5: Elise

I WAS shocked at first.

I had never seen him that angry with me or anyone else. In the back of my mind, I still wondered what he’d said to Shiela to make her look truly sickly and pitiful, even to me, after everything she had shouted at me out there.

But then I got very angry because I wasn’t the one who sneaked through professional security guards to get to someone who didn’t want to see me anymore.

I had to admit to the woman’s ingenuity. But she was still bat-crazy.

Who the hell would do what she just did if not a crazy person?

And then he tells me it was my fault?

*“It’s my job to filter your guests when you are busy with something important,” I explained, but I was already scowling back at him.

“Your job isn’t to let anyone speak to you like that! You should have called me!”

“But Gian—”

“If you ever do that again, you’ll go back to your parents. You can’t cut it here!”

I was shocked.

Okay, so I was also a personal friend. I should have expected his anger.

But I didn’t expect a threat to be sent home, a failure, for… this?

My lips started to tremble against my will. Going back to Puerto Galera a failure was unacceptable.

Not when the reason for the failure was so stupid.

I felt like I’d been hit by a whip. I was trying not to cry, and I was insisting I wasn’t about to cry because I was an idiot.

I was so angry.

Alright?!

But it was my call. It was my call what to do. Why did he even go on a date with a psycho?!

He wasn’t happy to see that I was struggling not to cry. “Don’t you dare cry. You deserve to be castigated,” he threatened—threatened—me again.

But the truth was he hated seeing women cry. That was a secret we all knew about the Verrazzano men.

No matter how authoritarian they acted or how cool and collected they looked, a woman crying was like dropping a bomb at them.

And I didn’t want to drop a bomb, but it was so unfair!

And I was already too emotional to stop myself from shouting back.

“I was doing my job! It’s not my fault you think with your dick when you choose a date!”

He paled. “What did you say?”

“Why did you even date a crazy woman? I told you the first time I met her there was something off with her, didn’t I?”

I did. But he didn’t listen.

Shiela had never liked me from the beginning, but I didn’t make a fuss about it because I generally avoided that part of his life.

“I’ll forget that you said that.”

I closed my hands over my ears. “Okay! I’ll forget it, too!” My god, why did I say that? He got me so pissed off!

“Regardless of what you say, my point is you should have had me called as soon as you saw her!”

“You were in a merger meeting!”

“And you think you’re capable of controlling a mental case when the security below couldn’t?” he asked incredulously.

I had no honest rebuttal to that. I really had no idea she was a mental case, as I was realizing now that it wasn’t a term he was using loosely here.

He was confirming that I was right—there was something off with Shiela.

And I stared at him.

He nodded, knowing I finally understood what he was embarrassed to tell me directly.

“So don’t ever do that again! Even if you’re the best-paid employee, you will never get paid enough to deal with something like that shit! But that’s the thing! You aren’t really my employee. You’re an equal owner apprenticing to me! It was your call to get me if something like that happens here because you knew if I had been here I‘d never tolerate anyone doing that to you. I trusted you to do that, Elise. Didn’t you think I did?!”

My tears did fall that instant. Why did that hurt?

I was protecting him.

I was waiting for the guards, who were first called, to arrive, hoping the noise wasn’t reaching the conference room and would disturb the merger.

It was the fifth of VerraCom’s, and I felt it unprofessional not to have gated the problem on my turf while he was doing whatever he needed to do with the partners inside.

Then he was walking towards me and I stepped back, alarmed. But he didn’t stop.

And then I was held to him and, yes, held tightly. And I felt him trembling with anger.

And all my anger just melted away.

He wasn’t angry at me. All the angry words weren’t for me.

He was angry at himself and blamed himself because it happened because of him.

Shiela had been jealous of me from the beginning. She didn’t get why we were close. She asked him to fire me—or at least that’s what I heard from Madam Soniah.

And he laughed at it and then never asked her out anymore.

“I’m so sorry. You were right, it was my fault. I should have seen it coming. I should have known there was something wrong with her.”

“You’re really going to send me home?” I asked. I didn’t care a fig about Shiela. This apprenticeship was the only thing that was important to me. I’d grown to love everything about VerraCom. I did not want to leave.

“I will, you silly girl, if you do this again. You know that I will.”

I hit his chest with my puny fist and I tried to push him away. “That meeting was important! I was protecting business!”

“Elise, stop making excuses. You did that because you were protecting me.”

I stared up at him, and I sighed. Of course, he knew.

“I knew what you were doing as soon as Janet explained what was happening. Did you think it was easy for me to see you taking shit because I was a stupid fool?”*

“She’ll be there,” Gian said at present, with disgust in his voice.

I remained quiet, but inside my head, what Shiela accused me of that day continued to reverberate.

“He’s going to fuck you nine ways to Sunday but he’s never gonna be yours because you know what? He’s screwed! He’s as screwed as I am! And he’s going to come back to me no matter what you do, so you-leave-him-malone!”

That woman was mad.

And senseless.

Petites weren’t Gian’s type. Everyone knew this. All of the women he dated were so tall that they towered over me and they were model material.

Like, on their walk of shame?

They strutted out like walking on a runway.

I could never carry that.

Gian found my height really cute, and I believe that’s why he started calling me the sister he never had in the first place. I barely reached his shoulders. He sometimes would hold the top of my head to tease me about how little I was compared to him even if I stood on my toes.

Foolish woman.

“Don’t worry. She’s not ever going to get near you again.”

My eyes focused on our reflections on the metal surface of the elevator door as the car continued its ride down. He was watching my reflection—watching my face.

And he must be reading my thoughts through my expressions.

Ugh.

“I wasn’t thinking about her,” I denied.

“Really? Then why do you look like you wanted to slap somebody?”

I sighed. “That was somebody else.”

“I don’t know of anyone you fought with recently.”

“You,” I quipped, throwing a disgruntled look at his reflection in the clear metal.

“You wouldn’t slap me,” he replied, frowning. Then, “Will you?”

We arrived and when the doors slid to the side, I held his elbow before he could hold my back so I could pull him out instead of me walking out first.

“You’re the one who’d said I looked like I wanted to slap somebody. Not me.”

“So? You look angry. If it was me, what did you plan to do?”

I turned to him and looked up at him, then smiled my sweetest smile.

“I’ll report you to my Mama.”

“Can you just slap me?” he said after a little bit.

I laughed.