Chapter 351 The accident
Yan Mei snapped back to reality in a rush of awareness and quickly patted her cheeks to check for drool and cool the sudden hot blush blazing there. Even without being there, her husband managed to draw explosive reactions from her.
She hoped no one had noticed her sudden daydream. One discreet look around made her aware that every eye was riveted on Yue Yan, as it should. Yan Mei had never considered herself a beauty, no matter how her husband tried to convince her; she took his lovestruck compliments for what they were in her stride and moved on.
She had naturally envied one or two features but there was no way she could find herself jealous of Yue Yan's beauty and her infectious verve for life. Of course, she'd felt a twinge or two and had initially been uncomfortable with her husband rekindling a relationship with his ex the first time he had spoken of it.
That feeling had quickly faded the minute she heard her story, a sense of kinship had developed instead. Now she was just grateful for her and happy that she had bounced back happily and readjusting to life after losing three years.
She waved in the general direction of Yue Yan's admirers who seemed to have blocked the petite girl from view and turned to the bank of elevators heading to her office.
She had a lot of things to do now that her head was clear and she knew that Yue Yan would drop in as soon as possible.
She made it two steps in that direction before Yue Yan called her again. Yan Mei sighed, a theatrical performance complete with eye rolls before she stalked across the sales floor to rescue her honorary sister.
Between the two of them was a bank of display glass, showcasing finished pieces of jewelry in artistic settings. Some were in classic styles, others were more dated or bold styles that appealed to select crowds but she was nothing if not enterprising and Yan Mei had found and expanded a market in which people wanted pieces of jewelry that enhanced and catered to their select personalities.
The display glasses were individual boxes resting on iron and velvet frames to facilitate their removal and perusal by clients, it was only when she was halfway across that the intense sense of foreboding caused her to look to the left.
The whine of heavily burdened metal caught the attention of everyone and drew their gaze around that area of the display frame, Yan Mei walked faster, hoping to do something, anything to prevent the disaster that was unfolding right in front of her eyes when an entire line warped, launching its contents at her.
It was as if the entire floor froze collectively, her legs felt like putty trying to tackle the command to stop running forward and escape the glass cases racing towards her. If her feet felt like clay, her senses felt overcharged, over aware.
Somehow she caught the expression of more than a few people in that room, there was the expected look of shock, fear, alarm, and even macabre fascination, all of them witnesses to the train wreck that was somehow her life today.
The bubble of silence bursts and she could suddenly hear the screams of most everyone on that floor, one in a particular way high pitched, getting closer by the minute, and sounded achingly familiar.
Yan Mei was almost looking in the right direction to see a blur of pinks and gold's crash into her, pushing her clear of display glasses headed for her. She hit the floor and heard the tinkling of broken glass at the same time, she had a moment's reprieve before the pain crashed into her.
*********
The caller had been frantic, relaying the incidents to him without taking a breath, as a result, the words were garbled.Lei Zhao calmly asked whoever it was to repeat that before he registered that it was his wife's new personal assistant talking.
That realization had fired up his own anxiety immediately, when he finally made sense of her words, the anxiety had punched through his gut and driven the breath out of his body.
He'd walked out of the office with instructions to cancel all his meetings as he rushed to the banks of the elevators and straight to the parking lot. The ride to the hospital took less than ten minutes and he barged into the emergency room. He searched for her in the waiting room but found the pale personal assistant choking down the cup of sludge that was called coffee in hospitals around the world.
The woman had sprung to her feet at the sight of him "right this way sir, the both of them are surprisingly okay"
'The both of them?!' There was no way he had misheard her words, his body reacted on a near visceral level to the possibility of losing both his wife and the best friend he had only just reconnected with recently.
He felt like screaming, or punching something to ease the churning rage in his gut, his fists clenched until they bled white, his short nails digging into the skin of his palms as he struggled to control himself.
The moment lasted a short while, he exhaled loudly, adjusted his tie, and gestured at the scared woman to lead the way.
When they first entered the room, he found the two of them more or less intact. There were no physical signs of what they had just gone through except the air of shock and anxiety that was blatantly advertised on their faces.
The both of them looked up in tandem to see who had come in, Yan Mei got up from her chair and smiled as she walked into his embrace. His arms banded around her in a near-crushing embrace as he wondered how he would have reacted if he came in and saw her....
'No, don't think about that,' he chastised himself silently, allowing himself to sink into her scent and her embrace. Over her shoulders, he smiled at Yue Yan and she gave him a tired smile in return.
It was a few minutes before he released her from the almost painful hold, in the aftermath of it all, his body shook subtly with the excess of adrenaline but he didn't let go of her hands.
Foll𝑜w current novels on fre(e)w𝒆bnovel