The King by Rick Soper Read Free Book Online

joy – and he didn’t know if he’d ever be ready for her to date, let alone at sixteen, just a few weeks after getting her license. But he’d raised her to be a confident, healthy, intelligent girl – and she was beautiful - and there was no way to avoid the fact that those qualities made her very attractive to boys, and they were going to ask her out. In the end, after every dreadful thought had run through his head, he responded as best he could, by telling her that it was...great...and that she should...tell him about it, all the time with a fake smile plastered onto his face, and a silent prayer that she couldn’t sense the terror he was feeling.
    She proceeded to give him a detailed description of Tommy Healy, the quarterback for the football team that she cheered for. All the girls wanted to go out with him but he had asked her.  She told him how good that made her feel, and how they were going to dinner and a movie, and that she would be home by curfew, and how great it was that Russell was being so cool about it. All of which helped alleviate the terror that he had first felt at the pronouncement.
    But then the date happened, and things went very wrong...
    Tommy Healy was used to going out with girls who threw themselves at him and let him do what he wanted, when he wanted because he was the shining star, the quarterback everyone loved. But London wasn’t like that. Russell had raised her to be confident and intelligent and she had great respect for herself. So after dinner, before they even went to the movies – in the car behind the restaurant when Tommy decided he wanted to take her, she said no. Tommy didn’t believe her, he was used to getting his way. He tried to push past her upheld hands, and grab her breast, and she punched him in the face and broke his nose, just as she had been trained to do in the karate classes she’d taken with Russell as she was growing up.
    Tommy was furious and on the edge of hitting her back, but instead he just pushed her out of his car and drove away. When she called Russell, he went into a blind rage. He picked up his daughter and took her home, and then went straight to Tommy’s house. When Drake Healy, Tommy’s father, answered the door, Russell pulled back and threw a fist that broke Drake’s nose and cheek bone
    “You better get a fucking handle on that son of yours,” Russell snarled, “because if he ever comes near my daughter again I’ll be coming after you!”
    As he drove back home, the rage started to fall away and he realized that he’d just committed an assault that could land him in very deep trouble, especially with his record of obsessive behavior. But as he walked through the door and found London still crying on the couch, he didn’t care: he’d protected his daughter, and whatever they threw at him was fine – it was worth it.
    The police never showed up. Drake didn’t want anyone to know what his son had done, so the whole mess just faded away... mostly. The fact that Tommy and Drake suffered broken noses at the hands of London and Russell made its way through the school, and made other boys scared to death of going anywhere near her. By then, she didn’t mind. The incident with Tommy had soured her on dating, something that Russell was secretly happy about.
    Until she went to college…

Chapter 16
     
    The Agency had offices all over the country: Seattle, Hollywood, Miami, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Washington DC. Wherever there were famous people who needed to have their images polished, The Agency was there. With one of their top clients, Billy Stone, going in front of congress to testify, Tom Francis – as the Agency’s CEO – was in the Washington DC office, ready to do damage control for whatever mess Billy got himself into.
    Stevens hated the media in general, but a firm like The Agency that manipulated public opinion, he hated even more. Stevens blew through security with a push and a badge shoved in a guard’s