With an air of total certainty, Bianca explained that Miles would stay with her until he was feeling 100 percent again. Awkward though it was, Ryan had insisted on calling Marcus to make sure the new plan was okay––he’d sighed and said, “I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore,” and said good-bye before explaining what that meant––because, last she checked, she was Marcus’s employee, not Bianca’s.
After Ryan hung up, Bianca tilted her head and coolly assessed her, as if pulling some designer garment off the rack for closer examination. “Can I give you a piece of unsolicited advice?” Bianca asked Ryan, who couldn’t help cringing.
“Go ahead. Shoot.” Ryan braced herself. The phrase unsolicited advice meant, of course, that Marcus’s ex had seen the videos and pictures, read the stories, and come to the same conclusions Ryan’s mother (and the rest of the world) had.
“You seem like a nice girl, but you’re young––very young. And I know Marcus might seem like this incredible catch. He’s rich, he’s famous, he’s handsome.”
“He’s all right.” Ryan was going for levity, a little joke to lighten the mood, but either her delivery was way off or Bianca didn’t have a sense of humor. She decided to return to her silent nodding routine. Just let this woman speak her mind and be done with it.
“Let me just say this to you, woman to woman. That man does not know how to be a partner. Not to me, not to you, not to anyone.”
Who said anything about “partners”? Ryan wanted to scream, though she followed her own advice and STFU. All the man did was hold my hand!
“He’s a textbook narcissist,” Bianca continued. She seemed to have done some psychology coursework of her own, or at least turned the pages of a few self-help books. “He puts all this love and compassion in his songs, so the world will think he’s this amazing guy. He puts so much of himself into his music, in fact, that there’s nothing left for the rest of us. He’s got no time for his kids, and he certainly didn’t have time for his wife.”
“He has time for me, Mom,” Miles said meekly.
“Aww, hon, I didn’t know you were awake.” Bianca was acting like she’d just been talking about the price of butter or landmarks on the side of the road, not the most important man in her son’s life. And incredibly, Miles’s injecting himself into the conversation didn’t make Bianca realize that the subject at hand was maybe, just maybe, inappropriate. “Marcus lives in his own world, and no woman is going to change that. The music has always come first, and it always will.”
It takes two to tango, Ryan thought. Talk about being lost in your own world. She looked at Bianca and tried to picture what the woman had been like before Marcus’s successes had altered her life forever. Had she always been this self-centered, or had her wealth and fame by association changed her forever? Ryan knew one thing: she would never want that to happen to her.
“So, Rachel, enough about us,” Bianca said. “Tell me something about you.”
Chapter Sixteen
Full-On Paradise
“You’ve done some stupid things in your life, Marcus Troy, but this one beats them all,” Bianca said, not two seconds after entering the suite.
He didn’t say, Stupider than marrying you? Instead, he went with, “Nice to see you again, too, Bianca.”
Behind her, Serena seemed to be willing herself to become invisible. In silence, she gathered her laptop and charger and tiptoed out of the room. She looked at Marcus with a benevolent sadness. He smiled and shrugged. This was Serena’s first Bianca encounter, but it surely wouldn’t be her last.
“Really, Marcus,” Bianca continued. “What did you do to drive Mrs. Janssen away? She was fantastic, and the kids loved her.”
Marcus found himself tongue-tied; Bianca had never even met the tough old Swede. But he knew there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t further provoke her, so he just stood there, rubbing the five o’clock shadow on his chin, a nervous gesture he resorted to under stress.
“Say something!” she yelled. But he just raised his hands. It wasn’t only that he was following his therapist’s indisputably wise advice––never engage Bianca when she’s in a rage, don’t start a battle you can never win, you’ll only add fuel to the fire, etc.—but also, he had just recovered from a spell of sickness, and was simply too weak to put up a fight. Small blessings, he thought.
“Maybe you and your nanny are the perfect fit, then. She sat in the car with me for two and a half hours and didn’t say more than ten words. The two of you can live happily ever after in stone-cold silence, for all I care.” She shook her head in dismay, and he wished she could see what he did—that she was still grieving the end of their relationship, somewhere in that mysterious heart of hers, and instead of healing herself, was taking her frustrations out on the kids. “Well, Charlotte and Miles are coming home with me. This tour was obviously a huge mistake. I should have never agreed to it.”
“Bianca, we reached an agreement. We signed an agreement.” The ten-week custody contract had weighed about as much as his first record deal, but he was sure glad he had it now.
Bianca sighed. “That agreement is going to be voided, rest assured. And you’re going to be served within forty-eight hours.”
“With what, a subpoena? Another custody hearing? Please, Bianca, don’t. This kind of instability hurts the kids even more than it does us.”
“You leave me no choice. We agreed that you would allot time in your schedule to care for—”
“I have allotted that time.”
“—and that you would hire a trained, professional caregiver when you’re not.”
“Ryan is a professional.”
“I’ll say she is. A professional climber. How long did it take her to crawl into bed with you?”
“Just…don’t. Please. Nothing of the kind has happened.”
“The photos are everywhere. People who are not involved, they don’t look like that together.”
“I comforted her, that’s all,” he said. “I touched my employee’s elbow, for God’s sake.” He hoped no judge would entertain such subjective “evidence” and use it to justify taking the children from him.
“You’re a celebrity, Marcus. You should hold yourself to a higher standard.”
“I was just trying to be, I don’t know, compassionate.”
Bianca shook her head. “Well, at least let them stay with me until Miles is healthy again. Until everyone in the crew is on their feet, so it doesn’t wear the kids down. Regardless of what the court rules, they can’t tour the country in a bus with you if they have to pull over to the side of the road every five minutes to be sick.” She slung her Commes Des Garcons handbag over her wrist with an air of finality.
In moments like these, Marcus didn’t know if Bianca was crazy or just crazy-strategic, but she did have a habit of calmly following her frothing-at-the-mouth tantrums with a single morsel of common sense. It was disconcerting, but Marcus would consider this one an olive branch.
“Fine, they stay with you, but only until the tour starts again. Most of the crew is going to be here at the Hyatt, but Smitty and a few of us are going to Canyon Ranch for a bit. I’ll come back to LA in five days, or as soon as everyone is fully healthy again. Does that work for you?”
“You’ll be served by then, and I can’t predict when the hearing’ll be scheduled.”
“Fine.” He didn’t want to resort to cliché, but it was hard not to say, I guess I’ll see you in court.
Bianca nodded, her mouth still a dour, straight line that cut across her face like a blade. But, unreal as it was, he and his ex-wife seemed to have reached an agreement. When she turned and click-clacked out of the room in the four-thousand-dollar Louboutin heels she’d bought with his alimony money, he felt so faint, he had to brace himself against the wall. He didn’t know whether he was feeling nausea or just relief. He stood there in a daze, taking deep, even breaths, hoping he wasn’t about to be sick again.
Three hours later, a knock on his door. At fir
st, thinking it was Serena, he ignored it, cocooning his head into an ultra-plush hotel pillow and willing the sound to go away. It was no fun being sick, but this deep, dreamless nap was a sweet consolation prize he didn’t want to give up just yet.
“Marcus? It’s me, Ryan.”
“Oh, hold on just a second.” He reached for a glass of water on his bedside table, and downed the whole thing like a man dying of thirst. Then he gave his cheeks a couple of light slaps, sat up in bed, and pulled the sheets to him. He was not feeling very sexy at the moment. “Okay, come on in.”
Ryan entered the room and walked the ten feet to the foot of his bed. She stood there, looking like she didn’t want to come any further.
“Good,” he said. “Stay there. I don’t know how you’ve managed to avoid this damned virus, but let’s keep it that way. We need somebody on this tour to stay healthy.”
Marcus struggled for a moment to remember that they were in Los Angeles. Because they always stayed in Hyatts, the blueprint for his suite never changed––same four-poster California king-sized bed with six-million-thread-count sheets, same “living area” with overstuffed blue-velvet couch––so they could have been in any number of cities. The tour had just begun, but he found himself longing for his own bed in Bigfork. As he looked at Ryan, who for once was wearing not a T-shirt and jeans but a pale green skirt that ended just above her knees and a fitted, short-sleeved blouse, he thought, God, she’s amazing. But then he remembered the video, and the photographs, and even worse, the subpoena he was supposedly about to receive, and his heart sank. Relationships brought nothing but trouble. Bianca had once been “amazing” to him, too. Now they couldn’t even be in the same room together without fighting. Things with Ryan would sour in much the same way eventually, he was sure.
“So, Serena tells me we’re going to some kind of ranch?” she asked.
“Well, it’s not really a ranch ranch. Not to a Montana girl like you, anyway. It’s more like a retreat, a wellness center. They’ve got yoga classes, Pilates, meditation, all kinds of stuff. The food is low-calorie, but absolutely delicious. And it’s on this fantastic property, right smack in the middle of the desert. It’s an incredible spot. You’ll love it.”
“Yoga classes? You’re sick as a dog. Why would you want to do yoga?”
“I’m not going to be doing many vinyasas or downward dogs, not at first, anyway.” He chuckled. “But Canyon Ranch will be an awesome place for us to all recuperate for a few days, before the tour gets up and running again.”
“You don’t think it might just be a twenty-four-hour flu? Miles seems better already.”
“Well, I hope so, but once a virus starts kicking around on the bus, it winds up hitting just about everybody in the crew eventually. It’ll probably take a few days to cycle through that. Maybe even a week.”
“The Bus of Not Quite So Awesome.”
“That’s right.” Marcus paused and readjusted the pillow behind his back. He felt a little odd having Ryan this close to him when he was sick in bed—not exactly a rock-star setting, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. “Ryan, listen, about Santa Barbara…”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to go out there, it’s just that Charlotte—”
“Oh please, you don’t have to be sorry. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I should have been more careful, with those paps there.”
“But how could you have known touching my stupid elbow would turn into an actual scandal? It’s completely ridiculous.”
“I probably should have explained to you what life is like on tour, huh?”
“If you had, I wouldn’t have believed you.” They both laughed.
“So, listen,” Marcus said. “The real reason we’re going to the Ranch is this: it’s not a pretentious environment, but it is exclusive. People who go there expect privacy; they demand it, and in return, they respect the privacy of everybody else around them. No one’s going to be snapping cell-phone pics or tweeting about us, so we can all take a breath and relax. And by the time we go out on the road again, the gossip will have lost some of its lustre, and we can get back to business.”
“God, Marcus, your life…” Marcus braced himself. He’d heard women complain about “his life” before.
“What? Go ahead, say it.”
“…sucks. Sometimes, anyway. How do you deal with it?”
“I don’t know, day by day?” He felt Ryan slipping away. They all slipped away, every woman he’d ever cared for. Was this the price he had to pay to live his dream—that he’d have to live it alone?
“Is it worth it, though? Having people follow your every move like this, sticking their nose into your business?”
Marcus thought for a moment. Is it worth it? He hadn’t asked himself that question in a while. “This is the price I pay for being successful at doing what I love. I suppose I could just stop writing, stop recording, stop touring, but that’s never going to happen. I need to keep making music, for my mind, my body, my spirit.”
“No offense, but you kind of sound like a hippie right now.”
“I guess all us musicians have a little hippie in us.” Then Marcus drawled in the scratchy, over-earnest stoner accent of one of his roadies, “We know how to tap into our emotions, man. That’s where, like, our art comes from.”
“Wow, dude,” Ryan shot back at him with her own version of the stoner voice. “Like, that’s so profound.”
Marcus started to laugh, but the laughter made his stomach muscles hurt. “Ow, stop,” he said. “You’re killing me here.”
“You’ll be all better once we get to this heaven-on-earth hippie yoga thingie.”
“You make fun, but you won’t once we get there. Canyon Ranch is paradise. Full-on paradise.”
Marcus had never met anybody like Ryan before. He had never met a woman who could be so sexy and so funny, and he’d never laughed so hard with anybody he’d known such a short time. In fact, he couldn’t remember any of his lovers cracking him up, not like this. In an ideal world, one without celebrity culture and ex-wives and subpoenas, he and Ryan could really have something special together, couldn’t they?
“One more thing, Marcus,” Ryan said. She inhaled sharply. “You’ve either gotten used to living in the spotlight, or the way you were built, you’re just plain better equipped to deal with it in the first place…” She hesitated and bit her lip, which despite the difficulty of the moment, Marcus couldn’t help but notice was very sexy.
“Yeah? Go on.”
“I don’t think it’s for me. I don’t want my every move dissected by people who don’t even know me, and I don’t want my mom to see me on Entertainment Tonight.”
“Oh Ryan, you’re not quitting on me, are you?” Marcus didn’t want to lose her, for so many reasons.
“No, no, it’s not that!” she said. “It’s just that if you could—well, the world already knows my last name, and there’s nothing we can do to change that—but if you could just help me keep myself in the background a little, I would really appreciate it. I think I’ll do better if I stay behind the scenes, you know? That’s more my style.”
“You mean, you don’t like guys catcalling to you as a football stadium’s worth of people watches?”
“That is exactly the kind of thing I’m hoping to avoid.”
“Not a problem. No more shout-outs to Ryan Evans. I’ll just deliver my thanks privately.”
“Oh, Marcus…” Ryan stepped toward him, close enough to touch. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”
Maybe she wasn’t slipping away. He would have killed just to hold her in his arms right now. No one was with them; the door was locked. Marcus felt like if he could feel her skin against his, her body pressed against his, even for an instant, everything would be all right. But instead, he said, “Don’t you take a step farther. I’m officially quarantining myself.”
“Okay, then. Feel better soon.”
Marcus tried again to conjure that “ideal world” w
here he and Ryan could be together. It wasn’t easy, with so much reality encroaching. In the real world the only way to avoid pain and frustration was to keep things strictly professional. Thankfully, he had a few days at Canyon Ranch to look forward to, with the kids in LA but Ryan very much along for the ride. And the Ranch was as close to an ideal world as he could imagine. They’d only be there for five days, but he meant to take full advantage.
Chapter Seventeen
The Ranch
Ryan couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that everybody referred to the luxurious spa where they were staying as “the Ranch.” Having grown up on an actual ranch (albeit a humble one), she’d milked cows, birthed calves, shorn sheep, and stopped by the chicken coop each morning to collect fresh eggs. But she didn’t see anybody caring for livestock here. The only needs the guests at Canyon Ranch were tending to were their own, though those needs were surprisingly plentiful.
The retreat felt absurd and unreal, and yet after two days walking the stone pathways between the many various outbuildings, participating daily in as many as six classes (the selections included yoga and Pilates, of course, and many others such as Extreme Cardio, Deep Water Pump, Astrology and Gemstones for Personal Growth, Wallyball, Desert Drumming, Buff Booty II––which sounded to Ryan like a porn film––and a sculpture class called Malleable Expressions), and eating the low-calorie but (Marcus was right, again) addictively tasty food in a resplendent dining room, everything had begun to seem oddly normal, even inevitable.
She’d become more and more friendly with Serena, who had relaxed considerably now that she had nothing to do but exercise and eat unreasonably delicious health food. The two of them had been attending classes together and sharing meals, and had fun gawking at the handful of celebrities who mixed in subtly with the other “regular” wealthy New Yorkers and Angelenos. “Look,” an amazed Ryan said at Pilates, “there’s Anderson Cooper.” Though the CNN newscaster, fit and devastatingly handsome, was indeed there, punishing his core along with everyone else, the two girls had fun pretending that everyone in the place was a celebrity. “Look, there’s Kim Kardashian,” Serena whispered at breakfast, nodding toward an overweight brunette with the bandages from a recent plastic surgery experiment still covering her cheeks and nose.
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