I'm Your Baby Tonight - Part One - A New Adult Contemporary Romance Series (I'm Your Baby Tonight Series) Read Free

keeping an eye on them for like, ten, fifteen minutes?”
    “Sure, no problem,” she said. She watched Sasha as she made her way to the door.
     
     
    CHAPTER 2
    S he slipped out through the heavy oak door, careful to tiptoe around the kids, and practically sprinted down the abandoned and litter-covered hallway, looking at her watch along the way. Teacher’s open doors lined him on either side. All of them had apparently already convened in the auditorium. If there was one thing Principal Close hated, it was tardiness, and she was about to be three minutes late:  a mortal sin in the eyes of the school’s principal. 
    She nearly fell in a puddle of suspicious liquid. The janitor was an old man who was losing his eyesight. A consequence was that sometimes he missed some of the kids' messes. Sasha just prayed that this was a case of spilled water and nothing worse. She wiped the bottom of her shoes on the dingy tile floor and kept running. She was supposed to be going to some mandatory staff meeting for the teachers, and she only hoped she could slip in without being noticed.
    The auditorium was on the other side of the school, right near the front entrance. It was a large open room with rows and rows of tidy, small chairs. Every week, a different class was assigned to cleaning the bare concrete floors and straightening the chairs. This week, it was Ms. June, Sasha thought, but she wasn’t sure. She rounded the corner and stood at the double doors. They were painted over with a fading coat of cheap crimson paint. This auditorium hadn’t been renovated in years. It smelled like stale milk and little kid sweat, and probably had for some time. It desperately needed new doors or new curtains across the stage to make it look like one of the more modern school auditoriums. As she cracked open the door, the auditorium was already so full that she was going to have to push her way through the crowd and step around several people to find an open seat. There was no way she could do so unnoticed. She’d take the brunt of Mr. Close’s punishment for sure. 
    “Ms. Cox!” the principal quipped loudly, stopping mid-sentence as his booming voice echoed off the walls and ceiling of the school auditorium. All heads turned to her, and Sasha sat down in a child-sized seat. “So glad you could join us. We were just talking about you, actually.” His dark, tired eyes scanned Sasha. He looked like a stressed man, probably worried with the burden of taking care of this school.
    “Were you?” Sasha asked, trying to lighten the mood, “What was it this time?” She looked around, smiling at her co-workers' faces. She was friendly with most of them. Everyone giggled. The principal was a tall man, and looked even taller standing up on the stage’s auditorium all by himself with the teachers sitting in the crowd. He was thin and balding, in his fifties, with a mildly friendly face. Sasha pinned him as an older, smaller Bruce Willis. The actor hid his age well, but Mr. Close had not been that lucky.
    “Budget cuts, actually. We were talking about the district-wide budget cuts, and how they were affecting our different departments, including yours.” Principal Close wore a sympathetic expression and he looked a little tired. His wrinkles looked deeper than usual.
    “Including mine? How so?” Sasha sat up and thought about the lousy half a cracker that she had just fed her students an hour ago.
    “Well,” the worried principal said, stuffing his hands into his pockets as he paced the stage back and forth, “it seems that we’ll have to put a hold on the chairs that you ordered, for starters.” He stopped pacing and looked right at Sasha and waited for her expected upset response.
    “What? But the ones we have now are falling apart. If one of those kids falls, you’re just asking for a lawsuit.” Sasha already knew that it was no use, but she had to try. She felt like crying and stamping her foot like one of her students, but she