AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It broke her heart to be stuck in this place, having to choose between the life of her father and the possibility of happiness with Thomas Leone.
Just then, her father groaned in his sleep and woke up. “Lorena?” he said weakly. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Papa, it’s me. I’m here. What do you need?”
“Sweet Lorena, my little girl,” he said, patting her hand.
“I love you, Papa. You’re going to get better. I’m going to make sure of it.”
“You always take care of everything. You’re so much like your mother,” he said.
Her heart swelled at his words. “I know. You tell me that all the time,” she said. “I miss her too.” She couldn’t let her dad die. He was all she had left. The tears that were always so close to the surface these days overflowed once more. “Go back to sleep, Papa. You need your rest so you can come home.”
As she watched, he relaxed back into sleep. She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. “Goodnight,” she said and quietly left the room, blinking back the tears.
The drive home was agonizing. She was utterly racked with indecision. What she was doing to Thomas felt so wrong. It went completely against her nature. This was the world her papa had always shielded her from, and now here she was, in it up to her eyeballs in order to save his life.
Chapter5
Thomas
Thomas tried to walk briskly to vent the remains of the day. The day had been shit. He’d been exposed to incompetence from every angle. He felt like he was about to explode.
The pending blow-up was, however, quickly diffused as soon as he hit the office. Lorena, looking stunning, was sitting there at her desk. She looked like an absolute doll, busy at her job.
Thomas steered himself so he’d walk by her desk on his way to his own. He wanted to see what she was doing, to pass through her magnetic field as he moved around.
“You’re late,” Lorena told him as he walked by. She didn’t even look up when she said this.
That took a lot of nerve. He was the boss. Maybe he’d heard her wrong.
“Excuse me?” Thomas fired back. Then he backed up two steps so he would be parallel with her desk and have eye contact with her, and neither he nor she would have to lean or stretch too far.
“I think you heard me,” she snapped back. “You’re late.”
“Is that so?” he asked. He tried hard not to sound shocked, and he also wanted to laugh. “How is that possible? I am the boss.”
“Simple. It is clearly late in the day to be starting work, and here you are, just now arriving at work. If you put two and two together, it looks like you are late to work to me,” she added, barely holding back the smirk he could see tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“I see. I am glad you are feeling feisty. I have a whole slew of things on the agenda today.”
“I hope there is plenty on it for me,” she interjected. “Some people are okay with slacking. I like to be productive.”
“Did you just imply that I am a slacker?”
“No. I would never do that. You are the boss. You said so yourself,” she sassed back. “I told you that you were late. And you are late. I will admit, however, being late is a common slacker trait.” She didn’t hide her smirk very well. He liked how she wasted no time getting her jabs in when she could.
“Look here, sweetheart,” he told her. “I am really glad you are on time and watching the clock. I do have a load of things for you to take care of today and the rest of the week. I am going to go grab my coffee, get some notes from my desk, and then I will be right back here at your desk. You and I will go through the agenda.”
“I love it,” she told him. “That sounds perfect.”
“Why do I sense there is a ‘but’ that was supposed to be spoken and was held back?”
“Because there was a ‘but’ statement,” she told him. “It just seems a little entitled to me to show up to work and take a coffee break as soon as you get to work, especially when you showed up late to begin with.” She wiped a hand over her luscious mouth, failing to hide her snarky smile.
“That’s quite a mouthful,” he answered. Then he walked off and waited until he was out of sight and beyond earshot to smile and chuckle.
In his office space, with the door shut and no one able to look in, Thomas took his shirt off and banged out a hundred pushups. He did enough to pump up his arms and chest and get his blood flowing, then grabbed a black T-shirt from the extras in the closet, put it on, and tucked it in.
