Page 86 of Detention with Daddies

Will this be the end of their willingness to share me? Or will this mean I finally have to make a real choice. Will it be made for me?

I can’t lose them. Not any of them.

MATTEO

There’s a commotion happening in the center. Some new piece of gossip is spreading like wildfire. I’ve never seen it cause so much of an uproar before.

Everyone is whispering to each other, murmuring in my hall, every time I get up to peek out of my door, quiet ensues and people skitter away.

Marie shoos me back into my office, but I spare a look for her. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“If I did, don’t you think I would tell you?”

She would, and if she doesn’t know…and it’sthisbig. That screams trouble.

Especially since something seemed to break midday. I haven’t seen Olivia today. She wasn’t at lunch with Nick as she usually is, and she hasn’t stopped by to say hello. It’s odd, and it leaves me in a funk.

It takes me another hour and a half of phone calls and emails before I can take the break and leave my office to check on the staff. To see if I can figure out what’s distracting all of them.

But as I charge past Marie, her brows furrowed, that initial worry gets worse.

I’m getting looks as I walk by. Gazes avert from mine, and the heat of displeasure and disappointment builds slowly.

If this is another smear campaign on Olivia’s personal life, any hint of gossip about her, I will go nuclear. And maybe that’s the problem with my dating her. I don’t care. I will set an example about pettiness in the workplace.

Of sticking noses where they do not belong.

More avoidance sends a sinking feeling low in my stomach, especially when Maddison, my head nurse, skitters away from my approach.

Fuck.

I run into Nick, and his frown shoves my stomach lower.

“What’s going on?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Have you seen Olivia?”

“No. She was with you last night, right?” I send him a side glance as we both peer around the empty hallway.

“Yeah. Dropped her at her lab after class. She didn’t feel well. Maybe she went home before her clinic this afternoon?” His worry has him rubbing a hand over his mouth.

It’s still an hour until then.

“Is anyone talking to you? Your students? Clients or patients that have overheard anything?” I ask, hopeful that this is all something being blown out of proportion rather than something serious that’s sent Olivia running.

I hope that she would have come to me right away if someone had done something to her here.

“No. Nothing. Fuck, this is bad, isn’t it? I’m usually included in the less serious, less cutting gossip.”

Of course he is, as charming and pretty as he is. Which is unfair of me.

At least, I didn’t say that out loud.

“I have a bad feeling about this.” I nod him toward the stairs, down to Waylen’s office.

He’s standing with his hands on his hips in the doorway, staring down the hall at a couple of nurses who are hurrying off. He looks furious, not confused.

The fire in his blue eyes is the reason so many of his students are scared of him. Surprisingly, his reputation still isn’t as bad as mine for scaring staff and students alike.

---