Page 17 of Passion’s Song

“Okay. Also, I just got word that the tickets for Senator Landry’s reelection fund-raiser came through.”

“Awesome,” Damien said. “Put it on my calendar.”

“Oh, and Kurt called. He wanted to know if you two were still on for lunch.”

“Why didn’t he text me?” Damien pulled his phone from his pocket, making sure nothing was wrong with it.

“He said he wanted to hear my sexy voice. Your brother is such a flirt.”

Damien rolled his eyes. “I’ll text him in a minute,” Damien said. “Do you mind ordering chicken lo mein and the shrimp in garlic sauce from Five Happiness?”

“I’m here to grant your every wish,” she said, eliciting another eye roll from Damien.

He quickly went through a few more emails before shutting down his computer. Just as he rose from his desk, Clarissa’s voice came through the phone again.

“The Gambit is on hold,” she said.

Damien stared at the red blinking light. He pressed the intercom for Clarissa. “Can you take a message?”

There was a beat of silence before he heard heels clopping and his door sprung open.

“Take the call,” Clarissa said. “You do not turn down a call from the Gambit.”

Damien cursed his decision to have a less formal office environment as he picked up the phone. As he expected, the paper, which was one of the top entertainment news outlets in the city, wanted to interview him for what they were calling NOLA Notables. Damien had no doubt that this was a direct result of the Top Ten Eligible Bachelors article. It was as if the floodgates had been opened. He was no longer seen as just a businessman in the city. He was now a “notable.”

Damien wasn’t sure how to handle this. In a way, it was press—it was good press. And good press was golden. But he wasn’t sure how this type of press would come across to potential investors. Would they see it as good-natured fun, or would they see it as a reason not to take him seriously?

He would have to figure out how to make this new local fame of his work to his advantage, because it wasn’t going away anytime soon. Something in his gut told him that having April on his arm, with her refined taste and regal manner, was the way to go.

Damien only hoped that he was making the right decision. He had too much riding on this to get things wrong.

* * *

Damien wound his way down the parking garage’s spiral ramp, then headed straight for his brother’s favorite Chinese restaurant in what was known as the Carrollton area. The hostess knew him by face, seeing as Damien made a weekly appearance at the restaurant. He’d been stopping in for takeout every Friday for the past two years, ever since he returned to New Orleans.

He backed out onto Carrollton Avenue and made his way across the city to Bayou St. John. Damien considered this area, which was part of New Orleans’s Mid-City neighborhood, as the gold standard when it came to locations that had revitalized themselves following Hurricane Katrina. The neighborhood, which was made up of a collection of colorfully painted houses done in the colonial and Italianate styles, along with a number of one-of-a-kind eateries and retail shops, was the heart of New Orleans. Residents banded together and rebuilt their community into something that was even more spectacular than it had been prior to the storm.

The area had grown by leaps and bounds in the past couple of years. Millennials who had come to New Orleans to take advantage of its budding tech industry, small families who’d moved out of the suburbs, but who still wanted the sense of a close-knit community, had found their way to Mid-City.

And where the people came, commerce followed. New businesses continued to spring up, changing the landscape of the neighborhood. It was exactly what Damien had in mind for Alexander Quarters. He could turn that area into a viable part of New Orleans, too.

Damien pulled into the driveway of the single-story bungalow he’d purchased for his brother two years ago. Instead of taking the front steps up to the porch, he walked along the access ramp, inspecting the wood for warping. After a week of late-evening downpours, Damien wanted to make sure the rain hadn’t affected Kurt’s mode of getting into the house.

Thankfully, according to the meteorologist, the rains were done for the rest of this evening. It shouldn’t hamper the affair on Julia Street tonight.

The front door opened and Kurt wheeled himself out.

“Hey, man, what’s going on?” His brother, who was older than Damien by four years, greeted him with a huge smile.

“Nothing much,” Damien answered. “Other than you hitting on my office manager, that is.” Taking the hand his brother held out to him, he bent low for a one-armed hug.

“Hey, she’s the one who flirts with me,” Kurt said.

“Says you. Clarissa tells another story. And the problem is I wouldn’t know who to believe out of the two of you.”

Kurt put a hand to his chest. “That hurts.”

Damien knocked him on the shoulder. “Let’s get inside and eat this food before it gets cold.”