Read For the Love of Gina: The President's Girlfriend for Free Online

drive to move, until she was clean out of his sight.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
    CHAPTER FOUR

 
    Cindy,
the maid at Hammersmith, rolled her bucket toward the fifth floor elevators to
mop up a spill.   Jade, along with three
others, stood at the elevator doors waiting for them to open.  
    Cindy
smiled.   “Good morning everybody,” she
said.   Everybody spoke.   The spill was just pass the elevators.   She looked at Jade as she walked pass.   “Excited, Miss Jade?” she asked her.
    “Very,”
Jade replied, pressing the already lit button again.
    “This
is your second time on furlough, ain’t that right?”
    Jade
wanted to roll her eyes.   “Like no.   This will be my first time away from this
place.”
    Cindy
smiled.   “And you don’t wanna come back,
do you?”
    But
Jade, who the entire staff at Hammersmith knew could be so moody and
unpredictable, looked at her.   “Of course
I want to come back.   Why wouldn’t I?   Why would you think otherwise?   I love this place.”
    Cindy
laughed, knowing Jade had to be kidding, but Jade didn’t so much as crack a
smile.   She, instead, waited for the
doors to slide open, and stepped onto the elevator with the others who had been
waiting.   When the doors closed, and Jade
was gone, the maid stopped laughing and shook her head.
    “Hateful
bitch,” she said in a whisper, as she continued to mop up the spill.

 
    Samantha
Redding, Jade’s mother, stood at the window inside the private waiting room and
let out an exhaustive exhale.   The
grounds of Hammersmith were immaculate, with all genus of flowers and plants
and trees and magnificent waterfalls in the center, and the patients walked
around as if they were just taking their ease at some luxurious retreat.  
    But
Sam knew better.   No matter how much they
tried to dress this up, and pretend it was nothing more than a “resting place
for the wealthy and well-connected,” she knew it was nothing more than a mental
institution.   Her daughter was in a
psychiatric hospital.   The daughter she
raised alone and, apparently, raised wrong, was now institutionalized.   It had been a long time, but she was still
trying to come to terms with that kind of truth.
    The
door was opened by one of the staff members, causing Sam to turn toward the
sound, and Dutch walked in.   Sam had
expected to see Dutch.   She had expected
to see his tall, gorgeous frame come walking through that door any second.   Jade had, after all, requested to spend her
two-day furlough with her father, so he would undoubtedly fly to California to
pick her up.   But what she hadn’t
expected was her reaction to seeing Dutch again.  
    When
Jade was carted across the country to this supposedly superior institution, she
and Dutch were on friendly terms.   She
had even made her peace with Gina.   But
when Dutch went to court to force Jade to remain hospitalized, and all those
months of Sam being alone, with Dutch nor Gina so much as picking up the phone
to see if she was okay, changed her.   Now
instead of feeling a sense of warmth toward him when he walked through that
door, she felt a sense of anger.   He and
Gina had it all.   She and Jade didn’t
have shit.   And Sam was beginning to
dislike such a reality intensely.  
    “Hello,
Samantha,” Dutch said with a grand smile as he entered the private waiting room
and headed toward her.
    Sam
turned on the charm too, although with far less vigor than Dutch.   “Welcome to California,” she said.   She had moved there, to be close to her
daughter, and ended up accepting a teaching job at a local junior college.   Now, regardless of what Jade did next, she
planned to remain a Californian.
    Dutch
kissed her on the cheek as they met and gave her a friendly hug.   Sam inwardly cringed when he touched her.
    “So
how have you been?” Dutch asked her.   She
was a beautiful woman, Dutch thought, with her flawless black skin and still
one of the prettiest faces he’d