Well, I knew what I was putting myself in for when I interrupted the meeting. I can only hope that this talk does, eventually, go smoothly.
Chapter Nineteen
Amanda
I am absolutely furious. I cannot believe that Lyle has done this. How dare he interrupt my meeting like that?
On top of that, he just brazenly came into the room and introduced himself, as though he hasn’t been hiding his identity from me since we started dating! I know he’s sent me several messages since our break-up, but I had no intention of answering the
m, sweet as they were. We’ve broken up. I don’t need to know his secrets and he doesn’t need to know mine.
Well…most of mine. There is, of course, the small matter of the baby that’s still growing inside of me. That is something that he needs to know about .
The elevator doors shut on us. Instantly, Lyle turns to me.
“Can you please wait to yell at me until we’re in my office?” he asks in a low voice.
He’s expecting me to yell at him. Good. He should be. He lied to me (somewhat). He manipulated me. And now he’s crashed my incredibly important meeting.
Sourly, I think Brandon must have been in on it too. The man was far too calm about his boss interrupting the meeting. Normally, he hates it when anyone comes in.
I maintain a stony silence all the way up to the top floor and Lyle, thankfully, doesn’t try to speak to me. At the top floor, a woman at the desk looks up with a smile, which fades when she sees the two of us. She blinks at Lyle, and it’s like a message passes between the two of them.
I’m not jealous. I’m not. I broke up with Lyle, after all. I don’t care what strange woman he apparently can talk without words.
I don’t.
Finally, we step into Lyle’s office. It’s wide and open with large windows on one wall to allow in the natural sunlight. It’s modestly decorated too, far more tastefully than that of my father, who has displayed all his trophies in a cramped cabinet and tends to keep the thick curtains mostly shut.
The fact that Lyle’s office is so nice annoys me. It’s petty, but I don’t want Lyle to have nice things that I like while I’m mad at him.
“So,” I say frostily when the door snaps closed behind us. “Lyle Thompson, huh? Bit of a nasty surprise to spring on me.”
“It would have been, if you hadn’t already known,” Lyle points out.
I glance at him. I’d like to ask him how he realized that I knew, but I know he’s smart. He knows how mad I am, and he’s probably deduced the most likely reason for that.
“Maybe,” I bite out. “Still, crashing the meeting was a jerk move. Did it occur to you that there’s a reason I didn’t want to talk to you?”
“It did,” Lyle says. He’s way too calm; that just makes me more irritated.
“Then why bother?” I demand. “I broke up with you. If you’re here to beg me to take you back…”
“I’m not,” Lyle interrupts. His brow furrows and he scowls at me, finally looking upset. “God, as much as I want to, I’m not going to do that. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us. I just didn’t want us to part with you thinking that I tried to trick you.”
I pause.
“What?” I ask, genuinely confused.
“Look…I understand why you’re mad,” Lyle says with a sigh. He crosses the room and takes a seat in one of the guest chairs in front of his desk, likely so we can sit together. I’m half-tempted to go around the desk and sit in his chair, but I take a seat next to him instead. “If I were you, I’d be angry, too. I don’t blame you for breaking up with me. Will you please just hear me out, though?”
I don’t really want to. I have the feeling that whatever he has to say will break every barrier I’ve been trying to build. Part of me has known all along, that Lyle wasn’t just stringing me along, that he was actually genuine. But I don’t need to hear it, not if I want to stay firm in my decision.
“Fine,” I say abruptly. “Make it quick. I have a meeting to go back to.”
“Of course,” Lyle says with a nod. “I’d first like to promise that, on the night we met, I didn’t know who you were, just like you didn’t know me.”
That’s…surprisingly relieving. Part of me had wondered if he had sought me out just because I was Alan Simmons’ daughter.