Page 31 of Her Hidden Smile

Huh?

“Sleeping Beauty, are you awake?”

It wasn’t a dream.

“Renzo?” I sounded hoarse. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Renzo?” I shook my head and everything came flooding back. “Why are you still here?”

“I told you that you needed something more substantial to eat than chocolate, but then you decided to do the sleeping beauty act on me. You’ve been asleep for a little over two hours. I was about ready to wake you up for dinner. How are you feeling? Nauseous?”

I did a mental check. Actually, I was feeling pretty good. My thigh and hip weren’t hurting; well they were only aching and that was definitely a win. And my head didn’t have a marching band playing in it anymore. Usually after such a bad cramp that went up to my head, I’d end up with a headache from hell, but not this time.

“I’m starving,” I admitted as I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the couch and started to rise.

“Hold up,” Renzo said as he bolted from the kitchen. “I don’t want you walking by yourself quite yet. You almost took a header the last time you tried that, remember?”

I could feel my face turning red.

I nodded.

“How often does that happen?” he asked as he hovered over me.

“Never.”

“How about you tell me the truth?” Renzo said as he watched me stand up on my own. I scowled at him.

“When I say never, I mean never. You saw how I was leaning on my desk. I would have sat down on my own until it was safe for me to stand up again. I work with a physical therapist online every week. It’s not medically necessary anymore so he’s not covered by my insurance, but I work hard with him to make sure that I stay limber and my leg and hip will always be working to their peak capacity.”

“So what happened today?”

Gah! I could tell that Renzo was not going to stop questioning me until I told him. Well, I’d tell him part of it. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that I was showing off for him!

“I crossed my legs when I was sitting in my office chair while I was talking to Chuck. I didn’t even think about it, I just did it. I was feeling like a hotshot because I was going to get this big donation. For once I felt like I was really one of the big dogs, and I was doing what I thought all those women in the corporate world would be doing in their offices.”

“Seems to me that you are hot shit. How much was that donation worth? Five million?”

I laughed. “Multiply that by ten.”

Renzo’s eyes got wide. “Are you kidding me?”

“Nope. Luxton has deep pockets, and they need to pay after what they’ve done.”

“Why, what have they done?” Renzo guided me to the dining room chair and I sat down. He’d set the table, and even found my cloth napkins and had them folded at my place setting.

Impressive.

“Luxton has one arm of their company that does paper products; their money maker is diapers. When we had the big supply chain problem because of Covid, they had to raise their prices by twenty percent.”

Renzo nodded. “It was the same in the construction business. Everything went up.”

“But then it went down again, didn’t it?”

“Yep. We were on all of our suppliers to get us our supplies at the pre-Covid pricing.”

“Exactly. You were large and savvy customers, who could have taken your business elsewhere. Unfortunately, Luxton’s subsidiary held forty percent of the diaper market here in the US, and when the supply chain problem went away, they didn’t lower their prices to the pre-Covid pricing. They figured if people were paying that price, they could continue to ask for it. When other smaller companies saw what they were doing, they followed suit.”

“Why? They could have undercut Luxton and taken more of the market share.”

“They were after those same easy margins. Now there were one or two who tried reducing their prices, and when they did, Luxton acquired them. It was easy. Come to think of it, I probably should have asked for a much higher donation.”