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Setting her bags on the floor, she looked around. To her left was the living room, in front of her the stairs, and to her right the hallway and kitchen.
“We are going to have our hands full cleaning this place,” Maurice said in a teasing voice.
She looked over her shoulder, keeping her emotions in check, and nodded. “Yeah, but I’m looking forward to it.” And she was. God, did it feel good to want to be a part of a life she’d wanted to get away from for so long.3“I want these files completed by five today. They have to be sent over to the McCain firm. Do you understand?” Elijah said into the phone, feeling his patience wane, his nerves about to snap, and his anger rise. He slammed the phone down after the call ended, breathed out, and closed his eyes. His business was booming, and the money was rolling in, yet he was more stressed out than he’d ever been in the past four years.
Turning in his chair, he stared out the window of his office. From fifteen stories up, he looked down and stared at the activity below. Although it wasn’t really that high, for the town of Grapplers Corner, it was considered a skyscraper view.
He stood, walked over to the glass, and continued to gaze down at the city below. After not moving for what seemed like several long moments, he heard a knock on his office doors. Without turning around, he called out for them to enter.
“Mr. Westgate?” his assistant, Brenna, said from behind him.
He turned and looked at her. She held a stack of papers and a manila envelope in one hand, and in her other hand, she carried a cup of coffee. She set the coffee on the table and handed him the paperwork.
“You have three appointments this afternoon and another one tomorrow. Mr. Jerald wants to talk to you about the new property development—”
“Cancel my appointments for the rest of the day and tomorrow.”
She was silent for a moment. “Okay. Are you feeling okay?”
He looked down at the files. “I’m fine, but the appointments today and tomorrow aren’t anything that can’t be dealt with later in the week.”
“Okay,” she said again and turned to leave.
Once the door shut behind her, he sat back down and rested his head back on the chair. Staring at the vaulted ceiling in his office, he felt strained, pulled, and tugged because of work, because his life was so hectic anymore. It was the evil that came with success. It was the strain that came with the payoff, the loneliness that came with being wealthy.
He picked up his phone and dialed the front desk. “Get Franco on the line for me, please,” he said to Brenna. After a second of silence, he heard ringing on the other end of the receiver. He waited for a man he’d first met years ago to come on the line.
“Elijah, it has been too long,” Franco, a Portuguese business investor Elijah had met five years prior, said in his deeply accented voice.
After they small talked for about five minutes, Elijah finally got to the reason he’d called Franco. “You remember that property you mentioned all those years ago, the one you owned about two hours from the city?” They’d spoken just last month at a gala, and when Franco had mentioned the property to another investor, Elijah hadn’t been able to help but grow interested.
“Si. I’ve been in the market to sell it and was speaking with someone at the gala, if you recall.”
“I do.” Elijah turned and stared out the window again. “I’d like to talk business with you regarding it. Personal business.”
“You in the market for property?” Franco asked.
Elijah thought about how lonely he was and how pathetic it was that he went home every night to his apartment and stared below at the activity on the streets. He thought about how he had no one, and when he’d been married, he’d felt more alone than when he stood in a room by himself. In the past four years, he’d become more successful than he’d ever thought possible, especially in a city that wasn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis.
He had no wife, and the women he associated with weren’t ones he’d be interested in spending the rest of his life with, not when it was clear their interests lie in his bank account. Yes, he was in the market for property, one that would give him the solitude and the peace he needed, even if he’d be alone.4Elijah pulled his Mercedes onto the cobblestone driveway of the cabin about two hours from the city. Franco wasn’t there yet, but Elijah was twenty minutes early. After cutting the engine, he climbed out of the car. Although this was considered a cabin, was out in the middle of nowhere on ten acres of thickly wooded acreage, and was the farthest thing from simplistic Elijah had ever seen, and he’d have his space.
