CHAPTER 1

Mason

“This is the future!”

I stepped out from behind the podium and shook hands with Bill Ross and Dave Klein, two of the fastest rising stars in my company Savage Enterprises. Dave and Bill had been working night and day to expand on the real estate side of the business. Savage Enterprises had been in commercial real estate for almost ten years, but now we were going even higher to start working on building hotel casinos in every major city in the United States. I was so excited I could hardly sleep nights anymore.

Things were going very well.

“Excellent presentation guys,” I said. Then I turned to face the entire group. “I want to thank you all so much for all of your dedication and hard work this year. We are taking this company even higher in the coming years, and it is all thanks to you. I hate to spoil the surprise, but all of you will start seeing higher numbers on your paychecks starting tomorrow.”

Everyone around the conference table began smiling and applauding. I basked in the adulation for a moment, even though it made me a bit uncomfortable. I was truly blessed. I had a great team. They were wonderful, hardworking, talented people and they deserved every cent of the raises I’d approved.

The following year was going to be amazing.

I wrapped up the meeting and headed over to my office down at the other end of the hallway, pausing briefly to talk to my secretary, Judy.

“Your calendar is fairly clear Mason,” Judy said. “Tomorrow will be a bit of a bear, though.”

I sighed as I looked at the layout for tomorrow. It started with two back to back meetings—one for the real estate sector and the other for the technology sector. I always liked to keep things varied because I got bored easily. Savage Enterprises had our hands in real estate, IT, entertainment, and we were branching out into fashion and sports. Those were the two things I was most excited about. I’d always dreamt of owning an athletic wear fashion line.

And now I was on the verge of making that a reality.

After the meetings, I had to visit a few job sites and check out the progress with the foreman, then I had a business meeting/golf game with Chris Chambers, a longtime friend and business partner of mine, and then in the afternoon I would visit the location of a few restaurant franchises I was working on starting up. It was a fun experiment for me that I wasn’t sure I would do very well with, but I was going to give it my best shot and have fun with it.

I learned long ago that one must learn to love what they do.

“Ok, all of this looks fine,” Mason said.

With all of this mulling over in my head, I walked briskly into my office, grabbed a bottle of water, and sat down behind my desk. I was tempted to pour myself a whiskey, but I rarely drank in the middle of the day unless I was celebrating something. Besides, I had to go pick up my son Toby in about two hours.

It was always the highlight of my day. Ever since Toby’s mother had passed away three years before, it had just been the two of us. I dated here and there and I’d had a few women I thought might want to take things to a more serious level, but they weren’t quite suitable mother figures for Toby. It wasn’t that they didn’t care for Toby or that they didn’t like children, but Toby had never really gelled with any of them. Toby was a sweet, sensitive, artistic child. He never had a bad word to say about anyone and he was genuinely receptive to most people, but when I thought about what type of woman would be a great fit to assume the role of mother to my four-year-old son, there had not been anyone that seemed to click with Toby on that level.

So, the search continued.

“Well, maybe the search has ended,” I mumbled to myself. “But the first step seems to have hit a snag.”

I laughed gently as I thought about Libby Norris. She was Toby’s preschool teacher. She was the type of woman that really made your heart soar the moment you laid eyes on her. She was beautiful, sweet, fun, intelligent, perfect with kids, and she loved Toby, who also idolized her.

“Then what is the problem?” I asked aloud. I often spoke to myself when I was alone. It helped me think things out. Sometimes a good back and forth pacing would be applied to this.

The problem was that when it came to Libby, I felt like a gawking, lonely teenager at the school dance who desperately wanted to ask the prettiest, most popular girl in school to dance. Every ounce of confidence and “game” that I’d developed over the course of my lifetime was suddenly gone when I was in the presence of this woman. I was lucky if I could mumble out a few words about the weather or something else mundane. There had been no chance for me to asking her out.

Tags: Mia Ford Accidental Hook-Up Romance
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