Page 1 of The Candlemaker

Chapter One

Chandler

“Another one fell through?”I pulled off my blue-light blockers and stared at my VP, Tom Morgan.

At his grim expression, I let the glasses drop onto my desk, and I pinched the bridge of my nose, the familiar pound in my temples coming into focus.Damn headaches.I’d worked late into the night for as long as I could remember, but only in the last few years did my head start to pound by eight o’clock. I wasn’t going to cut back my hours. Not a chance. So, I’d settled on the glasses to help with all the screen time, but I was starting to suspect even they weren’t going to cut it for much longer.

“Afraid so.” Tom grimaced and crossed his arms. “They didn’t give a reason either, except to say they were no longer interested.”

Just like the last five.

I was still getting used to his bald-and-beard look since he started shaving his receding hairline, but honestly, it took at least ten years off his sixty-eight. I wished it tookoff ten years from his impending retirement because I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do when he retired from Collins Realty and Acquisitions. He’d been my right-hand man from the beginning. Older. Wiser. His name belonged on the front of the building just as much as mine, but he’d never allow it. Never wanted it. Never wanted anything but my success. So I refused to think about how I’d manage all of this when the man who’d been with me through everything left.

“What the hell is going on up there?” I muttered low, my jaw clenching. This deal—thisshould’ve been a piece of cakesale—was turning into a shit show.

Nine months ago, I’d inherited an old, long-closed, former inn in the small town of Friendship, Maine, from my father. And I wanted nothing to do with it.Not the inn nor the man who’d abandoned my mother.So, I did what I did best: I slapped a for sale sign on it.

Collins Realty handled forty percent of the commercial real estate sales in Manhattan and almost sixty percent of commercial deals in Boston. The sale of some nondescript, historic inn in some seaside tourist town in Maine should’ve been a breeze. Instead, each of the five prospective buyers had fallen through with no clear reason why.

I’d never had so many prospective buyers evaporate so suddenly before, and it was starting to piss me off. I wanted nothing to do with my father—nothing to do with anything he decided to leave me—including this damn inn.

“It’s like he’s still fucking with me. Even in death,” I growled. “Like he knows I’m going to destroy what he left behind.”

My father was also in the real estate business up until a few years ago. His company, GC Holdings, had been strong while he’d been at the helm, but after he got sick and stepped down, things started to flounder, and I saw my opportunity. Overthe last three years, I’d carefully begun acquiring properties I knew my half-brother, Mark, was bidding on. I had more capital. More resources. It got easier and easier to pluck investments right out from under them, and GC Holdings started to flounder. And in a few weeks, it would more than flounder; it would sink.

“Or it’s just not our usual inventory,” Tom offered instead.

He wasn’t wrong. Collins Realty dealt in billion-dollar buildings. High rises. Condos. Hotels. Not in ramshackle inns.

“There’s still one offer on the table?—”

“No,” I clipped. “The Kinkade offer is too low.”

“Maybe they’d up it if you talked?—”

“And it’s too messy,” I cut him off, and it earned me the kind of chiding stare only Tom could dole out to the CEO. “Sorry,” I muttered.

When mydearold dad passed, the deed to this inn was given to my younger half-brother, Mark—the oldest child from his current marriage. A legal oversight because I’d done my damnedest to distance myself from Geoff Collins. However, a closer inspection of Geoff’s will indicated the inn was supposed to go to his oldest son—not from his current marriage. Not from any marriage. Oldest son, period. Which was technically me.In name fucking only.

But in that lag time between Mark thinking the inn belonged to him and realizing it was willed to me, Mark sold it to a local family in Friendship. Kinkade. I couldn’t even remember the guy’s first name. So, there was a whole legal shit show because the property was never Mark’s to sell. Anyway, once Collins Realty listed it for sale again, Kinkade made a second offer. I admired the perseverance, but the offer was too low, and the whole thing was too fucking muddled to sell it back to them.

“All right.” Tom sighed, knowing when he’d hit that stone wall of stubbornness in me. “I’ll drive up next week and see?—”

“No.”I sat back in my chair, glancing out the windows lining my corner office for the first time all day.Below, Copley Square was lit up for the night, a crowd of people all dressed to the nines collected under the red awning at the Fairmont hotel across the street. A wedding, it looked like.How much of my life have I spent watching other people live outside my window?

I shook off the thought and added my signature to the document I’d been reviewing when Tom came in and sent it off, sealing my acquisition of a multi-unit property in Boston that would’ve promised salvation for GC Holdings. But in my hands, it spelled their ruin.

I looked up at Tom and declared, “I’ll go. I just signed the paperwork for the Stocker building. I need you to finish up the acquisition.”

I’d tried to give Tom this office when we opened our New England headquarters, but he wouldn’t even consider it. Something about how if I didn’t have windows, I’d never get any sun. At that point, I knew any attempt to argue would only result in a conversation we’d had countless times before, and one I didn’t want to have again. I respected the hell out of Tom Morgan, but only my business was his business, not my lack of work-life balance or personal life.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I interrupted, my jaw clenching. “I’ll stop and visit Mom.”

That instantly appeased him because he visited her more than I did. Another tenuous conversation we’d had multiple times.

“She’ll be happy to see you.”

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