Page 25 of Unlocking my Boss's Heart

This was a sign of worry: flipping through a document without paying attention to the words because her mind was on something else.

She sighed and straightened imaginary creases in her dress. “Anton.”

My eyes narrowed. I knew that tone. She was about to tell me the real reason she’d shown up unannounced.

“I'm guessing you weren't just missing me more than usual?” I nudged her after a prolonged pause and waited for her to speak. An impending lecture, no doubt.

She took my hands in hers and squeezed them. “I spoke to Reeva.”

I pulled my hands away, standing abruptly. “Mother—”

She reached for me again. “Wait, listen to me.”

I didn’t want to hear anything about Reeva. I still couldn’t understand how that woman had managed to dig her claws so deep into my mother. But it was my fault. I hadn’t objected when Reeva met my mother at an event and started joining her for lunch. It’d kept my mother off my back about settling down witha wife, but in hindsight, I shouldn’t have stayed silent when I barely knew Reeva.

Now, it was coming back to bite me.

“She doesn't know what she did wrong. Just have a chat with her, and she'll change.” My mother honestly believed that. Naive woman. She’d been too sheltered under my father’s care for the last thirty-five years.

I suddenly felt bone tired. “I don’tneedher to change. I just need her to leave me be. Things didn’t work out between us.”

“When we shared brunches, she sounded nice… you need someone, Anton.”

“Not just anyone, Mother.”

Her idea of ‘someone’ actually meant “a wife”, and I knew it.

I gazed at my mother, unable to express how I felt. How could I tell her that witnessing her fights with my father during their early years of marriage had terrified me?

“Anton, honey—” she began, but I sighed.

“Mother…” I started but stopped short.

Reeva aside, I wasn’t ready for this conversation. I’d never told anyone that watching my parents’ stormy early years had made me wary of marriage. I didn’t know how to explain my fear of ending up married and hating my spouse, as they once had. My mother would likely brush my concerns aside because things had eventually turned out alright for them. But I didn’t have much hope that I would be so lucky. Especially not with Reeva. The way she already behaved clued me in that women like her weren’t wife material.

I loved my mother, and I wanted her to understand where I was coming from, so she would stop obsessing over seeing me married. If she didn’t drop it, I would start avoiding her. This subject of marriage grated on my nerves more and more each time she brought it up.

“If you’re ready to sleep with someone, you better be ready to marry them,” she stated, repeating what I've heard from my father for years. They were old-fashioned that way.

“I don't want to talk about Reeva,” I insisted.

“The poor girl cried when we spoke. I think she really has feelings for you,” she stated, ignoring my request.

My eyes narrowed at that. Reeva had feelings for me like she had for her designer handbags. Losing the link to my status, which she was obsessed with, would, of course, make her cry. It was a no-brainer.

But I wasn’t telling my mother that. The only way for her to truly understand Reeva was to see it for herself.

“I need to change.” I left for my bedroom.

My parents had an arranged marriage, and it started off rough. Two strong personalities forced to live together inevitably clashed. I often wondered how my brothers and I even came to be, considering how often they were at each other’s throats. I guessed that when my parents met in the bedroom, all was forgotten, only for their stubbornness to resume in the morning.

From an early age, I learned that marriage wasn’t for me. I never wanted to put children through what I’d experienced. Besides, the divorce rates were unsettling. Why should I set myself up to be just another statistic?

Eventually, my parents’ relationship evolved, and they fell in love, but the contentious beginning was imprinted in my memory. Johan was three years younger—did he have a similar recollection of our parents that continued to haunt me into adulthood?

I’d reviewed too many divorce cases to believe marriage was a good idea for anyone. Very few turned out happy. Why did people keep tying themselves up in legal unions with such a high probability of misery or a costly divorce?

Standing at the sink in my bathroom, I was reminded of another sink I’d stood by recently; the one at Celia Adams’ place. Our time, sharing the pizza, invaded my thoughts. The way we’d chuckled like old friends at her door flashed through my mind. She seemed really nice.

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