawhide chaps and his trademark Stetson, he looked as at home on the range as any Texas cowboy.
But now a photogenic young student from Georgetown University named Jason Mitchell had come forward. His lurid tale of an encounter with Brant Rawlston in a men’s room at an Arlington mall was dominating the news cycle. Senator Rawlston decided to answer the accusations himself.

“Of course I never met that — that person. That fame-obsessed little creep only outed himself, as a pervert and a liar. The real question is, who paid him to cast his sick accusations?”

The senator then pointed out that his young accuser’s only “so-called evidence” was a single, dimly lit, out-of-focus phone photo. And the nameless man in the photo, who was hunching to pull up his trousers, was wearing a fully zipped windbreaker and a baseball cap with its brim pulled low. Only a swatch of neck and jowl could be seen, but nothing else of his face. Even high-tech photo enhancement couldn’t reveal his identity.

The senator handled himself with customary aplomb before the microphones and cameras, as his beautiful young wife posed by his side made the accusations look even more preposterous. Next-day phone polling of the senator’s constituency showed he’d beaten the rap again, though his supporters was starting to show some weariness. Cynical political pundits branded this his closest call yet, as late-night TV comics had another field day at his expense....