Page 54 of His Cruel Billionaire Scorecard

“Roman Knight asked her out!”

“Who is that?” Bella called.

“Seriously? No fair!” Meredith yelled, leaping over the couch to join in the conversation.

“First you have a hot boss and now he is asking you out?”

“Oh please, we’re not dating, it’s all a ploy for this deal he’s working on. Remember, it’s a secret. I may lose my job if you tell anyone.”

“It looks pretty real to me,” Meredith said.

“Yeah, you should see the way he looked at you in this picture when this guy was talking to you.” She added, scrolling through her Instagram and checking their pictures together.

“Oh, did you think he was jealous?” Sylvia asked.

“I couldn’t even get a read on him. I don’t think that he is capable of feeling emotions like that,” Olivia said, laughing again, even as her stomach filled with butterflies at the thought of him getting jealous.

Bella came to join them in the kitchen.

“As long as you get the money for Mama,” she said, and the group sobered immediately.

She felt lucky that she had gotten this job. Her passion aside, it was because of their mum, who was in the hospital.

Olivia looked round at her sisters; she was the oldest of them and, therefore, the one who had to step up the most for them following their father’s death since they were little.

Their mum had barely held down jobs as long as they could remember because of her frail health, and now she was diagnosed with a heart condition and was kept in the hospital.

The bills were piling up, and on a whim or desperate move, she took a shot in the dark and applied for this job and was surprised when she got a call for an interview.

It turned out that she was lucky when his company was looking for paid interns; her profile was exactly what they were looking for.

To her luck, Roman had just fired his former assistant for some reason she did not want to care or think about, and he spoke of employing her.

The salary that attracted her and the health benefits. Not to talk of the boss himself, she thought.

“ I hope you stay longer in it. It seems you like the job well enough,” Sylvia said thoughtfully.

“I don’t know about that. Being a personal assistant is a whole new, different thing from being an intern,” she said, waving her hands dismissively.

“Who wants extra popcorn?” Bella asked, trying to lighten the mood.

Sylvia smacked her head with a spoon. “We don’t eat popcorn when it’s dinnertime!”

“Hey!”

The rest of them laughed.

“Hey,” Meredith said, holding up Olivia’s phone, her expression panicked.

“It’s the hospital, the doctor is on the line, it’s about mom.”

***

Olivia sat on the couch in her living room, her heart sinking at Meredith’s words. Worry etched on her sisters’ faces as they gathered around, Bella biting her lip and clutching her favorite stuffed animal tightly.

Sylvia’s voice trembled as she started, “We have to go to the hospital right away. Mom needs us.” Her words hung in the air, thick with the weight of their shared concern.

Olivia reached out and squeezed Sylvia’s hand, her voice steady but filled with underlying anxiety. “We’ll go together, just like we always do. We’ll support each other through this.”

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