Page 15 of Billionaire and the Barista

NATHAN

Four years later…

I stood in my father’s office and stared at the piles of documents and file folders.

Of all the things to bring me back home, my father’s death was the last thing I had imagined. What had started off to be a two-week extended visit for the funeral, and to help my mother while she grieved turned into a permanent relocation. The morning I walked into the St. Louis office I realized I wouldn’t be returning to Europe anytime soon.

There had only been a few days’ notice for me to pack my bags and fly over from Amsterdam. My father’s sudden death caught us all off guard. I was staying in my mother’s house for the time following the service when my uncle, who had already returned to Europe, called and informed me that I would be taking over the US offices.

“How did he find anything in this mess?” I asked the assistant I had inherited with the position.

“He didn’t,” she said with a weary sigh. Her name was Cameron and she had managed— or maybe it was put up with— my father’s system for the past two years.

“Filing cabinets?”

She shrugged.

“And yet…”

“There was a method to his madness. Unfortunately, only he knew what it was,” she finished my thought.

The office wasn’t a madhouse of chaos, but it was unorganized. My father’s assistant didn’t know where anything was. He had been bad at delegating and wanted to be in control of everything. Case in point, my life.

I had been dangerously stupid, and I had been beyond my father’s control. Shipping me away from the local temptations and to my uncle had been my dad’s solution for forcing me to grow up.

It wasn’t my uncle who got me to finally act like an adult. There was nothing like a series of losses that put life into perspective. First, I lost Gabriella to my ego, and then I lost my friend Fred to a motorcycle accident. There wasn’t much left for me other than work.

Taking over the US office had been discussed many times. It was assumed that I would eventually transfer back to the States. But eventually had been an abstract concept, a lot like returning to find Gabriella and convincing her to come to Europe with me. It was a nice idea, but the reality of it was nothing more than a dream.

Well, the dream was coming true. Only it was more of a nightmare than anything else. And I certainly hadn’t thought it would have been under such rushed circumstances. I hadn’t brought any business clothes with me, and I stood in the middle of an executive office in jeans and a Henley with the sleeves rolled up.

“Suggestions, Cameron?” I asked, looking at the piles.

“We take over the conference room, bring in some temps, buy a bunch of bankers boxes for temporary filing, and get it sorted,” she said.

“Sounds like a plan. See to it. I am going to need to see any open property searches and the files for anything we are in the middle of.”

She made a low noise in her throat. It sounded like a threat response.

“Problem?”

She gestured to the piles. “Gavin should have open property searches, as that is his wheelhouse. But anything that is under contract…” she sighed. “I’m hoping we discover that he had a preferred pile. The only things on his desk were three properties actively in development. I’m going to miss the old man, but I am not going to miss his system. Sorry.”

She looked abashed with her confession.

“Not to worry. It’s not like he made this easy on either of us.”

My sleeves were already rolled up, it was time to hit the ground running. I had to catch up in a hurry. The US office handled more than hotels and resorts, the properties my uncle in Europe focused on. Here, the preferred developments were multi-use properties. We were creating communities from empty fields. Taking underdeveloped areas and breathing new life into them with combined living and commercial spaces.

And of course, after we manufactured a highly desirable destination, we brought in the hotels. It was a multi-phased approach. The US office had a more long-term vision when it came to development.

I dumped my jacket and case on the desk chair and flipped through the short stack of files on the desk. The first file was a multiplex in an area of St. Louis undergoing heavy re-gentrification. I knew the area well.

I slowly flipped through the documents, opening schematics, looking at photographs. I lingered over one in particular. It was an old turn of the last century style home with a shop on the first floor. Well, a coffee shop that was more bakery than anything. The upper two floors were a family-sized apartment, and then a smaller one-bedroom apartment.

I knew it intimately. Did Gabriella still live and work there? She loved that job. If she hadn’t been willing to leave it to go with me, I couldn’t imagine what would take her away from it.

I read through a few more documents. If we had purchased the property, was the building even still there? I pressed the intercom button on my phone.

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