by Kylie Walker
“Yep,” Lauren went on, “His grandfather was the one that initially invested in real estate. Something happened to the market and he lost most of his money in the seventies but he hung onto that one building. It was originally a department store and office buildings but he had it turned into residences. The top floor was always reserved for family.”
“Wow,” Nat said, “I’m going to find out where the next guy I decide to date lives and you can give me his background before he breaks my heart.”
Lauren made a sad face at her friend and said, “Just because that asshole broke your heart, doesn’t mean all men are the same. I mean seriously look at that smile on Jordan’s face.” They both turned and looked at her. She felt herself blush a little bit and stuck her tongue out at them. They both laughed and Lauren went on to say, “Chase Louis is living proof that people can change.”
It wasn’t so much what Lauren said, although that was odd too since she didn’t know Chase, but it was how she said it that made the hairs on the back of Jordan’s neck stand up.
“What do you mean?” she asked Lauren. Confusion marred her face.
“Oh you know, that trouble he got into back when he was only eighteen…” Lauren must have realized mid-sentence that wasn’t something that Jordan and Chase talked about the night before. She tried to change the subject by saying, “So what did you buy today?”
Natalie started to tell Lauren about Jordan’s dress but Jordan interrupted her. “What trouble?”
“Oh, well I just read an article in an obscure magazine about his family. The article was really old…”
“Jesus Lauren, get to the point.”
She sighed and looked at Nat. Nat just shrugged and took a drink of her wine. “I don’t want to start any trouble. Damn, I’ve got such a big mouth sometimes. You’re so happy. I don’t want to mess things up for you.”
“See that’s what worries me, Lauren. Why would something he did over a decade ago affect my relationship with him now? It had to be something pretty serious so spill it.”
Lauren’s bottom lip was set in a pout as she said, “He killed his father.”
Natalie spit out her wine. Jordan felt the blood drain from her face. It had to be a mistake, she thought. Chase was a professional businessman and everyone that worked for him had nothing but good things to say. He’s kind and gentle with her…there’s no way he’s a murderer. This had to be some kind of mistake.
**
Hours later Jordan laid in her bed looking at the ceiling. She had excused herself from the little party in the living room and she had gone to her own room and googled Charles Louis Sr. She got tens of thousands of hits so she narrowed it down by typing in Charles Louis Sr.—death. That netted her almost the same amount of hits. She clicked on a local news source. The article was in the archives of the paper and it was dated for almost eighteen years earlier. The senior Mr. Louis had indeed been murdered. He was stabbed twice. Once in the hand and once directly through the heart. Chase Louis…Charles Louis Jr. had pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter. He had been offered a ten-year sentence in return for his guilty plea. Jordan clicked around and read a few more articles. Chase had done his time uneventfully, one article even said that he earned his business degree in prison. He was released eight years ago and his father’s company was in financial straits. Chase had taken over as CEO and within five years the company was once again thriving.
Jordan’s mind was in a chaotic state. None of it made any sense to her. While she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling she got a text message from Chase that said, “Did you make it home from your shopping trip safely?” She stared at it for a really long time. So long in fact that she got another text from him that said, “You’re okay, right?”
Is she okay? She had been on top of the world only hours ago. When she got involved with Axel she had been so young and naïve. She was only twenty years old and out on her own in the world with only her friend Natalie as a constant in her life. She had discovered her love for photography at an early age when her foster family bought her a camera one Christmas when she was thirteen. She carried that old camera everywhere she went. She had been enrolled at a community college for a little over a year at the time she met Axel. It was purely by accident, or so she had thought at the time…but maybe it was fate. Maybe his horrific road was the one she was supposed to take so that she could come out the other side with the maturity and confidence she needed to take on the world basically alone.
She and her friend had been out for a drive one Sunday afternoon. Jordan didn’t have a boyfriend at the time. She only had two boyfriends in her life at that point. The first was the quarterback of their high school football team. He was gorgeous but Jordan found out that he was not a nice person when she walked up on him bullying a smaller boy at their school. She had tried to intervene and her boyfriend had turned on her angrily. After that he spread rumors about her at school and anytime she was face to face with him he would say ugly things. Jordan moved on from that teenage angst and in her first year of college she met another guy. This one worked with her on the school newspaper. She was the photographer and he was one of the reporters. That young man was a nice guy, but as much as Jordan liked him she couldn’t ever see herself developing real feelings for him. When she finally decided to break up with him it was because she didn’t feel like she was being fair to him. When he asked her why she didn’t want him she told him the truth or most of it, she just didn’t feel the attraction. What she didn’t tell him was that she had always been attracted to the bad boys, the dark, smoldering type. Steven had just been too nice.
Jordan was twenty the day she agreed to go for a ride with her friend. They stopped at a gas station and attached to it in the strip mall there was a little hole in the wall bar. In front of the bar was a line of about ten shiny Harley’s and while her friend pumped the gas Jordan took her camera and went over and started taking pictures of the bikes. She had snapped about five of them before she was caught off guard by the sudden appearance of a big man in her face. At first, she was terrified and she took a step back, tripped over a curb and fell on her butt. The man leaned down and said,
“Why are you taking pictures? Who are you?”
From her vantage point on the ground, he looked huge. He was attractive in that bad boy kind of way too but she was too afraid at that point to notice. She explained to him in a shaky voice that she was a college student and photography was her major, and the love of her life. The man helped her to her feet and introduced himself and told her he was Vice President of the Queens Borough Wrecking Crew. It was an MC club and for some reason the idea of knowing a real biker gave Jordan a thrill. The fact that the biker had light blue eyes, dark hair, and a killer body fascinated her further. Axel had bought her a drink that day and just about one year later had tried to kill her. She figured out early on who and what Axel was, but she stayed in denial right up until the night he stopped only abusing her with his hateful words, and started raising his fists.
Jordan hated thinking about any part of her life that Axel had been a part of but the simple fact was that you couldn’t change the past, you could only move forward and heal. She had been ready to take steps to do that with Chase only twelve hours ago and now she couldn’t help but wonder if that had been her being naïve or not. The sound of her ringing telephone startled her. She saw Chase’s number on the face and she felt her stomach grow butterflies. She was pretty sure that if she didn’t answer it he would only show up on her doorstep again. With what felt like the sudden weight of the world on her shoulders she said, “Hello?”
“Jordan? Hey, I was getting worried about you. Did you get my text messages?”
“Yeah, I did. I’m sorry…”
“Jordan what’s wrong?”
Her thoughts were racing. Should she just ask him? Would he tell her the truth? One of the big questions in her head was this: Would the D.A. have let him plead to manslaughter if he was simply a murderer? She couldn’
t help in her active imagination, however, imagine what it would be like to plunge a knife into another human being. That would take a lot of effort…or passion…
“Jordan?”
She sucked in a shaky breath and before she had fully decided what to do she said, “Did you kill your father?” Now his side of the phone was silent. She could hear him breathing and she was about to say his name when he spoke at last.
“I spent almost eleven years in prison for stabbing my father. I’ve been out for eight years. But Jordan everything isn’t always what it seems.”
“So then tell me, Chase. What is it?”
“I can’t do this on the phone. I need to see you, face to face.” Now she was hesitating. She had spent six long years getting her confidence back. Six long years of forcing herself not to jump at every sound and not to flinch every time anyone came toward her too quickly. Axel liked to use his fists on her. Somehow it made him feel like more of a man. But he used to threaten to use all sorts of things and when he was feeling particularly nasty he would describe to her how he was going to kill her and carve her body up with a knife. Her heart was telling her to give Chase a chance to explain but her head was screaming at her to run.
“Maybe in the morning,” she said at last.
“No Jordan. In the morning we’ll both be surrounded by people and immersed in work. We need to do this alone with no distractions. I don’t want you thinking about this all night until you hear from me what really happened, please. I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll come there with Natalie in the other room. I’d never hurt you. The very idea of you being afraid to be alone with me makes my chest hurt.”
She heard sincerity in his voice. She didn’t think he would ever hurt her. As a matter of fact a few hours ago she would have sworn to it. But then again when she first met Axel she wouldn’t have guessed he would hurt her either…the difference, however, was that she had always kind of known Axel wasn’t a good person at heart, even before he threw the first punch. She had only been young enough then to believe love could change him. She felt Chase’s goodness when she was with him. She saw the look in his eyes when he saw what Axel did to her. That could all be faked, but for the first time in six years she had met a man that she wanted to trust and believe in from the start. No matter what she had been through in her life she had never been one to go backward. Always forward. Always with her head held high.
“No, don’t come here. You’re right. We need to talk about this alone and face to face. I’ll grab an Uber and be there in half an hour.”
His voice sounded relieved as he simply said, “Thank you.”
Chapter 16
Chase
One of the big questions in Chase’s head, when he was twenty-eight years old and fresh out of prison, was, “how do I tell people about what happened?” The old men on the Board of Directors already thought they knew. Chase saw it in their eyes when they looked at him and heard it in their voices when they were forced to speak to him. He had thought that before he took over the company he would stand in front of them and address it. He wasn’t going to tell the absolute truth but he thought he owed them some kind of explanation. He had gone into his first board meeting with the intentions of somehow trying to appease them, but then a funny thing happened. He looked at their judgmental faces and realized that their opinion of him didn’t mean shit. They didn’t live in that house for eighteen years. They would never begin to imagine the secrets that his “perfect” family kept. Even if he tried to explain it, they would still judge him and worst of all, his mother, and that was the moment that he knew he didn’t owe them a thing. He was the CEO of the company. His name was on the building and if they didn’t like anything about him then they could simply go fuck themselves.
Chase never once considered talking to any of the women he “dated” about it, not even Samantha. As he waited for Jordan he had to wonder what was happening to him. He was about to tell the absolute truth about what happened that night eighteen years ago and he had no qualms about it whatsoever. At least not in the sense that he was afraid that Jordan was going to run and tell someone or sell his story to the tabloids. He did have qualms about telling her something that might make her run from him. Caring that much about someone’s opinion of him was new, but then again everything, where Jordan was concerned was new. He had never felt this way about anyone and if he hoped to have any kind of future with her then she deserved to know the truth, all of it.
It was almost a half an hour on the dot when Jordan got to his place. The doorman notified him that she was coming up so he stood in the doorway of the penthouse and waited. He felt a flutter in his stomach when the elevator dinged and his breath in his throat when the doors slid open. So fucking beautiful. She was fresh-faced, no makeup at all. Her hair was hanging straight down like she had just run a brush through it and left it there and she had on jeans, boots, and an NYU sweatshirt. He thought that she could still win any beauty contest in the world. She locked eyes with him as she stepped off the elevator. He could tell that she was nervous but when he really searched her face he didn’t see the one thing he had been most dreading…fear. He couldn’t stand the thought of her being afraid of him.
“Hi.”
She seemed to force a little smile. “Hey.” He stepped back from the doorway and motioned her in.
“Thank you for coming. You want something to drink, maybe a glass of wine?” She smiled before saying, “No, thank you. Natalie and I already had a little too much wine today. I’m fine Chase, thank you.”
“Okay, have a seat then and let’s get this over with.” She did flinch at that but she walked over and sat down on the couch. He followed and sat what he hoped was enough distance from her that she didn’t feel boxed in or cornered and started. “My father was a horrible man. I don’t say that as an excuse, but simply because it’s true. He didn’t care about anyone or anything other than himself. He wanted people to look at his life and be envious. He had the perfect, beautiful wife and the son that would one day follow in his footsteps and take over the family business. He was an asshole to his business associates and employees but they all cowered down to him because he was rich and powerful. He got off on it and when he came home and the doors to the fancy penthouse on Park Avenue were closed, he demanded it from his family as well. My earliest memories of my father were the terror I felt in my chest every time he walked in the room. Sometimes he was in the mood to tell me what a disappointment I was to him and how I was walking around sucking up oxygen he paid for and I didn’t deserve. I never felt anything remotely like love for him and as I got older and watched the way he treated people, I began to hate him.” He paused and ran a hand through his hair. He could see there was a question in Jordan’s eyes.
“Did he abuse you?”
Chase felt an odd sense of relief. He told himself that she was looking for a way to excuse what he had done and that was a good sign that she hadn’t given up on him just yet. But this was about the whole truth and the fact of the matter was that while his father verbally, mentally and psychologically abused him at every turn, he never once laid a hand on him. He couldn’t even actually remember if he and his father ever even touched one other than the handshakes and slap’s on the back he gave to Chase in public for show.
“Not physically,” he finally said. “But my mother wasn’t so lucky.”
She drew her brows together and frowned. “He hurt her?”
Chase nodded. “I was about five years old the first time I remember watching him punch her in the face. I freaked out and tried to help her but she begged me to go upstairs and stay in my room. I can’t describe the feeling, even at five years old, of walking away and leaving her there with him. He beat her so badly that time that she had to spend five days locked away from everyone, except me. She told me over and over how sorry she was and how much she loved me and how she would never, ever let him hurt me. She didn’t seem to understand how badly I was hurting already, for her. When her face h
ealed I watched her paint the smile back on and go on with her life as the perfect wife and mother. She headed up charity events and she attended every one in the city on my father’s arm. She was beautiful and she just had this aura about her that attracted people, men and women alike. She had a lot of acquaintances but no one that could really be called her friend. My father didn’t allow her to have people at the house unless he was there and it was something he had approved in advance. He told her what to wear, how to wear her hair and if she dared to try anything he didn’t okay in advance, like maybe a new hairstyle or color, she would get berated and belittled. When I was ten she got her hair cut to her shoulders. It was in style at the time and she looked gorgeous, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she was a little bit crazy. I knew my father was going to hate it…and he did. After using a belt to ‘punish’ her for not asking his permission to cut her hair, he gave her a pair of clippers and told her that if she had just cut it off the way she had then she didn’t deserve to have it. I sat at the top of the stairs and listened in horror as he made her shave her head bald. I could hear her sobbing and that was the first time I remember having thoughts of wanting to hurt him.”
Jordan’s face didn’t look horrified as he thought it would. Instead, her blue-gray eyes were filled with tears and her delicate features held a look of sympathy. “I’m so sorry Chase. No child should have to go through that.”