Malibu Rising: A Novel, Taylor Reid [best fantasy books to read TXT] 📗

somewhat from the shock of the fall but mostly from trying to take in the faces of the people she had been anticipating meeting all night. Jay was skinnier, Hud was … much more beat up. And yet, Kit seemed to match perfectly with the picture Casey had had in her mind. She always assumed there would be at least one Riva who looked at her with suspicion. And here she was.

“What, exactly, is going on?” Kit asked.

Mick, too, was confused.

“This is Casey Greens,” Nina said.

Casey waved and half smiled, not looking directly at any of them.

Nina lacked the energy to ease them all into it. She had spent so much of her young life being tactful and gentle and making things OK. But Nina couldn’t fix everything, could she? For fuck’s sake. “She’s probably our sister.”

Everyone was surprised, but it was Jay who spoke up. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Mick ignored Jay’s incredulity. “Casey?” Mick said to the girl.

Casey nodded.

“Care to fill me in here, hun?”

Casey began searching for the words. But Nina jumped in and Casey felt taken care of, like she was being wrapped up in a soft blanket.

“She was adopted in 1965,” Nina said. “She was raised by the Greens family in Rancho Cucamonga.”

Nina nudged Casey and put her hand out. Casey handed her the photograph of her mother.

“This is her mom,” Nina said. “I mean, her birth mother. You can see on the back, someone wrote a note that you are her father.”

Hearing the phrase birth mother gave Hud the very strong instinct to stand up and sit next to Casey. He had so many things he wanted to ask her.

Nina offered Mick the photo and Mick took it from her hands gently, as if he was reluctant to touch it. He looked at it, front and back.

“Her name was …” Nina realized she had forgotten. “What was her name?”

Casey found her voice. “Monica Ridgemore,” she said, and it really sank in that she was talking to Mick Riva. One of the most famous men in the world. A man she’d seen on billboards and on TV her entire life. “She would have been eighteen. Apparently, she told people that she was carrying Mick Riva’s baby. Your baby.”

Hud wondered just how many other children his father had fathered. Jay wondered whether the girl was lying. And Kit wondered how they all could possibly be descended from the man in front of them. They were nothing like him.

“I don’t want anything from you,” Casey said. “Any of you. Well, not money or anything like that. I have enough money.”

She had so much less than any one of the Riva kids had at that very moment. She had such a small fraction of what Mick had that you couldn’t calculate it in whole percentages.

“I’m here because …” Casey found it difficult to keep going. She knew the words she wanted to say, she just didn’t know if she could withstand the ache of saying them. I don’t have anyone else. Mick looked up from studying the photo and saw that Casey had her mother’s eyes.

“She’s looking for family,” Nina said. “Sound familiar?”

Mick gave a shy and bittersweet smile, his eyes downcast. He looked at Nina and then Casey. And then back down at the photo.

He tried to place the face in the picture. Had he slept with this woman—Monica Ridgemore—in 1964 or ’65? Those were big years for him. He’d toured all over the world. He’d slept with a lot of women. Some of them were groupies. And, yes, some of them had been young.

Mick looked up from the photo and at Casey, at her eyes and her cheekbones and her lips. There was something familiar about her—but that was a feeling Mick had all the time. He had met so many people in his lifetime that, years ago, it had begun to feel like there were no strangers anymore. Just different versions of the same person over and over.

It was just as likely that Mick had slept with Monica and forgotten about it as it was that Monica had made it up.

“I don’t know,” he said, finally. He watched Casey’s eyes close and her chest fall as she understood she would find no answer tonight. “I’m sorry, Casey. I know that’s probably not what you wanted to hear. But the truth is that I just don’t know.”

It broke them all a tiny little bit—Nina, Jay, Hud, Kit, and Casey. There was no end to the ways he could disappoint.

Six police officers arrived in three squad cars.

They drove through the quiet streets of Point Dume, their sirens off, their lights silently cascading over the high fences and hedges.

When they got to Nina’s door, they knocked. If they’d been at an out-of-control party in Compton, they would not have knocked. Leimert Park, Inglewood, Downtown, Koreatown, East L.A., Van Nuys, they would have walked right in. But this was Malibu, where the rich white people live. And rich white people get the benefit of the doubt and all of its many benefits.

The door opened just as Sergeant Eddie Purdy’s knuckles grazed it. Sergeant Purdy was stocky and stout with a face covered in stubble unless he shaved twice a day. He gazed up to see the gorgeous woman in front of him.

“Oh, thank God you are here,” Tarine said. “You need to do something. Now they are on the roof, trying to ride surfboards like sleds into the pool.”

There was broken glass and vomit and passed-out half-naked bodies and two people doing lines off a silver platter. The female Channel 4 news anchor was crying into a bowl of dip.

“Ma’am, is this your home?” Sergeant Purdy asked.

“No, it is not.”

“Is the owner of the home here?”

“We are still looking for her,” Tarine said. Vanessa was outside, on the hunt.

“Well, can you help us to find out where she might be?” he said. “I need to speak