Happily Ever After: 6 Marriage Romances In 1 (BWWM Romance)

by BWWM Club

  She saw that she had ended up overcompensating for the time that she had lost in the phone call and as a result was going to get to work at seven thirty, fifteen minutes before she would have to get there even by Michael Gamble’s incredibly early standards. She decided to park her car at a nice little park and think about everything.

  She knew that if she wanted to center herself and actually start to think about everything properly, she was going to have to let all of the thoughts come in. There was no use fighting it. Life was not going to be easy on her, it was not going to allow her to simply push everything bad into the back of her mind. No, she was going to have to put a lot more effort into this. She was going to have to give this her all.

  She started to let all of those thoughts in. She thought about her father, noble and courageous. His life was in danger, the condition that his heart was in was so utterly unstable that he could end up dying at any second. No one knew how much time he had to live. And yet, even though he was in such a terrible situation, all he cared about was the fact that his wife and daughter were being inconvenienced by his condition. Instead of worrying about himself, he was worrying about everyone else which was all he ever seemed to do.

  Kizzy also thought about her mother. She knew that it could not be easy for her to be in that situation. Whatever her father said had been right. She knew that her mother was suffering a lot as well because of her father’s illness. Kendra probably did not care about the fact that she was being forced to forsake all of the things that she had enjoyed doing in her life. She loved James, and she would not even enjoy herself if she went out and tried to do things with her friends.

  And yet… Kizzy felt incredibly guilty for not being there. She was aware of the fact that she had no reason to feel guilty. After all, she was doing her part from here in the city. However, her parents were the kind of people that never left home. They went for vacations to other states but at the end of the day they didn’t really care much about other parts of the country or the world. When Kizzy had told them that she wanted more from life, that she wanted to move to the big city, they had been a little cautious about it at first. Perhaps they had felt that she was unhappy with how her life was being lived. And perhaps that was actually true. But they had been completely okay with it when she told them that it was her final decision. They had not forced her to reconsider, they had not tried to make her do what they wanted her to do. They were not like that, and that just made her feel guilty about the fact that she was not there with them right now.

  If she had never left for the city, she would have been there to help her mother out. She would have been able to share the load. However, it could also be said that if she had never left the city her parents would have had no way to come up with the money to pay for the medical procedure.

  Kizzy checked her watch. She had five minutes to get to work, and work was three minutes away. She sighed and started her car. It was going to be a long day at work. On the first day, Gamble was going to force her to do a lot of things all at once. He was going to test her mettle and push her to her very limits. She was going to have to make sure that she was up to the task, otherwise she would not be able to last in this job very long.

  This job was how she was going to pay for the medical procedure. It was the only solution, even if she took a loan because otherwise she would not be able to pay it back. Kizzy realized that right now she was simply in the best worst case scenario, nothing more. And this concerned her to no end because it made her feel like nothing would ever get better.

  Little did she know, something was lying around the corner, something that would change her forever. And she was going to have to be very careful over the course of the next few days.

  Chapter 3

  Mike had not gone home last night. It was not uncommon for him to stay late at the office, but he had never before failed to go home entirely. Ironically, the reason behind him not going home the previous night had nothing to do with work. Rather, he had chosen to stay at the office because he had started to feel increasingly uncomfortable at his place of residence.

  He was thirty three years old now. He had enjoyed his life quite a bit, but he had also always kept his responsibilities at the forefront of his mind. He had always been aware of the fact that he was his father’s only child, and that meant that it was going to be his responsibility to make sure that the company moved forward and prospered. He was going to have to be the one that took the business to the next level when his father finally chose to retire completely and handed over complete control to him.

  However, in spite of the fact that he got flawless grades and always did a good job, the fact that he partied so hard and slept around so much had made everyone brand him a playboy and a reckless wild card that had to be controlled. His parents had started to think of him in this manner as well. It was not enough that he was doing a perfect job running the company as the CEO. His parents had stopped trusting him, and were thus hell bent on making sure that his playboy past was behind him once and for all.

  He was not a playboy anymore, of course. He didn’t sleep around all that much, and whenever he did have a one night stand he made sure that the girl knew exactly what was going on. He never led a girl on, and whenever there was a girl that he felt might end up feeling like she could get something out of him he started keeping her at arm’s length. He was too smart to allow anyone to sully the reputation that he had been building around him.

  However, his slowly improving reputation was not enough for his parents. They wanted something a lot more concrete. They wanted him to get married, and get settled.

  Mike looked at his phone for the first time since eleven pm last night. There were three missed calls, and half a dozen text messages. All of them were from Madeline.

  Madeline Jones was a socialite with a very wealthy father who had a company of his own. Henry Jones was an old friend of Mike’s father, Michael Gamble the Second. However, Henry did not have a son of his own to run the company for him, and his daughter was certainly not the kind of person that would take well to a job like this.

  Mike knew that it was no coincidence that his father was trying to set him up with the daughter of such a powerful businessman. He knew that his father had a plan in mind, just like he always did. His father was planning to get Mike into the family business that Henry Jones owned and operated, so that when Henry finally retired he would consider handing that business over to Mike as well. With both of these billion dollar businesses in command, the value of the company would double overnight and make the family one of the richest in the entire world, thrusting them well into the top ten list that they had not yet managed to break into over the course of their business careers.

  Mike appreciated his father’s sentiments. There were two reasons why his father wanted this, of course. The second reason was that he believed that if Mike finally settled down and got married, there would be no chance whatsoever of him returning to his playboy lifestyle. Mike knew that his father looked at him like some sort of ticking time bomb. He knew that his father was constantly on the verge of stress because he feared that his son might be tempted by the playboy lifestyle yet again, and would end up doing something that could harm the family business in the long run. This was his father’s way of making sure that his son did not mess up.

  A doubling of the company’s value and assurance that his son would never return to the playboy lifestyle again. A strong heir to his empire, and the prospect of making his empire greater than it had ever been before. This was a classic Michael Gamble II move. This was the sort of subterfuge and cunning that had gotten him so far in the world of business. Mike just wished that his father wouldn’t use this cunning on his own son.

  Mike had not gone home because he knew that his father had been planning to come to his apartment to talk to him about the whole marriage deal. He had noticed that Mike was not exactly enthusiastic about what was going on, and he knew that Mike was not going to easily give in if he was n
ot spoken to. Mike did not want to have this conversation with his father. Between his father’s inevitable house call and the smitten Madeline calling him and trying to get him to like her, Mike had started to feel like he was going crazy and no one could really blame him for feeling this way.

  It was ten minutes past seven in the morning. Mike had slept on his couch in his underwear, keeping his office door locked so that he could be sure that he would not be disturbed. However, it was going to be time to get back to work soon. He had a closet in his office in which he kept a few spare suits and shirts, and his extravagant bathroom had a shower in it as well which he could use to freshen up. No one would know that he had not gone home the previous night. That was a good thing. He did not want anyone to know what was truly happening in his personal life. It would make everyone think that Mike was, perhaps, not good enough for the job. Mike already had enough people that doubted him.

  As the son of the owner of the company, Mike had faced a lot of resistance when he got into his position as CEO. Most people assumed that he had just been given the position because his father wanted his son to be taken care of. Everyone had known that Mike would get a big position at the company, but no one had thought that he would end up getting the top spot. Hence, when the top spot was eventually given to him most people were hostile towards him, treating him like he was some child that did not deserve all of the things that he was getting.

  Mike had known from his very first day in this office that he was going to have to control this company with an iron fist. He had known that he could not let anyone doubt his efficacy in the role, nor let anyone doubt the legitimacy of his claim to the top spot at the company. This was when he started to get a reputation as a workaholic and a very temperamental man. Part of it was true. He really was a workaholic. He didn’t see any other part of his life that held true meaning, he just felt like his job would be the thing that would make people think highly of him in the long run.

  But part of this persona that he had cultivated for himself was also a ruse. He wanted people to be afraid of him. He wanted people to think twice before they thought about interrupting him in a meeting or undermining his authority in any way. This was the only way that he would be able to truly lead the company in the way that his father had envisioned. He was a fighter, and that meant that he would stop at nothing to make people understand that he was not just competent enough to run the company, he was the only person in the industry that could do the job as well as his father had done.

  He sighed as he took off his boxers and entered his bathroom. A long hot shower was just what he needed right now. He didn’t usually get the time to take long, leisurely showers because he needed to get to work by eight at the latest, and he usually stayed at work until ten. That meant that he usually left his home at a quarter past seven, and he got home a little before eleven. He only had time to undress and sleep, and in the morning he only had enough time for a three minute shower and breakfast on the way to work from his favorite restaurant and coffee place.

  For perhaps the hundredth time this year, he started to wonder if he was truly happy. Was this really living? Was this how people were supposed to spend their lives? With no time for anything but some sort of nebulous, ill defined entity that had been passed down by an older predecessor? He had never asked to be the CEO of the company, it had just been something that his father had always expected of him. He had been trained for this from the very beginning of his life, from childhood.

  As he showered, he realized just how tired he was. He considered living at the office. Was it possible for him to build an apartment over this office? He just needed a room with a bed and a TV that he probably was never going to use. He sighed once again. That was a very depressing prospect indeed. His life was this merry-go-round of commitments and responsibilities, each and every one of which were responsibilities that others had handed to him without any regard for what he wanted with his life.

  This job, his inevitable marriage, all of these things were what his parents wanted from their darling son. They had this roadmap of his life in their heads, and it was as if they would not rest until they saw their son firmly following this roadmap. He wanted more from his life. He had dreams of his own. He was so rich that nothing he could ever do would overshadow what his father accomplished, but he did not want to overshadow his father. He just wanted his own life.

  He had been a software engineer first and foremost. That had been what he had studied at college, that had been the very thing that had made him want to get into the company in some small way. But when he had asked his father to let him work in the software development section of the company, his father had refused saying that the company was to be run by a Gamble and there was no other way that things could play out.

  Mike had shifted to business as a result, but his passion for software never died. He still wanted to develop an app of his own. He loved games of all kinds, he wanted to create a game that would bring joy to people’s lives. His creativity was dead because of this job, but he knew that if he started to focus on this idea of his he would start to have ideas immediately.

  But, the sad problem of his life was that his parents would never allow that. They controlled him completely. Even now, even though he was thirty three years old, they never let him sell his shares in the company. They refused to buy his shares because they could not believe that their son would use the money for anything worthwhile. They assumed that if he was allowed to go free in this manner, if he was allowed to do whatever he wanted with the money that he got from selling his part ownership of the company, he would blow it all on drugs and alcohol and prostitutes.

  In order to make his parents see that he had left his hard partying lifestyle behind him, he was going to have to get married. But getting married to Madeline would mean that he would remain trapped in this company forever, because his father would want him to keep working on the projects that would arise from the Gamble-Jones partnership and merger. And there was no other woman in his life, he had left all of that behind him.

  The true irony of the situation was that Mike had left all of his sordid dealings with women behind him in order to prove to his parents that he had changed. But his parents didn’t believe him, and because he had sobered up he had no way to prove that he was a new man. He could have married anyone at all, even for a little while. After selling off his part ownership of the company he could have divorced his wife, it would have been a fair trade-off. A business transaction. But there was no one that he could do that with now.

  He exited his bathroom and sat down at his desk. He was wet and the water was not good for the plush leather of his office chair but he did not care. He sat on that chair, completely naked, and placed his feet on the desk. The next ten minutes were going to be the only minutes he got to himself for the rest of the day. He could stall his father for a few more days, but then he was going to have to end up giving in and marrying Madeline. It was the only way that things would be able to work.

  He glanced at the amber whiskey in the bottle in a corner. He wanted a glass. It was half past seven in the morning and he wanted a glass of whiskey. This was not normal at all. In fact, this was incredibly destructive. He needed to take control of his life again somehow.

  He decided to get dressed, wearing one of his smart brown suits. Such expensive suits, each costing upwards of ten thousand dollars. All for what? What purpose did these suits serve?

  He needed coffee. Something, anything in his system. Any chemical that would make him feel something else. Usually, he would enter his office at eight on the dot and he would have hot, steaming Turkish coffee sitting ready for him courtesy of his personal assistant. But it was still five minutes to the time that his assistant was supposed to get here, as it was only twenty minutes to eight. He could not blame her for not having his coffee ready when he had not even gone home the previous night.

  He thought of making the coffee himself, but then realized that he did not know how to make
Turkish coffee. He had been drinking it every single day ever since he had discovered it three years ago, and yet he did not know how to make it. He grimaced.

  The new assistant came in at sixteen minutes to eight. She was a minute early. This annoyed Mike for some reason. He was feeling very moody, and he had been hoping that she would be late so that he could give her a piece of his mind. In the back of his mind he knew what an utter asshole he was being, but he was an entitled rich man. Such things rarely made their way to the forefront of his mind.

  He exited his office and entered the little mini office that lay between his own place of work and the hallway beyond. The new PA was sitting there, looking up at him wide eyed. Her name was Kizzy, he remembered now. He was glad that he remembered , as it would have resulted in a lot of awkwardness had he forgotten.

  She was gorgeous, one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Her skin was as dark as the coffee he drank every single morning, and smoother than the feathers of a dove. It was as if she had been woven of silk. Her hair was bushy and unapologetically so. She was not the type of woman that would alter her appearance based on how other people felt she was supposed to look, and that was the sexiest thing about her.

  Her lips were full and seemed to be slightly parted all of the time in a look that was both thoughtful and elegantly sexy. She had a pout but it was not feigned. That was just the way her mouth was. Lips made for kissing, skin made for stroking. Her cheekbones seemed like they had been carved out of pure marble, and her eyes seemed like the depths of the ocean. Mike wondered what secrets lay beneath the surface, what things he could discover about her if he looked deep into them.

  Her body was also fantastic. Hips that swayed with every movement, breasts that were full and visible against the fabric of her shirt. And yet, her body seemed perfectly proportioned as well. Her ass was round, a true bubble butt, but it was not like something out of a comic book. Her breasts were full but similarly realistic. Nothing about her was exaggerated or artificial. She was a real person, her beauty was real, and what Mike always enjoyed in a woman was realness. A grounded, gritty, realistic woman who knew her strengths and was not afraid to tackle her weaknesses.