Page 1 of Bargain With the Boss
Prologue
Xavier
Two Years Ago
March came in with a howl of wind and unseasonable temperatures for Crescent Cove. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my peacoat as sand shifted under my boots. I climbed the hill toward my biggest acquisition.
Once upon a time it had been a strip mall of sorts. At least that was the best name I had for the husk of storefronts that sat above the best stretch of beach on Crescent Lake.
It had been a year since I bought the land on a lark with Gavin Forrester and Jude Keller.
Truth be told most of my acquisitions were on a lark. Well, that was until I hooked up with Gavin and Jude. Once we discovered how well we worked together, we made it official.
FHK Property Group had been born.
Now we owned and rented out properties all over Crescent Cove. We started out with shops on Main Street, then added rental apartments, new build homes, and warehouses. Thanks to our combined capital we’d diversified and grown exponentiallyin the year since we’d bought Lakeview Terrace. Not that our property deserved that snazzy name at the moment.
It was a damn wreck. The smudged glass that used to read Brantley’s Delicatessen had a spiderweb crack coming out of the corner thanks to one of the storms this winter. The storefront beside it had changed hands a dozen times, all of them trying to sell everything from beachfront trinkets to T-shirts, but nothing really caught on. The most successful of them was the corner gallery.
However, without the foot traffic from the beach, all the businesses had faded into obscurity.
Most people spent time on the watercrafts and sunning on the docks on the other side of the lake these days. A Jet Ski or sailboat had a lot more lure when it came to the massive expanse of Crescent Lake.
But we had a vision for this bit of land. The crown jewel of our property—our beach—would bring foot traffic back to the area as soon as we made it hospitable. It had untapped potential on a number of levels.
Finally, above the storefronts was perfect for apartments for young professionals who weren’t ready for the baby fever that afflicted my hometown. I’d lived here all my life and didn’t remember such a baby boom in all my thirty-two years.
An old memory scratched at my brain and I pushed it back where it belonged. The what-ifs always sent me into a spiral. The past needed to stay in the past. Period.
I’d seen the proof of surprise babies blow up this town in the last few years. My sister, Luna, had been one of the unplanned moms. In the end, it all worked out, ending with my witchy tarot and aura reading sister marrying a Catholic school teacher.
Life had one helluva sense of humor.
Fate’s sense of humor included the insane number of setbacks we’d had since we bought this stretch of real estate.We’d been fighting to get permits approved to start building and were blocked every step of the way.
I had a feeling Arthur Maitland had a hand in that particular problem. He was our direct competition when it came to the future of Crescent Cove. Where we wanted to build community and create spaces for entrepreneurs and bring in local businesses, Maitland wanted to cash in on the lake view.
His plans for high-end spas and a resort would price out a lot of the families that called the Cove home.
He’d already come to us offering to take the property off our hands —at a loss, naturally—so we didn’t lose any more money fighting the red tape we were dealing with.
The Hastings family had a lot of pull as one of the founding families, but my parents were more involved with banking and money. The fact that I’d been focused on real estate instead of following in their footsteps had been another bone of contention which didn’t help the cause. My father thought my little side project would fade away. Instead, I shut up about it, preferring to fly under the radar. I wanted my family money to build up Crescent Cove, not just make stacks of cash on loans and investments.
The sound of Gavin’s truck rolling on the broken blacktop dragged me out of my musings. Instead of a power suit, he was in his foreman gear. Jeans, layers of thermal and flannel, and steel-toed boots that could break a bone. His long-legged gait ate up the patchy parking lot as he met me near the lone picnic table under the still-to-bloom red maple creaking in the harsh wind.
“You called an SOS?”
I tipped back on my heels. “Only way to get us all together.”
We both turned to see Jude rolling up in his latest rental car. He still hadn’t pulled the trigger on moving from Seattle to New York, but disentangling from his family’s business was proving more difficult than he’d planned.
Jude’s dark hair was tousled from the wind, leaving him looking a bit less austere than usual. Since he’d been on the East Coast for business, I figured it would be a good way to get us together to figure out how to get our waterfront project moving.
He met us at the picnic table, his hands jammed in his suit pants. “Didn’t get the memo it was spring?”
“It’s been a brutal winter. Persephone’s not quite ready to come back out to play.”
Jude snorted. “The things that come out of your mouth.”
