BWWM Interracial Romance 1: Professional Relations by Elena Brown

friends with the company’s president for years—the two of them going on poker cruises, out to golf games. He was in a very good position to destroy her, she thought, but why would he want to? He had never worked with her before.
    As they turned a corner, Regina followed, in spite of the fact that it was in the opposite direction of where she had wanted to go. She was fascinated; horrified at the slander that was leaving the man’s lips. The other man he was speaking to—a slightly lower level manager, not quite a toady but certainly a yes man of sorts. “How did you hear about this?” he asked the other manager, almost as curious as Regina was.
    “Oh, I’m acquainted with someone from her life—her ex-husband. While I’m sure there’s two sides to the story, I have to believe that he’s got a good idea of what the woman’s really like.” Regina stopped in her tracks as the men continued to move forward, utterly and completely shocked. She had thought of many possibilities when she had been wondering who and how and why someone was lying about her; she had never even remotely considered that her husband could somehow be part of it.
    Regina abandoned the task of visiting the accounting offices and made a beeline for her own office instead, closing and locking the door behind her. Conflicting emotions rose up: anger, sadness, fear. She had thought—had honestly thought—that the divorce had made everything between her and her husband come to an end. She had foregone any kind of alimony payments because she had known that her husband would fight them tooth and nail, that he would drag her name through the mud just to avoid having to pay them. She had given him the lion’s share of their assets, wanting nothing more than to get the divorce completed. When she moved away, started a new job with new coworkers, she never thought that her husband could be so vindictive as to follow her and ruin her career.
    His words came back to her with chilling clarity. “You’re nothing without me.” He had said it over and over again, and he was apparently determined to prove it. Regina slumped to the floor, feeling overwhelmed and anxious, even as the sparks of anger inside of her began to grow. What had Richard even hoped to accomplish? Just because her job was in jeopardy didn’t mean she was any more likely to go running back to his hateful embrace. He was so determined to see her fail that he was willing to find and make friends with people in her company who didn’t know her—just so he could sow the seeds of her destruction.
    Regina threw the file she was carrying across the room, consumed with sudden bitter rage. She had stood up to him before, she thought. She could do it again. But would standing up to Richard, telling him that she had figured out his stupid, petty trick, really solve the problem? She had to be smart about the situation. She was so enraged she could barely think. Regina stood up, walking across her office and throwing herself into her desk chair, growling with the anger that burned through her stomach and into her heart.
    She had spent years kowtowing to him. She had submitted to his demands, had taken her beatings, had listened to him rant and rave at her over nothing at all. Finally, she had gotten the courage to leave him, to tell him that she wasn’t going to be his punching bag or his emotional whipping boy any longer. And now he saw fit to take away even the tiny victory she had managed to gain in leaving him. Regina shook her head, staring unseeingly at her computer screen as her rage continued to smolder. She would deal with him separately, she decided. She needed to take care of her career first—she had to find out a way to implicate that manager, to prove that she was more than worth the value of her salary.
    Regina didn’t know how she was going to do it, but she knew it had to be done. She wracked her mind, trying to think of who she could go to. She could talk to Talitha, but her