I stood there in the still silence holding on to Mason, just being together. It was so nice. For a moment everything was peaceful.
After a few minutes of silence Mason suggested I join him for a dip in the swimming pool. I did not feel at all like swimming, but he insisted that it was the perfect temperature for it. And he went off to get Toby, who was crazy about the idea.
Ten minutes later we were all in the pool. Toby had on his little floaters and was happily splashing about in the small, shallow kid section of the pool, while Mason and I swam around in the deep end. I had to admit that after a few minutes of it I was starting to calm down. The water was warm, yet soothing enough to stay just a little bit cool as you moved through it. Again, Mason was right about the temperature.
He’d had some new swimsuits in a guest closet. He kept them there for when he had clients over to hang out and they wanted to have a bit of a party in the pool. A less confident woman would not have believed such a tale, but I trusted Mason. He had no real reason to lie to me that I could see. And with a great relationship that had just started, the last thing I wanted to do was ruin it by not trusting the man I had just fallen in love with.
Mason wrapped his arms around me and held me against him. He kissed me sweetly and we continued our embrace.
“This will end,” Mason said. “Trust me. Someway, somehow—it will be over. Just have some patience.”
I nodded. “I know.”
But I didn’t. I wanted to believe him and I believed that he thought he was telling me the right thing, and maybe it was the right thing for me to hear, but I didn’t know if I had his level of faith in all of this. I wanted this over more than anyone. I wanted to go back to my old life, and I wanted to see how Mason and I worked in the real world without this odd bubble around us.
“I know,” I said again before kissing him sweetly and resting my head against his warm chest.
It was the only place I truly felt safe. The only place I truly felt peace.
CHAPTER 25
Mason
“Toby is out like a light,” I said as I plopped down on the couch in front of the television. Libby and I were relaxing in the home theater with some hot, buttered popcorn and each of us sipping a beer. Toby had been with us until he fell asleep, so I carried him upstairs and put him to bed.
“Great,” Libby said. “He’s had a pretty busy day,” she said.
After we finished our swim, we decided to go on a nice horseback ride, so we drove over to the stables and saddled up a few horses (Toby rode his pony Jake) and then we set off along the woods that surrounded my estate. It was peaceful, and I tried to spend as much time out there as I could. I couldn’t recommend enough the value of the peace and serenity of it, especially what it did for my emotional state. Any time I felt my mind becoming too cluttered with the chaos of the city or the corporate world, I would take a horseback ride and clear my head, usually stopping to rest at several places along the way.
When we got back home we had some dinner and sat down to watch some family movies. Toby lasted through about a quarter of the first film.
“He has,” I said. “So, what do you want to watch? The same movie?”
Libby laughed. “No, I can do without the Disney stuff for this evening.”
“Ok, I hear that,” I said. I grabbed the remote control and began flipping through the channels. I figured once through, if we didn’t find something we’d go to some of the streaming channels or my extensive DVD collection.
“Wait,” Libby said. “What is that?”
I paused when she said “wait”.
I immediately saw what she was now looking at. I was floored. This was definitely not what I wanted to see and I could only imagine how bad this was for us if the wrong eyes saw it.
I was looking at a news broadcast about Arnold’s funeral. It was several days ago, but this news story was not about the funeral, but who was discovered at the funeral. Apparently, the paparazzi were more slippery than I had even imagined. There on the screen with the caption “Billionaire playboy has ties to the mafia?” was a large close-up of me with Ranier and a few other members of the family paying my respects to Arnold. It was unmistakably me.