Race (17 page)

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

THE CHILDREN'S SOCIETY

Alice and Ronan arrived at The Children's Society, where Harry Rodgers wanted them to donate his cut of the money.

"Hello," said the manager of the children's society. He was wearing blue trousers with a blue shirt to match. He also had circular glasses that he pushed down his nose and hung loosely at the ends where they met his ears.

"Good afternoon," Ronan smiled. "I'd like to make a donation to the orphanage." He handed over a briefcase which was full of the money: the fifteen million dollars, plus the tax.

The receptionist opened the briefcase and gasped. He quickly closed it. "Thank you so much, Sir. You're money will help the children out so much. Thank you again."

Ronan nodded briefly, and he and Alice walked out of the society.  Ronan picked up his phone to ring Harry. "I've given the orphanage manager the money."

"Thanks buddy," Harry replied at the other end, whilst Mini smiled. "Now, enjoy the rest of your life, okay? Bye." He dialled off. Ronan smirked and he and Alice went off in their car.

From exactly that moment, Mini and Harry walked into the orphanage from the back door, and went over to the manager.

"Mr Harry  Rodgers, this is for you," the manager said, smiling, and handed over the briefcase to Harry.

"Thank you," Harry smiled. He opened up the briefcase and took out one of the stacks of notes, and gave it to the manager. "Here you go."

"Thank you so much," the manager said, nodding.

"You're most welcome," Harry replied, shutting the briefcase again. He handed it over to Mini and the pair of them walked out of the children's society.

"Sir," Mini piped up as they walked out of the orphanage, "why didn't you just get the money directly from them? Why through the orphanage? Then the manager wouldn't have had to have a share."

"Well, good work pays off, baby." Harry remarked, throwing his apple in the air and catching it back in his hands.

"I was going to get scared," Mini grinned. "That you've actually become a good man and done such a big charity."

Harry roared with laughter. "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!" he cried. "There's not a charitable cell of blood in my veins. The way you give the charity, the way you eat the flower, like I always say, baby. Eat the flower and do good. After today, I will never eat fruit again." Harry tossed up his apple and it landed into the hands of  a child passing by. The child ate the apple. "After today, I'm only gonna eat dry fruit," Harry declared.

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

THE HUGE SHOCK

"Today, Ronan, we'll celebrate our victory, now we've got all this money," Alice said, giggling as they walked into their house.

"You're the boss, baby," Ronan remarked, opening the door for her.

"Thank you!" she smiled, and when they walked in, hugging and kissing each other. But then, they were completely and utterly rendered speechless. They heard something being played back to them. The words that Ronan had said after he and Alice had made love. What he'd told her about his and Noah's past.

"This house was first my dad's friend's. Me and Noah always came to play here. We would always race on these roads with our bicycles. And that's how mine and Noah's racing began." Ronan remembered his childhood.

"Come on, pedal faster, Ronan, faster!" Noah exclaimed as the two little boys cycled down the road. "Come on, faster. Faster! Ronan, try to catch me! Catch me!"

"Noah always won," Ronan continued. "Daddy would always celebrate his victory with a party." He spoke in a tone of jealousy. "I didn't like it. I didn't like it all. But I never cried. I only thought how Noah thought if things worked differently. But Noah always won Daddy's trust. When Daddy died, he gave away everything to Noah in his will. The business, the property, the money. You name it. I was the second class citizen in my own home." He paused, tears in his eyes. "Whenever I wanted something, I would go to Noah, and he would give me whatever I wanted. But side by side he always gave me the impression that he was better than me. That he was the older brother and I was the younger one. That was the love poison that stayed in my blood. But I won that poison. In the race of life, I beat him. I beat him, goddammit."

Ronan and Alice searched the house frantically, in and out of doors and rooms, wondering where the voice was coming from. They tried looking through the radio, but that wasn't playing it. It was playing on the television. They both gasped as they listened to everything being replayed. Not a word escaped from ither of their lips. When the clip was finished, something came on, something came on that Ronan would have passed out about. Noah was being played on the television screen.

"What's the matter, Ronan?" Noah's voice came from the TV. "The race isn't over yet, and you've all ready recited your fantasy about winning it and making me lose. Alice swallowed, and the pair of them spun around when they heard some one walk into the room. It was Noah. Alice looked as if she was about to faint, and Ronan looked as if he was about to pass out of his skin.  Noah entered the room, a small devilish smile plastered on his face, as he watched them both stare at him. Ronan took a few steps backwards, frightened about what was going to happen. He knocked over some things on the table. He had never got such a shock in his life.

"This is what you're thinking right now, isn't it? That I fell from the terrace. There's a big difference between falling and dying. You watched exactly what I planned you to watch." Noah took a gun out of his pocket, blowing at its tip. "The plan was yours, but it was going exactly the way I wanted it to. Your eyes followed my every move, and my eyes followed your every move." Noah lay down on the sofa, resting his legs on the table next to it. "I would have never found out a single part of your plan, until I heard the phone call that you made in the hospital."

Noah went to the toilet and Ronan took his phone outside. He switched on the bathroom light to watch outside what Ronan was doing.

"Hello?" Ronan asked.

"Hello, it's Frank here," came the answer.

"Why are you ringing me at the specific moment in time?" Ronan hissed.

"Where's my money?" Frank demanded.

"Money?" Ronan repeated. "Noah's alive, he's not dead. There's nothing wrong with him at all. I need him killed, Frank, do you understand? I need him killed! But you're not doing anything now. I'm going to do it all by myself."

"When I got back from the hospital and went home,  I searched your bedroom. There, I found Chantelle's file in your drawers. I was thinking where you got Chantelle's file from, when you had never even met her before. I finally understood, that you would use Chantelle to get what you wanted. I was the one who shook her hand first. I never sacrificed my love for her,  Ronan; I got her to play a game with you. We had it all planned out from the start. All from the bloody start. I wanted to know what your plan was, and Chantelle helped me in doing that."

"What drink will you have?" Ronan asked Chantelle, grinning.

"You know I don't drink," Chantelle said seductively, joining him at the mini bar of the house. She wrapped her arms around him and gazed into his eyes. "Ronan, look  how quickly we've both fallen in love," she smiled. "Let's get married."

Ronan began to laugh. "How can we get married?"

"Why not?" Chantelle asked, her arms still around him, but she was frowning.

"Why not?!" Ronan repeated. "Because a wedding takes a lot of preparation."

Chantelle detached her arms from him and resolved to standing next to him. "So ... is it that you think I don't love you, and you think I'm still in love with Noah or something?"

"Nope," Ronan denied, and a smirk started to form on his lips.

"Come on baby, stop joking!" Chantelle said, wrapping her arms around him again and kissing his lips, wanting more, just like he'd kissed her on the ship. But he didn't kiss her back. He looked truly disgusted at her.

Ronan pulled away from her, and began to laugh loudly. "I'm not joking," he said, as Chantelle frowned even more. "I'm serious." He walked away from her and towards the bookshelf, where he took a piece of paper out from an old, battered book. "How can I love a girl like you?" he said finally. He held the paper up in his hands, and walked towards her again. "After reading this, I don't think anyone will be prepared to marry you."

"What is that?" Chantelle asked, because she truly didn't know how he could hold something as little as a piece of paper against her.

"Your bio data," Ronan said, smirking more. Chantelle gulped and stared at the papers.

'Runaway girl from orphanage apprehended' was one of the bold articles, and so many terrible mistakes from her past were all outlined.

"From your childhood to the present day, this is what nobody has ever discovered. These names aren't your mother's or father's, because they were the ones who sent you to the orphanage, even though you weren't an orphan. Oh Chantelle, what are you going to do? When you were fifteen years old, you got up to some naughty things with the men, you committed crimes ... and then you tried to run away from the orphanage. When you got caught, you murdered the person who found you ...  Goddammit. Honestly, mate. This has all come out today when I got hold of this from that institution. Then you became a famous bar dancer, dancing on poles, and you did wrong things, you stole money, you tried to have sex with the men to get what you wanted and get them on your side, and then you tried to steal a huge load of cash and someone saw you ... you killed the poor bastard. You're a really filthy little girl, aren't you? And there's not to mention what you did next ..." Ronan laughed hardly, and then sat down on the couch. She heard him mutter the word 'whore'.

Chantelle collapsed on to the floor at his knees purposefully, holding them and staring at him. "Ronan, I wanted to tell you everything about me by myself, but I was too scared that I might take your heart away from you." She tried her best to find the right words to compose her sentence with.

"Take my heart away from me?" Ronan repeated nastily, laughing harshly. "Do you think that this file is the only evidence I have? My eyes were only actually on yours when I was drunk, the rest of it was just part of my plan..."

Chantelle didn't understand what Ronan meant. She sprung to her feet, and then took the glass of alcohol from Ronan's hands. She sat at the other side of the room, face to face with him, and she drank the entire contents of the glass. She'd never drank alcohol before in her life, and she'd just done it now to prove to him that she'd sacrifice anything just so that he wouldn't hold his past against her. "Now, you tell me. What do you want?" she asked in a bitchy tone.

"Me? I want exactly what you want. Money," Ronan said. "The property that you tightened Noah up for, that will all be done in time. But I've got a plan for something worth one hundred million dollars. If you help me out with this and take my side, I'll give you twenty million of those dollars."

Chantelle stared at him with interest, as one hundred million dollars was such a huge amount of money. "Where are you going to get all that money from?"

"The things that I hate most in life, death after death, they end up having some good uses. Me and my brother have an eighty five million dollar insurance policy ... If my brother died in an accident, then I would get one hundred million." Ronan said vaguely.

Chantelle laughed. "Well. Compared to you, my file is nothing. Until today, I've never met such a bastard, someone who would, for money, sacrifice his own brother." She said this in a foul voice.

"What's so bastard-like about this?" Ronan shot back, trying to act all innocent about it. "Noah always tells me that he loves me, and for me, he'd sacrifice his life. So I'm fulfilling him of that duty."

"If your plan was all set, then what was the bloody need to pretend to love me for such a long time?"  Chantelle asked him, intrigued. "I was so stupid, I thought you liked me, and on that ship ... I thought ..."

"You think of a lot of things, don't you?" Ronan said bitterly. He was no longer the sweet, romantic man that Chantelle had fallen in love with, now, he was a foul bastard, who showed that he didn't care about anything other than himself. "I made this fake romance because it's important that Noah thinks we've got a natural love relationship and nothing was rushed."