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“How old were you then?”
“In my early twenties. I was shocked at how many years I’d spent playing at being a free spirit. Time had passed swiftly, and one day I woke up in a doorway and knew I had to get back to the real world, or I’d be lost forever.”
“What about Katrina?”
“She was already lost. Kat was always high, hopped up on whatever drug she could find. I tried to get her to go into rehab so many times that I finally gave up. Leaving her was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but by then, it was her or me.”
Rylee, knowing his report inside out, wondered if he’d mention the circumstances that led to his moving on. She didn’t know how to broach the subject, but she truly wanted to know what had happened.
Hoping he’d take the hint, she spoke. “Lord almighty, that must have been hard going it alone.”
Jake stared at her for a few seconds, his narrowed gaze questioning, digging, searching her sincerity. Relieved that she was able to maintain her innocent facial expression, she smiled coolly and kept her interested look steady.
“Actually, something else happened around the time that helped me to make the break. The night before I left, I’d been in a rundown neighborhood where anyone with any smarts wouldn’t hang out unless armed or in a group. There was an altercation, three bruisers were working over a sad individual who was taking a horrible beating but wouldn’t give up or play dead. To this day, I have no idea why I stepped in to stop them.”
“Did you? Stop them?”
“Of course. They knew me and that helped.”
“You’re telling me that you talked them down?” Rylee recognized the chances of that happening were like little to none. Men, worked up to the bloodlust he’d described, didn’t just stop because someone asked them to. Unless, it was a person they feared or respected.
“Seriously? You just asked them to stop and they did?”
“Not quite. They took some convincing, but they eventually saw my point and left.”
Jesus! Rylee would have liked to have been a rat on the side of that road to see what had gone down. From what Leo had described in his deposition, after they’d become roommates, Jake had come to his protection on numerous occasions, and vice-versa.
After his rescue, Leo had moved to Washington with Jake when he started at the college. To save on expenses, they’d found an apartment together. Leo had ended up working numerous jobs, making sure Jake had his chance at school.
Except Leo became sick and that was the end of a dream for Jake. Instead, he’d taken contracting jobs to pay the hospital bills and medicine expenses. During that time, he’d work late into the night, building a smaller app that had multiple uses, which he eventually sold to the highest bidder. Once he’d begun receiving the initial millions for this invention, their circumstances had changed dramatically.
What really surprised her was how little Leo would disclose about their lifestyle now. He led them to believe that Jake was a very private billionaire who wouldn’t tolerate any interference. If Leo hadn’t seen with his own eyes the dangers that existed around his boss, he’d never have come forward to seek their added protection.
He would have played bodyguard himself as was usual, but they had too many irons in the fire at home for him to leave. Which, her superiors took to mean, Jake had responsibilities he couldn’t ignore unless the man he trusted most, his partner, stayed home.
Hence, Leo’s call for assistance from the FBI.
To this day, Rylee hadn’t figured out just what it was that they worked on, besides the app, and why it was so important that one of them be there to handle things. Thanks to Jake’s genius, they’d installed so much secrecy around their activities, even the FBI investigators couldn’t seem to break through their firewalls.
