Unlocking my Boss’s Heart (Romance in Sweet Comedy #4)

8. Anton

Chapter eight

Anton

I stepped into my place and locked the door behind me. As I bent down to set my briefcase on the floor, a whiff of citrus with hints of vanilla caught my attention.

My mother’s perfume.

“Don’t tell me you still drop your things at the door,” came her voice from the living room.

I smirked and shook my head. “Hello, Mother,” I said, taking off my shoes and placing them neatly under the small table where I’d dropped my keys. Then, I crossed the foyer to the living room.

Hannah Waltons was still a beautiful woman at fifty-five, with dyed blonde hair and brown eyes. She sat on the three-seater couch, dressed in a flowing maxi dress, her feet propped on the matching ottoman as she flipped through one of my case notes.

“Those are confidential,” I reminded her.

She chuckled, closing the file and setting it aside. “No secrets from your mother, dear.”

“That’s not a secret, but clients’ private information.”

With one graceful move, she stood and wrapped her arms around me in a warm hug. I took a deep breath at her familiar scent.

“I haven’t seen you in ages. Did you miss me, darling?” she asked.

“Very much.” I smiled tightly.

She pulled away and sat back down, picking up the file again. I reached out and took it from her. “If you’re bored, why not read a book from my library?”

I sat beside her, draping an arm over the couch behind her shoulders.

Waving me off, she said, “I wasn’t really reading. If I was, I don’t remember any of it.”

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 with a 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’t need her 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.

But what kind of woman was she, really? What kind of wife would she make? If—and that was a big IF—I ever decided to get married, the kind of camaraderie I shared with Celia would have to be a daily occurrence.

For the first time, I allowed myself to imagine what life might be like if Celia were my wife. She was a quick thinker and an even faster talker. She would say unexpected things and make me laugh. Our exchanges had felt invigorating rather than confrontational. Life with her certainly wouldn’t be dull. It might even be fun.

I blanched at that thought.

Was I actually considering what it would be like to be married to my employee?

I’d only known her for less than a month. Besides, I would never want a wife who was focused on her career. I would want her to stay home and raise our kids. But not many women would want to give up a career they’d worked so hard for.

I rejoined my mother in the living room, pushing the disturbing thoughts aside.

“So, did you have any plans after you finished setting me straight?” I asked her.

“Don’t change the subject yet, Anton. Is it really that difficult to imagine a woman could have feelings for you? Or do you have something against settling down?”

I ran my hands over my jaw. “Mother listen—”

“Give her another chance,” she implored. “I understand how guarded you and your brothers have become because of the position you hold, but I didn’t expect that to turn you away from settling down.”

The mention of my brothers was a lifeline I desperately needed, and I clutched onto it to change the subject. “I spoke to Johan the other day.”

She raised an eyebrow, clearly displeased that I hadn’t followed her lead in the conversation. “And?”

“He’s taken after Father so well with his business vision. Balancing it all is a challenge, but he seems to embrace it. He’s designed some projects and is preparing to present them to the board.”

“Yes.” She nodded, glancing down at her hands.

That wasn’t the reaction I expected. I thought she would be happy to hear that the family legacy was in good hands. I looked at her hands, too. Her manicure was different than usual, but the shift in her demeanor was more concerning than her choice of nail polish.

“What is it?”

My mother was one of the strongest women I knew, but something in my last words had shaken her.

She let out a shaky breath before turning to me. “I haven’t told you or your brothers....”

“What’s wrong?”

“Your-your father. He has—” She took another shaky breath. “He-he has a heart rhythm problem. We heard from the doctor a few days ago. He’s been having chest pains. The doctors said we’re lucky we caught it before he had a heart attack. They’ve scheduled a procedure in two weeks.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said, throwing my arms around her in comfort, though inside, my heart felt cold. The warmth of the embrace felt distant, muted by the cold dread seeping into my chest. I pulled back, trying to mask the fear tightening around my heart. “If he’s having chest pains, why wait two weeks?”

“The doctor said the medications they gave him are supposed to stabilize his heart before the procedure. So, they gave it two weeks.”

This news was a reminder that my father was growing old. What would this mean for our family? My earlier thoughts in the bathroom about all the wrong reasons to have a family on my own, came rushing back. Would a child one day feel as I did now about me? The image of Celia flashed in my mind again. Uncertainty gnawed at me as I looked at my mother’s weary face. I realized then that love, like life, was fragile—balanced on the edge of the unknown. And in that moment, I knew I had to find the strength to forget all that had kept me away from my family and be there for them.