Page 95 of Falling for Them

She purses her lips and looks down.“Fine.”

She looks as if she thinks I’m going to chastise her.

“Joel,” I bark.

My son looks up in surprise.He thought I was going to chastise her, too.Fuck’s sake.My kid doesn’t know me at all, if he thinks I would take his side after he posted a sex video of an unwilling participant to the company communications system.

“Joel, you’re fired from Tyler Analytics.Effective immediately.”

Now Ella looks shocked.

Joel sputters.“What—you can’t do that!I’m your son.Our family name is the company.You can’t cut me out of it like that.”

“I can, and I will.Your behavior since meeting Ella has been shameful.”

Ella looks down, her cheeks flushed.

“Ella herself is beyond reproach,” I add, just to make that clear to her.“Joel, you’ve been in the position of power from the beginning.Had you taken Ella on dates and treated her with respect, I honestly wouldn’t have minded.Instead, you engaged in sexual intercourse while you were supposedly ‘working’ for our company.Even then, it might not have been a problem had you treated this woman with respect.But every time I turned around, you were acting as if she wasn’t valuable.”

“Because she’snot,” he says, sneering.“She’s just a fucking maid, and that’s all she’ll ever be, and so yeah, I fucked her, and—”

“I suggest you shut up now,” Sebastian says, stepping up to Joel.

Joel looks like he wants to keep talking, but he sizes up Sebastian, who’s a good four inches taller and has twenty pounds of muscle on Joel.Add the tattoos, and Sebastian is rather intimidating to a punk like my son.

Joel rolls his eyes.“Whatever.But Dad, you can’t fire me.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing, though,” I say.“I gave you every chance to respect this young woman.”

“You only care about that becauseyouwant to fuck her,” he says.

Sebastian leans forward.“I’m fucking telling you, you better watch your fucking mouth.”

“Yeah, whatever.”Joel looks past Sebastian to me.“You’ll change your mind, Pops.”

“Doubtful,” I say.“But maybe when you change your ways.”

Then he points at Ella.“And you’ll change your mind, too.”

“I’m already changing it,” she says.

Sebastian and I stare at her.I couldn’t have heard her right.Even Joel looks surprised.

But Ella holds out her arms and says to Joel, “How about a hug goodbye?”

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.She steps forward and…hugs him.Wraps her arms around his waist and leans in.

It’s kind of sickening, after knowing what he did to her.What the hell is she thinking?But then she pulls away from him, and his phone is in her hand.

He reaches for it, but Ella evades his grasp.

“Hey, what are you doing?”he says.

“Taking care of what’s mine,” she says, before turning quickly on her heel.

She takes two steps toward her cleaning cart.With a grimly satisfied expression on her face, she drops the phone into the bucket.

Joel makes a sound of despair.“All my shit is on there!”