Chapter 95 Richard's Cottage
Melissa got out of the car, breathing in the air, it has been a long time since she's visited Richard's place. The house was still like she remembered, except a few modern changes that'd been added to it by Richard himself.
It was a small house, almost like a cottage with several exotic plants surrounding it, most of them were planted for their attractive plumage while others were there for medicinal purposes or poisonous ones. For example, at the far edge of the arranged symmetry of flowers was the wolfsbane plant which is highly poisonous to werewolves.
Melissa exhaled, as Richard's arm wrapped around her. "You okay?" he asked in a manner that showed he could care less about her answer.
"You are too emotionless," she said and rolled her eyes.
He chuckled. "I am just trying to do what normal boyfriends do, this whole relationship thing is a little out of my forté," he removed his hands from around her as he spoke.
"I don't want a normal boyfriend," she replied with a smile. "I want you, so stop doing weird things," she said.
It's been just a day since she'd told him she loved him too and since then, they hadn't really seen each other eye to eye. Melissa had been busy with tons of paperwork, even though Avalors had lifted about sixty five percent of it, it was still so much she couldn't finish it until midnight. The moment she finished it up, she fell to bed and slept off.
Richard on the other hand had started to form a little task force unit. He'd decided that guarding Melissa alone was a stupid approach. She was the most important person in the entire pack. He'd started scouting for people with the help of Avalors and had spent his entire day taking interviews.
Melissa could understand that after their proclamation to each other the urge to protect everything that was dear to them increased almost a thousand fold more. She'd focused more on ruling than she's ever done, taking her time to access every dingle form sent to her.
Currently, the southern part of the kingdom is experiencing a shortage of doctors, due to the fact that most of their children grow up automatically wanting to be Sentinels. This was probably due to the fact that they get a higher exposure to revenants than every other part. Though it has reduced drastically during her father's reign, still that path of life became almost like a tradition.
Melissa had easily made a short term solution for them by signing the request to send more doctors and she'd also passed an order to begin an awareness programme for the children so they would stop growing up under the delusion of being a warrior where one isn't needed.
She'd never really put that much effort into something so trivial before, she's always just sent them what they needed and moved on.
"What are you thinking about?" Richard asked as he pushed open the door to his house.
Melissa waved him off with her hand, indicating it wasn't anything important. Richard's house was a little bit neater than she'd expected. She remembered that as a kid, he didn't really care about arrangements, he was actually pretty rough.
"This is actually very neat," she said.
Richard scoffed. "I had a lady staying over, she left around a week ago," Melissa nodded at what he said. He'd said it so casually that it took Melissa about ten seconds to realize the absurd nonsense he'd just said.
"What do you mean you had a woman over?" She asked.
"Oh…" he raised his eyebrows in realization too. Then he chuckled. "Are you jealous?" He asked.
"Yess!" She screamed. "What do you think? Who is the girl?" She asked.
"She is just a friend in a way… I may or may not have dated her…" he trailed off.
Melissa almost exploded. "You don't think that is an information I should know about?" She asked.
Richard suddenly broke down in laughter. "Oh my!" He exclaimed in the middle of laughing. He stopped laughing, looked at her face and he broke again, laughing till his eyes started to get teary. "I was kidding," he said at last. "Candice slept at my place for a week," he said.
"What?" She asked. "Candice?"
"Yeah, she didn't tell you. She needed to meet her boyfriend around the area and she'd asked if she could stay over since I wasn't really using the house," he said.
"Candice has a boyfriend?" Melissa asked.
"I don't know." He answered offhandedly.
Melissa didn't argue further, all throughout the last week, Richard was mostly with her. "Don't tease me like that again," she warned.
"Ah, I can't promise that," he said.
Melissa shook her head. "Look, it is eighteen hundred hours already, be quick, I can't wait to get out this bunny hole and go back to the palace," she teased him.
"I just thought of a very dirty joke," Richard said and Melissa screamed at him.
Richard listened to her though and started to switch on his small laptop. That was the reason they'd come. To play whatever was on the drive. Melissa 'd realized it might actually be something sensitive so she'd decided to open it on a more secure computer.
Richard had about seven levels of firewalls on his computer and it wasn't even connected to their web.
He flipped open the computer system and switched it on and then left to connect some wire cables to it. Melissa was a little impatient, so she brought out the flash drive and told Richard to come open the system up as it had a security lock.
"The password is Melissa with a ham," he informed me. "All caps and no spaces."
Melissa blushed at the computer screen."what a stupid password," Melissa said.
Richard smiled and they inserted the flash drive after a while and the files on it loaded automatically and the first thing Melissa on the screen broke her heart. It was her mom, staring into the camera with a smile.