by Cat Carmine
Copyright © 2018 by Cat Carmine
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For anyone who’s ever wished for a second chance.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Also by Cat Carmine
About the Author
One
“Oh my God,” I moan. My skin is slick with sweat, so flushed it’s practically hot to the touch. “We need more fans.”
“We already have seven,” Kyla points out, as she kneels in front of the open mini-fridge and swings the door back and forth, trying to usher some of its precious cool air out into our sweltering office. “I’m afraid if we add another one we’re going to blow a fuse.”
I glance down at the power bar that juts out from under my desk. There are so many plugs jammed into it I’m surprised the whole place hasn’t burned down. I collapse backwards against my chair.
Big mistake. My back sticks to the cheap vinyl and I lean forward with another moan, scooping the damp auburn tendrils of hair off my neck.
“Do you at least have a hair elastic?”
Kyla nods, still swinging the fridge door. “In my desk drawer.” She’s got her chest pushed so far into the appliance that she looks like she’s about to crawl right in. She looks ridiculous, but mostly I’m just jealous I didn’t think of it first.
Despite the fact that right now, Kyla is tits-deep in a refrigerator, she’s actually one of the most together and effortlessly cool people I know. We’re the same age — twenty-seven — and about the same height — five foot four — but that’s where the similarities end. Her dark hair is bleached blonde on the tips, and she’s always wearing t-shirts with bands I’ve never even heard of. She carries a messenger bag, ironically emblazoned with the logo for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Most of the time she has on her big white noise-cancelling headphones. She’s the kind of person who always has the perfect song for everything.
I, on the other hand, live in yoga pants and only carry purses big enough to fit a wine bottle and a foot-long sub. I cry at most — okay, all — commercials that have animals or babies in them. I never have the perfect anything.
I yank the drawer of Kyla’s desk and wince at the piercing squeal as it scrapes open. I find the hair elastic and have to use my hip to smash the drawer closed again as I knot my hair up on top of my head. Ah, that feels better. I don’t know what I was thinking, leaving it down today.
“Remind me again why we opened up our office on the surface of the sun?” I lament to Kyla as I flop back down in my chair.
Kyla finally emerges from the fridge, but not before she grabs two cans of Diet Coke and hands me one.
“Because,” she says, as she flips the tab on her can. “My parents are giving us an awesome deal and there’s no way we could afford an office in Manhattan otherwise.”
“Right, that.” I grin and press the cold can against the exposed part of my chest for a minute, before cracking it open and taking a long swallow.
Kyla and I started Marigold Marketing almost a year ago now. For the first six months or so, we worked online, meeting in my Brooklyn apartment or at a coffee shop when we needed face time. But business picked up, and soon we craved a more permanent space. Somewhere we could spread out. Somewhere we could call our own. Plus my sister, who I share an apartment with, also happens to work from home, and both of us crammed in a little apartment all day was proving dangerous for our relationship. There’s only so much Emma The Perfect I can handle in one day.
So Kyla and I set a budget and started the search for our perfect office space ... which quickly turned out to be a complete and utter pipe dream. If housing in New York City is bad, commercial real estate is even worse. Even moving out to New Jersey would cost us more in rent than we made in three months.
Then Kyla’s parents stepped in to save the day. They own and operate a laundromat in mid-town Manhattan, in a building they bought in the seventies, when they first emigrated here. The property is worth a gazillion dollars now, and they could sell it and make a mint, but according to Kyla, they’re happy running the U-Coin Laundromat and don’t intend to give it up any time soon.
Which worked out perfectly for us. The space upstairs from the laundromat was only used for storage, so in exchange for helping them clean it out, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang agreed to rent it to us. The amount they charge us is barely a pittance — we couldn’t rent an office in Boise, Idaho, for what we’re paying, never mind New York City, and having a Manhattan address gives our business a legitimacy we’re hoping will help us land bigger clients.
Not that we could ever bring them to our office for meetings. Not unless we want to start including a sauna package in our service offerings.
I take a long swallow of the Diet Coke and set the can on the edge of the desk, next to the green file folders that have been staring up at me all morning. I flick the edge of one of them with my nail.
“Do you think we should talk about this now?” I glance at Kyla. She eyes me over the edge of her can as she drinks, and then she sets it down and sighs.
“I guess we should.”
She drags her chair to the little round table we set up in the middle of the room. We found it on the side of the road one day, not far from my apartment, and hauled it on the subway all the way to Manhattan. It has the green felt top of a poker table, and a deep gash on the edge that we’re pretty sure came from a bullet, so we figure it once belonged to some kind of illegal gambling operation. But it’s our conference table now, or at least what passes for a conference table at this stage in our careers.
I drag my own chair up to the table as Kyla spreads the file folders out. There are three of them. One spills over with papers, but the other two are slim and nearly empty.
“Do I want to know?” I ask, staring down at them.
“No. But you can probably guess.”
“Probably,” I agree with a slump of my shoulders.
She nudges one of the slim folders towards me.
“These are the accounts that are paid up.”
I flick the file open and skim the four single sheets of paper inside.
“Right.” I swallow. Four accounts paid up, and none of them all that big.
“And these are the invoices that haven’t gone out yet.” She nudges the second folder towards me.
I open that one too, running one roughly
chewed nail over the pages inside — seven of them, this time. A little better.
“This isn’t bad,” I say.
“Look at the totals.”
I flip through the pages again, mentally adding the numbers printed in the ‘total due’ section of each invoice.
“Damn,” I mutter.
“Yeah. April was a slow month, since we did that pro-bono work for the Dress To Impress fundraiser.”
“Right.” There’s not much I can say about that — the Dress To Impress project had been mine, and Kyla is the one who’d reluctantly agreed to it.
I close the folder and push it away.
“What’s this one?” I ask, gesturing at the third folder, the one that’s at least an inch thick. “This looks more promising.”
But Kyla shakes her head, cutting off my budding optimism.
“Those are the invoices that are due.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Let me rephrase. Those are the invoices that are overdue.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.”
“So we’ll start calling them. We did the work — we deserve to be paid for our efforts.”
“Sure.” She pulls the folder out of my hand and opens it up again. “Where should we start? The women’s shelter we did that social media campaign for? The bulldog rescue group that needed a new website to promote the forty-nine dogs that had come into their care and needed to find homes? Or, oh, maybe we could start with StreetTeens and tell them they owe us for the fundraising marketing we did.”
I look at Kyla in dismay as she slides the folder towards me again.
“Which one, Rori?”
I don’t answer. Instead I open the folder and flip through the pages inside, looking at the invoices.
The names bring back a rush of warm memories — StreetTeens, Bulldog Rescue NYC, Liberty Village. Kyla and I do a lot of great work with Marigold, and we made a conscious decision early on to focus our efforts on non-profits, charities, and community groups.
What we hadn’t counted on was that most of them are stretched as it is. Paying for our services is difficult, even when they desperately need them. Especially when they need them.
Add in the fact that neither of us want to be the sheriff who chases down delinquent payments, and ... well, let’s just say our bank account isn’t exactly growing.
“We’re losing money at this point,” Kyla sighs, as if reading my thoughts. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Me either.” My voice catches in my throat. Kyla and I met in marketing school, where we both enrolled to get a marketing diploma once we realized our English Lit degrees weren’t landing us the cushy jobs we dreamed of. We soon discovered we shared a mutual passion for giving back — and for red eye coffees from the cafe down the street from our college — and we kept in touch after the course was over, even after we both took jobs at different PR firms.
Every couple of months or so, we met up for a red eye and a catch-up session. And after my best friend Celia followed the love of her life and moved to Chicago, Kyla became the closest thing I had to a BFF.
Back then, we inevitably spent our time together bitching about our jobs and how we’d do things differently in our own firms. No bullshit clients! No waste-of-time meetings! Friday afternoon dance parties!
One red eye lead to another, and the idea for Marigold Marketing was born.
A year later, our caffeine-induced hubris is clear. What were we thinking, starting our own company? Neither of us have ever run a business before. Sure, we’re good at marketing. Kyla is an amazing designer and all around creative genius, and I promise you that even in my yoga pants, I could strategize my way out of a paper bag — and make the whole thing go viral on YouTube. But neither of us know a thing about running our own business. That much should have been obvious when we started looking for office space with a six-hundred-dollar-a-month budget. I’m surprised our broker didn’t laugh us out of the room.
I take another sip of Diet Coke to distract myself for a minute. When I set the can back on the green felt, I wipe a layer of sweat off my brow.
“Well, we’re going to have to start calling the people who owe us. It sucks, but we can’t work for free.”
Kyla nods. “I know. I just hate it.”
“Me too,” I agree. “I wish we could afford to take on more pro-bono work.” We’ve started doing that over the last couple of months — like the Dress To Impress project. The charities appreciate it, and we love to do it, but pro bono doesn’t pad the bank account.
“Okay, then, agreed?” I flip the folder closed. “We start calling and following up on our outstanding invoices. We can split the list. I’m sure it won’t be that bad.”
“Can we start tomorrow?” Kyla asks with a sigh, grabbing the folders off the table.
“Dear God, yes.”
We both laugh, and Kyla stuffs the folders back into the filing cabinet where we won’t have to look at them.
At least not until tomorrow.
“Did it get hotter in here in the last half hour?” I ask. I pull my shirt away from body and flutter the fabric, trying to cool my stomach.
“I think they’re running Buttercup. Feel the vibrations?”
“Oh, Buttercup.”
Buttercup is our nickname for the industrial dryer downstairs. It’s an ironic nickname, of course, because Buttercup is a bitch. She’s a bitch and a half, actually — the machine takes up almost the entire back room, and when it runs, it raises the temperature in the place by a whole ten degrees. Not to mention the rumbles that echo deep in your gut. I’m pretty sure the damn thing is as old as the laundromat. It might even be as old as time itself.
Cheap rent, I remind myself as I blow a stray strand of damp hair out of my face.
I grab the small fan off my desk.
“Don’t judge me,” I warn Kyla. She grins as I lift my shirt and point the fan straight at my disgustingly sweaty chest. I swear my bra is half a shade darker than when I put it on.
“Hey,” she laughs. “No judgement here. I think it’s brilliant.” She grabs her own desk fan and does the same thing. Thankfully Kyla and I have the kind of friendship where seeing each other’s sweaty tits doesn’t faze us.
I sigh happily as the slightly-cooler air from the fan pummels my chest, while Kyla leans over her computer and opens up her music app. The next second, a rap song blares from her tiny speakers.
“It’s getting hot in here,” I laugh, recognizing the lyrics as soon as the first notes play. “This should be our theme song.”
“Be it resolved,” she shouts above the music, “that Marigold Marketing now has its own theme song.”
We start dancing around like fools, holding our shirts up over our heads and pointing our fans at our chests. We must look like complete lunatics, but these are the kind of moments that make me love being in business with Kyla. No way could we do this at a regular office.
I’m so into my dancing that I don’t notice when Kyla stops. I wave my elbows up and down in some kind of fan-holding chicken dance while she clears her throat, and then I give my ass a good and healthy shake.
It’s not until she says, “Rori,” that I stop. Then I turn. Then I see him.
I stand there shocked for a moment. Unable to move. Frozen in place at the sight of the man standing in front of me. He’s older than he was the last time I saw him, but there’s no mistaking that chiseled jaw, those pillowy soft lips, those piercing blue eyes.
“Rori, your shirt,” Kyla whispers. I feel like I’m in a trance. She takes the fan out of my hand and I let my shirt fall back into place. My entire body goes numb.
“Hello, Rori.” His deep voice fills our tiny office.
“Son of a ... Buttercup,” I whisper.
Two
“Have you talked to her yet?” My business partner Levi Goldman is sitting across from me, his legs crossed. He bounces one foot up and down.
“Going over there this afternoon,” I assure
him. I don’t mention that I’ve had Marigold Marketing’s website open on my computer browser for days now, staring at their ‘About’ page and the auburn-haired beauty pictured there.
Rori Holloway. As breathtaking as the last time I saw her. Her face, at least in the picture, hasn’t lost any of the openness I remember, and her wide smile is as friendly and down-to-earth as it always was, despite her more imposing ‘Chief Strategist’ title.
“You think she’ll go for it?” Levi asks, examining one perfectly manicured nail.
“Of course. Why wouldn’t she? It’s a huge opportunity for her.”
Levi raises his eyebrow — as well manicured as his nail. “Remind me, how do you know this woman?”
“We went to school together.” An understatement, but Levi doesn’t need the whole sordid story. All he needs to know is what I’ve told him. That Rori Holloway is the perfect person to take on our … rather unique marketing needs.
“College?” he asks.
“High school.” I don’t elaborate further.
“Ah.” He says nothing else, but his eyes narrow as he studies me, and I wonder what’s running through his mind.
Levi and I have been business partners for coming up on eight years now, and we’ve built our firm, GoldLake Developments, into one of the biggest and most successful in the city. Which, in a city like New York, is a stunning accomplishment. Levi is everything I’ve ever wanted in a partner — cold, calculating, ruthless. He sees everything as a risk or an opportunity. Doesn’t matter if it’s properties or people, his approach is the same: what can he get out of it? Or, alternatively: how can this hurt him?
