Rider: An MC Club Alpha Male Romance (19 page)

KYLE

“Liana’s at it again, Kyle,” Nicholas grumbled as he strode into my office. I took my eyes off the Wall Street Journal for just a moment to see his hands fling a copy of the latest issue of the National Inquirer down onto my desk.

I sighed, bracing myself for the headline. It showed me guiding Liana into a taxi but it had been photoshopped to make it look like I was slapping her. The headline read:

“BILLIONAIRE BADBOY BACKHANDS BAWLING EX IN BOWERY.”

“They did so well with the alliteration, except for the word ‘ex,’” Nicholas noted to me, pulling up a chair and pouring himself a glass of scotch from the decanter I always kept on my desk. “You’d think they could have found something else to call her?”

I spun around in my chair, taking in the panoramic views of Manhattan that my office, a corner unit in the headquarters of Stone Equity, allowed me: the city stretched out before me, farther than any idea could see, a magnificent kingdom of the rich and powerful and wealthy, of whom I am one of the richest, the most powerful, the most wealthy—because, I am, after all, Kyle Stone, the richest man under forty in America and newly single, owing to the shenanigans of the woman featured on the front page of the Inquirer.

“I mean, bitch is too easy. What else? Broad? ‘Backhands Bawling Broad’ sounds good,” I mumbled, watching a helicopter drift by lazily in the cool early autumn sky. I often wondered what it would be like to be a bird, to fly away… To live free and be able to fly away from my problems…

As it was, I was more inclined just to buy a plane and live life in the sky, but you can’t buy everything. Though, you can damned well try.

“If only you had knocked Liana up,” Nicholas suggested, his face screwed up in a cynical smile, half-helpful, half-joking. “Then it could have read ‘Bad Boy Billionaire Backhands Bawling…”

“…’Babymama.’ You’re right. I really should have had a child with Liana. That would make this whole divorce a whole hell of a lot easier, wouldn’t it?” I shot back with a grin over my shoulder. I turned away from the beautiful skyline and returned to my desk.

“Tell it to me straight, doc. What do I have to do to make this go away?” I said, eager to get back to work but not so eager to be rid of Nicholas. Nicholas Blink is maybe my only true friend. A prep-school classmate, we grew apart after college, but after I began Stone Equity and I found myself looking for a chief public relations officer, who should be on the market for an exit from his high-paying but stifling Edelman gig but Nicholas? After a round of drinks at the Union League Club here in Manhattan, I had given him the job and every week since, we’ve had these informal meetings to discuss my public image, and, more importantly, the image of my company.

Oh, who am I kidding? They’re one in the same anyway.

“Well, there’s the thing, Kyle,” Nicholas said with a sigh. “Liana says she’ll behave herself but the heroin doesn’t necessarily agree with her. She’s at rehab on Long Island now but who knows how long she’ll stay? She’s a grown-ass woman. We can’t make her stay somewhere she doesn’t want to.”

“Why can’t we get her parents on board again?” I grumbled.

“They’re on permanent vacation in Maui. You know that as well as I do. They’ll keep moving twenty-grand into her checking account every month until they die, and then she’ll get it all at once. Hell, if she overdosed, I doubt they’d even notice—that account would just grow fatter and fatter, with no one to spend it on smack and Lululemon yoga pants.”

I scowled. I blamed Liana’s parents for fucking her up, but hey, we all blame our parents for messing us up, don’t we?

Marrying her was obviously a mistake, in retrospect, though tell that to my young self four years ago. I had just finished my gig at Goldman and I was on top of the world, flush with cash, and horny as hell. I was a young stud, determined to make New York City my bitch.

I was an asshole.

I still am, but I’ve got more self-awareness now.

And there she was—a hot mess of a Barnard girl, gorgeous blonde hair pulled back into a braid, skinny to the point of sickness but looking like an Eastern European model, leaning over the railing of a SoHo loft and giggling as the DJ spun records. I had pulled her into my arms, we had danced, and we had breakfast the next morning. For me, breakfast was eggs, bacon, and toast. For her, it was a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a line of cocaine.

I should have known it was wrong, but the things that are bad for us are so tasty sometimes. The wedding was an outrageous, almost disgustingly luxurious affair on Governor’s Island. Bloomberg was there, so were the Clintons. Katy Perry played the reception.

And from day one, things started to fall apart. Probably the first thing that should have clued me into the fact that we wouldn’t work out was the day after when I woke up alone in bed, stumbled into the bathroom, and found her in the bathtub, naked, twitching, with the busboy dozing shirtless between her legs.

We tried to make things work. Really. We did.

But sometimes, you can’t buy everything.

But you can try. And boy, did I try. I got the best marriage counselors I could find—half of them bullshitted me, the other half suggested a divorce, an annulment, or a separation, depending on who I asked. I tried to get Liana to go to rehab twice, only to have her check herself out after less than a week, claiming she had “seen the light” and whatever else the staff wanted to hear. I tried getting her a job so she would have responsibilities, have something to do during the day that wasn’t heroin and yoga, but she was fired from Edelman, Nicholas’s old public relations outfit, within a week and barely managed to hold down a gig as a yoga instructor for a month before she blew off a week of classes to go to Bermuda with friends.

In the end, I was spending more time working on Liana than I was working on my company. I knew one of them would have to go and at thirty-one, I’m too young to retire. I gave her an ultimatum: get help, or I was leaving.

I had told that to Liana one morning over breakfast. For me, my morning routine consisted of a run, half an hour at the boxing gym, and then a big breakfast of oatmeal, eggs, chicken sausage, and a kale smoothie. For Liana, it was a cigarette, a glass of white wine, and a cup of coffee if she had to go anywhere.

She looked at me with dull, uncomprehending eyes as I delivered my final decree.

“Wait, what?” she mumbled as I finished up my planned speech. I scowled and stormed out, something the marriage counselors had advised me not to do. But that was my first reaction. First reactions are usually bad.

I found my things being loaded into a moving truck when I came home that evening. I charged up to our fifty-ninth floor high-rise condo and found it locked. A big Israeli mover pushed me out of the way as he strode by with boxes.

I’m not a man who likes to be pushed. I’m not the kind of man you push. I’m the kind of man who does the pushing. I push. I don’t get pushed.

But then I stopped. I found my hands sliding into my pocket, feeling the cool, sharp metal of my condo keys, pressing the metal into my flesh.

No, it wasn’t worth it. I had everything else. I had money. I could go to a hotel. I would figure it out.

And so, instead of confronting Liana, I had turned around and walked right back to the elevator. I took the elevator down to the lobby in silence, ignored the quiet gazes of the other residents, other bankers and lawyers and doctors who usually ignored me, usually didn’t have much to say to me nor I them. But now, the only human interaction they would offer me was a quiet look of pity.

I didn’t want their pity. I didn’t fucking care.

I stormed out of the building, gaze the moving company my phone number, told them to call me when they had picked everything up and take it to a storage warehouse in New Jersey. Then, I checked myself into the Hilton and called my lawyer.

The divorce was easy. Liana agreed to everything, and we had signed a pre-nup beforehand, so the proceedings went smoothly. It was what happened afterwards that made my life a living hell.

Liana calling me constantly, showing up at my office, interrupting dinners, stalking me around town… The particular instance immortalized on the cover of this tabloid showed a moment last weekend when she had tracked me down to a Midtown restaurant where I was holding a dinner for my new management team, congratulating everyone on a good first quarter. It was a welcome distraction from the madness of dealing with my ex-wife.

And then, into our private dining room, Liana stormed, her thin, pale face running with mascara, her lipstick slathered on awkwardly, a glass of white wine in her hand.

“Kyle,” she screamed. “I can’t find the fucking remote!”

I remember simply putting my head down on the dinner table, face-down, as the staff escorted her out. My people know about my wife; they know the trouble we’ve been going through. None of them were surprised. I couldn’t think of a better crowd to have that happen in front of.

But then, she had hidden out outside the restaurant, in a line of clubgoers waiting to get into the night spot next to the restaurant. She flung herself at me, screaming as I hailed a cab that was meant for me, but which I ended up depositing her in, handing the cabbie a hundred-dollar bill, and telling him to take her back to the condo.

I guess there had been some paparazzi in the area. You can never escape. There’s something that money can’t buy me, I suppose. Damn it all to hell.

“Nick, just make her go away…” I sighed. “Make it all go away.”

“Like I said, Kyle. Not that easy,” my friend and PR man said with another long-suffering sigh. “You know that Jenkins Consulting is starting to say they don’t want to work with us?”

My eyes widened and I sat up in my chair. Jenkins was a consulting outfit we had been looking at acquiring for the last six months. The deal was almost done with.

“What? Why is this the first time I’m hearing about it?” I demanded, reaching for my phone.

Nicholas smiled cautiously, smiling the smile of a man who’s not happy about anything.

“They—“ this meant the other senior company officers. “—wanted me to tell you. So you wouldn’t be mad.”

“Damn right I’m mad!” I yelled. “Just over this stupid thing?”

“It’s everything, Kyle. Your divorce has been in the tabloids for weeks, months even. It’s one thing after another. These aren’t glamorous celebrities you’re working with—they don’t want to work with Chris Brown. They want someone who doesn’t get written up for slapping his ex-wife.”

“I didn’t slap her! I put her in a taxi home!” I protested, growling like a cornered beast. But like a cornered beast, I was ready to fight.

“I know that. And she knows that. And hell, the tabloids probably know that. But does the rest of the world know that?”

I sat back in my chair and once again, turned around, taking in my skyline, the skyline and panorama of the city I planned on someday owning. It had darkened over the course of my conversation with Nicholas. Now, storm clouds were moving in from off Long Island Sound. Big, bloody, angry ones, with deep rumbling emanating from their guts that spoke of an oncoming tempest.

I glanced down to the street, seeing the people, like little ants down there, rushing about, trying to take cover and hail cabs as the rain began to fall. Within moments, moments of silence between myself and Nicholas, bullet-sized drops of rain began to pour out of the sky, peppering the ground like shotgun pellets.

I might have been a cornered beast ready to fight, but that didn’t matter one damned bit if I were shot down before I could do anything.

“Is there anything I can do to improve my reputation, then?” I asked, turning back once more to my friend. Nicholas stood, taking his glass with him as he walked over to one of my bookshelves. I used to keep books on management and finance in my office, but found that I never looked at them and, besides, who really cares about reading books like that? So, instead, I switched them all out for the classics—Faulkner, Hemingway, Melville, Shakespeare. Nicholas set down his scotch and plucked The Great Gatsby out of the shelf.