by Nancy Adams
The room resounded with nine unanimous ayes, each of them a nail in the coffin of Bormann’s tenure at the company. Sam took this moment to fix Bormann with a steely glare, his vicious eyes boring into his enemy, a flame burning so brightly that with any more enthusiasm it would have burst from his eyes as lasers and burned two holes through Bormann. His whole look told Bormann to fuck off and never show his face at Techsoft again.
After the vote, Bormann left post-haste without bothering to shake hands with a soul, and the rest of the board finished up by looking through candidates for the vacated board member role. As Calloway was moving up to CEO and Bormann was leaving the company all together, there was a vacancy on the board. They spent an hour going through the various candidates until they decided to bring aboard Sarah Cortez. She was currently the head of development at Techsoft’s Joy-Box branch. Alongside Sam, Cortez had helped develop the console and was only months away from releasing its next-generation update, a feat that Sam had left entirely up to her.
“Hey, I don’t wanna sound biased,” Sam had said when they were going over the candidates, “but Sarah was instrumental in us breaking the big three in the games market. There’s a reason why Techsoft is now so synonymous with the gaming world, and that’s Sarah. She makes bold and swift decisions and I think she’ll be a very good fit for us.”
After that, the meeting was over.
Having said his goodbyes to everyone and leaving the building, Sam was driven by limousine to his Hollywood mansion. Three years before, he had bought a beautiful palatial house that was modeled on an old Spanish villa. It was all white facades, terracotta-tiled roofs and large archways with huge windows to allow the house to become flooded with light, as well as opening the inside up to a panoramic view of the two-and-a-half-acre estate that it was immersed in. Inside it held ten bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley and a discotheque. Outside it had four tennis courts, a working vineyard, stables and another swimming pool. It was a house fit for royalty.
The main reason Sam had bought it wasn’t for its splendor, however, but because it brought him closer to Techsoft headquarters in L.A. It also allowed Jess to have friends from the local affluent neighborhoods and go to a local school with them. As the years had gone by, he’d felt more and more guilty for isolating Jess at the Cliff Face, where she only had himself, Maud and Jenna for company most of the time. In L.A. at least he could send her to school and she could have friends stay over. It was only fair that his daughter get a childhood.
When Sam’s limousine pulled up at the mansion, his footman Grayson opened the door for him. Having thanked Grayson, he strolled confidently inside the opulent house. The moment he reached the large marble hallway, however, Sam felt his inner enthusiasm dissolve as he heard the raised voice of Jenna rebuking someone upstairs. Immediately he knew who it was that she was arguing with. The same person that she was always arguing with: Jess.
As Sam went up the marble staircase, the voices became more distinct.
“You have your own dresses that your father has bought you,” Jenna was saying. “Why do you have to steal my things when you have your own?”
“Because they’re not yours,” came the angered voice of the ten-year-old Jess. “Not one of them was bought with your money.”
“How do you know that? How dare you? You think I didn’t have a life before your father—well you’re wrong.”
Sam recoiled slightly when he heard Jenna’s answer. Why does she have to play up to her? he asked himself while walking across the landing toward Jess’s bedroom. She should just take back the dress, Sam continued in his head, rather than get involved in an argument.
As he approached the open doorway, the girl and the woman continued to spit venom at each other inside.
“And what’s this?” Jenna cried out.
“That’s my drawer, you shouldn’t go in there.”
Sam came around the corner of the doorway to find Jenna opening Jess’s dresser and going through it. The young girl was standing behind her with an angered look.
Noticing Sam in the doorway, both of them turned to him sharply.
“Look what she’s done,” Jenna exclaimed in annoyance when she saw him, thrusting a ruby-red, silk Armani knee-length dress in his face.
Looking down at it as she held it there, Sam saw that something had been spilled on it.
“And then look at this,” Jenna continued, waving a diamond necklace in front of him. “I found this in her drawer just now.”
“Dad, she has no right to go through my things,” Jess complained.
“Jenna, can you come out of her room, honey?” Sam said to his girlfriend.
She darted her eyes at him and in an indignant tone said, “Don’t take her side. Not again.”
“I’m not doing that, Jenna. It’s just that if this is to be a peaceful negotiation, then it’s best if you go wait in another room while I get all of your things back. Okay?”
He looked at Jenna softly and at the sight of his gentle blue eyes, her indignation melted a little.
She let out a sigh, shrugged her shoulders and left the room. Sam closed the door after her and sat down on his daughter’s bed. The room was the ideal of all little girls of Jess’s age. It was very big and contained a king-size four-poster bed fit for a princess. In one corner stood a huge flat-screen television in an area named the entertainment zone, with countless consoles, a karaoke machine and other gadgets there too. The walls were covered in posters of the latest teen idols and the floor was covered in toys, beanbags, and inflatable furniture.
As Sam sat there, Jess came and joined him, seating herself on the other end of the bed.
“Man, she has a problem,” the girl muttered impudently as she sat down.
“But do you have to give her one?” Sam replied, looking his daughter square in the eyes.
“Dad, I was only borrowing her dress and a couple of pieces of jewelry. I was gonna put it straight back but she came home early. Me and Kim were playing dress up and we wanted to take our pictures wearing it. It was fun. Then she comes back and starts shouting at us. She shouted at Kim as well, Dad. It’s so embarrassing that she seems to think it’s okay to shout at my friends. Kim went home because of it.”
“Okay, I agree, she shouldn’t fly off the handle like that. But you should’ve asked. They are her things and you have no right to just go into our room and take them.”
“But if I’d have asked, she would’ve said no.”
“Then you should’ve listened and not worn them.”
“She wasn’t supposed to even find out. She said she was going to her friend Donna’s place out in Malibu. She’s usually gone for at least two hours when she goes, but today she came back after only an hour.”
“That’s no excuse, Jess,” Sam put to her. “Can’t you just try and not provoke her, huh? At least until Maud comes back from her holiday.”
“Dad, I do as you told me, I try to avoid her most of the time.”
“But taking her things without permission is not avoiding her, is it? Sometimes I think you do it just to upset her.”
“Daddy,” Jess exclaimed softly as she slid across the bed and put her arms around him, resting her head upon his shoulder, “how could you say such things?”
“You know me and Jenna have been together for nearly six years, Jess. Maybe one day we’ll get married and then what?”
“Don’t say that,” Jess said from his shoulder.
“But I want us to be a family, Jess.”
“But we are without Jenna.”
Sam sighed. In the previous years, things between Jenna and Jess hadn’t improved since that fateful day upon the beach. In fact, they had worsened, and the two fought religiously. Jess couldn’t accept Jenna so soon after saying goodbye to her mother, and she did everything to sour things.
“I gotta go,” Sam said to his daughter after they’d sat for a while.
She moved off of him and he stood up.
Facing her, he said, “Do you love me?”
“Of course, Daddy. It hurts that you need to ask.”
“Then if you love me, Jess, be better to Jenna. Try for me.”
Jess frowned slightly before telling him that she would. Sam bent down and kissed his daughter on the forehead before leaving the room. After closing the door behind him, he went down the long corridor to his own room where he found Jenna sitting on their bed looking down at her stained dress.
Looking up at Sam when he entered, she said in a teary voice, “Look what she’s done, Sam. She’s ruined it.”
“I’ll get you another one.”
“But this dress meant so much to me. I got it when we flew to the Milan fashion week last year. It was a present from Giorgio Armani himself when we stayed at his villa. It meant more than just a dress; it was a cherished memory. And now it’s ruined.”
“I’m sorry, Jenna.”
“You needn’t apologize for her, Sam. You’re always apologizing for one of us to the other. I should just face it—she’s never going to accept me.”
Sam came and sat down next to Jenna on the bed, placing his arm delicately around her shoulders. He leaned in and kissed her neck with little pecks, making her smile.
“I accept you,” he whispered softly into her ear. “Isn’t that enough?”
Beaming all over, she replied, “Yes—but she’s a part of you.”
“Just give it time.”
“Sam, it’s been long enough now.”
He took his face away from her neck and looked at her with a bemused frown.
“What’re you saying, Jenna?”
“I love you, Sam. I love you dearly. But it can’t go on like this, even you have to admit that. So I guess what I’m saying is that we either have to call it a day and move on, or Jess has to go into a boarding school.”
“Whoa!” Sam exclaimed, coming away from her entirely, so that he was now standing in front, looking down at her with incredulity. “I can’t believe what you’re saying,” he went on. “You can’t give a father ultimatums like that. Eventually she’ll have to accept you, Jenna.”
“She’ll never accept me, Sam. We need to face up to it. If you want to keep me around, I’m afraid she’ll have to be away a lot more. I’ve been looking into it.”
“You’ve been looking into it!?”
“Yes,” she replied firmly. “She’ll be away for most of the year and during the summer, I’ll disappear off somewhere while you two get all the time you want alone together.”
“Jenna, this isn’t a solution.”
Jenna stood up and came over to him.
Placing her hands on his arms and looking him dead in the eyes, she pronounced, “It’s the only one whereby you get to keep me.”
With that, she walked out of the room, leaving him standing in the middle of it, unable to comprehend what had just happened. She hadn’t even asked about the board meeting. It was as if her stupid dress was more important than anything else. And it wasn’t just a one-off occasion where her fury made her forget herself. Jenna rarely ever wanted to know anything of Sam’s world and often stopped him if he talked about the company.
It had been so different with Marya. Techsoft was so much a part of them and they would talk of it excitedly for hours. But Jenna didn’t want to know, even when he would talk of the breakthroughs in psychiatry that could be achieved with the technology he was developing. Eventually, Sam had simply stopped mentioning the company all together.
For all his achievements in the boardroom, Sam had been unable to make a harmonious home. He was constantly being torn between his daughter and his girlfriend, and this latest desire of Jenna’s to rid the house of Jess pulled at the strings of Sam’s mind ever more.
Shaking his head, he walked off into the bathroom and began taking a shower. Underneath the spray, he allowed the water to gradually wash away his cares. And anyway, he was thinking, it’s not like I’ll be here for the next few days. It was true, he was flying to New York that night and wouldn’t be back for four days. He hoped that in that time, Jenna would cool down and forget this nonsense about sending Jess to boarding school.
He hoped.
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NANCY ADAMS is an Amazon bestselling author of contemporary romance. She's currently single and dreams of one day meeting her prince charming and starting a family. She loves people and loves life. A real "people-person" who sometimes can't stand the noise. During those times, she curls up, shuts the door, and drifts into beautiful fantasy and welcomes all along for the ride. She expresses how she feels and what she wants to feel through her writing, and she doesn't know what she'd do without it. The mere fact that she is able to share her gift with the rest of the world is simply a bonus, and one that brings her nothing but pure joy!
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