“That’s all I can ask, Edward. I know things are tough right now, but I really need you on my side. I need you to go into that meeting with the fire that I’ve seen in you a hundred times. Go in with that never-ending energy and don’t take no for an answer.”
River knew he couldn’t force Edward to make the deal happen, but he also knew that Edward had the ability to make the deal happen if he really wanted to. In all the years that River and Edward had worked together, there hadn’t been many deal that Edward didn’t get. He was just really good at reading people and seeing what it was that would make them happy.
“I’m going to head out,” Edward said as he grabbed the file folder of information and stood up. “I’ll do my best.”
When Edward left, the first thing River did was call Mariah. He had to tell her about the meeting. Even though Edward had been very standoffish, River felt like the numbers were going to win Edward over, eventually. As soon as he started to look through all the numbers, that would be when Edward would change his mind and decide he really did want to keep River. Once Edward had that thought firmly in his mind, there was no doubt River would be staying in as CEO of his company.
“So I think it’s going to work out,” River said to Mariah.
“I think so too, River. I just have a feeling that everything is going to be just perfect. Even though I’m not really sure about your statement still.”
River knew that the statement was what was bothering both Mariah and Elizabeth the most. River wasn’t all that sure of it himself. But he wasn’t ready to back down from it yet. He couldn’t see another option that would let him get his side of the story out. Plus, Mariah had been the one who originally told him that making a statement was the right thing to do.
“I know you’re nervous about the statement. I am too. But I just feel like I need to get it all out there.”
“I’m here for you. If you decide to make the statement, I think you should totally do it.”
“Just a second; I think I hear someone pulling into the driveway.”
River looked outside, but he didn’t recognize the car. It could have been Edward’s car though because he had recently purchased a new one.
“I’m going to have to let you go. I think Edward just came back. Maybe he wants to talk more about our plan.”
“Sounds good. You take all the time you need. If we are going to do the press conference, though, I think you should do it Sunday. More people watch press conferences on Sunday than any other day of the week.”
River couldn’t help laughing at Mariah. Even when she didn’t like his plan, she was still trying to help him make sure it was an effective one.
“Will do. I’ll let you know first thing in the morning.”
As River hung up the phone, he looked out his window to see who had pulled up. When he saw the governor walking up his steps, he didn’t know what to do. Even though he hated the governor, it was still a huge shock to see the man walking up to his house.
River didn’t wait for the governor to knock. He quickly opened the door and was on the offensive rather quickly. River didn’t know why Kimberly’s husband was there at his house, but he certainly wasn’t welcome there, and he needed to turn around and leave right away.
“You need to get off my property right away,” River said as he looked intently at the governor.
“I’m not going anywhere. I heard you talked to my boy about him being your son.”
River seemed really confused. If the governor had been the one to tell Jackson about everything, why on earth would he be surprised when River talked to Jackson about it all?
“Jackson came to me. He hugged me and told me that you were the one who told him I was his dad. He said you did it to make me angry and to make him not like me. Well, it didn’t work at all. Jackson and I are closer than ever. In fact, I was planning to hold a press conference tomorrow so I could tell the world that I was his father.”
The governor shook his head in disdain at River as his face started to turn red.
“Don’t you dare expose my son to the press like that!” the governor said.
“Your son? The Press? Give me a break. You’re the one talking about him on the campaign trail all the time. You’re the one who leaked the information to the press about the story. Were you the one who called and threatened me with the story as well?”
“You were threatened with the story?” the governor asked looking surprised.
“Give me a break. It was probably you who called me.”
“Screw you! I wouldn’t ruin my family over something so stupid.”
“Screw me? Really? That is so presidential of you.”
Before River could get the door closed, the governor pulled back his fist, rapidly threw it at him and landed a shot right on River’s already sore eye. The governor was surprisingly a really good shot as River staggered into his living room and tried to regain his composure.
The governor followed River into the room and started to swing at him again. River moved around the room in an effort to get away from the governor, but everywhere he went he was met with a punch to the face.
“Stop punching me you asshole,” River yelled at him.
“I should kill you for what you did to my family.”
“I didn’t rape Kimberly!”
“No, you didn’t. But you took away my ability to be the hero in my own family. I am Jackson’s father, and now he looks up to you and talks about you instead of me. You deserve to get your ass kicked for that.”
As the governor went to take another swing at River, he ducked down and avoided the punch. But unfortunately, he also fell to the ground. Once on the ground, River was an easy target for the governor.
The first kick took his breath away, and River felt himself trying to get more air into his lungs. He could hardly stand the pain as the governor kicked him again. Over and over, the governor kicked River, and he started to get worried that the governor wasn’t going to stop.
River reached for the governor’s foot and pulled on it as he tried to destabilize the man. With all of his strength, River grabbed both of the governor’s feet and yanked them from beneath him, sending the governor plummeting into the glass coffee table. At the same time, the governor’s foot slipped from River’s hand and kicked him right in the face.
The room went black almost instantly.
Chapter 27
MARIAH
River had told her that he was going to call first thing in the morning, so she could set up the press conference. But it was almost noon, and River hadn’t called her or answered any of her text messages.
Mariah decided she couldn’t wait for River all day, and she made her way over to his house. She wasn’t exactly sure what she expected to find when she got there. Maybe he had stayed up all night drinking? Maybe Edward and River had partied all night long with strippers. Mariah had no idea why River wasn’t answering her calls.
When she pulled into River’s driveway, she noticed a car that wasn’t River’s. She assumed it had to be Edward’s, and that they had passed out or fallen asleep while watching whatever sports game they had decided to watch the previous night.
But as she walked up to the door, Mariah noticed that River’s front door was wide open. Now she knew he was lacking with his security measures, but completely leaving the door open did not seem like something even he would do.
As she walked up the steps, Mariah noticed what appeared to be blood just inside the doorway. She started to get scared. There was no reason that his door should be open, and there should not be blood in his entryway. Instead of going inside the door, Mariah dialed 911.
“911, what’s your emergency?” the operator said.
“I’m not quite sure; I came to check on my friend, and his front door is open and there is blood in the entryway.”
“The address?”
“1818 Golbert Way.”
There was a long pause, and it seemed like the operator had put Mariah on ho
ld or mute or something like that. Mariah looked inside the main living room area to see if she noticed anything unusual. For all she knew it was a robbery and the people were still in the house.
“Hello!” Mariah hollered into the living room. “River, are you in there?”
“Ma’am, do you see your friend in there?”
“I haven’t gone in yet. I don’t know if he is alright.”
“The officers are on their way. You should step away from the house just in case the perpetrator is still inside.”
“What if my friend is hurt? I need to go in and see if I can help him.”
“Ma’am, it is an active crime scene; I cannot advise you to go in there.”
Mariah stood by the door. She always followed the rules, but something inside told her that she needed to push the door open and go into the house. She was scared out of her mind, though, and she froze as she waited for the operator to tell her it was alright to enter the house. She waited for the police to get there so they could enter the house.
“I have to go in. What if he’s hurt?” Mariah said as she gathered up all the nerve she could muster and pushed the front door wide open.
“Stay away from the blood. If you’re going in there, try not to step in any blood. It’s evidence,” the operator said.
Mariah appreciated that the 911 operator remained so calm on the phone with her. It was because of her calm voice that Mariah had gotten up the nerve to push into the house and see if she could find River.
As she walked toward the couch, Mariah looked over it and noticed what looked like a bloodied man lying in the middle of the broken glass table. He was face down on the table, and Mariah couldn’t tell who he was, but there was a large pool of blood all around him.
“There’s a man, he’s face down on the glass coffee table. There’s a lot of blood,” Mariah said as she continued walking toward the man. “Oh, my God! River,” Mariah screamed.
As she made it to the side of the couch, she saw River lying next to it. His face was all bloodied, and he appeared to be having trouble breathing. When he heard Mariah’s voice, he tried to move but then groaned out in pain. His nose also looked broken, and he had blood pooled up around the sides of his face.
“Is your friend dead? Check for a pulse,” the 911 operator suggested.
“My friend is alive. He’s hurt really badly. I’m not sure about the other man, though. River, who is that?” Mariah asked.
River tried to respond, but his words were coming out too slowly for Mariah, and she decided to go look at the man’s face and see if she knew who it was. He was tilted to the side so Mariah walked around the table to get a better look. She still had the phone up to her ear when she noticed who the man was.
“Shit,” Mariah said as she saw his face. “I think he’s dead. I think the governor is dead.”
“What?” the 911 operator asked, sure that she had misheard Mariah.
“It’s the governor; I don’t think he’s breathing, and he’s lost a lot of blood.”
The 911 operator was quiet again.
“You’re sure it’s the governor,” the operator asked.
“Yes, you should probably get an ambulance here right away. I’m afraid to move him. There is so much glass around him and a lot of really big pieces.”
“Can you check for a pulse?”
Mariah didn’t want to go anywhere near the body. If the governor was indeed dead in River’s home, Mariah didn’t want to be the last person who touched his body. She hesitated and just as she was about to reach down and check his pulse, she heard the sirens pulling up outside the house.
“They are here,” Mariah said with a huge sense of relief.”
Mariah got off the phone and stood still as the police officers made their way into the house. Shortly after they arrived, the ambulance arrived as well.
“Ma’am, what happened here?” one of the officers asked Mariah.
“I don’t know. I talked to my friend River last night. He said someone had just arrived at his house, and he would call me right away in the morning. When he didn’t call me and didn’t return my calls; I decided to come and check on him. This is how I found them.”
“So you know both of these men?”
“Yes.”
As the paramedics worked on River, another team came in and pulled the governor off of the table. When they moved him, the governor moaned out in pain, and Mariah felt a huge sense of relief almost instantly.
“Who are they?” the officer asked.
“That’s River Anders, and that’s the governor,” Mariah said without blinking at all.
The look of surprise on the officer’s face was priceless. He clearly had not expected she would say what she did. Mariah could only imagine what kind of protocol the police station and ambulance service were going to have to go through because of the high profile nature of both the victims.
“So you don’t know what happened?” the officer asked her.
“No idea.”
They moved the governor out of the house the quickest. He had lost a lot of blood, and when they took his vital signs, Mariah heard them say they couldn’t get a very strong pulse. It was scary to see just how weak and pale the governor looked. Mariah instantly thought that she needed to call Kimberly and tell her about what had happened.
River was certainly injured badly. His nose had bled plenty, and he looked like he was in pretty bad shape. But as the paramedics worked on River, at least he was able to answer their questions. His answers were sometimes really slow, and Mariah couldn’t understand them all of the time. But River was talking to the paramedics; that was a really good sign.
Mariah followed River’s ambulance to the hospital and watched as they brought him into the emergency room. She rushed in after them, but because she wasn’t a direct family member, the nurses wouldn’t let her get an update on River or even see how he was doing.
She didn’t know who else to call, so Mariah called Kimberly first. She told her everything she knew, and Kimberly started crying so hard that Mariah couldn’t even understand her. It was hard to get off the phone with Kimberly because she was crying so much. Finally, Mariah just had to hand up the phone.
Her next call was to April. If there was anyone in River’s life that could get in touch with his family or close friends, it had to be April. As Mariah explained the story of what was going on, April seemed very calm. Nothing about the story seemed to surprise her, and Mariah even started to speak up louder just in case April couldn’t hear her.
The final call Mariah made was to her father. By the time she made the call, Mariah felt like she was going to fall into a million little pieces. She was shaking and could hardly get the words out when she told her father what was going on.
Mariah had been deathly afraid of her father for most of her life. There wasn’t one particular thing that had Mariah afraid of him; it was more like the definitive way he always decided what was right and wrong. Mariah’s father was a man who was set in his ways, and Mariah feared him more than ever as she briefly told him what had been going on between her and River.
To her surprise, Mariah didn’t get a big explosion from her father. Instead, he simply asked her to call him as soon as she had any updates.
“Wait, Dad,” Mariah said before he could hang up. “They won’t let me see him. The nurse said only immediate family members can see him. What should I do?”
“Just walk up there and tell them you’re his wife, and you want to see him,” her father told her.
Normally, Mariah would have protested at the unusual nature of her father’s suggestion. But Mariah had broken the seal of her goodness. She no longer was going to listen to every single rule in the world. Mariah had her own ideas of what was right and wrong; it was time for her to follow her own rules.
Chapter 28
RIVER
He felt the doctors working on him, but River couldn’t seem to catch his breath enough to talk. As they got an IV into his hand,
they shot some pain medication into him, and that was the first moment that River realized he was going to be alright.
They took x-rays and set his broken nose. River let them do everything they needed to, and he didn’t protest, even when their tests caused him a lot of pain. River was happy that they had made it to the hospital, but he was much happier that they were now giving him pain medications.
“Can you tell me what happened?” the doctor asked River.
He could tell the doctor what happened, but River wasn’t about to get the real live version of the events down on paper. It was already going to be a media circus once the press found out that both River and the governor were taken by ambulance to the hospital. There just wasn’t the ability to hide those things like there used to be.
“I don’t remember,” River lied to the doctor. “Is the governor alright?”
The doctor didn’t answer River and instead went back to looking at his tests and taking care of him. After a few minutes, the doctor gave the nurses some orders and then made his way to the room across the hall.
“Is the governor alright?” River asked one of the nurses.
“He’s not doing too well. He lost a lot of blood.”
“We were talking to each other through most of the night,” River said to the nurse. “He lost consciousness a little before sunup.”
The nurse nodded at River’s willingness to tell her part of the story. Then she walked across the hall to relay the information to the team that was working on the governor.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Anders?” another nurse asked him as she checked his vital signs.
“I’m good. Can you see if my girlfriend is anywhere? I’d really like to see her.”
“Sure, what’s her name?”
River gave the nurse Mariah’s name and a brief description of her. As the pain medication started to kick in, he was feeling much better. Still not well enough to get up and move or anything like that, but River felt like he needed to talk to Mariah right away.
“River!” Mariah screamed as she ran to him from the doorway of the hospital room.
Breaking the Rules: A Billionaire Romance Page 23
