by Tia Siren
She knew she couldn’t put off telling him. When he returned home, just before lunch, she broke the news to him. She had sat him down in the living room, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth he had stood up.
“You said you couldn’t get pregnant,” Ray said, his eyes wide.
“I didn’t say that I said I was on birth control.”
“So you lied?”
“No!”
“So you quit taking the pills?”
“No!” Danielle said. She felt hot salty tears stinging her eyes.
“Don’t you start crying!” Ray said forcefully. He sounded angrier than she had seen him.
“Ray, I love you.”
“You love my money,” the man said, confirming Danielle’s worst fears.
“No!” the black girl argued. It was all she could say.
“You want my money! You think this is the way to get it? I thought you loved me! I loved you!”
“I do!”
“You love this life! This money! My money!” Ray argued.
“It’s not your money!” Danielle said before she could stop herself. “It’s daddy’s money, and I don’t give a shit about any of it!”
“Fuck you,” Ray said coldly, and then he turned and left the room. Danielle ran after him. She begged him not to go, but he wouldn’t listen. He walked out of the massive front door, and she stood there, watching as he climbed into one of his sports cars, and then he was gone. Danielle fell to the ground in a heap, and cried.
When she could, the young woman called a cab and packed up some clothes. Ray had bought her many things over the four months, mostly clothes and shoes, and she was careful not to take any of it. By the time she had a small bag the cab was outside of the gate at the end of the long driveway, and she walked down to meet it.
She had the million dollars in her bank. She hadn’t touched it yet, she hadn’t needed to. Now she did, using it to pay for the cab and a hotel room. She didn’t want to go back to Las Vegas. She needed Ray to know that she loved him. Days passed. They turned to weeks, and then a month. She tried to call him, tried to text him, but he would never speak with her.
She went to an upscale stationery store and bought a beautiful leather bound writing journal, and a set of silver pens. She had the woman at the counter wrap them for her, and then she went to Ray’s home. He wasn’t there, so she went to his parent’s house. His sports car was parked outside. Someone let her past the gate, and she parked next to it, driving a rental car. She sat for a moment behind the wheel, writing a check for the money he had paid her to marry him, or, at least, most of it. She didn’t have the money to pay back the hotel or rental car.
Danielle climbed out of the car and went to the front door, knocking softly. Ray opened it.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want to talk.”
“Our lawyer will talk when the baby comes,” he said and went to shut the door. She held her hand out.
“I don’t want money from you,” she said.
“I don’t believe that for a second,” another voice said, and then Danielle saw David, Ray's father, come to the door.
“Dad, I can handle this. She’s not the first woman to come after my money.”
“Here’s a check for what you paid me to marry you,” Danielle said, and by the look on David’s face, she knew that news was a surprise to him.
“What’s she talking about?” David asked, and when it looked as though Ray wasn’t going to fill his father in, Danielle did so.
“He wanted to make you mad, so he married me in Vegas after paying me a million dollars. He didn’t think you’d want him marrying a black girl.”
David said nothing. Usually, people didn’t want to talk about their racism. Ray remained silent as Daniel held the check out to him.
“I don’t want it,” she said. “I want you. I fell in love with you.”
Ray opened his mouth to speak, but then he shut it.
“Get this gold digger out of here,” David said from over his son’s shoulder. “Or I can get security to do so.”
“Give me a minute,” Ray said, and he stepped out and reached back, shutting the door behind him.
“I’m sorry,” Danielle said. “I didn’t want to get pregnant; I didn’t trick you. I don’t want your money.”
“The pill doesn’t mess up. You can’t get pregnant on it.”
“You can, it’s just rare,” Danielle said. “Trust me, you can.”
She felt tears in her eyes once more, and she felt like an idiot. One slipped over her bottom eyelid and slipped down her mocha cheek, but Ray reached out and wiped it away.
“I bought you this,” Danielle said, holding the gift out to him. He opened it and smiled when he looked to her his own eyes were misty. “You can’t give up on your dream,” she said. “You have to write that novel.”
Ray nodded. He couldn’t speak.
“I want to tell you about my father,” Danielle said. Ray looked to her. She had never opened up about her dad. She went on. “He died before I was born. That’s why I don’t talk about him. I don’t know him. He was with the wrong people. He was killed, shot by a guy he had some sort of beef with. It sounds dumb. Exactly what your father must think about black people, but that’s who my dad was. A thug who was killed. That’s all I know him as. I didn’t get to learn about the man my mother fell in love with. I don’t want my own child to do that. You aren’t dead, but I don’t want this baby to grow up without knowing their father. It has nothing to do with money; I want him or her to know you. You. An amazing man, with love, and passion, and a writer. I want this baby to know you. A writer. A father. Someone who does amazing things with his life. That’s what I want for the baby, and for you. It has nothing to do with me or the money. We could live in a one-bedroom apartment.”
Ray laughed. “We might have to. My dad is going to have a fit when I tell him.”
“When you tell him what?”
“That I’m going to be a dad. That I’m going to be with you. Telling me about your father… I know that this was just…. an accident, but you know, thinking about it, maybe it’s exactly what we need. I love you, Danielle. I do. And if I weren't already married to you, I would want to marry you.”
Danielle grinned and threw her arms around her husband. They kissed, and she knew they would be together forever.
*****
THE END
The Billionaire’s Secret Love Child – Rae’s Story
1
Rae Coleman couldn’t believe her luck as she walked onto the movie set. She had been waiting years for this, ever since her mother had agreed to move to Los Angeles when Rae was sixteen so she could try to get into commercials. She was a pretty girl, then at sixteen, and now at twenty-four, and she had gotten the commercials. Her skin was the dark brown color of mocha, her hair brown and kept short. Her legs stretched on for miles, and her hips were pronounced and feminine, without being large. She was pretty, beautiful even. But that’s not all you needed to make it in Hollywood.
For one thing, she was black, and there just never seemed to be as many roles for her as there were for her white peers. Rae had lost count how many times she had lost out on a role for being “too urban.” She had never been urban, having been born and raised in an affluent Cincinnati suburb. Often at her schools, she was one of only a few black kids.
But she kept landing commercials, and at age eighteen managed to get in a pilot, which tested poorly and never got picked up. Back to commercials she went. Her mother had gone back to Cincinnati when Rae turned nineteen, but the young girl wouldn’t give up. She couldn’t. She got a little apartment with another struggling actress, an Australian girl named Gillian, and she kept grinding, filling in the time between commercials with waitressing jobs.
And then last year she landed the role of a lifetime. A movie. A true blue, play across the world movie.
And not only was Casey
Denning producing it, but he was also going to star in it.
Casey was one of the most popular actors in the world. He had gotten his start as a young man in a couple of horror films, but he quickly transcended them and got the roles his talent deserved. He was forty-two now, and he was on the cover of magazines more than he was on the silver screen. Every stay at home mom loved to read about him, and needed to know who he was sleeping with, and what car he was driving, and where he ate.
Casey was Caucasian and had salt and pepper hair, and a dimple in his broad chin. His eyes were cold and gray but expressive, and his smile could light up a room. He had been in the room when Rae had auditioned for the movie, and it made her nerves even worse than they had already been.
He had spoken to her, sitting there with two others at a long table. A woman producer and a man. The man was directing the film. He was older than Casey, with red hair that was thinning. Rae had smiled to each of them, but her eyes kept going back to Casey.
“You’re Rae?” he asked, looking down at a sheet with her information on it.
“Yes sir,” she said, and Casey had laughed, an easy laugh that was full of warmth.
“Sir? I like that!” he had said. “Unless you’re calling me that because I’m old.”
Rae felt her cheeks burn, and she shook her head. “No, not at all!” she stuttered. Casey held a hand up and smiled at her.
“I’m only messing with you,” he said. “Can you go through page twenty-one with me?”
Rae nodded and lipped through the thick script she was holding. The film was a drama called When Love Speaks, and it was about an older married man who had an affair with his secretary, even as his son battled cancer at home. The man felt great guilt about the affair, but the stress of his son’s sickness had created a rift between he and his wife, and he found solace in the arms of the beautiful secretary. Rae was trying out for the role of the secretary. She had been in the waiting room with seven other girls, one of which she recognized from a number of films. There was no way she was going to get the part.
When it was done, she had felt good about her reading. She had been to a hundred auditions, and some of them she knew she would get it, and some she knew she had messed it up, but this one, she felt she had done well, but she wasn’t sure what would happen.
Her agent called her the next day and told her she had the part. There had been a script read through, and costume fittings, everything working in that whirlwind Hollywood way. A script could languish for years, but when the ball got rolling, you had better stay out of the way.
She had seen Casey again at the reading of course, and he had hugged her and congratulated her. She had met her other co-stars, including Amelia Stevens, a well-known actress who was playing the wife. She had been just as kind as Casey.
There were a number of people on the set, but not as many as Rae expected. It was her first day, and they were shooting a scene from the middle of the film, a sex scene on the office set. It was the second to last day of shooting at the set. Not many people realized they shot films out of order, depending on what sets or locations they had, and for how long. Every scene set in the office would be shot in a block of days, and then after that they would move to the next location or set. Rae wasn’t introduced in the office though, she was introduced while Casey’s character was on a business trip with her. They almost make love at their hotel, but he refrains. So though Rae was in the film for three scenes before the first sex scene, she had the unfortunate duty to film the sex scene first.
It was unfortunate because it was the scene Rae dreaded filming the most. The idea of kissing Casey was pleasant enough, but doing it in front of twenty people scared her to her core. Not to mention the fact that he would be ripping off the tight blouse she had been fitted for, and groping her breast through her bra, and then pushing her backward onto his characters desk and climbing atop her. There would be a close up of his hand on her bare thigh, pushing her skirt up, and then the scene would be over, the rest of the juicy details left to the audience's imagination.
The red haired director was named David Greene, and he had worked on a number of films which most people knew and loved. He made his way to Rae as soon as he saw her, stopping to point to something on the set while he told someone to move it. When he stopped in front of her he held his hand out, and she shook it.
“Great to see you again, Rae,” he said with a smile.
“You too, Mr. Greene,” she said.
“It’s David!” he said, and then laughed. “Hey, I have a closed set today. I know this is your first big thing, and it’s a bit of a doozy, I know that. If I could have started with another scene I would have. But the guys tell me we have to go on this, then we have to.”
Rae smiled and nodded. David had a Brooklyn accent, and he was animated when he spoke.
“So we can go through it once or twice, with minimal contact, just to get the blocking down.”
“We can go however you like,” Rae said. “Contact is fine.”
She felt a bit more comfortable when he told her it was a closed set. That meant the only people there were people who had to be there. No extraneous crew, just someone holding the boom mic, a cameraman or two, David, and makeup and costume people. Of course Casey would be there as well.
He stood by the desk on the set, his eyes closed and white earbuds in his ears. Rae made her way up to the desk, and started her breathing exercises. She had just closed her eyes when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She opened her eyes and saw the impossibly handsome movie star smiling at her.
“What a way to get to know each other, huh?” he asked, and Rae laughed.
“I guess you could say that,” she said.
“I don’t want to be forward, but I learned something on one of my first films, and I thought it might help you,” Casey said.
“Okay, let me hear it,” the pretty young woman said.
“When you have to kiss someone in a scene, you shouldn’t be kissing them for the first time. I know we’re going to a bit of rehearsal, but David likes to be sneaky and have a camera running. Sometimes he uses the first take.”
Rae nodded. “Well, that makes sense, I guess, to be comfortable with someone. Familiarity.”
“So, we should kiss,” Casey said, making sure she understood. “For the role.”
“For the role,” Rae said, and then the man was dipping his head and stepping closer to her. One of his hands went down to her hips, and the other reached up, his fingers resting lightly along her jawline. She closed her eyes inhaled deeply as their lips met. He smelt of expensive cologne, and he tasted of mint. He had just brushed his teeth, as she had as well. She wondered if he was as nervous as she was.
The kiss was light, but it was long. Finally he pulled away, and she opened her eyes. For some reason she had expected him to have turned away, to be busying himself with something else, simply trying to prepare for the scene, but he was looking right at her.
“Wow,” he said.
“Wow,” Rae agreed.
“Alright you two, ready?” David called, and Rae jumped. For a moment she had somehow forgotten where she was, even though there were three bright lights directed at her. They dimmed now, and the set was filled with blue, a pretty good approximation of moonlight coming in through the large window of the office, with the fake city background behind it. Rae knew it would look exactly like they were in a high rise office building on film, but it was a little bit ridiculous to be standing on a set in a large warehouse with girders running across the ceiling.
“Sure,” Casey called, and Rae turned to find her spot. She could be knocking on the open door, and they had a bit of dialogue before she entered and they began to kiss. A cameraman was set up just outside the set, and another with a camera on his shoulder entered the set and stood a bit behind Casey.
A young woman came up with a clapboard and held it in front of the main camera. “Scene seventeen, take one,” she said, and c
lapped the board together.
“Sound. Rolling. Action,” David said.
Rae knocked on the door, and they began. David stopped them three times before they got to the part where they kissed, but on the fourth they must have given him what he wanted, because he let it continue. She stepped in. Casey said his last line, and she replied with hers, and then they were kissing again.
This kiss was deeper than the one they had shared before they started. Their tongues met, something that rarely happened in film, but here it felt natural, and Rae welcomed it. He tasted of mint as well, toothpaste and floss. Casey’s hands were strong upon her, and he ripped open her shirt, and then his hand was groping her, and she felt her nipple harden against the material of her bra and his palm. He pushed her slightly backwards and went with her, still kissing her. His hand went on her thigh, pushed her skirt up. They still kissed. Somewhere someone was saying something, but Rae was lost in a world of ecstasy.
Finally, Casey broke the kiss and got up off of her and the desk. “Woah,” he said to her as he offered her his hand. Rae took it and stood. “Sorry about that.”
“I called cut about fifteen times,” David said, and Rae looked to him. He was sitting next to a small bank of monitors, where he could watch what the cameras saw.
“That’s my fault,” Casey said.
“Do yourself a favor Rae, don’t be pulled into this guys world of tabloids,” David said with a laugh. Rae knew what he was referring to, Casey never seemed to settle on a lady for long, and each new one was splashed across the pages of Us Weekly alongside him.
“Hey, there’s fancy yachts and trips around the world that come with that tabloid stuff,” Casey said to the young woman with a grin and a wink. She smiled.
“I’m sold then,” Rae said.
“I give up,” David said with a laugh. “Let’s go again from the top.”
The scene wore on for some time, and when David finally called cut for the last time, Rae was tired and anxious to get out of her uncomfortable heels. Casey had one more scene to shoot on the set, a short transition, but she was done for the day. A black sedan drove her back to the hotel the cast and crew were staying at. They were shooting in Toronto, a popular city for such things, and Rae had never been there, so she was anxious to see the city, but all she wanted to do right then was take a hot bath, and climb into bed.
