Dropping The Ball - A New Year’s Billionaire Romance - Weston Parker Page 0,79
her taking a break, but this reporter never believed any of it.
He went on and on about how many times he’d tried to get her to talk to him, how she’d “abruptly left” the interview she’d finally agreed to when the questions got “too hard,” and how he’d finally learned the truth.
Naples never came back after falling one night during a show. There was widespread speculation that she’d injured herself, but her team insisted that she was unharmed and had simply taken a spill because she was tired.
This isn’t true. Days after the fall, Naples was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, a potentially disabling disease of the brain and central nervous system. While it is unknown what stage her disease has progressed to, one thing is clear. Naples is done with the stage for good. She’s too ill to perform, and she and her advisers have been covering it up all this time.
Meanwhile, she’s got a new beau and sources say they’re planning on falling off the map together.
There was more, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Fuming as I fumbled for my phone, I marched back in the direction of my apartment and hit dial on Billy’s number.
He picked up after the first few rings, his voice tight when it came over the line. “Carter? How is she, man? Thank fuck you’re with her.”
“I’m not,” I said, not sounding much better than he did. “She kicked me out, but Bart is with her. She’s safe. He’s my boss and he knows what she means to me. He won’t let anything happen to her.”
“What? Why would she kick you out?” Even though he was hundreds of miles away, I heard the worry and confusion in his voice as clearly as if he were right next to me. “What happened? Jules called my parents to let them know she was in the hospital, but I don’t know much more than that.”
“She kicked me out because she’s trying to protect me,” I said. “We’ve been seeing each other and I knew she was worried about what would happen if her MS flared up again, but I didn’t think she’d take it this far.”
“Hold up, you’ve been seeing each other?” he asked disbelievingly. “Fuck, man, how long has this been going on? She told me you didn’t used to make out behind my back. What the fuck is this now?”
“We never made out behind your back.” I squeezed the back of my neck while I prepared to tell him the rest of it. “Well, not when we were kids anyway. It only started after I got assigned to her detail.”
He kept quiet for a few seconds. “Is it serious?”
“Yeah.” I blew out a breath. “From my side anyway. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her, but she won’t listen to me. Someone needs to help her see that this disease is only a slight limitation right now.”
“You want me to come out there?” he asked, and I suddenly heard the sounds of traffic from his side. “I’ve been thinking I wanted to, but I thought I’d wait until I got an update before I made a decision.” He paused again. “Hey, Carter?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not saying I’m okay with you guys hooking up and not even telling me, but if she kicked you out, that means she’s serious about you too.”
“She’s pushing me away.” I sighed, the pieces of my broken heart contracting painfully. “It isn’t the way to go about anything, but I understand what she’s doing. She thinks her life as she knows it is ending and she’s trying to set fire to it so she can move on. Probably somewhere by herself.”
“I’ll be on the next flight out,” he said. “When I know what time I’ll be getting in, I’ll text you. Can you pick me up from the airport? I need to know what happened and I want to look into your eyes when you tell me how you feel about my sister.”
“Are you going to kick me in the balls?”
“Depends. Are you going to hurt her?”
“I already have, but I didn’t mean to.” I screwed my eyes shut. “I’m never fucking lying to anyone again, not even by omission. This keeps coming back to bite me, but I recognized her when she first hired my firm. I didn’t tell her who I was even when I realized she didn’t know. I kept it from her and from my boss. And from you.”