Page 14 of It's Only Make Believe

I decide where the paper belongs, and I stand up and edge around my desk. A shadow falls over me as I get ready to leave the office. I glance up and Luke is in my doorway.

“Is everything ok?” I ask.

Am I going to be in trouble for putting that call through, despite what Mel said?

“Yes,” Luke says. “Your father wants to talk to you. He’s still on the line.”

Fuck. What do I do now? If I take this call, the ruse is up. I think on my feet.

“Tell him I’ll call him on my break please,” I say.

Luke opens his mouth, no doubt to argue with me, and I push past him and run to the ladies’ room. The one place he can’t follow me. I know he’s going to be angry, but it’s better than the alternative.

I pull my cell phone out of my jacket pocket as I sit on the closed lid of a toilet, and quickly text Louisa telling her she needs to call her dad and why. She texts back saying she will do it in ten minutes. That’s the main problem dodged. Now I just have to face Luke and try to come up with something convincing to explain my rudeness. At least this time he’s going to be pissed off with something I actually did, not some imagined crime Louisa’s dad reported. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.

Chapter

Ten

LUKE

Istand for a moment, my mouth hanging open in shock as Louisa runs down the hallway away from me after rudely refusing to take her father’s call, and then almost knocking me over as she pushed past me to leave her office.

“What the fuck was that?” Mel says from behind me, and I turn around to face her. She’s standing in the doorway of her own office opposite the entry to Louisa’s.

“You saw that too then?” I say. “Honestly, I was starting to think I imagined it.”

“No, I saw it,” Mel says. “She ran out of there like the building was on fire and you’d told her she couldn’t leave.”

I remember I have Enrique still on the line and I turn to go back to my office.

“When she comes back, tell her I want to see her,” I tell Mel who nods her head and retreats back to her desk, where she can still see the entrance to Louisa’s office.

I thought Louisa and I had made a bit of a break through when she confessed that she knew her father had asked me to be hard on her, but maybe not. Maybe now her true colors are showing. That doesn’t feel right though. I feel like the hard working Louisa is the real one, and this rude side of her is some sort of an act. But now I know that she knows about what her father said, why would she put on an act that she’s rude?

I shake my head. I don’t think I’ll ever figure this one out. I go back to my office and lift my receiver again.

“Enrique? Louisa isn’t at her desk. I’ve left her a note to call you,” I say.

“Damned girl, no doubt she’s skiving off somewhere,” Enrique says, and he hangs up the call before I can tell him that actually she doesn’t seem like the type to do that at all. Maybe that’s what that was all about. She hadn’t had a chance to mentally prepare herself for the bashing her father was about to give her.

I don’t know why I suddenly feel the need to defend her after her little outburst back there, but I do. I really don’t like this affect she has on me. It feels like trouble waiting to happen.

I put Louisa out of my mind and focus on my own work until a timid knock sounds and I figure it’s her. And if she’s here in the flesh it’s ok for her to be on my mind, because it would be weird for her not to be, so for the time she’s here, I can at least stop trying to force myself not to think about her. I call for her to come in and the office door opens, and a very sheepish looking Louisa comes in.

“Close the door and sit down,” I say.

Louisa does as I say and once she’s seated, I raise an eyebrow.

“Well?” I say.

“Umm Mel said you wanted to see me,” Louisa says.

“Playing dumb isn’t helping your case here,” I say. “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was having to come back to Enrique and tell him you weren’t where I thought you were?”

“I … I’m sorry,” Louisa says. “I just don’t want to mix my personal life with my professional life.”

“I get that,” I say. “And I respect it, but when I personally tell you to take a call, you do as I say. Ok?”

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