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2
JASE
Home was a three-level penthouse on the upper East Side of Manhattan that Emilia and I shared. There’d never really been any question about whether we’d live together once we were wealthy enough to buy it.
We’d been living together since we were teenagers, after meeting in a foster home in Kansas twenty years ago.
Having aged out of the system after neither of us had been adopted, I spent seven long months on my own after turning eighteen, waiting for Emilia to reach the same age. I’d taken three part-time jobs and had done nothing but work and sleep a couple of hours a night, saving every penny I could so we could get the hell out of Kansas and move to New York.
I’d managed to buy a run-down, beat-up car for a couple of hundred bucks and it had held up long enough for us to reach our destination before it died completely. The first few years had been tough, living in dives passing themselves off as motels, and taking whatever jobs we could get while studying everything we could online at local libraries.
We’d made a plan about the direction our lives would take together before we’d left our foster home. Our foster parents had laughed when they’d discovered our notes after snooping in our rooms and had seen fit to inform us we were deluded.
We were never going to amount to anything and giving ourselves false hope would bring nothing but misery down the track.
But we were determined, and not even their ridicule and scorn stopped us. We were going to become business partners and build a vast empire that would make us rich beyond our wildest dreams. We studied business, reading books borrowed from the library and digging out discarded magazines from the trash.
We used the internet at the library and read everything we could get our hands on, educating ourselves about how to run a successful business and learning what we needed to about the financial side as well. We’d even snuck into university classes and listened to some lectures on various subjects, careful not to get caught.
Watching television programs about flipping properties had gotten us interested in real estate, and after Emilia had located an article about how big the market for sex toys was, we looked further into it and decided it was a smart investment.
We’d also both taken unpaid internships with a couple of successful businesses one summer. Mine had been in real estate and Emilia had talked her way into working for an escort agency. What she’d learned that summer had sparked what was now an empire that made us millions every single year.
The business of selling pleasure was something we’d never thought about, but it had made good business sense. After all, everybody had sex. Everybody sought pleasure, whether it was at their own hand or with a partner, at a club or buying discreetly online.
That was a big selling point with our website. All customers were guaranteed discretion with their purchases. Hidden Pleasures wasn’t listed as the name of the store they purchased from on their credit card statements; instead, it came up as Shooting Stars Enterprises.
All items were wrapped in plain brown paper before being shipped, so even if they were opened the contents wouldn’t be easily identifiable. The packing slips only showed item codes, not names.
It was why we had so many repeat customers, and our mailing list had millions of names on it. We were America’s biggest selling online sex toy and lingerie shop, and we were proud of that.
But our businesses would live without our undivided attention for one afternoon. It was lunch time, and I wanted to get Emilia out of here. She needed a break, something to distract her mind from the cheating douchebag.
I powered down my laptop and slid it into my bag before stepping outside to instruct Marian to discard any more messages from Patrick. I made a mental note to get Connor to contact him and tell him if he continued to reach out to Emilia we’d have him up on harassment charges, because I knew if I called him myself I’d lose my temper.
Fucker.
Emilia slipped out of her office, her large handbag on her shoulder and her laptop in her arms. I took the latter from her and slipped it into my bag next to my own as I smiled at Marian. “We’re taking the afternoon off and heading home. Think you can manage without us?”
“I’ll try my very best.” The corners of her mouth twitched. “Have fun, you two.”
I took Emilia’s hand and led her to the elevator which took us down to the parking garage underground. Our personal driver, Stuart, was waiting for us by our town car. He opened the door for Emilia and closed it behind me after I climbed in.
The traffic wasn’t heavy, given it was early afternoon on a Tuesday, and since we only lived nine blocks uptown from the office, the drive was thankfully short.
I let Stuart know we were done for the day and he could head home himself. He was on call round the clock, but only worked when we needed him. What he did in the hours in between was up to him, and since he didn’t live too far from us, he could get to us whenever we needed him.
Once inside our spacious penthouse, we separated to go change after placing our laptops in the home office we both used.
Emilia and I each lived on one floor. The top floor of the penthouse was where our private elevator arrived, and it contained the living room, kitchen, formal dining room, a bathroom, and the doorway to the private balcony that held our pool and outdoor entertainment area with a barbecue.
The middle floor was Emilia’s. She had a dressing room and walk-in closet attached to her bedroom, along with an en suite. She also had a library for her vast collection of books.
The bottom floor was mine and was similar in design to hers. I also had a dressing room and walk-in closet, the space required for all my designer suits. While my closet wasn’t quite as big as my best friend’s, it was still bigger than some apartments in Manhattan.
Both floors had a couple of guest bedrooms and separate bathrooms, but the truth was we rarely had guests staying with us. Our home was our sanctuary, our private space where we could just be Jase and Em, two kids from Kansas who’d made something of their lives.
Marian had stayed with us on occasion, as had one of our closest friends, Victoria Nolan. Together with her father, Joseph, the stunning redhead ran a hotel empire which spanned the globe. Their luxury hotels and resorts were second to none and had made them both billionaires.
