Second Chance Mess (Bad News Billionaires #1) - Lucia Jordan Page 0,3

distract myself for a little while, just until I can get my head on straight,” I said.

“All right, man, well, be careful, and have fun. Sorry again about Brooke.”

When I hung up, we were almost to my apartment. I kept this downtown apartment just so that I would have a place close to the company office. My real home was an architectural delight that I built alongside the Cascade Mountain Range, and it was where I went every chance I could get. Being a billionaire CEO of a company that designs, builds, and converts shipping containers into modern, modular tiny homes, had the advantage of being able to create anything that I wanted for myself in my spare time. Max was an expert designer and had helped me construct my home in the mountains, which was comprised of four modular tiny homes stacked together. That home had garnered some major positive publicity for my company, Cubed, and made me one of the hippest and most well-known builders around. I think that was part of what drew Brooke to my company, which reminded me that she wouldn’t be there tomorrow.

Jaspers was one of the hottest nightclubs in downtown Seattle, and it was nearly impossible to get into the place unless you were part of the elite social scene. I called up a few friends—the kind of friends who were more like club partners than actual friends—and by the time everyone had arrived at the bar, I had already realized that this idea of mine wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t stop thinking about Brooke, no matter how hard I tried. I watched the people laughing and mingling, and I watched the girls dance in the middle of the dance floor. It looked like an undulating sea of bodies that were glittering with the sheen of sweat and makeup. But it was impossible for me to think about anything other than Brooke.

When Chelsea walked over to sit down with us, I almost got up to leave, but then I realized it would have been a ridiculous move for me to make. Nothing had happened that night, not for Chelsea’s lack of trying, but still nothing. Getting up to leave just because she came here to hang out with some of our mutual friends would be the same kind of avoidance that got me into this mess with Brooke, to begin with. Apparently, avoidance was more of an admission of guilt than I had realized. So, I stayed and hung out with everyone for a while, pretending to have fun and trying not to pay attention to the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about Brooke.

The next day, I was back at the office, and everyone was hitting the ground running with the new Spokane project. As much as I didn’t want to, I had to find a new assistant to take Brooke’s place. My schedule and the project workload at the company was just too busy not to have an assistant to help. I spent the morning interviewing a handful of people that my HR lady had selected. She said that as soon as the open job posting went live, there were more responses than there were hairs on a cat, which I assumed meant an unfathomable amount.

She selected the best ones and lined them up for interviews in my schedule immediately. By late afternoon, I had hired a new assistant to take Brooke’s place. The girl would start tomorrow, and it would feel weird. I sat at my desk for a few minutes before I started going through all of the motions at work without Brooke there to talk to, and the only word that I could use to simplistically describe how I was feeling would have been unhappy.

3

Chapter Two (Brooke)

This was just not going well. I was all moved into my new apartment space with Kate and was trying really hard to adjust to the change in lifestyle, but it wasn’t going well—at all.

Kate was great, and she has certainly saved my ass by letting me move in with her, which I loved her for. But she just wasn’t easy to live with. Her apartment was a wreck literally all of the time since neither she nor her boyfriend ever seemed to clean up after themselves. She had Nick over constantly, so he was essentially more like a third roommate than a drop-in boyfriend. On top of that, they were so overly sexual that they couldn’t seem to keep their