“Yes you do,” she smiled back.
What the hell, Axe, go for it.
“Off the record?” I asked.
“Off the record,” she promised.
“Well you were right about some of those things…” I started slowly. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d revealed my history to anyone, it had been years. I felt I could trust her, though, with the weight of what I was about to reveal. “Well, I grew up with two younger siblings, a girl and a boy, they were twins. They were a bit younger than me and so I kinda took them under my wing, I guess you could say. I spent most of my time outside as a kid. We lived on a ranch in the mountains so we were always outdoors, exploring and running wild. My mother was amazing, she was the best. My father was the mayor of our town, he was great, too. He was loved by everyone. He decided to run for Governor. And he won.”
“Oh my gosh,” she interrupted, genuinely shocked. “You’re a Governor’s son!”
I nodded shyly.
The girl clasped her hands together and seemed to see me in a new light. “You must have grown up like a prince!”
“Yes, well no, I mean. Not exactly,” I couldn’t help but stare at the ground as the tone shifted greatly. This was the part I hated. The part I kept to myself. “My dad never took office. There was a, um, there was a brush fire… our ranch… our home… gone.”
I could barely get the words out. Immediately the girl’s smile faded and I could see she felt immense sympathy for me—normally I hated that, when others felt sorry for me, but from her, somehow, it was okay.
“Your family? The twins? Your parents?” she asked cautiously.
“Gone,” was all I said.
The look of shock on her face was almost enough to put me over the edge so instead I just kept talking. Rambling almost. I explained to the girl that after my family died, I went to live with my aunt in New York. It was quite a change, to say the least. She was a socialite, a total academic and a bit elitist to be honest, but she doted on me like crazy.
She’d never had children or a husband of her own and she took me in and treated me like I was her entire family because in a way, I was all she had, and she was all I had. The life she gave me was the complete opposite of what I’d grown up with. It was hard to get used to at first but soon enough all those fancy dinners, 5-star vacations, and access to anything I could possibly imagine were second nature to me. I never took it for granted though, and I never forgot where I came from.
I didn’t tell the girl everything though.
She didn’t need to know about the 100 million dollar trust my aunt had left me. She didn’t need to know that I would use it to restore my family’s ranch. And she definitely didn’t need to know perhaps my biggest secret of all…
It would surely cloud her judgement of me.
Like it had with so many other women.
“Anyway,” I continued, “so here I am, a fifteen year old boy from a small town with mountains in every direction and I get dropped in the middle of Manhattan with a country-club socialite as m
y new ‘mama’.”
The girl nodded and smiled sadly. God I hope she didn’t think I was pathetic or weak for spilling my guts to her like this.
“I bet you loved your aunt very much,” she said sweetly.
“Oh absolutely,” I replied. “She taught me a lot about life, especially the type of stuff that I never got from my upbringing. I got the best of both worlds. A wild, adventurous childhood and sophisticated “society” teen years…”
She smiled again and I felt myself wanting to move towards her lips—was that crazy? I didn’t even know her name!
She crossed one leg over the other and I couldn’t help but look at her legs again. She wore cut offs and they were short but instead of being tacky or revealing they were inviting. Damn. It was frustrating how much I wanted to see more.
This girl, whoever she was, was making me forget all about the conversation I’d had with my contact and what lay ahead for me in just three days.
Precious cargo…
Micro level…
Compromised…
“So, Chaperone,” she smiled sexily, “you’re not off the hook you know, for being a jerk to me earlier. Do you have some sort of intense, stressful job here?”