Chapter 30 Chapter Thirty
CANDY’S POV
It doesn’t take ten minutes post my call with Mr. Cunsulo for me to start regretting my decisions and questioning if I’d made the right call. Do I really want to face him feeling like I do right now? It’ll only take him looking at me the wrong way this evening for me to unravel.
You can only be so strong they say, but nobody ever tells you how intensely true that is or how devastatingly crushing it gets when you can’t cower and hide behind your strength any more.
The door bell rings loudly, rudely interrupting my inner debate and the smidgen of peace I’m pretending to have found in the visitors’ room downstairs where I hid because I knew no one will come looking.
I wait for the annoying sound to go away on its own and when it doesn’t, I stand angrily from the bed. God help whoever is at that door because they might actually get to meet the bitchy angry bird cohabiting in this body of mine.
Angry bird……..the name brings an unexpected onslaught of memories with it that brings bumps to my skin and flush to my cheeks.
Every time, I think I’m over this and then a tiny memory like this just flashes and fans the embers of my impossible desires back to flame without my permission. Fuck, I miss him. I miss my hot neighbor so much, sometimes it brings me to the brink of tears. I miss being held and being stared at like God took the liberty to place the setting sun on my face.
Sighing, I get to the door and fling it open, my face contorted into an instant frown.
On the other side of it, I find a strange lady, looking bored to be outside my door but here nonetheless.
She looks no more than five four but has the carriage of someone that sees herself as no less that six feet something. Her face is creatively made up in an array of bright daring colors that somehow matches her perfectly coiffed hair, her previously bored eyes now curiously going over me.
“Are we going to stand here all day so you can keep gawking, or what?” She asks rather rudely, flicking her nails. “I do not have all the time in the world.”
“Not exactly, we’ll be right in as soon as you tell me who you are and why you’re here.” I say, folding my hands across my chest and fixing my stance. If she’s going to take that tone with me, I might as well meet her halfway there.
“Adrian knows better than to set me up for this shit.” She scoffs with an accompanying eye roll, already reaching for the bags stacked beside her that I hadn’t noticed earlier.
A sharp, matching retort comes flying to the tip of my tongue, ready to show her the way out just before the name she just mentioned registers in my suddenly slow brain. Adrian? As in Mr. Cunsulo?
Shit.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry. You’re the stylist he mentioned, how can I be so stupid. Come on in.” I ramble apologetically as I move out of the doorway, not for fear of her but because I’m kind of deathly afraid of the man in question.
Pissing her off could mean I’d be out of job by come Monday morning and I genuinely can’t have that on top of everything else at this trying time.
With an eye roll and a mumble of something along the lines of if it hadn’t been for my boss, she wouldn’t have been caught dead stooping so low as to take insults from the likes of me, she reluctantly follows me.
Helping her in, I lead her into the downstairs room I was in before she knocked. Mine is still being occupied by Peach and I’m not ready to have another run in with her.
Without much exchange between us, the lady starts setting up her equipment with an efficiency that surprises me. Maybe it’s why she has a chip on her shoulder, she really does know her way around her job.
She pulls out an expandable rack from one of her bags, stretching it out to showcase an arrangement of absolutely beautiful dresses. Taking another curious look at my figure, asking me to turn around for proper viewing and I do because now I’m at her mercy.
She nods before pulling three dresses off the rack.
The next hour or so goes by quickly with her dolling my face up and doing my hair and overall glamming me up enough to impress Adrian’s potential partners. A little too much if you ask me but she doesn’t look the type to take suggestions to go less from clients, most especially ones she already dislikes.
After that is done and dusted, she holds up the three dresses, staring between me and each of them as she picks it up. Instantly, my eyes pick and fall in love with the second dress. It looks absolutely divine, gorgeous and classy. But God it must be outrageously expensive if the detailing is anything to go by and I don’t want to be that indebted to someone as mean as my boss.
She must have thought the exact same thing because she cracks a small smile, her first since stepping in here, and whispers, “This.”
She shakes her head no when I start to protest, adamant in her decision. Against my better judgment, she helps me into it and we both share a look in the mirror- mine doubtful and unsure, hers reassuring.
I guess I can agree it looks perfect.
She finishes up the other little polishing before packing up to leaves. And just before she walks out the door, she says the weirdest thing ever, in little wonder.
“You must mean a lot to him. It cost him an arm and a leg for me to be here.”
I puzzle on that statement until the sound of his Mercedes Maybach pulling into the drive way snaps me out. Why would he go to such length, such stress just to get me to go for a meeting I was even supposed to be there for. The man hates me and puts in great effort to make it clear every day since the day I walked in first into his office.
He’s such an enigmatic idiot sometimes, it’s painful.
I find my way to the door before he can ring it, first because I absolutely cannot deal with his nagging if I respond a minute too late and because I don’t want that ring to draw the attention of anyone else in this house.
They too, I cannot deal with.
I won’t be able to deal with the guilt tripping and gas lighting that’ll ensue, but I can deal with the consequences of my absence upon my return, that I am sure of.
Hurriedly, I pull open the front door, ready to escape.
Except, my feet are frozen in their spot, my jaw dropped to the fucking floor, my eyes round as saucers as my brain does double takes, unable to comprehend what my eyes are staring at
My heart races, doing double beats as my eyes stay glued on the figure in front of me.
I must be hallucinating, seeing things. This must be a fucking dream.
Because there’s no damn Maybach out front, no, in it’s place instead is a shiny, black, probably new Aston Martin and in front of that Aston Martin?
Him!