Billionaire Protector

by Kyanna Skye

  He lowered his head almost shamefully. “Well… the news guys greatly exaggerated some of those incidents…”

  “Oh?” she asked, feeling her defensive power rising. “And all these women I heard about?”

  He froze.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about that. You’ve got quite a loyal following,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “One of them even has her own blog.”

  He tried to shake it off and look smooth about it. “You can’t trust everything you read on the net, Kelly. If you did–”

  “She described your tattoo in perfect detail,” Kelly said pointedly, almost spitting the words out. “The one that you had when you graduated that no one can see easily.” She leaned forward on the table, like a judge passing a sentence on a convict. “She said, ‘He told me I was sweet… that he’d never met anyone like me… that my skin was so soft it was like cream.’ Does that sound familiar to you? It sure as hell sounds familiar to me.”

  He froze again, a look of shame washed over his features. That surprised her. The Chad that she had known years before would have been proud of that accomplishment. He’d spoken those same sweet words to her long ago. That someone else, a stranger, could quote them… she had felt crushed. She had known his reputation around the school and she had only agreed to tutor him because Susie had vouched for him. Later she had come to realize that his reputation was well founded, though no one could prove it. At least, not then they couldn’t. But once she’d seen that blog and read those descriptive words, she had found the truth.

  “That was a long time ago,” he said, his voice regretful.

  “The Bronze Age was a long time ago,” she retorted. “That blog was posted only four years ago, Chad. That’s recent history.”

  He said nothing.

  “Why did you come here?” she asked, going on the offensive.

  He folded his hands on the table, interlacing his fingers like he was about praying. “I came for the wedding.”

  “Not here to Holy Oaks… I mean here, to the diner? Why did you go looking for me?”

  “I wanted to see you,” he said.

  She waited, wanting to see if he would say any more. But no other words left his lips. “That’s it?”

  “Plain and simple.”

  She felt a small anger surging within her. She could almost see the Chad Cinch in front of her that was written of in the papers and spoken of on the news. He was looking for another woman to drag into his bed that might increase his popularity or whatever after another sexual escapade. Somewhere in the past she had realized that that was all she had been: an episode in his life. She had no desire to be a re-run. Chad was anything but plain and simple. She had known that from the beginning. “Well, you’ve seen me… and I’m humiliated. I suppose you’re going to go back to Susie and tell her what you’ve learned?”

  His face fell, like he was actually hurt that she assumed he would do such a thing. She felt a small pang of regret at it, but she recalled who he was now and why he often did the things he did. The regret faded instantly.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head gently. “No, I won’t tell her anything.”

  She paused at that. “Why?”

  His eyes didn’t leave hers. “Because it’s not my place to tell her the truth, if anyone should it should be you.” He looked around at the diner. “Whatever the reason is that Julliard didn’t work out for you… that you missed home… that’s your business. If it comes from me then it’s just gossip and I’d be no better than those fuckers who print the news about me. They don’t know me and they don’t know what I’ve done or why I did it to begin with. But you know what you’ve done and you know better than anyone else why you did it. And if it comes from you, then that’s the truth.”

  It sounded so enlightened that it was uncharacteristic of him. That didn’t strike her as the popular football player she had known back then, or of the playboy that he had since become. She’d really only gotten to know him for a month at the time when they had been in school together. But during their time together in that month…

  Unbidden into her mind came an old memory. She and Chad… the dimness of an empty room around them… feeling his muscles underneath her bare hands… seeing that tattoo… a tattoo that so many other girls had seen.

  That snapped her out of it.

  “Well, it’s big of you to admit that.” She looked at the clock on the wall. “Well, look at that. My lunch break is over. Time to get back to work.”

  He looked at the same clock with confusion. “What do you mean it’s over? We’ve been sitting here for ten minutes.”

  “Have we?” she asked. “Time does fly when you’re having fun.” She began to push her way off of the seat.

  “Kelly…” he said, reaching out and taking her hand, stopping her from leaving. She could feel the strength in his hands. The strength that she remembered, the strength that she had craved, had felt safe with… but the strength that had cradled the bodies of so many other women. “Please, don’t go.”

  “Sorry, I have to get back to work,” she said plainly and freeing herself from his grip she stood up. “I’ll make sure that you get that baked potato.” And without looking back she walked away. She was pleased that she did so, because the instant she turned her back on him, a single tear rolled down her cheek.

  Chapter 6

  Chad stood leaning against the front fender of his truck when she came out. It was nearly five in the afternoon when he saw Kelly emerge from out of the diner. She looked a little more ragged than she had when first he’d seen her. Obviously waitressing was tougher work than he had imagined. But he’d seen some of the characters that had been in the diner and he could well imagine that such work would take its toll. Her hair hung about her head in thin strings, looking partially unkempt. Her dress was stained in the remnants of someone else’s baked potato and she had the look of someone who’d had their fill for today.

  He’d seen that look countless times before.

  But when he saw it on her, he actually felt pity for her. Pity and something else that he couldn’t readily identify and it was that uncertainty that kept him anchored here, like a ship trying to stand against a great storm.

  When Kelly stepped out from the diner she saw him instantly and froze.

  All he could do was stand there, watching her.

  For a moment, neither of them said anything. He just stood silent and ponderous while she stood with the deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face. She looked angry, he could accept that. But what he couldn’t accept was how she so easily brushed him off like he’d been nothing more than an unwelcome nuisance. He had done things that he wasn’t proud of… in fact he’d been light hearted about some of them. But for whatever reason, it was different with her.

  He couldn’t get around that.

  “How long have you been standing there?” she asked, folding her arms sternly.

  He checked his watch. “Roughly, since I had to eat two baked potatoes by myself. I wasn’t sure what time you got off work.”

  She stood staring at him. “You’re lucky. Today I got the morning shift. Last night I didn’t get home until after dark. You should have gone home, Chad. What will Susie think?”

  He shrugged innocently. “I texted her. She thinks that the measurements for my tux were all wrong and that old man Chalmers had to start over. I said it could be hours before I made it home. It looks like I was telling the truth in that.”

  Kelly’s stern look didn’t diminish.

  He looked around at the parking lot. Most of the vehicles parked here were service trucks, most of them labeled with the rock-hammering logo of the local mining industry. There were a few others, mostly minivans or compacts. None of them struck him as the kind of car that a musical prodigy would drive.

  “Which car is yours?”

  She looked angry for a moment, “I’m a waitress working for minimum wage, Chad.” Her look changed, becoming embarrassed. “I can’t afford a
car. I take the bus to work.”

  “Oh?” He sensed an opportunity. “Then will it be okay if we go somewhere and talk? Just talk, I swear.” The words sounded feeble, even to him. He’d used that same arrangement of words before hoping that it would lead to sex.

  She seemed to be thinking the exact same thing as her angry look returned. “I can’t. I have to get home. I have… things to do there.”

  “Really?” he asked. He gestured to his truck. “Hop in, I’ll give you a ride.”

  “No thanks,” she said, starting to walk towards him, though he knew she was aiming for the bus stop on the far side of the parking lot behind him. She walked by him, not looking back for the second time today. “I’m used to it.”

  “Kelly,” he said, his voice filling with defeat. Something inside of him told him that it was time to go for broke and pray for a Hail Mary Pass. “Look… I know you don’t enjoy being this close to me. I understand that. But I’m trying to make amends here. Will you at least allow me to be polite and take you home?”

  She paused midstride.

  Feeling like a fisherman with a small nibble on the line, he kept at it. “If I do anything that you don’t like, you can scream ‘I’ve been kidnapped’ out the window and I’ll confess to the first cop that shows up. I swear.”

  She remained still but he could see the scales of her mind balancing in her head. He’d given up long ago trying to figure out women that didn’t throw themselves at him. But there was something about Kelly that simply demanded attention.

  “Does that include talking to me?” she asked.

  He felt a twitch of irritation in his mind. “No… I want to talk to you.” This didn’t’ seem the right thing to say, so he settled for a compromise. “You don’t have to talk back if you don’t want to, but I do want to say a few things. I can’t promise I’ll be quiet. But I won’t do anything else to upset you, I swear.”

  She remained where she was for an moment, looking off to the waiting bus stop that was empty of anyone else. The sun was still high in the sky and the heat was already unbearable. He didn’t like the idea of her taking the bus. And the chance to speak with her, privately, seemed too good to pass up.

  She finally turned to him. “You’d like that though, wouldn’t you? It would feed this bad boy image that you’ve been building up for years now, wouldn’t it? To have a woman scream that you kidnapped her probably wouldn’t be good for you though. You’d be looking at federal jail time for that.”

  Her words had all the sensitivity of a mac truck running him over and they stung like poison. They were even laced with the appeal, like she might do just as he suggested so that he would go to prison. Okay… that backfired, he thought with self-loathing. “No…” he tried quickly, “that’s not what I meant…” He fumbled his words. “Oh, Jesus in a taxicab… Kelly… I just want to talk to you. I have to say a few things that have been on my mind since Susie told me you were here. After that if you never want to see me again – after the wedding, obviously – then I’ll respect that. But please, just give me the length of time it takes to get you home. Give me that, at least.”

  She fixed him with a stern look, the scales of her mind still looked off balanced, but she seemed to be coming to a decision. After only a few more seconds, she finally spoke. “Alright… but I’m not coming because I’m interested in what you have to say. And I sure as hell don’t want Susie to blame me for her cherished brother to go to jail. I’m just going because it means I’ll get home faster.”

  He felt a tremendous moment of victory but tried not to let it show. He stepped to the passenger door of his truck and opened it.

  She looked irritated that he’d done so but walked over and though he offered her a hand up, she ignored it and climbed in all on her own. She even yanked the door out from his grip and closed it before he could do the gentlemanly thing and close it for her.

  He climbed in and started the engine. “Where do you live?”

  She looked away from him out the passenger window as she responded, “The Hathaway Apartment building.”

  Without commenting on this he put the truck into gear and drove out from the diner’s parking lot. He knew where the building was, an old high school conquest had once lived there. And it would be a short trip, he knew.

  As if she were reading his thoughts she said, “Whatever you have to say, you’d better say it. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  He took a breath. He’d had hours to rehearse what he wanted to say in his head, but now that the moment of truth was upon him he was at a loss as to how he should begin. “I feel bad about this, I really do.”

  He expected that to evoke some kind of a reaction from her, but it didn’t. She simply kept gazing out of the passenger window and didn’t look at him. She had always been one to stick to her guns. He’d admired that about her. It was one of the things that he remembered most about her.

  “Look, I know that it should send off a stalker alert the way I tracked you down today, but I had to talk to you… I had to see you. We have a history and I know that it’s complicated. And I know I didn’t make it any better after I left but neither did you. You were the one who wanted to stop seeing me, remember? I can still remember the text message you sent me. We have to stop. Don’t come back. Do you remember that?”

  He expected that to have a reaction, but again she remained silent.

  “When I went away to college I used to talk to Susie, asking her how you were. But she said that she was too busy with school and she didn’t keep in touch with anyone from home but she imagined that you were out becoming a master musician. I tried texting you… calling you… but you never answered. After a while, I admit, I just gave up trying to reach out to you. But I wasn’t trying to get in touch with you because…” he slammed the wheel of his truck in frustration. “I wasn’t trying to get in touch with you because I was horny or anything… I really wanted to talk to you.”

  She said nothing.

  “I wondered about you for weeks. What was Julliard like? What were you studying? Would there be a time I could fly out there and surprise you? Fuck, Kelly, I wanted to see you again.”

  She looked away from him pointedly, deliberately keeping him well out of her vision. This wasn’t the girl he’d known before. She had been warmer… more inviting… soothing even. But now she was cold and detached. It was like she had built a wall of ice around her.

  “It took me a while to accept that you didn’t want to see me again, Kelly. To this day – and I’m not trying to sound self-important here – you’re the only girl that has done that. And I can’t deny that I’ve been with other women… you’ve seen the blog, so you know that’s true. But those others would sell their grandparents into slavery for the chance to be as close to me as you are now. I don’t expect that to mean anything to you, but between you and them I’d rather have you.”

  She put an arm up and rested her head on her fist as if she was bored and on the verge of falling asleep, but again she was silent.

  “Christ,” he murmured. Why am I even bothering? She obviously doesn’t care. But he knew he had to speak his piece on this. He might never get another chance. “I always wondered if it was something that I did – or didn’t do – that made you want to stop seeing me. Maybe it was something that I said – or didn’t say – that got you so pissed off at me. I made mistakes in school, I admit that. And I do wish I could take it all back sometimes, but here we are. You have secrets that you want to keep from Susie, that’s fine. You don’t want her to know that you’ve been here all this time and that Julliard didn’t work out? I’ll take that to the grave, she’ll never hear it from me.

  “If you want to start your own blog about what it is that I’ve said here, that’s fine too. I’ll swear to it in court if you want. But the full of it is… fuck, it hurt when you said you didn’t want to see me anymore. I remember that feeling and it feels like someone pumped molten metal into my chest. And all I ever really wanted to know was why y
ou didn’t want to see me anymore.”

  She maintained her silence and kept her eyes away from him.

  He decided that he wasn’t going to get any reaction out of her. He decided that he wasn’t going to torture himself with this at all a second longer. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

  The rest of the trip passed in silence.

  When he pulled into the parking lot of the Hathaway building he drove right up to the front entrance. Kelly was quick to unbuckle herself and she almost jumped out of the door with paratrooper-like readiness. That she was so eager to get away from him suddenly hurt him all the more.

  That’s the irony, isn’t it? Bad Chad… the definition of a gridiron man on the field; he’s so hard that he doesn’t care what legal troubles he causes for himself or for his team. He doesn’t care how the public perceives him, because they show up in droves to see him play. And he doesn’t care that he leaves broken-hearted women in his wake everywhere he goes. And yet this simple girl, that used to tutor him years ago, can make him blabber like a sitcom actor. Yeah… if a blog starts on this, you’ll never live it down.

  He watched as Kelly began to close the door, but she halted.

  He froze, watching her.

  She lowered her head as if some massive thought had just struck the back of her mind and more of her golden tresses hung limply around her face. She turned to look at him and much to his surprise her eyes were wet with tears that had not yet formed.

  “I didn’t go to Julliard,” she said, her voice tense. “I never even made it past the town limits after I graduated. I’ve been here for four years. Everyone else has moved on… and I’m still here.”

  With that, she slammed the door shut before he could respond and rushed inside the building, vanishing through the glass lobby doors.

  Kelly’s stomach did a belly flop the following day when she looked at her cell phone and found that Susie had sent her a new text message. The message was short and sweet, but it felt like she had been impaled with the lightning rod of a skyscraper.