Total pages in book: 19
Estimated words: 18755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 94(@200wpm)___ 75(@250wpm)___ 63(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 18755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 94(@200wpm)___ 75(@250wpm)___ 63(@300wpm)
It had been a month. A full month since that kiss in the conference room, and Kendra had spent every single day of it telling herself that she had made the right decision by saying no.
Most days, she believed it. But today wasn’t one of those days. Instead, it was a day that made her question her entire life, and it all started with waking up to water drip, drip, dripping straight down on her face.
Because the roof was leaking.
Again.
The kitchen leak, she had successfully solved after several attempts, two YouTube tutorials (the idiot’s guide was what won the day, if she was being honest), and a bucket of roof cement that cost her two shifts at the bookstore. But this bedroom leak was a completely different beast, and a stubborn one at that.
Since the typhoon roaring outside the window made any immediate repairs impossible, and it was just one of those days where you’d wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and everything else was wrong after that—
Kendra simply dragged the entire bed to the side and took out the dented pot which she had stored under the bed for days like then. She positioned it right under the leak, waited to see that the dripping hit the pot smack in the middle, and then she went back to bed.
Or at least she tried to, but now she found it difficult, with her mind having already emerged from the fog of last night’s restless sleep. She tossed and turned. Even tried covering her head with a pillow like she often saw others did in movies. It didn’t work at all, but neither did she feel like getting up.
She didn’t have to work today, so maybe that was one reason her body was feeling a little sluggish. She considered giving Mr. Alden a call, whom she knew would always welcome a helping hand. The man was in his seventies, no wife or kids, and he had been running his little bookstore on his own for about three decades now. He didn’t pay a lot, but that was fine with her. From the day she had made her choice to study literature, she had known it was choosing a future that held no promise for any high-paying job.
Not that it mattered at the start, though. Even when they were still dating, Porter had made it clear to her that he would prefer it if she were to stay at home and take care of him and the house. He was always so proud to introduce her as Kendra, his ‘homemaker wife’. It made her wonder when all of that changed. And why. And how.
She supposed she could ask him. For closure. But honestly, the mere thought of having to talk to either of them just made her feel like throwing up. It was better to simply not know rather than forcing herself to—
Ring.
Her brows furrowed even as she got out of bed. She hadn’t made a lot of friends since moving back to her mother’s home. Who could be ringing her doorbell while a typhoon was raging outside?
She took a peek at the peephole and saw four men in camouflage windbreakers. “Who is it?” She asked this without opening the door because even girls like her wouldn’t be so stupid to just let them in when they outnumbered her 4 to 1.
“Good morning, ma’am. I’m Merke, and this is the rest of my team. We were sent by Mr. La Rocca.”
What in the world?
We’ve already done preliminary aerial inspection on your roof. We expect to be done with the repair in about an hour’s time. Tops.”
By the time they finished talking, she had already opened the door, and when she had checked her phone—
Ah, there it was.
His secretary back in New York always sent her text messages to confirm all the crazy things his billionaire boss was most recently up to. As a safety precaution, please call us immediately if anyone approaches you about Mr. La Rocca that doesn’t come with prior confirmation.
The first time she had received such a text, she had thought he was being paranoid. But when she had succumbed to the urge to Google him and discovered all the grisly details of his childhood and the violent death that orphaned him at nineteen—
Kendra took those confirmations seriously since then.
But even so.
“I’m sorry.”
It didn’t mean he could get away with controlling things when he was nothing but a stranger.
Who happened to kiss her on the first day they met, yes.
But still.
He was being too high-handed, and that wouldn’t do at all.
“Is it the time, ma’am? We can probably finish it in forty minutes—”
Merke was still talking when a second van pulled into her driveway, and two women in bright yellow rain coats ran out of it carrying what appeared to be an entire refrigerator's worth of groceries.