Millionaire Boss (Freeman Brothers 1)

After saying goodbye to my other two brothers, I locked up the house and went for a shower. I stood under the hot water for a long time after the smoky smell of the fire washed away from my skin and hair just to let my muscles relax. When I was done, I threw on a pair of boxers and slid into bed. My eyes flickered over to the tablet on my nightstand. The screen was dark, but I could almost hear all the emails and messages inside waiting for me to reply.

It was late, but not so late that I couldn’t get some work in. I thought about getting just a little bit done, spending at least part of the night being productive. Even when I wasn’t at the office or the racetrack on any given day, the work didn’t stop. There was far more to be done for the company than just the races themselves, and the messages, questions, and requests never stopped. I started to reach for the tablet, then stopped myself.

I wasn’t going to do it. I’d gotten a rare, treasured night completely off, and I wasn’t going to ruin it by burying myself back in work again. I had the next week free, and then it was back to racing season. Once that started, it was going to be all stress and schedules so busy they were bursting at the seams until the season came to an end. The whole point of taking the time off before the season got underway was to relax, and that was exactly what I was going to do. For the next week, it was all about giving myself the time to chill, rejuvenate myself, and prepare for the inevitable, unavoidable chaos to come.

Rather than picking up the tablet, I called out to my virtual assistant to turn on some music to help me sleep, turned off the lights, and closed my eyes with a long exhale.

2

Merry

“Shit, shit, shit, I’m gonna be late!”

My clothes were scattered all over the floor, a bra was hanging from the back of a chair in the corner, and I couldn’t find one of my shoes.

It was nowhere near as exciting as it sounded. It wasn’t the fun of a carefree night. Or even an ill-advised, but still thrilling, night. It was the sheer chaos on the morning of the interview for a job I would kill for. I wasn’t usually one for hyperbole and definitely wouldn’t want to just start wishing violence on everybody around me, but for this job, I might make an exception. Working for the Freeman Racing could slingshot my career to a whole new level.

Being a social media consultant gave me the opportunity to work with a lot of interesting people, but the unfortunate thing about it was the smaller clients often thought they could pick up the skills themselves and start doing it on their own rather than relying on me—thought being the operative word. More often than not, they’d depend on me to build up their social media presence for a few months, see the benefits, then decide they could do it themselves and let me go. Inevitably a good portion of them would realize the whole reason they’d hired me in the first place was because they didn’t know how to run their platform effectively.

That meant I got repeat business, but it was frustrating as hell. I hated seeing the mess they created out of what I built and having to fix it. It was especially aggravating when I realized it was my name attached to what they made out of it. Of course, there were other times when the smaller companies and private clients actually did pick up on the skills and were able to keep it going on their own. That was a victory of its own kind for me. In the end, the point of my job was to help companies gain more visibility and success through the effective use of social media.

But it all boiled down to the same thing. I was a professional transient. Not the wander the streets and sleep under the bridge type, but the bounce from post to post, gig to gig, always looking for work even when I had it type. That didn’t sit well with me. It was exciting when I first started. In those first few months when I got my business going, I felt like a powerful contemporary woman standing on my own two feet and running my empire. At least, the beginning of an empire.

The novelty wore off after a while, and I started longing for something more stable. I set my sights on just that, a big company that would need their social media built but then sustained. Larger companies didn’t have the time to keep up with that sort of daily activity, meaning if I could land the position with Freeman Racing, I might be able to settle in for the long haul. That sounded glorious.