Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 79963 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 267(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79963 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 267(@300wpm)
She locked eyes with me and began to walk towards me too. I’d never seen her look so lost and unhappy, like she was about to burst into tears. We stopped a foot away from each other.
“I’ve been waiting to dance with you,” she whispered, her eyes enormous.
The band was playing so I took her hand and led her to the dancefloor. I held her tightly and we swayed to the beat. Slowly, I felt all the tension in her limbs evaporating. I nuzzled her neck as we danced, peppering kisses on her skin, and inhaling her scent, which oddly made me feel as if I’d finally come home.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.” My fallen angel looked up at me, her face vulnerable and sad. “Did you want to go with Paige?”
I froze. “What? No. I came with you and I’m going back with you.”
She nodded but looked unconvinced. “I’m contemplating whether or not to tell you about the conversation I had with your mother.”
“Tell me,” I commanded. I could feel my insides clenching. If she had said anything, anything at all to hurt Lillian…
“But I don’t want to cause any trouble between the two of you.”
“Tell me or I’ll get it out of her and that won’t be pretty.”
She sighed. “Okay. She told me that you and Paige were in love for a very long time and she thinks that you’re still carrying a torch for her.”
I was too furious to speak. This kind of bullshit was exactly why I left Connecticut.
Lillian forced a smile, but it only made her look more wretched. “I told her not to concern herself with me as I wasn’t a threat to the great love between you and Paige.”
I took a deep breath. “This nonsense has gone on long enough. I never loved Paige and I only…it doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago. I’m only interested in one woman here tonight. And that woman is you. Paige may be the woman my mother wants me to marry and start a family with, but it’s certainly not the woman I want, and she knows better than to try and interfere in my life by telling you a bunch of lies. I’ll have a word with her tomorrow.”
“Please don’t say anything to her. It’ll only make her hate me more,” Lillian begged worriedly. “Promise?”
I stared at her, still furious with my mother. “I can’t not say anything, Lillian.”
“Please just leave it. It’s fine,” she pleaded. “What we have is casual, we have no claim on each other, and I’ll probably never see her again.”
My mother needed someone to stop her in her fucking tracks, but at the same time, I didn’t want to make Lillian more uncomfortable than she probably already was. I decided to tackle my mother when Lillian was out of my parents’ home.
Lillian stayed in silent contemplation, and when she spoke it was almost to herself. “Strange how she seemed to really hate it that I was one of your staff. She called me a secretary as if it was a dirty word.”
I looked down at her fair bent head and a memory came to mind, one that I’d long forgotten about. And suddenly, I knew why my mother was being so unreasonable.
“My mother’s hatred is not personal, Lillian. It comes from the biggest humiliation of her life. My father was having an affair with his secretary, and while they were going to a hotel from a party he met with an accident. His secretary died on the spot and it became a big scandal. The newspapers carried the story and all her friends were whispering about it behind her back.
“I was twelve then, but I can still recall how incensed she was about the discovery of the affair rather than the actual affair. She was willing to accept my father’s affairs as long as he was discreet about them.”
“You’ve probably hit the nail on the head. Until she found out I was your assistant she was quite friendly,” Lillian said. “After what happened to her, I guess she hates all secretaries and PAs.”
We’d talked about my mother enough. I had an idea of how to make the rest of the night pleasurable for both of us.
Chapter 40
Lillian
He brought the car to a stop in front of his parents’ house, killed the engine and turned to look at me, his face serious.
“You know me; I’m an asshole, but I don’t play games. When I’m with someone, I’m with only that person. Okay?”
‘A girl like Paige,’ Max’s mother had said, ‘is from our class. Can’t you see how well they look together?’
Once she had let me know that Max and Paige could have been the love affair of the century, she gleefully went on to advise me that Max was just using me. I understood perfectly what Max’s mother was trying to drum into me. Of course, she was right: men had been sleeping with their secretaries for centuries and never married them, but it had hurt seeing Max and Paige draw so close to each other.