Dropping The Ball - A New Year’s Billionaire Romance - Weston Parker Page 0,103

say.

No matter what, my heart was hers. As always though, she surprised me completely, and from the stunned looks on the faces of the people around me, she did the same to the crowd.

“Thank you for letting me crash your party, Phil.” She smiled at the host before her chest expanded on a deep breath. “I was standing backstage, listening to Nathan sharing details of my life that he knows nothing about, and I just couldn’t let him carry on.”

Nathan and Phil both opened their mouths, but Rylee ignored them and kept her attention on the audience. “Most of what Nathan has just said is completely untrue. For a man who claims to be after the truth, he sure doesn’t know how to tell it.”

“Are you saying you don’t have MS?” he asked into his microphone, disbelief ringing clear in his voice.

She hardly spared him a glance. “That’s why I said ‘most.’ The only thing that is true is that I have been diagnosed with MS.” Her voice was strong and confident, carrying over the crowd as she completely opened up to them. “As many of you know, two years ago, I took a fall on stage. The time that followed that fall was without a doubt some of the toughest months of my life.”

Neither the host nor the asshole interrupted her. “I’m sure many of you that are here tonight or watching from wherever you are have been told news that rocked you to the very core of your being. Some of you might even have been given the same diagnosis as I was, or have been told that you have another one of the hundreds of other illnesses that won’t ever go away.”

Heads all around us nodded, and Rylee’s lips formed a soft smile. “Those of you who haven’t heard the news yourselves have no doubt known people who have. Family. Friends. Colleagues. A lot of you will, unfortunately, be able to relate to what I’m about to tell you.”

Silence reigned supreme in the area around us. Music from some of the other stages carried on in the distance, but here, everyone was waiting with bated breath to hear Rylee’s story.

“When I fell, I didn’t know what was wrong but I knew it wasn’t just nothing. My legs just completely gave away from underneath me. I might not have a medical degree, but even I knew stuff like that didn’t just happen to completely healthy twenty-four-year-old people.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, inhaling another deep breath that she released slowly. “My parents came up from Texas and they were with me when the doctors told me what they’d learned from my tests. To be completely honest with you, I hadn’t even known MS was a real disease until that moment. I had no clue what it would mean for me or what to expect. I was terrified, confused, even angry at times.”

There was more nodding in the crowd. Some people were even starting to tear up. “My manager, who is also a very dear friend of mine and who was an absolute rock to me during that time, told everyone I was taking a break. At the time, that really was all it was. I was taking a break because I was trying to learn to how to keep living with an illness like that hanging over me every second of every day. He kept my diagnosis private because that’s exactly what it is.”

She cut a glance at Nathan, who was becoming paler and paler. “I was always going to share it with you all when I was ready, but in the end, Mr. Biles wasn’t willing to wait for me to find my own words. The truth is that I still don’t really know what to say. It’s been two years, but I don’t know much more now about what the future holds for me than I did then.”

“I’m still scared,” she confessed. “I just had another attack a couple of weeks ago. I was ice-skating with my amazing, supportive boyfriend when suddenly my legs failed me again. It could happen at any moment, even while I’m standing here. It’s difficult to make plans when you don’t know if your body is going to turn on you from one moment to the next. Luckily, Carter was there to catch me and I know now that he always will be.”

Somehow, despite the lights and the crowd, her gaze landed on mine. The sapphire blue of them burned