Free BWWM Interracial Romance 6: Her Protector by Elena Brown

as they spoke. Sawyer couldn’t really understand; he still had both of his parents. If he lost his job as a police officer, he would be horribly disappointed, but it wouldn’t be as though he was failing his parents. She managed to keep her spirits up while he stayed on the line, but the moment he hung up, Adriana put her phone down and started to cry once more.
    She sat at the kitchen table, remembering all of the fun times she had had with her parents—with her father—in that room. She couldn’t escape the feeling that running his business into the ground was not just a personal failure; she would be tarnishing his memory if she couldn’t get the restaurant to turn a profit. She would lose one of the things that had been so essential to her father’s life, his entire passion, his biggest accomplishment. If she couldn’t find a way to make the restaurant work, she didn’t know how she could even consider herself her father’s daughter anymore.
    Adriana stood from the table as the last of her sobs worked through her body and dried her face. She would pull up the schedule on her own computer and she would start deciding where to make cuts. She would schedule herself for as many hours as she could possibly stand, and she would find a way to make it all work. Sawyer might not understand, but she had to make her own sacrifices—and if that meant putting a love life on the back burner, she would pitch that particular luxury onto the bonfire without even looking back.
     

Chapter Seven
    There were only a few employees left in the building as Adriana sat at the desk, counting the cash for the third time. It was late; the kitchen had closed down for the night more than an hour before, and the servers had divided up the tips and were doing side work. She had sent a few of them home as the evening rush started to dwindle, not quite meeting their gazes as she responded to their questions about whether they could stay to do side work with a negative.
    The meeting to inform her employees that the restaurant was going to start running lean had been the week before, and everyone was still adjusting. In the interest of fairness, Adriana put all of her tips in the communal pile whenever she took a serving shift on—she wasn’t an employee, and with hours being cut all around, she wanted to give her staff whatever extra she could. The oldest employees hadn’t been at all surprised at the revelation that things were going to have to change, at least temporarily. “I hate to do this because you’re all like family to me,” Adriana had said at the meeting. “But the fact of the matter is that I have to make a decision to have a little pain now or a lot of pain later—and I don’t think any of you want to lose your jobs entirely any more than I want to have to close this place down.”
    The older employees had expressed their commitment to doing whatever it took to keep the business running; the ones who had been hired more recently were not quite as gung-ho—but then, Adriana thought, there was no real reason for them to be. Most of them hadn’t been around long enough to have really gotten to know her father, and some of them had never met the restaurant’s namesake at all. All they knew was that Ellis American Cuisine was a mainstay in Portland, and it had been a fairly safe bet for a job when they signed up.
    Becky came into the office, knocking on the door lightly. “Hey, Adriana,” she said, yawning slightly and then shaking off her fatigue. “Everything’s done out on the floor.” Adriana nodded. She felt tired down to her bones. She and her mother had both been putting in extra hours, but since she was the legal owner of the restaurant, and because she was younger, Adriana felt like she had a greater responsibility to shoulder the added burden. Esther was still somewhat sickly from her older age; on top of that, Adriana knew that her mother was still mourning the Ellis patriarch’s passing, even almost a year