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I returned my attention to the program in my hands, my impatience starting to get the best of me. My eyes landed on the F-4 and I scanned up from the listing to the current item on the block in an attempt to figure out how much longer I’d have to wait until the beauty would be mine. There was a crapload of vintage cars that were being cycled through, and after they were all spoken for, the F-4 would be the first of the three planes that Carl Edwards had owned—good thing I only wanted one.
I sighed, waiting for the next car to be brought up to the auction block. The showroom was really just a massive warehouse that had been decorated to the nines. I was fairly sure that when the space was not in use for events, it wouldn't look all that much different from my own warehouse back home, which was about as no-frills as it could get. Dull cement floors, off-white ceiling tiles, and permanent grease stains. In contrast, whoever had planned the auction, had really gone all out to transform the typical warehouse into an expansive room that felt more like some fancy hotel ballroom.
A plush green carpet had been laid down over the floor, each chair around the center stage was draped in heavy linen and embellished with little gold ribbons tied around the back, a decorative touch that I could almost guarantee ninety-nine percent of the people in the room didn't give two shits about. Or maybe it was just me.
They’d even gone to the trouble of setting out two marble topped bars, one on either end of the room. When I’d shown my ticket at the door, I was given my bidding paddle and three paper tickets. Each one could be traded in for a drink.
I wasn’t about to become fancy, but there were definite perks to living the life for an afternoon.
One other perk to the highbrow affair was the absolutely staggering amounts of beautiful women in attendance. Usually, at a car or plane auction, there would be models who’d been paid to attend and show off the assets of the cars—a.k.a. their own assets—and flirt shamelessly with the potential buyers, in hopes that the items would fetch a higher price on the auction block.
This was different.
These women were dressed to the nines, and though some were wearing fairly revealing attire, none of them looked like the typical car show models I was used to seeing. Nope, this was an entirely different caliber of women.
High-class women—or hookers—it didn’t matter to me.
They were a fun bunch—and I could fuck any one of them just as prim and proper as the next millionaire—but they usually didn’t want that. These women wanted a ride. A hot, take-no-prisoners, fuck. And I was just the man to do the job.
I scoped the room as the auctioneer took the stage to start bidding on a pricey Jaguar. It appeared that most of the women were either spoken for—or paid for. I could get used to this.
Some of the women were dangling off the arms of some rich-looking geeks, smiling and networking with anyone they got close enough to talk to. It was kind of an odd scene. Half auction and half socialite event. Or maybe it was just an auction with a bunch of high-class hookers. In any case—attached or not—I knew if I wanted to—I could take home just about any woman in the room.
They didn’t call me Player for nothing.
I smiled to myself, thinking about my old call sign from my days in the Navy. Sometimes, in the hustle of my new life as a business owner and entrepreneur, those days felt about a million miles away. If not for my best friend Jack, a.k.a. Boomer, McGuire, I had a feeling I’d wonder if those days had happened at all. I didn't regret leaving the Navy. It was both a duty and an honor to take over the Rosen Air Museum after my father's unexpected passing nearly two years ago. And I’d made the most of it. In that short span of time I'd grown the business from something more akin to an expensive hobby into an extremely profitable business. My progress had opened more doors for me than I'd ever thought possible.
But there had been tradeoffs as well.
Instead of spending my days flying ops overseas aboard an aircraft carrier—I worked sixty hours a week—, sometimes more, chasing down new planes to display at the museum and fixing up the ones I bagged. When I wasn’t coated in grease and cussing out stubborn, rusted bolts and finicky engines, I took tourists up for flight tours of the coast in any one of the old planes I'd rehabbed back to life and managed nearly a dozen employees that made the day-to-day operations at the museum possible. I would’ve never thought Rosen Air Museum would be so big and profitable—and so much work.
