Page 6 of Mayhem
“Wait,” Chayse stated, a spark in her eyes. Erin saw the exact moment the other woman put it together. You’re moving here?!” she questioned excitedly as she bounced in her seat, and Erin laughed.
“That’s the plan.”
“When?” Chayse questioned.
“When I find a place here in town. My lease was up in January, and instead of renewing it, I decided to do month-to-month.”
“You can stay at my place,”Chayse told her, and Erin raised a brow. “I mean, if you want to. Think about it. My lease is up next month. I can renew it and add you to it, and the place will be yours since I’ll be moving out.”
Erin thought about it for a moment. Chayse’s apartment was lovely, and it had a second bedroom, which she could use to take clients in if needed. After the move, work would not be steady until she got her name out there. However, Erin had saved a bit of money, and she’d discovered several tattoo conventions hosted in and around Denver that she could attend to pull in income as well. She could live on those things for a few months.
It wasn’t a bad idea, and if she could get Chayse to renew it for six months, it would give her the option of moving to somethingsmaller if business hadn’t picked up by then. Erin found herself nodding.
Chayse squealed with excitement, and a few people turned to look at them. Erin just laughed.
“Have you told Alijah?”
“Not yet,” Erin responded.
“She is going to freak.”
Erin was sure she’d have the same reaction as Chayse. They were all close, so the fact that they’d been separated had been hard on them, especially Erin. She didn’t do well with losing people she cared about, even if it was to distance. She honestly didn’t know what had kept her in Florida for so long after Chayse had left, but she’d gotten the push she needed.
“Mr. Adair.”
Cruz looked up from his computer screen to the woman standing in his doorway. She shifted from one foot to another for a moment.
“Yes?”
“Your four-thirty just called and said they would be about an hour late.”
Cruz glanced down at the time on his computer. It was four thirty-five. “Call them back and reschedule for some time at the end of May,”he responded, returning to his computer screen. Cruz listened to Jane momentarily hesitate at the door before disappearing from his doorway.
Glancing over at his office phone Cruz made sure it wasn’t set to send his calls to voicemail. Though he already knew it wasn’t. His new assistant insisted on coming to his door whenever she needed to tell or ask him something. He wasn’t oblivious enough not to have realized why. The woman just wanted to look at him.Cruz was sure that somewhere down the line, that might pose a problem, but at the moment, she was doing a better job than the last two he’d had.
Cruz leaned back in his chair. This was the second time he’d pushed this meeting back, and each time, it was due to the client not respecting his time. Cruz thought the other man would have learned from the first time when he had rescheduled the meeting, pushing it back four weeks. He would see how he felt about eight. After all, it wasn’t as if Cruz needed him. It was the other way around.
Picking up his cell phone, Cruz sent Nik a text asking when they were supposed to meet for dinner. He was sure the other man told him when he asked if he and Paetyn would join him. However, Cruz also knew that Nik had an uncanny habit of changing times at the last minute if he got…occupied as of late.
When Nik confirmed seven thirty, Cruz decided to call it a day. His four thirty would have been his last appointment, and he could do the rest of the work for the day from home or tomorrow. Shutting his computer down and grabbing his things, Cruz stood and exited his office, closing and locking it behind him.
On his way out, he nodded at Jane. Since she was on the phone, he assumed she was rescheduling the meeting. Instead of the elevator, Cruz opted to take the stairs. It was only four flights down. The main building was smaller than his research building.
He entered the parking garage and tossed his things into the backseat before getting behind the wheel. Since he had a few hours to kill before Nik’s dinner, he decided to head home and maybe work out for a bit before getting ready.
It wasn’t time for most people to get off, so he didn’t have much after-work traffic, which was good because it would have made his drive a bit longer. They lived about ten minutes outside of the city in the suburb of Lakewood. His office was almost fortyminutes from the city center, and the last thing he needed was traffic to make that drive longer. Though admittedly, he tended to speed once out of the center and made the drive in about half an hour.
When Cruz came up the long driveway, he pressed the button to open the second garage and pulled his car in.
Cruz placed his thumb on the reader beside the door and stepped inside once it unlocked. He went upstairs to his bedroom to change for his workout. First dropping his briefcase in the attached office. He was standing in his boxers, grabbing a pair of sweats, when Paetyn appeared in his doorway.
“Hey, did your meeting end early?”
Cruz looked over his shoulder at him. “No, I rescheduled it. They were late.”He pulled on the sweatpants before grabbing a pair of socks from one of his top drawers. “How did teaching the new chef go today?”
Paetyn sighed. “He’s a great chef. Very precise.”
Cruz sat on the bed and began to pull on his socks. “But?”
