A Virgin for the CEO

35

Arianna knew exactly who'd arrived just by the kind of noise she could hear from outside the house.

She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths to calm herself, and then she stepped out the front door.

And she sighed again when she saw her 'boyfriend' standing there, with a smile on his handsome face, talking to Chairman Castro in his soft, modulated, and manly voice that seemed always private and intimate to her ears, his eyes focused on the door where she just came out.

Even if she knew it was all an act, her heart still melted at the way his aristocratic face seemed to light up when he saw her.

As if she was a favorite sight those eyes wanted to see. As if all his worries and problems melted away.

And he was so convincing.

The workers were grinning at their lunch plates while they sat at the two long tables set up under the shade of the trees that protected them from the direct hit of the midday sun.

Meanwhile, her servers (the neighbors) were giggling their delight as they rushed to replace every serving bowl that needed replenishing.

The number of workers coming there for lunch had tripled in the month since her mother's release from the hospital, and others had found excuses to visit and see the new girlfriend of the younger Quiroz. Many of them brought something for the new house.

There were so many potted plants outside now and vases and new dishes, new curtains, and even sacks of cotton to fill up pillowcases since her mother got home from the hospital.

They were able to serve lunches again.

Their walls didn't have enough space for all the wall decorations they'd received.

And they kept coming.

Oh, everything was insane.

So, instead of them piling up where there was no space for them to pile up, her mother gave some away to their other neighbors who could use them, and to transient workers staying in bunkhouses.

There was the community hall that Señor planned to renovate and make bigger as his son's active participation in community reach-outs boomed these days. Some of the plants and curtains went there, too.

They were saying it was because he fell in love with a beautiful hacienda tenant.

At dinner during the evenings, she and her mama and Tommy usually discussed if her having Eric for a boyfriend was good or not.

They never had this kind of attention or good intentions coming from so many people.

They weren't asking for it, because many neighbors had been kind enough to them through the years. Their help and concern had been so much more than enough.

It wasn't like they weren't grateful, but it had become over-whelming.

But, as long as their mother seemed to be settling with this new change, she wasn't complaining.

Much.

She and Tommy had invented a story about how she and Enrique first met for their mother's ears only.

It wasn't easy because as far as her mother knew, she and Eric hadn't actually met before.

Yna seemed to be in another part of the hacienda the few times her family had encountered Eric in the past, so she hadn't seen him when she was younger. She and Tommy studied in a school in town when her father was alive so they were gone during the day. Their Papa would fetch them late in the afternoon from school, wherein if the young señorito happened to be in the hacienda, he wasn't anywhere on the way to the house.