During dinner, Summer sensed that something was wrong with “Douglas”. It was not due to his stony face-he had always been like that and looked foreboding when he talked. This time, she could sense something else from his expression-he was obviously in a bad mood.
Summer passed him a piece of fish. “You gotta try this. I cooked it with peppercorn. I hope you can get used to the taste.”
“Douglas” did not take it. Instead, he picked it out and dropped it on the dining table.
What was the matter with this man? It looked like she had stepped on his toes, but she could not recall the occasion. Was it when she tossed her handbag at him earlier and he got angry? It could not be. No doubt the man was huffy sometimes, but he was not that petty to become calculative about a trivial issue.
Sensing that Summer was staring at him, Leonardo looked up. “Where were you last Friday?”
“What?” Busy evading his eyes, Summer did not get what he said.
Leonardo put down his chopsticks, looking at her long and hard with his dark piercing eyes. He asked one word at a time, his voice loud and clear, “Last Friday, where did you go and who did you see?”
“What do you mean?” The questions startled her as she looked up. The way he asked them made her feel uncomfortable. He sounded like he was interrogating her.
Leonardo smiled, although his gaze was still cold. “So you’re starting to feel guilty, right? You really betrayed my cousin by hooking up with some man out there?”
“What are you talking about?” It was not the first time he had said such a thing, but the way he said it this time was disturbing.
Summer slammed her chopsticks on the dining table as she got to her feet. “Even if I was sold for three hundred million into the Emerson family, that doesn’t mean any Moo can interfere with my private life and dictate what I should do!”
After she said that, she stormed out of the dining hall. While she was at it, she inadvertently hit her head on the door frame-she had to be very mad.
Leonardo lost his appetite. As soon as he put down his chopsticks, his phone rang; it was Tim.
“Young Master, I’ve emailed you the security footage and related stuff from that day.”
“Mm, got it.”
Leonardo hung up and went into his study. Tim had sent him last Friday’s surveillance footage in the pharmacy. The footage showed the person Summer had met. Other than the pharmacist, there were two other men. One was wearing a facial mask and a baseball cap; Leonardo recognized him at once. The man was Adams.
The pharmacy was on the outskirts. Summer would not have gone there without a good reason, and the new product that the Jarrett Group was launching did not require her to be in that kind of place.
In the footage, Summer was seen grabbing Adams’s arm. She was obviously asking for help, and Adams brought her out of there. Later footage showed Summer getting out of the vehicle on a bustling street in the city. Aside from the two exchanging a few words, there was no improper behavior between them.
Leonardo froze the footage when Summer walked away and turned to look back. He wanted to know what she was saying, but the blurry zoomed-in image offered little clues. He could only roughly make out the movement of her mouth but not the content.
He turned off the computer, reaching to massage his brow. He realized that his behavior was getting odd lately. Adams had only casually asked about Summer, but he got so worked up that he found himself investigating her.
…
A sense of hunger woke Summer up at midnight. She regretted it big time. She should not have made her own life difficult by refusing to eat her dinner. Finally, she surrendered to her bodily urges and got out of bed. She wrapped herself in a thick down jacket like a dumpling and went downstairs to look for something to eat.
The mansion was built on the hillside. Except for the occasional howl of the night wind, it was awfully quiet in the mansion at night.
She got to the kitchen and found some veggies as well as tomatoes.
They seemed good as ingredients for a bowl of noodles.
The moment she started to cut the tomatoes, she felt a gust of cold wind behind her. Something was wrong. Was someone there? The feeling was becoming hard to ignore.
She closed her eyes for a while, trying to gather her courage to look back. Just then, a voice that sounded as cold as the air said, “What are you doing here?”
The voice scared the daylights out of her. The knife dropped from her hand and onto her foot. But she got lucky; the thick cotton sandals she wore had cushioned the blade. Otherwise, she would have found herself in deep sh*t and blood.
When the knife dropped, Leonardo’s heart was in his mouth. He scrambled up to her to take a look at her foot.
Once he made sure that the knife had not cut through the sandal into her foot, he breathed a sigh of relief. He rose to his feet and said in a low voice, “Summer, I’ve never seen such a stupid woman like you!”
By then, Summer had snapped out of her shock. She bent down to pick up the knife, glaring at “Douglas” before she turned to open the tap and give the knife a rinse.
“It must have been a big mistake for you, Mr. Emerson, to hand-pick a stupid woman like me to be your cook. Perhaps I should resign and move out of the mansion before Leonardo comes home. Out of sight, out of mind, what do you say?”
Summer put the knife back into the knife holder. She then turned around and looked at “Douglas”, her face serious. She had enough of his bullshit. There was no doubt that he had helped her before, and she was grateful for it. However, being grateful was one thing, and conspiring in his sexual advances was another.
“No way.” Leonardo’s expression crumbled-not that he had any in the first place. Nevertheless, his voice definitely sounded more menacing. “Are you trying to imply that I’m the one who’s driving you out of the mansion so you can drive a wedge between me and my cousin?”
“Believe it if you must.”
Summer looked down, not wanting to stoop down to his level and argue with him.
Leonardo stood with his back against the light while Summer faced the light. So, he could take in every movement of her facial muscles, however small it was.
Waking up in the middle of the night, her hair was a little messy with the down jacket zipped up to her neck.
Her face reflected the light in the dark, and her spirited cat eyes were half-closed, making her look very depressed. It felt like a century had passed when Summer finally heard his nonchalant voice again.
“Earlier, it was my bad.”
“What? Can you repeat that?”
Summer looked up at “Douglas”, confused. Was he apologizing? There was no way “Douglas” was going to repeat it. He cast his eyes on the half-cut tomatoes on the island top. With a plain expression, he said, “Make me one too.”
By then, Summer’s anger had partially subsided, but she still habitually talked back, “Would you still eat it if I told you there was poison in it?”
Leonardo looked at her nervously. “You eat, I eat.”
What a psycho, she thought to herself.