“Come on,” he said. “Trust me on this. We aren’t going out into public, well, not really at least. I promise no one will be able to follow us where we’re going. Throw on a sweatshirt with a hood, a pair of sunglasses, and let’s go.”
I looked at him for a moment before sighing and reaching up to take his hand. I grabbed a hoodie and some sunglasses and followed him down to his private garage. He grabbed a set of keys from a locker on the wall and put me into an SUV with a dark tint on the windows. We roared out of the parking garage and onto the street, no photographers in sight. At least I was shielded from the world by the dark-tinted windows, even though I felt like I was riding inside of some FBI vehicle going off to some secret location.
I watched out the window as Ryan navigated through traffic. Finally, we ended up at the marina, and he got me out of the car and walked me down the docks. He stopped in front of a boat, his boat, and helped me onto it, and then went to work casting off the ropes. I just stood there looking around, not seeing anyone else in sight. The boat was big, bigger than anything I had ever been on, but in comparison to the ones around it, it was medium on the scale of yachts. The deck was sparkling clean, and there were several fishing rods store up near the front. I held onto the side as some waves came from the open water and bounced us up and down. Ryan looked over at me and smiled, reaching his hand out.
“Come on, let me show you around really fast,” he said.
I walked through a door on the side into a hallway decorated like a house. The luxury vessel, though smaller than the others at the dock, was big enough to have a couple of very meticulously decorated cabins, a small galley which looked like a dining room in a mansion, and a relaxation space. Nothing was too huge, but the décor made it feel extremely grand. After showing me around, Ryan walked us back up top and smiled as a crew of three stepped onto the boat.
“Good evening,” a man in a captain’s hat said. “Where will we traveling today?”
I looked over at Ryan who was thinking about the question. The other two staff were standing by in white skirts and collared shirts with their hands behind their backs, smiling sweetly at me. I wondered if they had seen the papers that morning.
“I know,” Ryan said. “Why don’t you take us as close to Ellis Island as you can get? We can get an up-close-and-personal look at Lady Liberty. Would you like that, Sara?”
“That would be nice,” I said, still kind of shocked to be standing on his yacht. “I’ve only seen it from far away.”
“Perfect,” Ryan said.
“Of course,” the captain said, nodding at both of us before all the crew dispersed.
We walked up to the front of the boat and stood there looking out as the vessel began to move across the water. The wind blew through my hair, and I closed my eyes, sensing Ryan walk up behind me and wrap his arms around my waist. He hugged me tightly, keeping me firmly in place as we bounced over the water. Slowly, I started to relax my shoulders and my mind. I took in a deep breath and let it out, allowing some of the stress from earlier melt away and blow off into the wind. I loved being on the water and could remember my father taking me out when I was little, though it was on a much smaller boat and with a lot less riding on my shoulders. Either way, the trip was very much needed, and again, Ryan had saved me, only this time it was from myself.
I ran my hands over his arms as we stood there, thinking about how good it felt to have him there with me. I really liked the way it felt to have his arms wrapped around me. In fact, I was starting to think that maybe I liked it a little too much. I had let go when he took me to that gala, when he held me tightly and showed me off to the world. I had let myself slip out of the mode of short-term fling, and I could now admit to myself I was pretty sure I was starting to fall in love with him. I could feel the palpitations of my heart, the butterflies in my stomach, and that magnetic pull that made me want to be around him at all times. I had never fully been in love before, but there was no mistaking this feeling.
That thought itself, knowing I was able to admit I was falling in love with Ryan actually worried me more than anything else had between the two of us since I’d met him. It was a nervous ache in my stomach, a feeling that made me feel like crying or screaming or just running in the opposite direction. I had known since the first moment I met him that there was no future for the two of us, at least not anything long-term. Our relationship just couldn’t last. It was the cold, hard truth of the matter. We had two completely different lives. I lived in a small town, helping animals and having “galas” that included a female auction and Christmas lights. Ryan lived in a penthouse apartment, drove his luxury cars, and owned a damn yacht. We were as far away from each other as two people could get in terms of lifestyles.
I really was enjoying my time here in New York City. The lights, the people, the places, it was all so grand and beautiful. It was a taste of a life that I had never known before. It was like something out of a storybook, but it wasn’t something that could last. I couldn’t stay in New York permanently. I couldn’t even stay there long-term. My life, my real life, was back in Bonanza waiting for me. And while it was fun to play dress up, go out for expensive dinners, and be the belle of the ball, eventually, I was going to have to get back to the people and the animals who depended on me back in my hometown. My life was and always had been in Bonanza. It was where I was born and raised, and I loved it there. I built my life there fully knowing I could have gone anywhere I wanted to. I wasn’t willing to give that up, not even for a billion dollars and the boy who came with it. Money had never been important to me. I had always put the needs of others before my own, and I wasn’t ready to stop doing that just because I fell in love.
Besides, Ryan was a playboy, a bad boy billionaire who went through women like water. I was just one of the many who would fall in love with him and dream of a future that would never happen. He cared about me. I didn’t doubt that, but I had a really hard time believing he was in it for the long haul. He’d said himself, he never really had a long-term relationship besides Natasha and even that was “just for fun.” I was different, not the normal rich socialite he had gotten used to chasing around. Maybe he was just intrigued by me, thinking the grass was greener on the other side of the tracks. Eventually, though, he would tire of it, and everything would come crumbling down around us. I just wasn’t willing to stay around and watch that happen. It was a sad thought, one that made me seek solace in his arms again.
“I’m cold,” I said, looking back at him. “Can you take me below decks?”
As soon as we were down in his cabin, we started kissing, lying on his bed and kissing passionately. He was about to reach up to take off my shirt when the captain came over the loudspeaker. I sat up on the bed, feeling the boat waving up and down heavily.
“Sorry, Mr. Reines,” he said. “But there’s a storm blowing in, and the water’s incredibly choppy. We’re going to have to head back to shore.”
I took a deep breath and sighed, wondering if that was a sign. Would our relationship hit choppy water? I had this gut feeling it was going to be sooner than I thought.
Chapter 42
Ryan
We went to bed that night, and though I thought Sara had a good time, she seemed a little bit distracted. She slept in her room, and I slept in mine. I respected that, wanting to give her whatever space she needed. On Sunday morning, when my phone went off at five o’clock, I just about cursed my PR agent out.
“It’s Sunday, dammit,” I groaned.
“Before you lose it, I want to see if you knew about the story in the Post,” she said.
“What story?” I said, sitting up in bed. “Please, don’t tell me it has anything to do with Sara.”
“No,” she said shortly. “It’s the in-depth interview with your former bestie and current criminal doing life in Sing Sing or wherever the hell he’s rotting behind bars.”
My eyes grew big, and I jumped out of the bed, running to my office. I looked around and remem
bered the paper was delivered downstairs. Was she serious? What interview was she talking about?
“I’m freaking out here,” I said. “What interview are you fucking talk about?”
“Get a copy of the Post and call me back,” she said, hanging up the phone.
Part of me wanted to completely ignore the whole damn thing. I was so tired of the craziness my life had turned into. I didn’t want to know what was going on. I wanted to hide away with Sara and pretend none of it ever happened. I couldn’t, though, and I thought it might be better if I knew what was going on before she did. I picked up my landline and called down to the lobby, asking them to send up a copy of the Post. Someone was up to my penthouse within five minutes, smiling as he handed it over. If only he knew what kind of hell was lurking on those pages for me, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be smiling. I took the paper in my office and sat down behind my desk, pulling out the story. I sat reading, my hand pressed to my forehead. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, but I had to admit, part of me had expected something like this to happen at some point. It was actually pretty shocking that, with all of the people who knew me back in the day always looking for some kind of payday, it hadn’t happened sooner than this. There were plenty of sources who knew exactly where I’d come from.
My best friend from high school, a guy I had run the streets with, pushed the limits with, and gotten in some serious trouble with had finally spilled the beans about my past. He had been locked up in prison for years after a string of armed robberies and eventually an attempted murder charge. From what I heard, the last place he hit, he ended up shooting the clerk in the chest. The guy survived, but Tyler got the maximum penalty for it. He had been in and out of trouble with the law since he was a kid, so it wasn’t really a surprise. He had told the press everything about my life before I made my money, and what a story he told. It sounded like he took all the facts from over the years and put a magical fairy tale spin on them to make me look even worse than I was as a kid. He didn’t talk about why I was doing what I did or that I hated every second of it. He made me into a street thug, no better than himself. Maybe at the time, I wasn’t any better, but I never robbed anyone and definitely never killed anyone.
My childhood was not easy, and there had been no one there to help me out as a kid. They talked about social services and therapists, but that wasn’t for kids like me. I had been poorer than dirt, always one step away from being on the streets. There were more nights than I cared to remember when I went to bed hungry, sometimes starving even. Food was not a necessity to my father, and it had been a luxury I could only afford when things were really good for us. By really good, I meant the lights were on, and my mother had picked up a couple of extra shifts. It wasn’t that my mother didn’t work hard all the time. She did. And in reality, she made more than enough for us to be comfortable with food on the table and a roof over our heads. The problem was not that. It had been my father. He would take my mother’s money before she even had a chance to pay one bill. Once he had it, it was as good as gone, and we were left with empty tummies and broken dreams.
The money stayed in my father’s hand for at most an hour. He either drank it down in a bottle of cheap booze, snorted it up his nose, or shot it up as fast as my mother could make the money. He was a junkie, a street hound, a man who had fallen trap to the drugs and the liquor that the streets were very well known for. He didn’t care about anything but his next fix, and he took advantage of my mother to get it, leaving her and the kids to starve and freeze inside our tiny rundown house. My druggie father was my most shameful secret. The fact that he didn’t care for us and left us to starve was just icing on that painful cake. I never really told anyone about him, trying to keep my past in the past and move forward without everyone knowing about it. I already struggled to fit in with the elite, and if they knew my father was a street bum, they would never accept me. My company relied on those people, and this was more than damaging to that persona I had built up to protect myself.
What was even worse was the fact that it wasn’t just me and my mom, I had little sisters too. I had to learn to take care of them, to make sure they didn’t starve or freeze in the winters. My mother did the best she could, but she had a lot on her plate with so many jobs and making sure she could stow away some cash before my father found it. He would get violent if he didn’t get some money, so she had to split what she made, making sure he at least got something. A lot of times, though, he ended up finding it all. So, when I was old enough to use my hands and go outside, I found as many odd jobs as I finally could. I was young, maybe nine years old when I first got a job, but it was that or continue to watch my sisters go to bed hungry. Eventually, after a couple years of developing a name on the street, I got a decent gig as a runner for one of the gangs in my neighborhood. I wasn’t initiated, just used as a runner for them.
They needed someone to move their drugs and weapons who wouldn’t find themselves in too much trouble if they got caught. I had been underage, so all that would happen to me at that point was a slap on the wrist. They didn’t lock up kids, and the boys’ detention facilities were so filled up, they only messed with you if you were hurting someone. I kept my nose down, though, and never actually got caught on any of my runs. I became their main guy to go with and made really decent money to boot. That and they always had my back when I needed it. As I got older and started reaching the age where they could lock me up if the system really wanted to, they took me off running. I was no longer a mule for the gangs and, instead, became an enforcer. I was the muscle to keep the junkies in line, pay off old debts, and find out information whenever anything shady was going down. They asked if I wanted to be initiated, but I turned them down, and surprisingly, they accepted that, finding my services and how I handled business to be too good to get rid of.
I didn’t like the job. I didn’t like being affiliated with a gang, but I needed to make money to provide for my family. I didn’t know any better, and I had grown up in that society, doing whatever I could to hustle myself into a better spot. I ran with some of the most dangerous gang members in the city for a long time, but when I saw an opening, I got myself out of it. It all kind of fell together perfectly. The cops had busted the head of the gang for murder, and everyone else dispersed, going into hiding until things calmed down. Me? I ran for the hills, glad to be done with that kind of work.
It helped that I had finally been able to kick my father out of the house just a couple of weeks before that. He no longer was a threat to us or our livelihood, and the money I made from the gang it wasn’t needed anymore. Unfortunately, what sparked me tossing his ass out was the fact that he had beaten my mother black and blue, trying to get at me, knowing I was the breadwinner, but I wasn’t giving him any of my money for drugs or alcohol. I could have killed him that day, but luckily, cooler heads prevailed.
Now, though, my dirty laundry was out there, blowing in the wind for everyone to see, including Sara. Every single thing I had to do when I was younger came flooding back, and I had worked so hard to keep it buried. I cared a lot about what the socialites thought for business purposes, but even more than that, I cared what Sara thought about me as a person. It didn’t take long for me to realize that she had already read it. The only choice I had was to face it head-on and tell her the whole truth, hoping she would understand. Across the table from her over breakfast, I laid it all out there, telling her every sordid detail. When I was done, I sat waiting for her response.
“I know you’re a decent guy,” she said with a kind smile. “People sometimes have to face hard choices in life. I’m not here to judge you on your past, I would rather make my decisions on who you are in the present. The man you have grown to be is what’s important to me.”
She got up from the table and walked around, pulling me to my feet. She leaned forward and gave me a big kiss, wrapping her arms around my neck and squeezing. I was relieved she felt that way but still anxious about everything else. That was when m
y phone started to ring again and again and again. It didn’t stop for the rest of the day.
Chapter 43
Sara
I knew the story coming out was really hard on Ryan, and I tried to stay as strong and supportive for him as possible. On Sunday, after telling me the whole story, I then spent the day watching him fielding phone calls from his PR agent, crafting and putting out statements, and rehashing all the painful memories of his past. He then talked to carefully-selected new outlets about his past. I had to admit, his actions were admirable. The way he had the ability to sound genuine and to own up to his past mistakes while still sounding hopeful for the future was pretty amazing. He surprised me every time I turned around, and I felt good about the fact that I finally knew everything about his youth. I’d known he had a rough childhood, but I could have never imagined that it was that deep and that painful.
He had done the only thing he knew how to do as a kid to combat what his terrible father was doing to his mother and his sisters. He had no guidance, no love from the outside, so he found money wherever he could. He kept his sisters alive, and his mom, too, and that was something to be said for someone who should have been coloring and playing with Legos, not drug running for a gang. It was heartbreaking and eye-opening knowing that even that day, somewhere in New York and other places, there were children doing things that even adults shouldn’t have to do to survive. Growing up in Bonanza had sheltered me from those hard truths, making me think every child grew up like I did with an entire town of love to raise them. I’d grown up where if a family fell on hard times, everyone gathered together to help them through it. No child went to bed hungry in Bonanza, but that wasn’t true for the rest of the world. It was heartbreaking, to say the least, but I found a new respect for Ryan that I hadn’t had before.
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