Page 56 of Parading the Cowboy Billionaire (Bluegrass Ranch 4)

“Tonight?” she asked, clearly distracted.

“I thought you guys had another family emergency meeting at Old Ember’s tonight.”

“Later,” she said. “About ten?”

“All right,” he said, and she agreed and hung up.

Cayden sighed and looked out his window as he thought about Ginny. Things with her had been going amazingly well, despite his busy schedule combined with hers.

Sometime at the beginning of June, she’d texted him dozens of pictures of her mother’s new living conditions, and Cayden had enjoyed that. She seemed happier now that her mother wasn’t living on the second floor of the mansion, but he’d also had to hide in Ginny’s supply closet once when her mother showed up unannounced at her office.

She was certainly more mobile now, and Ginny had been dealing with pop-ins for weeks. Cayden had stopped going to her office, which was probably just as well, as it was a long drive there and back, and he had plenty keeping him busy here.

He stood up again to gaze down at the plans. The arena could hold nine thousand people in the stands and on the grass, and those fifteen-dollar tickets had sold out in forty-eight hours. The Bluegrass Suites on the third level—six of them, three on each side—had been booked by The Gemini Group for their employees. They’d paid tens of thousands for all six rooms, and Cayden wasn’t complaining about that.

He’d reserved the Chappell Coatroom on the fourth and top level for his family, and he’d turned in his menu a week ago. Three more suites took up the top floor, and then their premier space sat on the rooftop, with open-air, nearly three-hundred-sixty-degree views of the track and grounds.

That space had been divided in half, and each sold for twenty-five thousand dollars. They’d taken a bit longer to sell, and Tim had handled those high-rollers. Cayden had written personal emails to owners, breeders, the other horse farms around Dreamsville and Lexington, celebrities, and anyone else he’d encountered throughout the years in his job at the public relations director at Bluegrass Ranch.

In the end, the Darvill Family had bought one, and they were bringing their entire family. They ran a ranch south of Lexington, where three of their Derby winners and studs were buried. They’d definitely turned more to the tourism aspect of Horse Country, and the one time Cayden had checked to see if he could get a van tour to see the graves of the great horses, they’d been booked for eight months.

The other rooftop space had gone to celebrity chef Lisa Long, as she owned several racehorses that her trainers worked right there at Bluegrass Ranch. She wanted to bring her employees from her start-up restaurant in New York City, and they were planning a company retreat for the few days before the Smash.

He admired the arena on the individual pieces of paper, then gathered them all up and slipped them back into the right slot in his expandable file folder. He pulled out the papers in the next slot back, which were all the entry forms for the horses. The racing would begin at one-thirty, and he, Tim, and Darren had sorted the horses into age brackets, gender races, and length heats.

All in all, there would be eleven races, one about every half an hour, with a culminating event at the end of previous high-stakes winners. No one from the Belmont, Preakness, or Derby had been allowed to enter, but if a horse had won over two million dollars in their career, they could enter the high-stakes race.

He’d been surprised they’d gotten as many entries as they had.

All the horses racing in the Smash could be bought, and all of those sales were being handled through their Sales Office or the app that Cayden had commissioned back in January. He was dang proud of that app too, and it worked just like an auction.

Every horse would enter the auction the moment their race ended, and it would last until the starting bell rang for the next race. Whoever was the top bidder at that time had just bought himself or herself a horse.

Bids could be done through the app, which updated in real time, or through any window in the arena. Their signage would update in real time too, and Cayden’s stomach buzzed with anticipation to see how this would go.

He, Tim, Darren, Lawrence, and Mariah had been testing the app for two months now, and everything seemed to work. Last time, he and Lawrence had stood in the arena with all their displays on, and as the app updated, so did they.

They’d found a few bugs they’d passed on to the developer, who was a younger guy in his late twenties who’d made six figures to drop everything and create the app Cayden described to him.

All purchases had to be paid for in the Sales Office, and Cayden had his full veterinary staff coming in for the Smash, the same way he did for their other sales. This part of the Smash didn’t concern him, as he’d run dozens and dozens of horse sales over the years.

“What else?” he asked, sliding the entry forms back into the folder. It had cost five hundred dollars per horse to be entered, and all of that money had gone to the programs, so people could see which horse was running in which race, what kind of horse they were, age, winnings, times, the full nine yards.

The proof for the program would be in on Monday, and Cayden and Lawrence had an appointment with the print shop already.

Once the menu selections came back, Cayden would need to meet with Chef Bryson to go over the food order. He fingered those papers in the folder, but he didn’t take them out. The food would cost thousands, and Cayden closed the file folder and turned to his computer.

The Summer Smash needed to turn a tidy profit if they were going to keep doing it. The hours he and Lawrence had invested in it alone required that. He opened the master financial spreadsheet, which he looked at every single day.

Several other people had access to it, and as they updated their expenses and included revenue, the numbers changed.

He only needed to know one—the profit. It sat down at the bottom of over one hundred lines, several columns over, highlighted in red, with the text white.

Right now, with their entry fees, seats sold, sponsorships, banner costs, construction costs, app building cost, and several other items, their profit sat just above five hundred thousand dollars.

He frowned, because he wasn’t sure that was enough. “For six months of work?” he grumbled. “We still have three weeks to go.”

The food costs hadn’t been put in, but neither had the percentage of each sale Bluegrass would collect when someone purchased a horse. There were parking fees too, and likely thousands in concessions, as well as bar, restaurant, and café income.

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