Dirty Defiance Excerpt by Chelle Bliss and Brenda Rothert

I don’t pay much attention to what I’m throwing into my suitcase as I pack. Some of the clothes are still in their dry cleaning bags. I’ll manage a few work outfits out of all this stuff.

I’m pretty pissed. After three weeks apart, Jude took off on me and won’t answer my calls or texts. I missed him like crazy, playing the role of doting politician’s wife while he campaigned.

He knows how much I was dreading that fucking interview and photo shoot for a magazine spread about our home life. Even with the cleaning and decorating help his staff hired, I had to make sure everything was just perfect myself. When a photographer is coming into your home, you have to make sure every last thing is on point.

But I gladly did all of it for him. He’s only home for two days before he hits the campaign trail again, and I’m livid that he fucked me and hardly said two words to me before storming out of here.

We agreed before we got married that nothing would ever come between us. Not politics, not my father—our marriage comes first.

But today his fucking ego came first, and I’m not waiting around until he decides to come home.

I’ve been sidelining my work for months now, focusing on helping Jude instead. And that’s been hard for me, because I’m passionate about my work. I’m the US Congress liaison for The Lancet Foundation, an organization founded two years ago to advocate for bipartisanship. 

Jude and I have become the poster children for crossing party lines to find common ground. As Congressional opponents, we should have been enemies. For a while, we kind of were. But I quickly fell for him, seeing that what brought us together was more important than what we disagreed about.

I didn’t drop out of the race because of our relationship, but because the revelation about my father’s secret family made me reevaluate what was really important to me. But I’ve taken lots of hits from women’s groups within the Democratic Party for stepping aside for my man.

Fuck them. They don’t know me, and they don’t know us. 

I add a couple pairs of heels and my travel makeup bag to the suitcase, zipping it closed. When I pick up my phone, I see a text from Julia, my assistant. She’s booked my flight and arranged for me to be picked up in DC when I arrive late this afternoon.

I’ve been pushing this trip back for weeks, prioritizing Jude and his campaign. No more.