Stryker Read Free

following the NYSE and I never looked back. I
set my sights on the goal and I didn’t let anything stand in my way. I never
even went back home on breaks, choosing instead to find work as an intern on
break the first year while bunking with some guys off campus until school
started back again. By the following year I was hired part time at a brokerage
house that had heard about what I could do. It was all part of my learning
experience but I had no plans on working for someone else. I’d be fucked if I
were going to let someone else get rich off my back, no fucking way. I never
once thought I couldn’t do it. I’d fought off gang members from the age of
fourteen, men who wanted me to work as a runner to peddle their shit to school-
kids on the playgrounds. I’d suffered beatings and threats until I’d signed up
at the Y for some self defense classes and trained to be a mean- as- fuck
little bastard. At least that’s what they whispered about me behind my back in
the old neighborhood. I’d taken it a little farther and at sixteen when I got
my first little job at a fast food joint, I’d put most of it into Krav Maga
lessons.
    Now at thirty-two I’m a killing machine, no one was going
to get the drop on me.
    I fought my way out of that neighborhood with brains and
brawn until I became a force to be reckoned with in the financial arena. But
unlike many who had come before me, I was hungry but I
wasn’t greedy. I had no need for flashy cars and the high life; that will all
come later. The first thing I did was to buy my mother a nice little starter
home in Long Island and pay it off in full. She never had to worry about
dodging bullets every time she walked out the door. She kept her job as a
teller at the bank in Manhattan where she’d worked for the last fifteen years.
She had her eyes on her benefits and her pension: smart woman. I stayed in my
little apartment in Brooklyn for the meantime. I knew my day would come. The
only luxury I accorded myself was my Harley and a membership to the local crew.
I still had some street in me after all and I had to release some of that pent
up energy somehow. Riding my chopper with the guys on the weekends was a great
stress reliever. I knew the stigma that came with being part of the crew, but
that didn’t matter to me. It was my only escape. It did garner me a lot of
pussy though. For some reason women love the bad boy tattooed bike rider image.
With me they got the best of both worlds. I’d made myself a force to be
reckoned with in both arenas. The high profile business
tycoon and the biker. The papers had had a field day with that shit.
Five years after I opened my doors I was a millionaire ten times over. I could
do what I want when the fuck I wanted but still I was satisfied with what I
had. I had no wife and kids at twenty-nine so I didn’t see the need for more.
That would all change a year later when I would meet the most beautiful woman
in the world who stole my heart with a smile.

Chapter
4

 
    I’d waited to the last minute possible to show up,
intending to be fashionably late as opposed to being rude. I’d learned proper
etiquette by watching others. Like the many trust fund babies I’d met in my
days as a college kid. Not that most of those guys followed proper protocol.
No, it was when I’d been invited into their homes that I’d seen first hand the
way things were done. The way their parents wished they’d learned to do things.
What I hadn’t learned there I’d researched until I knew all the intricacies of
fine dining. It didn’t hold much appeal for me. I was never going to be that
person but it paid to know these things. There were still some left who thought
the young nobody from the streets of New York had no place among them. I gave
less than a fuck what they thought. I let my money and my success speak for me
but this was my way of showing them up. Of showing them that although I
might’ve had a rough start they were no better than I because