Page 1 of Triplet Babies for My Billionaire Boss

Chapter One

Rodney

The investors were all present today, which was a sure sign it was a big day for the company. They sat around my board room table, eager to hear what I had to say. They would not be disappointed.

My news was big.

I sat at the head of the table, watching their faces as I let the anticipation build. From my best friend Markus Brown, to the talkative woman Stella, who had been the last to come on board, they all looked excited.

Time to give them what they’d been waiting for.

I stood up. “As you remember, the projections for the last quarter were steep. You were all worried about it. I’m here to tell you, you worried in vain.”

I opened the chart with the results for the past quarter and they were staggering. The investors all gasped in surprise. It was the same reaction I’d had when I’d gone through the numbers the first time.

Mark sat back in his chair with a smirk on his face, his dark eyes on me. He had been the first person to believe in me, and I knew that I had proved to him that his faith and his money had been well placed.

“What you see here,” I said, “is what Berry Software achieved over the last quarter. The release of the beta program was a success, clients are happy, and a survey suggests we’ll only move upward from here.”

“That’s impressive, Rodney,” Clair Holt said. “I have to say, I was skeptical when you showed us your projections, but you delivered. What do you have in mind for the next step?”

I rubbed my hands together. “I’m considering a new approach to one of our first products.”

“Like a relaunch?” Mark asked.

I nodded. “That’s exactly it. Why fix what isn’t broken, right? But we can definitely upgrade it.”

I replaced the projections slide with a preview of the new program I wanted to release.

“Impressive, Jones,” Tim Gallagher said. He was an old man with more money than he knew what to do with. That was saying something because Gallagher was a spender unlike the world has ever seen. In short, he was filthy rich and something of an inspiration.

“What I want to know is,” Gallagher carried on, “who you’re banging on the production line to produce such quality.”

Everyone laughed, including me, even though I didn’t think his joke was funny. They never were, but his investment constituted almost half of my funding money, so I would laugh until I was blue in the face. Life was all about which ass you were willing to kiss, and who was willing to kiss yours.

I’d started Berry Software when I was fresh out of college with nothing to my name but a handful of dreams and a student loan that would take me years to pay off. Markus Brown had been fresh out of college, too.

A few years before we graduated, he had accidentally wandered into the wrong dorm room one night when he was smashed. He hadn’t been able to remember what number his dorm room was, but somehow, he’d remembered the concept papers I had on my desk. He returned the next day to tell me he was interested in funding those concepts.

He’d received a large sum of inheritance money from a recently deceased grandfather, one he had barely known. The timing was perfect. I had desperately needed someone to believe in me.

Berry Software was born. We’d joked about popping our business cherries the way idiotic college students did, and the name had caught on. Berry had sounded better than Cherry Software, but we knew where we had started, and it was our inside joke. The downside of my company was the abbreviation. Shortening the name to BS didn’t go down well with anyone if I wanted to be taken seriously.

I wrapped up the meeting and thanked the investors for their time.

“We’ll see you again next month,” Claire said. “It’s always a pleasure to see how you’re handling our money.”

The other investors agreed, and one by one they shook my hand before trickling out of the boardroom. Mark stayed behind, and when it was only the two of us, he kicked back and put his feet up on the table, his hands behind his head.

“It’s such a pleasure to see the way you handle them,” Mark said. “It’s beautiful to see Gallagher’s pinched expression fade and his eyes twinkle when you talk money.”

“Keeping the lot of you happy is what I live for,” I joked.

“It sounds sad when you say it like that, but it’s the truth.” Mark folded his hands on his belly. It had grown over the years we had worked together.

We had both started out young and strong in college. Since then, Mark had had a good life, drinking and eating and being merry with a perfect family–a loving wife and two beautiful children. I, on the other hand, had known misery more intimately than happiness. I went to the gym regularly to metaphorically run away from my problems.

The downside was a ten-year-old with no mother. The upside was a great physique and an envious glance from my doctor who was the same age I was and hated that I was in better shape.

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