Fernando - Bad Boy Love (Bad Boy Love Series Book 1) by Jessica Gray

looking for him before calling the cops.
    Unfortunately, a call to the cops had still been necessary. Gwen sighed. Those were the moments she hated her job. Yet another disappointment. When the cops had opened his apartment, they’d found him splattered across the couch, completely drugged up.
    While spending the remainder of the morning arranging counseling and treatment for her client, her mind had drifted to Fernando. Again. At least he wasn’t a drug addict, so his odds of making it through his probation were much better. She longed to see him and at the same time her stomach clenched at the idea of seeing him again. To hell with her raging hormones and this insane attraction she felt for him. She really should know better.
    Gwen eyed the blinking red light on her answering machine. Seventeen missed calls during her absence. What the hell was going on today? She listened to the messages one after another. Five from Vivian, each one more worried than the one before. Shoot. I forgot our lunch date. She fired off a text to her friend.
    Sorry!!! Work trouble. No worries. Will call you later.
    Some callers hadn’t left a message. Her boss relaying her some information. And so on. She stopped at the message of a judge who requested some urgent reports from her and spent the next hour preparing the information. Just before his session started, she ran the two blocks to the courthouse and delivered the required reports.
    She decided to grab a quick sandwich in the courthouse cafeteria before returning to her office and answering the rest of the calls. Meanwhile, several new messages had arrived. Her legs still shaky from the exciting morning, she wanted to hide in a hole where nobody could find her. She willed the red blinking light to go away, but finally pushed the replay button and listened half-heartedly to the slay of messages. She sat up straighter when she heard Fernando’s voice.
    Her heart thundered in her throat. Was he in trouble? No, his voice seemed happy.
    “Hey, Gwen. It’s Fernando. Could you call me back? Something happened today…and I wanted to share the news with you. Okay. Thanks. Talk to you later.”
    She picked up the phone with trembling fingers and called him back. He’d sounded so positive on the phone; she was anxious to find out about his great news. Did he finally get a job?
    “Hello?” a woman’s voice came over the line.
    Gwen’s brain froze as instant jealousy speared through her, and her voice refused to work.
    “Hello?”
    A woman answers his phone? And a young sounding woman. Gwen hung up before she could say something she might later regret. Her breath came in irregular bursts, each inhale dissipating her joy of moments ago until nothing was left. Nothing but the empty feeling of betrayal.
    Of course he has a girlfriend. He’s been playing me to get special treatment.
    She felt like a fool. She swallowed back the lump in her throat. “How could I have been so stupid? I should have known better than to fall for one of my clients. They are all the same. Willing to do anything to cheat the system and get ahead. And Fernando has just proven he isn’t better than the rest of them.”
    After her little self-talk, she turned on her computer, trying to complete some work, but the letters danced in front of her eyes, and all she could see was Fernando’s face laughing at her for being such a fool. Today definitely wasn’t her day, and after battling to concentrate for what seemed like an eternity, she turned her computer off, grabbed her bag, and called it a day.
    Standing in front of her car, she made the conscious decision to forget about Fernando Garcia for good. He was nothing but a juvenile delinquent who’d grown up to become a career criminal. He was nothing to her, and she wouldn’t waste her precious peace of mind on him.
    She climbed behind the steering wheel and without paying much attention to what she was doing, she entered the highway and passed her exit, heading to the