Sex and the Billionaire Crime Boss - Season 2

Ch. 17: Past is Prologue

"What do you mean?" I ask him.

For a moment I see a glimpse of the vulnerable Max who shared such a personal story with me last night over dinner, and who looked at me with eyes full of emotion when we got back to the suite, then made love to me all night.

Then something seems to snap into place and his eyes are guarded again, his voice carefully modulated and unemotional.

"I told you last evening that my mother wanted nothing to do with the mafia lifestyle she grew up in, as a princess in the Irish mob. She did not want to marry Patrick O'Cleary in a brokered match between two powerful families in the drug trafficking business."

I nod but say nothing. I'm afraid if I speak I might interrupt his narrative and he'll change his mind about sharing one more aspect of his family history with me.

"When my father met her, it was the first time he had ever even thought to envision another path for himself in life. When you are born into the kind of family he was, there are certain expectations you accept almost from birth."

As he speaks I wonder if he is referred more to himself than his father. It makes me sad, the notion that a person could be destined from birth to take on a certain role in life. Then I remind myself that we all have free will. Max - and his father before him - could have chosen to walk away.

Instead, they accepted a life of crime, violence and danger. Which is why Max's father is now living out what remains of his life in a federal prison.

"My father," Max continues, "would have given it all up for her. Or at least that's what he believed at the time. Of course, who knows how lasting a decision made in that first rush of love at nineteen would have turned out to be. Could they have escaped both their destinies? We'll never know."

"Because they were discovered," I say, nodding. "And stopped. She was forced to marry O'Cleary instead of running off with your father."

"That's right. She was packed back off to boarding school with the nuns at sixteen, then married at eighteen and suffered a miserable loveless union and her husband's habitual abuse. I imagine she dreamed often of what her life could have been like with the idealistic young man from America she fell in love with."

I sigh and close my eyes for a moment, picturing the young girl trapped in a situation she saw no escape from. "Until things became so desperate she reached out to the boy she'd never stopped loving," I say, and Max nods.

"Yes, except by that time nine years had gone by. The boy had become a man and accepted his place as heir apparent to the Bennett criminal enterprise and everything that means. He was not the same idealistic boy who would have thrown away his legacy to run off with Nora."

"This is so sad."

"This is life," Max say, a bit sharply. "My grandfather needed my father at the helm. My grandfather's health was already beginning to fail."

"What about your uncle? Your father's brother?" I'm remembering what Max told me about his uncle who runs the less savory aspects of the family business. Things Max would rather not be involved in, apparently.

"Yes. My father had - has - a younger brother. Edward Bennett. Known not just to me but to everyone as Uncle Eddie. But don't let the diminutive name fool you. Eddie is absolutely loyal to my father. He's also absolutely ruthless and has had issues with impulse control since he was a child. Leaving Uncle Eddie at the helm of the business could well have resulted in a bloodbath rather than the series of tenuous truces that have existed for many years between my family and others involved in criminal activities in Miami."