His Absolute Insistence: A Scandalous Billionaire Love Story (Jessika, #2) (5 page)

As soon as the doors opened, we sprang into action.  April still looked more nervous than nervous, but she knew this hospital and she knew where to go.  We fled down a hall, half-jogging and half-sprinting, dodging past the raised eyebrows of a couple other nurses, a doctor, and one patient with a walker.  I smiled and waved to the man in the walker, because he looked like maybe he was having a harder day than I was.  He smiled back and continued on down the hall, slow and steady.

Behind us, a door pounded open and someone shouted.  I didn't hear exactly what they said, but I recognized the voice as one of the news men.  Thankfully, April and I turned around a corner, then sharply around another one soon after, leaving them behind.  I wasn't safe outside yet—I didn't even know where outside was—but I liked my odds.

We hurried past the cafeteria and kept going straight.  The smell of muffins and bacon assaulted me.  My stomach growled.  I wanted to eat.  The last thing I'd eaten was cake at the party last night, and that seemed so long ago.  I didn't have time to eat.  We couldn't stop.  I didn't know when I'd be able to stop, either.  The first thing Jeremy and I were going to do was find food, I decided.  My mind equated freedom and the back door with food, goading me into even stronger determination.

April stopped by a door.  She breathed heavily.  I doubted many nurses were used to dashing through the halls of the hospital.  I spent thirty minutes on a treadmill every other day, though.  I felt good, invigorated.

"We're," she said, stopping to take a breath, "here."

I smiled and opened the door, admiring the bright sunny day and inhaling deeply, savoring the fresh outdoors air.  I saw the dumpsters far off to the side, but thankfully I couldn't smell them from here.  Jeremy stood near one of Asher's cozy sedans, leaning against the door and playing some game on his phone.

"Here," I said.  Before I changed my mind, I handed April my shoes.  "You can have these."

"What?" she asked, dumbfounded.

"I want to thank you for helping me.  You didn't have to, and you didn't have to go through all that trouble, but you did.  You haven't even said anything about the news article, either.  You didn't look at me like you thought I was a bad person.  I know what Asher said, and you don't really know if that's us in the pictures or not, but it makes sense and I wouldn't blame you if you thought it was us."

I took a deep breath and put the shoes in her unsure hands before she refused them.  "You can keep them," I continued.  "Or, sell them if you want.  They're my shoes, and I guess I'm a celebrity, so maybe that makes them special?  I don't know.  They're really nice shoes, though.  Oh!  We should get you a dress to go with them.  How's that sound?  I'll call you.  I'll call the hospital and ask for you and sometime soon we can go for lunch and then go shopping, alright?  Thank you so much, April.  Really.  Thank you so much.  I don't know what I would have done without your help."

"I..."  She just stood there holding my shoes.

Before she could say anything, I left.  I wanted to stride over to Jeremy and the waiting car with power and confidence, but the cracked gravel dug painfully into the soles of my feet.  Maybe I shouldn't have given away my shoes.  But, no, I'd done it.  Those were April's shoes now.  She deserved them.  I dealt with my temporary pain, hobbling and hopping across the rough pavement behind the hospital.  Jeremy saw me when I was halfway to the car.  He stared, open-mouthed, still holding his phone.

"Help?" I asked.  "I don't have any shoes."

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.  "I don't have any shoes for you, either."

"Open the door?"

He opened the driver's side door.  "Are you going to drive or what?"

"The back door!"  I laughed, even though I probably shouldn't have found any of this funny.  "Jeremy, hurry!  Just open the back door!"

He scrambled to the back and opened the rear door for me.  I was three quarters of the way to the car now.  In some random fit of genius, Jeremy strode towards me, picked me up off my feet, and carried me the rest of the way to the car.

It might have been romantic, or at least chivalrous, except this was Jeremy.  And he picked me up awkwardly, with one hand holding one of my legs while my other leg flailed about, and one of my arms sort of clung to his shoulder.  Also, I didn't expect him to do any of that, so I shouted at him and kicked my free leg and swung my free arm.  At one point, right before he put me down so I could get into the car, I accidentally slapped the side of his head by his ear.

"Sorry," I said.  "I don't know why you did that."

"Right," he said.  "I try to help you out and you hit me in the head.  Thanks."

"I said I was sorry!"

"I'm going to have a mark now."

"For what?  Two minutes?  I didn't hit you that hard."

"I might have to go in to see a doctor," he said, grinning.  "I'm feeling disoriented now.  I don't know if I'll be able to drive."

"Shut up," I said.  "It's not that bad, is it?  I really am sorry, though.  You didn't have to carry me."

He laughed.  "Nah, I'm fine.  Hurry, get in."

I slid into the back seat and Jeremy hopped into the front.  We both closed our doors, almost in unison.  They thumped shut, confirming my safety.

"So... what happened to your shoes?" he asked.

"I gave them to April," I said.

"Who's April?"

"She helped me leave the hospital.  Some news guys were chasing us.  It's crazy.  This whole thing is crazy.  I don't understand it."

"Yeah, well, that's what you two get for taking dirty pictures like that," Jeremy said, laughing.

"Shut up," I said.  Despite how nervous I was before, how scared and worried I still felt, I laughed.  This was good.  It was better, at least.  Maybe not forever, but at least for now.

Jeremy put the car into gear and started to pull away.  Before he left, I saw April standing in the door still, clutching my shoes to her chest, staring after us.

"Hold on," I said.

Jeremy put his foot in the brakes.  "What?"

I rolled down my window and waved.  April smiled nervously and waved back.

"I'll call soon!" I shouted.  "Thank you again!"

She swallowed hard, saying nothing.  I started to roll my window back up.

"I thought you looked beautiful!" she shouted; I stopped rolling the window up, leaving it partway open.  "I know maybe it wasn't you," she said again, loud.  "If it was you, I thought you looked beautiful, though.  I didn't think it was bad.  I'm sorry people are being mean to you and your husband.  I can tell you both love each other, though.  I thought the picture was beautiful because of that.  Anyone who can't see that it was a special moment for you two is... they're wrong!  It's not right for people to do that to you."

I smiled.  I didn't know what to say.  I smiled and I tried not to cry and I waved and she waved back.  I rolled the window the rest of the way up.  I should have buckled my seat belt, but I didn't.  Instead, I flopped onto the back seat and sighed, staring at the ceiling.

"You ready to go?" Jeremy asked.

"Yes," I said.  "Let's go."

"Where to?" he asked.

I thought about it for half a second before my stomach growled.  "Breakfast, please."

W
ith smooth, confident strides, Asher walked through the front lobby of the hospital and out into the open air.  A gathering of newspeople awaited him, though most were milling around and looking in the wrong direction.  A few of them spotted him and started talking loudly, then more turned his way, and by the time he completely left the interior of the hospital, he had most everyone's attention.

Great, he thought.  What a wonderful start to his day.

"Asher, can you confirm the reports of a sex tape involving you and your wife?" someone shouted out.

That started a deluge of other questions mainly focused around the article on the front page of that sensationalistic newspaper, and other similar sources.  He would honestly never understand how tabloid filth like that became something people fawned over with realistic expectations.  What ever happened to the days of false prophecies and fake sightings of some human-bat hybrid creature?  Loch Ness monster sightings?  Anything like that?

No, now it was all fake celebrity drama that sounded real enough that someone could easily believe it was true.  Inaccurate fact-checking for most random social media outlets didn't really help all that much, either.  People reported news based on gossip, citing uninformed blog posts as authority sources.  Sometimes it got a little out of hand.

Except he really had made a sex tape with Jessika.  Privately, for their eyes only.  He'd never shared it with anyone.  He still didn't know how the videos and the pictures from his camera were leaked.  He kept both of those stashed away and hidden in his guest home, where almost no one went.  And no one should have gone there except for a select few people, too.  He didn't want to place blame this early when he didn't have the facts to follow through with it, but if the situation was as bad as it looked, he might have at least one untrustworthy person working in his home under the guise of personal staff.

He didn't want to believe it, but he didn't know what to believe anymore.

The reporters kept harassing him with questions.  He really ought to answer them sometime soon, he supposed.

Holding up his hand to call their attention to him, he shouted out, "Quiet, please.  I'll do my best to answer some of your questions, though I doubt the truth will be as interesting as what you all may wish to believe.  Regardless of your dire need to interview me in this extremely unsuitable location, I'm going to have to ask everyone to move aside so the hospital staff can do their jobs.  This is a place of healing, where time can be of the utmost importance, and we would do well to remember and value that."

Many of them muttered, but following Asher's lead a majority of the media crews moved aside.  Asher walked towards a grassy clearing near the front of the hospital with a small stone bench in the middle of it.  Stepping up on the bench, he presented himself to the crowd.

"I know you all have a lot of questions, but can we do this with civility?" he asked.  "If I had to guess, a lot of your questions are similar, so how about we do this: raise your hand and I'll point to call on you.  That way we won't have people shouting out the same questions over and over.  Sound good?"

No one said anything to indicate they thought otherwise.

"Alright.  I'll take questions for approximately ten minutes.  Let's begin," he said.

More hands than he wanted to count rose into the air.

He pointed to someone on the left.  "Yes, you?"

The man cleared his throat before speaking into a microphone in front of him.  God forbid any of these people take notes and do a report or write up an article afterwards.

"Can you confirm the reports of a sex tape made between you and your wife?" the man asked.

"This morning is the first I've heard about them," Asher said.  "Unfortunately I can't comment on any of the reports because I haven't had a chance to look at them."

A woman near the first man raised her hand.

"Yes?" Asher asked, pointing to her.

"Is it fair to say that if you had made a sex tape with your current wife, you'd know about it?" she asked.

Asher rolled his eyes and laughed, unamused.  "I have nothing to say to that," he said.

Another person raised their hand and Asher called on them.

"Concerning the videos and photographs involved," the man said, for context.  "The pictures are of a high quality and the woman is clearly Jessika Landseer, but the man is unknown.  None of the images show his face, so—"

"I'm going to stop you right there," Asher said, holding his hand up like some sort of media traffic director.  "I haven't seen the pictures and I don't know the circumstances revolving around them, so I'm ill-prepared to talk about them.  I will say this, though: there are many ways to manipulate images, which I would hope everyone would be aware of by now.  Mistaken identity is also a possibility."

He hated saying that one.  He hated answering any of these questions.  He wanted to try and be as vague and unhelpful as possible, but some things just needed to be said.  And, really, of course this round of interview questions wasn't going to be easy.  They wanted to try and catch him up so they could use his answers against him, even if he didn't necessarily say anything incriminating.  This was what they lived for; these people thrived off of uncertain turmoil and unproven gossip.

He waved for someone else to ask their question.

"Are you denying the pictures are of you and your wife, then?"

"As I said before, this morning is the first I've heard of any of these reports about pictures, or videos.  I haven't looked at them yet, so I can't confirm or deny anything.  I hope all of you will understand that.  I realize that's not exactly a satisfactory answer for many of you, and the entire reason you came here was to question my wife about this, but perhaps it would do more good for all of us if we set up a better time and place for a real interview.  Can everyone agree with that?"

No, probably not.  It couldn't hurt to try, though.

A woman to the side raised her hand.  So much for vague hopes.

"Why were you in the hospital this morning?" she asked.

"My wife was here," he said.  "She stayed overnight.  I was worried."

The same woman raised her hand again.  Asher sighed and nodded to her.

"Can you comment on what happened last night at your mansion?  Preliminary reports mention an unusual fire.  Do you have any reason to believe this was arson or a cause for suspicion?  If so, would you care to comment on who you believe was behind it?"

"I can comment briefly," Asher said.  He paused for a moment, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.  "As you may have heard, Landseer Enterprises recently achieved a deal involving prosperity and mutual profits with a small business firm in Greece.  Hopefully by the middle of next year, if you're so inclined, you'll all be able to visit our newest resort there.  I won't get into the details, but we're hoping to push forward strongly with this one and make it into something special.  I'm excited to see the end results."