His Dirty Secret: A Billionaire Bad Boy Romance

by Aiden Bates

  Anthony didn’t fully understand why Jamie blamed Ryan for Tommy’s choices. All he knew was that whatever happened at the hospital, things were going to get explosive. Ryan had saved him tonight. Anthony had every intention of returning the favor.

  14

  Ryan had a kind of dim awareness of Anthony’s presence at his side, and he was grateful for it. They must have made an interesting picture, the three of them. There was Jamie, leading the pack, reeking of whiskey and white-lipped with fury. There was Ryan, sprayed with blood from Creepy Mustache Guy. And then Anthony, who’d caught some of the cast off, with his shirt torn open and bruises on his arm and hips.

  He couldn’t think about that now. Where the hell had Liam been? It didn’t matter. Ryan choked back the guilt.

  Jamie had told him to stay with Tommy. He’d had good reasons for leaving. He stood by his decision, but he shouldn’t have bolted until Liam showed up. Or else he should have called for an ambulance, because Tommy had been in dangerous straits.

  Screw Marianna’s bullshit about the family’s reputation, anyway. At least he’d have gotten away with a stomach pump and maybe a referral to rehab, instead of a visit to the psych ward and a documentable history of suicidal behavior.

  And fuck. That was Tommy, there in the bed. Tommy was alive. Ryan could see that much, but only because he had about a thousand monitors hooked up to him to prove vitality. Tommy was unconscious, probably sedated, and his arms were bandaged up to his elbows. His skin had lost most of its color, except for the yellowish tinge from the jaundice, and Jesus Christ he looked awful. Jesus Fucking Christ.

  The room spun. How had everything come to this? Tommy had been the good one, the one with all the potential. The one who fit in with the rest of the Roscoes, more or less. Ryan had sacrificed for him, so he could make something out of his life. Not so he could wind up in a hospital bed, in soft restraints.

  Liam was there, of course. So were Lincoln and Marianna, each looking about a thousand years old. Marianna’s eyes were red, and her makeup had actual tracks in it, like she’d been crying.

  Most of Ryan was in shock because his mother never cried, not at all, but a tiny part of him just shook its head. Sure, Marianna would cry for Tommy. She’d never shed a tear for her own son, no matter how many times he wound up in the prison infirmary.

  He held onto that little tiny part of him. Most of him was swirling, out of control, panicking, but that little nugget of resentment — that would get him through this. Ryan had learned a lot in prison. He understood now that survival meant more than throwing punches. He knew what to grab onto to keep himself afloat.

  Marianna’s eyes blazed when she saw Ryan, and she jumped up out of her seat. She threw herself between Ryan and Tommy’s prone form. “Get out!” she screamed.

  Liam rolled his eyes. Lincoln turned his head, eyes on the ground. Jamie turned to stand with his mother, face stony and every bit as resentful as hers. Anthony, though, Anthony just stood a little closer to Ryan. Ryan could feel the heat from his body, propping him up.

  “He’s my family, too.” Ryan fought to keep his voice even and calm. Tommy was almost certainly sedated, but the Roscoes didn’t have a monopoly on this floor. Other patients didn’t need to be hearing their shit.

  Then again, Roscoes rarely considered other people’s needs.

  Marianna spat at him. She actually spat at him. It fell short, hitting the ground with a repulsive splat, but she made her point anyway.

  “You lost your right to call yourself part of this family years ago. I should have forced you to change your name when this whole mess happened. What you put him through, all of this suffering — it’s no wonder he’s in this state.

  “He’s been trying to deal with it for the past ten years, having to live with what you did that night! He might have been alone tonight, but you might as well have held the razor for him.”

  Anthony flinched, but he slipped his little hand into Ryan’s. It helped to keep Ryan from taking a swing, but it didn’t banish the red haze from his vision. After everything, after all this time, he couldn’t take it anymore. He was done.

  “I didn’t put him through shit,” he spat out. “He’s in this state because he’s fucking guilty and he doesn’t want to deal.”

  Marianna recoiled. Two spots of red appeared on her cheeks. “You would dare!” she hissed, like an angry goose.

  Lincoln, though, he stepped forward. “Ryan,” he said in a soft and gentle voice, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Can you explain for us?”

  Ryan didn’t want to. He hadn’t done what he’d done to sit around explaining. The cat was out of the bag now, though, and his sacrifice had been wasted anyway. He might as well spill.

  “It all started when Tommy moved in, after his folks died. We’d always been close, and we just got closer.” Ryan squeezed Anthony’s hand as he started his trip down memory lane.

  Ryan at fourteen was already the black sheep of the family. He knew he’d never be what his mother wanted, largely because his ambitions didn’t match hers. He was mostly interested in cars — not so much in collecting them, which was fine and good, but in the machines themselves.

  He loved working on them, taking them apart and putting them back together again. His favorite thing to do was to sneak down to the local garage and pay the mechanic to teach him.

  When Tommy’s parents died in an avalanche during a ski vacation, Ryan had been disappointed at first. He hadn’t been close to his aunt and uncle, but he’d been unenthusiastic about adding more faces to the neverending circle of children who were better Roscoes than he was.

  When Tommy moved in, though, Ryan’s resentment turned to compassion. Tommy was grieving, and he needed comfort. He shared Ryan’s love of cars, and having him around meant Marianna focused on helping Tommy, instead of trying to force Ryan into a mould he hated.

  It didn’t take long before Tommy and Ryan were inseparable.

  The Roscoe family weren’t exactly abstemious, in any sense of the word. They didn’t do mental health counseling, either. Tommy had settled into the family core well enough on the surface, but he hadn’t gotten any help for the trauma of losing his parents.

  By the time he was fifteen, he was drinking every day. By the time he was sixteen, he’d added hard drugs to the mix. Cocaine was his favorite, but he wasn’t above meth or opioids. In essence, if it would give him a buzz, Tommy would put it in his body.

  Tommy and Ryan were still always together, but now Ryan stuck with Tommy because he was afraid to leave him alone. He ran interference for him in school, doing his homework for him when Tommy was too drunk to see straight, and making sure he didn’t do anything too stupid when he was high. He couldn’t keep him out of all trouble, but as long as Marianna blamed Ryan for everything, Tommy still had time to get his head straight.

  When Marianna found Tommy’s drugs, Ryan lied. He said they were his. His parents’ disappointment hurt, but it wasn’t anything new to him. And because he knew how it felt, he couldn’t expose poor Tommy to that kind of bullshit. If Marianna would ridicule and berate her firstborn son that way, how much worse would it be for her brother-in-law’s orphaned kid? So Ryan bowed his head and took the lectures, the punishments, the shame.

  He did try to get help for Tommy, as he realized his cousin’s problem was more serious than he could ever hope to solve alone. He even involved the school counselor. The school counselor involved Marianna, which only got Ryan punished worse. How dared Ryan try to drag poor, innocent Tommy into his spiral of filth? How dare he bring shame to the family by going to outsiders like that? Ryan learned his lesson well.

  Ryan applied to college, just like everyone else. He got accepted to Stanford, MIT, and Cal Tech. He turned them all down. Tommy hadn’t gotten in anywhere, and Ryan didn’t feel comfortable leaving his cousin. He knew, by this point, that he’d gotten into a bad situation with Tommy. He was enabling Tommy by covering up for him, but what else could he do? Tommy needed h
im, couldn’t get by without him. He couldn’t abandon him.

  Besides, if Ryan took Roscoe money to go to college, his mom would make him go into the family business. Ryan would honestly rather die. So he got an apartment with Tommy and kicked around town, working in the garage just to get away from Tommy’s drunken antics for a few hours.

  Tommy, by this point, was never sober. He was always either drunk, high, or both. He blew through his inheritance at an alarming rate. Ryan took advantage of his state at one point and dragged him in to see a financial advisor, and they put his money into a structured set of annuities and trusts to try to make it last.

  It worked, not that Tommy had the first clue. He just went on spending, with Ryan footing the bill for everything but his drugs and his booze.

  Ryan knew Marianna and Lincoln probably thought he was stealing from Tommy to feed a drug habit of his own. It wasn’t like Ryan was some kind of innocent. He drank and partied, but he didn’t lose control. Not like Tommy.

  He didn’t care what the rest of the family thought about him, though, If he could just keep Tommy’s body and soul together long enough to get him to help, he’d deal with the rest later.

  And he did try to get Tommy help. He even tried to haul Tommy’s drunk ass to a rehab center. He told Marianna that Tommy was on vacation. Tommy stayed in rehab long enough to sober up and realize where he was. When he did, he checked himself out and came home. That was it.

  At twenty one, they should have felt like they were on top of the world. Tommy sure did. Ryan couldn’t have told him what planet Tommy thought he was on top of, but he was feeling great that night. He was behind the wheel of the brand new Mercedes convertible Marianna had gotten him for his twenty-first birthday, having snorted enough cocaine to send ten rock stars to the moon and back. Ryan was in the passenger seat, because he was never far from Tommy’s side.

  He was clinging to the ‘oh shit’ bar hard enough to leave marks, actual marks, in the leather. He remembered begging Tommy to pull over, a constant litany of pleas falling from his lips like prayers in church.

  He didn’t get a good look at the woman Tommy hit. Tommy was going too fast for him to see much. Ryan glimpsed bleached blonde hair, a mouth rounded in a silent scream. Then the sickening thud.

  Tommy never did see any part of her, not while she was alive.

  Tommy did stop after the thud, the car rumbling as they waited for the woman to get up. Ryan remembered trying to force himself to get out of the car, his brain screaming to his body to move. And he couldn’t. His body wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t obey the most simple commands.

  Tommy panicked. He fumbled with the gear shift. Instead of putting the car into park, he put the car into reverse. Hey, P and R are basically the same, anyone could have done the same, right?

  He backed over the poor woman’s prone body. It caught on the undercarriage, and as Tommy put the car into drive, he dragged the woman’s body with them into the night.

  When Ryan saw what was left of her, he threw up. Everything he had went into a ditch. He grabbed the keys from Tommy and took the car, left the body where it was, and drove home.

  Tommy got back to their apartment and wrapped himself around a bottle. He occasionally roused himself enough to sob. You can’t turn me in, man. You can’t. I’m your family, you can’t.

  The story was all over the papers, because why wouldn’t it be? It was horrific. A hit and run, dragging, the woman unrecognizable.

  Ryan panicked. He fled to Vegas. He didn’t know what he was going to do there, but he intended to lose everything that remained of Ryan Roscoe.

  Even ten years of horror later, Ryan still had no recollection of the next few days. He remembered sitting down for a drink. The next thing he remembered was waking up days later, married to a stranger with a bad headache and a vaguely salty aftertaste in his mouth.

  His phone beeped with a voicemail from Tommy, the only person who’d called him in years anyway. They’re coming for me. They’re going to take me. You’ve gotta help me, Ryan. Please, you’ve got to help me.

  And Ryan knew. Tommy wouldn’t survive prison. Tommy would die of detox, never mind the other inmates.

  Ryan had dedicated the past seven years of his life to taking care of Tommy. He couldn’t stop now. Besides, Tommy was a real Roscoe. They’d help him, get him clean, help him find his potential and let him live a good life. Prison wouldn’t be a barrier to Ryan doing what he wanted to be doing, anyway.

  He called Tommy. “I’ll help you,” he said, “on one condition. You get clean. You get sober. And you go out and you live a good life. You make me proud. You hear me?”

  He believed he was getting through to Tommy. So he left Vegas, and the alleged husband whose name he didn’t even know, and headed back to Culvertown. He paid for a storage unit, put his motorcycle into storage, and walked into the police station.

  I did it. I was driving my cousin’s car when it hit that woman.

  He was sentenced to six years for vehicular homicide — too long for county jail. That meant Ely State Prison, hard time. Marianna was the only family member who turned up for his sentencing, and it wasn’t to show support. He would carry his mother’s disgusted face with him on the bus across Nevada.

  Ryan didn’t expect prison to be a cakewalk. He still wasn’t prepared for his life there. His personal hell started on the very first day.

  Someone helpfully told the other inmates who he was before he arrived. Ryan couldn’t prove it, but he always suspected Marianna had her hand in what happened. She’d hated him for as long as he could remember, and she’d been screaming a lot about “consequences” for the past few years.

  To say that he was beaten daily would have been too mild. On his first day, a gang of twelve inmates surrounded him in the dining hall and put the hurt on him.

  Hey there, rich boy, it’s the real world now. They had heavy objects hidden in socks, and they used them as bludgeons. All he could do was try to protect his head.

  Some days they used shivs to cut. Some days they just beat him down. Some days were worse. He could have made things easier on himself by joining up with a gang. There were at least three different white supremacist gangs at Ely who made it clear that they’d make a space for him.

  Ryan had no time for that shit. He took their beatings and worse. He bided his time. Sometimes he got taken to the prison infirmary, and sometimes he didn’t.

  He stopped caring if they saved him or not.

  Ryan got no communication from the outside world, other than his lawyer. His so-called husband, whose name turned out to be Peter, sent visitation requests, but Ryan declined them all. He wasn’t interested. He didn’t even remember the guy.

  He would have killed, or died, or something, to get a letter or a visit from someone in the family, but nothing came. So much for Roscoes don’t abandon one another. Even Tommy, for whom Ryan had made this sacrifice, cut him off and left him for dead.

  Hopefully, that meant Tommy had done what Ryan asked. He fantasized about Tommy being on the outside, in rehab, graduating from rehab. He imagined Tommy living his life, living independently, being happy. If he never thought about Ryan again, that would be okay, as long as he got his shit together.

  He considered suicide. The only thing that stopped him was Marianna. He knew Marianna would be too happy if he killed himself in here. He had to survive, if only to piss her off. It became his mantra, the rope he held onto in the storm of his life.

  He learned to fight back. At first, it only made the bad guys laugh. Then one day, out on the yard, he shattered an arsonist’s jaw with one blow from his fist.

  And he didn’t stop. His rage and his pain, his shame, and yes, his hate, all poured out as he took down one of the men who’d humiliated him.

  They added a year to his sentence and sent him to solitary as a punishment.

  Three days after he was released back into the general population, they came for him again. This time, he blinded a rapist. The man had a
lready shivved him once, and worse. He thought he could do it again.

  Ryan proved him wrong, and made sure he’d never have the chance to do it again. One of the man’s eyes popped right out of his head under the force of Ryan’s blows. This time, Ryan let himself enjoy it.

  Six months added to his sentence, and a month in solitary. Ryan was learning to like it in there. It was safer than the general population. It wasn’t any quieter, but at least he could sleep a little better.

  The next time they sent him back into the general population, they sent three men after him. This time he paralyzed one. He had a label now. He wasn’t Ryan Roscoe, the little rich kid who needed to be taught a lesson. He was the baddest fucker in Ely State Prison, someone they warned new meat about. He heard the whispers.

  If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay the hell away from Pretty Boy over there. He’ll pull your heart right out of your ribcage and eat it in front of you, and that’s if he’s feeling generous. Ask Mac what happened to his eyes. Ask Jimmy why he’s taking his meals in liquid form. Just stay away.

  They still tried, sometimes. All in all, Ryan wound up with four extra years added to his sentence. Ten years of hell, for a crime he hadn’t actually committed. But he came out without any strings attached — no parole, no probation. A truly free man, not subject to any kind of monitoring. He could go wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted. And as long as Tommy had upheld his end of the bargain, it would all have been worth it.

  Ryan finished his tale. Everyone’s eyes were on him. He was like a train wreck, he figured. Everyone was horrified, but no one could look away.