Page 17 of One Wild Ride

She pushed her finger deeper into my chest and it was starting to hurt. “Do you always take advantage of women in pain? Don’t think I haven’t heard about you. About what happened to that young mother and her baby.”

Not this again. Why was it when the press did find out something about me they only focused on the negative?

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read.” I grabbed her finger to pull it away from my chest, but I hadn’t let go.

“I didn’t, Alex. But from what I just witnessed, I’m starting to wonder if the article I read was right.”

I never cared about what anyone said about me or the lies they spread about my family. Ridiculous lies about my parents and even more crazy ones about me. It never hurt before because my mom and dad agreed on only one thing while I was growing up and that was that the press said anything to get people to buy their papers or watch their news show. Journalists were never to be trusted.

If both my parents agreed on something, then it must be true because they never agreed on anything.

“If you believe that, Aria, then you might as well believe all the other crazy things the papers have said about my family. Like how my mother has a secret love child with my uncle, and my grandfather got angry and had his own son killed. Or, maybe the one where I have a twin out there that I don’t know about. And the best one of all. The one where my mother had my father killed and is planning to take over the government. If Shakespeare were alive, he’d love to write a play based on those wild tales.”

She held up her hands but kept her eyes on the ground. “Look, I get it—”

“No, Aria, you really don’t get it. I may not know what it’s like to struggle to pay bills or worry if I have enough money to eat or pay rent or put gas in the car to get to work. I’m lucky in life. Real lucky, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t gone through things in life.”

I took a breath and grabbed her shoulders, forcing Aria to look at me. “And it doesn’t mean I’m some cold, spoiled monster ready to take a young mother in with her small child, only to have them booted from the country.”

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