by April Fire
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Take the Leap
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
A-List Temptation
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Cutting Ice
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Hit Hard
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Epilogue
Drive Me Crazy
April Fire
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Author April Fire. All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the author, except in the brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions or locales is completely coincidental.Cover Artwork – © 20XX L.J. Anderson of Mayhem Cover CreationsThis is a work of fiction intended for mature audiences only. All sexually active characters depicted in this publication are 18 years of age or older. Please do not buy if strong sexual situations and explicit language offends you.
Chapter One
Fed up would be an appropriate adjective to describe how Lauren feels at this precise moment. Bored, annoyed, exasperated and close to losing the will to keep going are equally fitting. Especially losing the will. The will has been creeping away from her at a rate of one meter per impatient sigh, and now, as she sits back in her apparently ergonomic office chair, she sees it wave her goodbye, middle finger proudly raised. She’ll never get this done.
Becoming a chauffeur was supposed to be easy, in theory; it’s just driving people around, right? She has a driver’s license, she could do that. And it was easy, to begin with. She knew the route to O’Hare like the back of her hand, she could put on a smile and a suit and sound like she knew what she was doing. But then success hit her in the face like a baseball bat, and now she’s slumped in an office, trying desperately to shuffle schedules around just so that stupid Julia can have her stupid vacation with her stupid new husband and their ratty little dog.
She shakes her head - snap out of it Lauren - and tries to focus on the good parts of her business. She loves being her own boss, and she gets to work with people she considers friends. She even gets to help those friends out by offering generous benefits, including health insurance - who the hell gets that these days? She built this business from the ground, and she’s damn proud of that.
The positive self-talk isn’t working. Her eyes burn from staring at her computer for six hours straight, her wrists ache from scattering over the keyboard since 8:30 am. Her business success might have granted her slightly less awkward working hours, but the routine has sunk exhaustion into her bones, and no matter how many good reviews her company receives, she can’t quite shake the anxiety at the sight of declining income and plummeting profits.
It’s not that she’s bad at her job, she’s made it a flying success, thank you very much, but the figures don’t scream triumph when she decides to stare at them a little longer. The discounts weren’t supposed to get this out-of-hand; it was a favor for returning clients, to drum up business, and it worked – for a while. Now she’s built up a reputation as the pushover, the silly woman who’ll beg to give you a discount, and it makes her seethe.
She nearly lost it at the rates the Kingswood CEO asked for. Kingswood’s offices took up half the city skyline, and being one of the richest organizations in town, they were perfectly able to pay her usual rates. But no, they strong-armed her and told her they’d pay the usual rates over her dead body, so what choice did she have? She’s clinging on to the hope that they’ll refer her to other potential clients, clients with less skyscrapers and more common decency.
It's the clients who both make her job and ruin it; they smile and pat her on the back and tell her that her company is the best in the city, all while robbing her of both her money and her sanity. She’s trapped in a paradox; she won’t charge exorbitant rates, she won’t ask for more money than she deserves, but she has to raise prices to cover expenses. The numbers on the screen just aren’t adding up anymore. But, as usual, she tells herself it’ll be alright, she’ll deal with it some other time. She listens to the soft rush of her computer powering off and tries to do the same with her brain. It’s far too late for her to still be here.
Everyone’s gone home by the time she’s packed up – and of course, stupid Julia wouldn’t think to stay back and help her – so she turns the lights out and digs out her keys with a sigh and a bitter smile at the mess still spread over her desk. Again, she’ll deal with it in the morning.
There’s still a winter chill in the air as she steps out of the building for the first time all day – lunch is for slackers – and she hurries to her car, her breath misting the air in front of her. She struggles not to think about clients as she checks her phone for anything other than their petty messages and eases her toes out of shoes she shouldn’t have bought before chucking everything in the passenger seat and driving as fast as her safety-conscious chauffeur brain will allow, out of the parking lot and off into the night.
***
Home is dark and cold. She promised herself she’d move out of this cramped apartment at some point, but she’s been making promises for five years now, and they’re becoming difficult to keep. She tells herself she can’t have stagnated, that she’s a prodigy, a competent business woman; but it doesn’t feel like that as she scrapes the tomato sauce off yesterday’s dishes. She wants her own house and a car that doesn’t rattle and a business she doesn’t have to take home with her. A man would be quite good too – or even just a cat, some other life form to make her empty home a little less empty.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom – there’s re-runs of Friends right up until midnight, and leftover lasagna in the fridge, so she showers work out of her mind and flops on the sofa, remote in one hand and dinner in the other. She m
anages to smear sauce across her face and down her top, too, but that’s just one of the perks of living alone. She can burp as loud as she likes and there’s no-one to berate her – then again, there’s no-one to applaud, either. A cat. A cat would definitely be a good addition.
Before bed, she rakes through some more emails from various clients – God, Kingswood is keen, they never seem to leave her alone – and stops on one from the CEO, no less, who seems to be asking her to personally chauffeur someone. Well, that’ll never happen in a million years, she thinks as she taps out a polite yet blunt reply that says no, she does not personally chauffeur, that’s not how the company operates anymore, but she’ll request the most senior driver to complete the job first thing tomorrow.
The very thought of tomorrow is enough to make her groan in frustration and push the heels of her hands into her eyes. She sets her alarm for ass o’clock the next morning and stretches out in the sheets, trying to blink the endless statistics from behind her eyes. Only after an hour of sifting through thoughts does she finally fall asleep.
Chapter Two
Caviar is disgusting, Richard thinks, not for the first time. It tastes, well, fishy, and he can’t quite get the voice chanting eggseggseggs out of his head. Baby fish, that’s what he’s eating. He can’t help but wince as the beads burst in his mouth and hopes to God that the man sitting across the table doesn’t notice. Mr. Calver is paying for this, after all; it might be considered rude if Richard spat half-chewed unborn fish all over his lap.
The restaurant hums with quiet voices, the table next to them just near enough that Richard can hear an elderly woman telling her partner about the time she went surfing and saw a stingray do a back-flip, which is vastly more interesting than whatever Mr. Calver is using his monotonous voice to explain now. Richard can barely bring himself to look up from his dinner; he knows the man opposite him has got a large piece of – well, something in between his teeth, and he also knows he won’t get this deal if he starts laughing his ass off.
So, he just nods along, making agreeable noises in what he hopes are the right places, deciding to give up on the caviar and move to the smoked-sturgeon cheesecake. It’s not half-bad, for a desert made of fish. He occupies himself with making little patterns with the sauce, first a smiley face, then a smudged cat, then a shoal of fish to make up for the ones he’s just eaten.
“- What do you think, Mr. Shepherd?” Calver’s voice filters through the steady stream of nonsense in Richard’s head, and he snaps his gaze up to meet the others man’s.
“…Uh, yes, definitely,” Richard tries, nodding as if enthusiasm will make up for complete ignorance of the subject matter, “of course.”
“That is good news,” Calver nods. “I’ll notify my colleagues.”
“Yes,” Richard flashes a smiles as fake as Calver’s hair. “So – so just run that by me again?”
“Well, it’ll require some more negotiations, of course, but if you’re happy to follow our lead on this, we’d be glad for your support – it’ll make us both very rich men, I’d wager,” Calver smiles, like they’re not already sitting in the most expensive restaurant in New York and checking their diamond-encrusted Rolexes. Richard resists an eye-roll.
“Okay,” he nods, trying to think of something witty to say, but coming up with nothing. The prospect of the merger should make him jump for joy – God knows that’s what his mom will do when she hears what a great success her little boys made of her company – but he can only muster a weak smile as he swallows down another forkful of sturgeon cheesecake.
“Fantastic. We’ll have you flown out to Chicago this Friday, seal the deal,” Calver says around a mouthful of duck.
They sit in awkward conversation for the rest of the meal; Calver likes to talk a lot about his LA mansion with its two pools and its perfect view of the Hollywood sign, boasts about his swim-wear model wife; what does it matter if she left him a year ago. Richard tries his utmost to look interested and avoids mentioning the fact that all the money in the world can’t buy Calver a more interesting personality or a voice that doesn’t make Richard want to throw himself under the next Aston Martin he sees.
After scraping his tiny desert plate clean, Richard and Calver shake hands and make their way out of the restaurant, juggling phones and briefcases and appearances. He’d like to say it’s the only meal like that he’s had, but they occur almost weekly nowadays, the same bored luxury and false smiles just in different restaurants, different cities. He’ll say goodbye to Calver only to meet one of his many clones the next month.
His PA is over the moon, as usual – she chatters excitedly through the phone at him, telling him all the great things he’s achieved simply by eating fish eggs and talking crap, but he can’t help but smile when she goes on about the hotel she’s fixed up for him. She’s new to the business, and it’s refreshing to see someone so excited about chocolates on pillows and free champagne. Especially the champagne. He reminds himself to keep her away from it before they end up in the newspapers again.
Something stronger than champagne wouldn’t be bad right now, he thinks, as he slumps into the backseat of his car and greets his driver with a half-hearted grin. He should be happy, that’s what this was about all along, to eat Michelin-starred food and sign million-dollar contracts, this is happiness, right?
It doesn’t quite feel like it, though, as he stares out of the window at the people on the street, the people who aren’t being driven from place to place by men in designer suits, the people who are laughing with friends or arm in arm with a lover. There’s really no time for friends when you’re country-hopping in search of cash – there’s really no time for anything much.
He sends a few emails and drafts a few more, taking his eyes off the outside world to bask in the glow of his tablet, notifications flooding in every so often to remind him how popular he is. He thinks about phoning his mom, wonders if he can remember enough of the conversation to relay it word for word like she’ll want, and decides he needs some more time to rehearse. He can call her in the morning, after what could be a glamorous night on the town but will probably turn out to be him toppling out of sobriety by himself in his hotel room. Then again, there’ll probably be some Friends reruns on somewhere – maybe it won’t be such a terrible night.
Chapter Three
“I’m just saying, you should really take on board what the CEO suggested. He’s obviously heard about how good you are, he’s paying you a compliment,” James babbles in Lauren’s ear as she attempts to make herself coffee without getting side-tracked.
“Well don’t just say,” she scathes, shaking her head. “I’m not ferrying some guy around just ‘cause some other guy asked me to!”
“But they want top quality service! This could be a massive break for us, Lauren, if you step up and do this, they might be a long-term client!” he exclaims, grabbing her by the wrist and almost sending her coffee all over both of them.
“Why me, though? Other people can drive!” she bristles, swatting at him.
James won’t quit that easy, though. “Don’t you see what this is? It’s a trust exercise. If the most senior member of the company is willing to give them exactly what they want, then they’ll know we’re for real!”
“Aren’t we real enough already?” she scowls, hurrying towards her office in the hope of losing him. “I’ve got better things to do than pander to rich people.”
“Like watching the business go under?” James says, raising an eyebrow.
“Hey!” she snaps, wheeling around. “We’re not going under. It’s just a – rough patch. It’ll be fine!”
“We need the rich people, Lauren! Without them, we starve,” he sighs, full of melodrama. “You know that if we get repeat business from them, it could save the company.”
She huffs at him, turning away instead of succumbing. She can’t admit he’s right to his face, or his arrogance levels might cause him to implode. Not that that would necessarily be a terrible thing.
“Just think about it, okay?” he calls after her as she stomps down the corridor, coffee searing her hand as it sloshes over the edge of the cup.
For most of the day, she steadfastly does not think about it; she bustles around the edges of it, picking up three potential clients, two of which do not sound like assholes, and finally works out a solution to the stupid-Julia-holiday debacle. She can do just fine without Kingswood, she doesn’t need their business.
She has second thoughts when she inevitably returns to the profits. No matter how much she reasons that she doesn’t need to eat that badly, she can’t quite shake the thought that if she did this – this one, short, easy job that she used to do all the time for half the money with twice the willing – she may not have to stay late every evening anymore, she may not have to agonize over redundancies, she could buy as many cats as she wanted and be able to feed them and herself.
It's the email that swings it. Kingswood have decided to kindly notify her that the client in question is one Richard Shepherd, CEO of the equally belligerent LBP Corporations, who – ah. Who could possibly be landed as a national account. Who could not only help her feed her hypothetical cats but could put her hypothetical kids through college. That’s interesting.
She could do it. She could chauffeur them good and proper. She could chauffeur them better than they’ve ever been chauffeured before. It’d be just like old times; put on her nicest suit and her cleanest shoes, practice a smile in the mirror, talk if they talk, keep quiet if they don’t. It’d be easy – and God knows she could probably do it a damn sight better than some of her current employees. Especially Julia.
After wringing her hands together for what she deems an appropriate amount of time, she gives in and types out an email. This Shepherd guy better think himself lucky.
The more she thinks about it, though, the more bells start ringing in her head. Didn’t she know someone called Richard Shepherd? Didn’t she date someone called Richard Shepherd?
Her college career had been mostly successful; she’d come out with a reasonably useless yet suitably impressive politics degree and had avoided getting stuck in the continuous state of partying that some people had fallen victim to. She’d made a handful of best friends and a fistful of worst enemies, but most people fell somewhere in between. Richard had been one of them; he was nothing special, really, not the smartest nor the funniest nor the best-looking guy she’d ever dated, but they’d parted amicably and he’d disappeared into the ether to focus on his career. Oh. Oh.
