Chapter Six
June –Wednesday
I am going to get the interview with Roy today, no matter what happens, I thought to myself as I glanced at my reflection in the mirror.
I had been up thinking about my strategy for most of the night, and I decided to make myself look as fancy as possible to try and fit in with his rich, fancy ways. It was practically the first thing they taught you at journalism school, to make the people you were speaking to feel like you fit in with them. The second they assumed they were above you, the harder it was to get information out of them.
I just hoped that I could pull it off. “Rich girl” wasn’t exactly a look I was familiar with. For someone who was most comfortable in skinny jeans and funky tee shirts, this retro, fifties-style, red dress felt a little awkward on me. I didn’t have anything designer, so this was the closest thing that I had. It had belonged to one of the girls I went to college with. She gave it to me as we were all packing up to leave, telling me that she thought it would suit me, and for some reason, I still had it.
It did fit around my curves well, and if I could just relax, I would probably have looked okay, but I just couldn’t quite seem to manage it. I’d also tied my hair up into a complicated chignon, which was making me feel a bit awkward, too…but I had to do it. It was all for the cause, and I was determined to come back successful. I really needed to.
“Okay,” I muttered to myself in the mirror, trying to calm down my racing heart. “Just forget what you’re wearing and get out there. Talk to this man; he can’t be that scary. Get what you need and write a damn kick ass article.” But for some reason, my pep talk wasn’t quite working. I still felt a little anxious, like I didn’t have quite have it in me.
Still, at least I knew where this man lived now…that was proactive and a step in the right direction. It was better than sitting in the office on the phone at any rate. That wouldn’t get me anywhere. If this man was determined not to speak to the press, then he would never, ever chat on the phone however many times I tried. This really was the only way.
I stepped into my car, trying to ignore the self doubt coursing through my body, and I tried to focus on the task at hand instead. I wasn’t sure quite what I was going to do, only that it wouldn’t be a straightforward profile. I needed to create something that made a massive impact to make my article stand out. I wouldn’t be able to decide on how to tackle it until I spent some time with him. I hoped I would get a feel for him and his lifestyle and something would become obvious.
It didn’t take me long to get over to where Roy lived. It might have been on the outskirts of the town, but it was such a small place that it didn’t really make any difference. I didn’t feel like I had long enough to get mentally prepared at any rate. But I had to do it anyway. I didn’t get dressed up this way for nothing.
But as I slowly moved my way out of the car and started towards the building, it became obvious that I wasn’t going to have an easy time getting in to his property unless he allowed me to do so. He had an old barbwire fence surrounding the place that I could have climbed over if I wanted to, but I didn’t feel dressed for that, and a large gate with security cameras and everything at the entrance. It was almost enough to have me turning back and running away, but I couldn’t do that. I was going to have to tackle this eventually, so why not now?
My heart thundered in my chest as I slowly moved my body closer to the gate, trying to keep my professional face on. I tried to remind myself that this was the real stuff, the difficult jobs that I would be doing if I did end up going national, but unfortunately, my career so far of fluff pieces was doing nothing to help me. I needed to toughen up if I didn’t want to make a mess of things.
With a trembling hand and labored breaths, I leant forward and pressed the buzzer, expecting the CCTV camera to turn around and face me at any moment. But I waited, and waited, and nothing happened. I waited for so long that eventually, I realized that he was either ignoring me, or he wasn’t in…and neither option would help me. That made me frustrated and angry. I’d spent so long preparing myself, just to leave with nothing wasn’t how I wanted this day to go at all.
I stood there for a moment, trying to decide what a real big-time journalist would do, before making the decision to drive my car around this man’s massive expanse of land. I had no idea what I was going to find, if anything at all, but I needed to at least give it a try. I would have walked it if it wasn’t so far…and if I didn’t have on a ridiculous pair of sky high heels that I could barely even walk in. I honestly wasn’t sure what I was thinking with that one. I knew the ranch would be muddy. How did I expect to survive it, even if I did manage to get in?
I moved the car much slower down the road than when I’d been driving in, and I eventually spotted something unexpected, something that made my heart stop dead in my chest. There was a man, on Roy’s land, on a tractor, pulling fence poles out of the ground.
At first, I thought that it must be someone that he hired to do the job, but then I recalled Hailey telling me that he was constantly elusive and that no one really knew him, and it became clear that this man had to be the person I’d been looking for.
I stared in awe for a moment, drinking in his shaved head, which he kept covering up with an old, faded cowboy hat, his tight jeans, which covered an amazing, strong-looking body, and the kind aura that surrounded him.
This wasn’t what I was expecting at all, and it was safe to say that I was a little blown away. I had thought that I was coming to meet an oil baron, someone flash with cash who didn’t allow anyone in because of his greed and paranoia, but clearly, I was wrong.
Roy looked surprisingly normal, and that knocked me off my feet. I glanced down at my ridiculous outfit in disgust; this wasn’t going to work at all. I needed to be more myself if I was going to speak to him, I felt like if he saw me like this, he would instantly shut down and never speak to me again. I couldn’t see him looking this way. I need to go back and rethink my entire strategy – this wasn’t the sort of thing that I wanted to mess up just because I was impatient.
But I couldn’t leave just yet – I wanted to watch him for just a few seconds longer. I found something seriously mesmerizing about him that I couldn’t stop looking at. Not only was he totally unexpected and nothing like the stuck-up billionaire I thought he would be, but he was also the best-looking man that I’d ever laid my eyes upon. I didn’t usually have such an instant attraction to someone, especially since the nightmare fling that I had with Baz, but there was something different about this guy…something that had me intrigued.
Stop it, I suddenly warned myself, shaking my head at myself. I couldn’t start having any feelings for this man, making a complex situation even more complicated. I needed to focus on the task at hand. There wasn’t anything worse than a journalist hooking up with the story, compromising everything, and I was determined that wouldn’t be me. I was a professional through and through, and that would be the end of it.
No, what I needed to do was get back to the office and rethink everything from there.
***
“Whoa,” Mike called out in a teasing tone of voice as I stalked through the office. “What’s gotten into you? I don’t think you have ever dressed up this much, even for the Christmas party. Do you have a date or something?”
“No,” I grumbled as a reply. “I had a plan, but it all fell apart.”
“Ooh, are you talking about Roy?” he replied, seeming to remember something important. “It’s hard to find anything out about him online unless you know where to look, so I have emailed you some links to get you started.”
I resisted the urge to snap at him and to tell him that I could have used that information before wasting my entire morning, because it felt pointless now. Instead, I raced to my desk, kicked off those stupid shoes, and logged on to find out what Mike was on about.
I clicked on the first couple of links, finding some well-buried business articles about him. They revealed that his oil company was an impressive Fortune 250 company. I knew that was a good thing and it proved just how business savvy it made him, but that wasn’t the angle that I wanted to take. I thought it would be too boring, the sort of thing that anyone could have written.
I started to feel despondent, like I was on another wild goose chase, until I spotted something a little more personal about him. However, it wasn’t something that made me feel good. “Billionaire’s Wife Loses Breast Cancer Battle.” The article dated five and a half years ago and went into a little bit more detail about Roy’s wife and her long fight against the disease, accompanied by a picture showing him in a very private moment of grief, putting flowers on her gravesite.
Poor guy… I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to lose someone you loved. It broke my heart to even think about it, never mind go through it.
The longer I looked at the picture, the more uncomfortable I became. The image was so raw, so filled with emotion, that I could barely stand to see it. It was clearly a moment Roy didn’t want the rest of the world to see, so it probably killed him that this was out there.
No wonder he was closed off and private; no wonder he hid away from the rest of the world – a town like this held no secrets. The only reason I didn’t know about any of this was because I wasn’t here at the time. I was at college, and the Larkins weren’t a family I knew well enough for anyone to tell me about it.
I sat back in my chair for a moment, wondering how I was going to get a man who clearly had plenty of reasons not to speak to me, to open up. All of a sudden, it felt like an impossible task. Sure, I didn’t have my family around me anymore, but it wasn’t like I’d lost anyone to be able to relate to him. It didn’t seem like we were going to have anything in common, anything to build a bond from, and that was going to make this that much more difficult.