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Chapter One
Blakely Cohen glanced at her digitized to-do list and allowed herself a little thrill at the number of green ticks she had accumulated. Was there anything better than marking something off as done? No, no, there wasn’t, not in her world.
Next up: haul three grown aristocrats all the way from London to New York in three days. That was exactly what her boss, the Duke of Brairbrook, had entrusted her with, although he only used his aristocratic title when he was back in England, which was getting rarer and rarer. To everyone else, he was Andrew Symmonds, the owner of AS Properties, based in New York.
In between packing for her trip to London, she was also putting the finishing touches to her boss’ wife’s birthday party, which she had planned from scratch, and had also set up a very important meeting with an extremely reclusive oil baron.
If Blakely could dothat, she could definitely get her boss’ sons to attend his wife’s birthday party, despite them completely ignoring all her invitations, sent weeks ago, and also not taking any of her personal calls. They also ignored their own father. She wasn’t going to be deterred by any of that.
Firstly, she was efficient in getting things done, and secondly, her negotiating skills were on point. Take the reclusive oil baron. She had researched the man to within an inch of his life and discovered he had fond memories of eating a glazed donut with his mother when he was young at a small little bakery that had been out of business for decades now.
Blakely tracked down the owners of the bakery and found the baker himself had died, but his wife and son were happy to sell Blakely the recipe for a hefty sum and a little extra for being her taste testers.
She then made the oddball deal with the baron through his secretary. If Blakely could deliver a taste of his childhood memory, it would cost him nothing but a meeting with her boss. He accepted her challenge, and she spent weeks perfecting the recipe until the mother and son finally approved.
The oil baron also approved.
Getting three men to attend a birthday party was ironically going to be a piece of cake.
She neatly folded two black suit skirts, two crisp white shirts, and two sets of nude, seamless underwear into her suitcase. She followed that with two pairs of cotton pajamas and extra pairs of emergency panties.
After collecting her toiletries bag, which included her make-up in travel-sized bottles, she added it to her suitcase, zipped the bag up, and wheeled it to her front door.
She checked the watch on her wrist and was pleased that she was three minutes ahead of schedule, enough time to follow up with the pyrotechnician about his choreography for the fireworks display for her boss’s wife’s thirty-fifth birthday.
By the time the company car arrived to take her to the private hangar where she would be boarding Andrew’s private jet, she was waiting right on the curb. Every minute of her life had to be articulated and properly utilized.
Oblivious to everything around her since it was not her first trip on her boss’s private jet, Blakely accepted a bottle of water from the flight attendant and opened her tablet.
She pulled up the images of the Marquis of Haroldcot, Simon Cunningham, the Marquis of Burshire, Henry Bailey, and the Marquis of Brentlywood, Asher Milton.
She told herself it was just so she knew who she was looking for to explain why she found herself staring at their images again, notwithstanding the fact that she had already memorized each of their likenesses.
Weird. But whatever.
She’d learned from Andrew that he had adopted all three of them after a tragic accident took their parents’ lives when they were six months old. They were also their parents’ eldest sons, and Andrew had made sure they carried their legacy, which explained how they all held the title of marquis.
She then called up her emails, answered them all, and worked on a speech Andrew was going to deliver at a college on climate change. She also had to make sure that the damage control on an image circulating around the internet of Tanya, her boss’s new wife, caught with a piece of toilet paper hanging out of her yoga pants after a session at the gym was still working.
American tabloids couldn’t have cared less, but not so much the British tabloids who had a field day.
The only way Blakely could minimize negative press was to put a positive spin on it.Sometimes, toilet paper is going to stick out of your pants.
Her spin had been that life happened, especially to a busy mom trying to take time for herself by actually going to the gym to be healthy but also hurrying home to her babies because she felt guilty for taking ‘me time.’
Blakely employed a ton of influencers to spread the spin and also had Tanya appear on a popular American talk show, and voila, she successfully turned an embarrassing situation into an empowering one.
She allowed herself a smug smile because she earned it. She was damn good at her job and liked nothing more than to be challenged. She was never out of options in any situation.
And to think her boss had warned her that getting Simon, Henry, and Asher to do her bidding and board a flight to New York was going to be the hardest thing she’d ever do.
Pfft.
After working for Andrew for three years, there hadn’t been a task she hadn’t executed or a crisis she hadn’t been able to avert. Plucking three stubborn English aristocrats out of their lives for a weekend so they could attend their dad’s wife’s birthday party was child’s play to her.
Oh, they probablyknewthey were extraordinarily good-looking and obviously thought themselves god’s gift to the female race, but unlucky for them, she didn’t care much for those kinds of things, which explained why, or rather because of it, she had accumulated only one failed relationship in her twenty-five years of life.
That relationship had lasted all of six months before it ended. It still stung a little that it had been he who had initiated the breakup.
