Page 1 of The Forbidden Sitter
Part One
Chapter1
Gannon
The first dayof November and a chilly wind tore through our fair city of Los Angeles at ten in the morning. The first cold front of the fall season had arrived, bringing with it an enthusiasm forchange.
I stood, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows of my fifteenth-floor office. In the distance the waves coming in off the Pacific Ocean took my attention as I waited for my personal assistant, Janine Lee, to let me know when my video conference was up andgoing.
My job was CEO of Forester Industries; a business passed down to me by my father. He’d inherited the company from his father and had turned it from a million-dollar company to a billion-dollarone.
Was I born with a silver spoon in mymouth?
That would be a yes. I had never known hardships, poverty, or the feeling of going to bed hungry. I had only known the world of the super-rich. A world where you asked for something and you got it. And it all happened veryquickly.
Maybe all that instant gratification wasn’t healthy for me, because I was impatiently waiting for the first time in my life. At thirty, some might say I hadn’t even begun to live my life yet, but waiting for my dream to be built felt like an eternity tome.
At a prestigious nightclub in Vegas one night a few months ago, I met a couple of fellow billionaire’s at Hakkasan, a nightclub for the extremely wealthy. One could blow a hundred grand with ease at the place. And it was there that a plan was hatched to build a nightclub comparable to thatone.
Hakkasan was number one on the top-ten chart of high-status nightclubs around the world. The men I met that night wanted to build something even better than that. And right here in L.A., the place we all called home,coincidentally.
It took us no time to find a place and get construction going on the club. Currently, we were bantering about the name of the place—hence the conference I was waiting for. We were at the stage where the name was necessary to order insignia and other things that would carry the nightclub’s name onthem.
I turned away from the window as my office door opened. There stood Janine, all four-feet-five-inches of her. Her short hair hung in dark-black, silky strands around her round face. Thick-framed glasses housed her chocolate eyes. One hand on her hip, she jerked her head in gesture. “Mr. Forester, your Skype conference is up in the conference room. August Harlow and Nixon Slaughter are ready and waiting for you,sir.”
“Excellent.” I strode across my large office, following her to the room at the end of the hallway. “Do you think you could find me a coffee this morning? Something that says fall ishere?”
“I’m on it, boss.” She flipped her hair and turned, heading off to find what I’d asked for. The woman was amazing. At nearly forty, she was adept at making things happen for those she worked for. I was lucky enough to have found her when her old boss had passed away a few yearsback.
She and I had something in common, we found out, as we accidentally met at the funeral home where her boss’ memorial was taking place and where my father’s body had justarrived.
It was in the hallway that we both went for the same box of tissues. And in that tragic moment, we found each other. She told me about her boss and her lack of a job as a personal assistant. I told her about how I was —now—with the loss of my —father—the CEO of a large business and could use a personal assistant. And in that sad moment, a partnership was made that would make us both feel better about life in general after suffering from ourlosses.
My mother had passed on several years prior to my father. Breast cancer took her from us. Being an only child, my father’s death left me utterly alone in the world—something I wasn’t real crazy aboutbeing.
But with Janine’s appearance right at the time I felt the most alone I’d ever felt, came hope. Perhaps things wouldn’t always feel the way they did at that time. One day, things would get better. One day I wouldn’t be the only member of the Forester family. Or so I hopedanyway.
Not that I was looking for a wife or anything. I was a bit on the busy side to be doing that. But once I had things the way I wanted them, the nightclub included, then I would slow down and find time to date more and find Miss Right. Instead of what I had been doing—settling for Miss RightNow.
Currently, I wasn’t even messing with Miss Right Now. I was involved in my work as the CEO and my work with the club. There just wasn’t time for anythingelse.
Stepping into the conference room, I found my partners faces on two of the large screens that ran in a circle around the room. Some conferences for the business took up all seven screens at once. We were global, afterall.
August and Nixon greeted me with wide smiles as I came in and took a seat. “Morning, gentlemen. And I do use that term lightly,” Ijoked.
August smirked. “So the time has come for us to put our bickering behind us and agree on a name for thisnightclub.”.
Nixon picked up, “Let the record show, I like the name, ClubX.”
I threw down, “And I’ve told you before, that name is much toocommon.”
“Yes,” August agreed. “But, Gannon, you have yet to come up with a name. You’ve shot down all the ones we’ve come up with, though. So I am throwing you into the middle of this debate and challenging you to come up with a name on the fly so to speak. You have oneminute.”
“What?” I looked back and forth at the screens, finding two earnest faces. “I’m not that creative. You guysare…”
“You’re wasting time, Gannon,” Nixon remindedme.
August’s arched brow told me he was completely serious as he looked at his watch. “The time is ticking away. Thirty seconds, Gannon, or we’re sticking with ClubX.”
