another minute. Her fingers flew over the keys. “I want to take you to dinner.”
“You what?” she asked.
“You’ve saved me a boatload of money and given me more financial tips than I could have ever expected to learn at some fancy college,” I told her. “I want to treat you to dinner to say thank you.”
She smiled. “When?”
“Are you busy in an hour?”
“I might still be doing your taxes in an hour,” she said.
“It’s fine. I’ll wait.”
“But I would need to go home and get changed,” she said.
I looked at the white satin blouse she was wearing with the button straining across her cleavage. “You are fine the way you are.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. “I’m positive.”
“Well then.”
“How long?” I asked.
She looked at me again. “How long for what?”
“Until we are done here.”
“Oh, maybe thirty minutes? I’m almost done.”
I leaned back in the chair. “I’ll wait.”
I was going to enjoy the wait because that meant I got to watch her and continue that little fantasy brewing in my head. The last two weeks had been fun. I never imagined I would ever think taxes could be fun, but here we were.
She was one of the few people that was nice to me. I supposed it could be because I was nice to her. I was never nice to anyone.
“Ready!” she said and shut down her computer.
“Did you drive to work?”
“No, I live close by. I usually walk.”
“Perfect,” I said. “We’ll take my car.”
The restaurant was nothing fancy, but I didn’t think she cared. We ordered and then it was just the two of us. It was almost a date. But not an official date. I wasn’t in the market for a girlfriend. I needed a wife that had connections and would kick open some doors that were currently closed to a young cocky bachelor.
“How did you get into this business?” she asked me. “I mean, did you wake up one morning and decide you were going to buy a business, fix it, and sell it for a profit?”
“It came to me while I was sitting in a boring business class. The professor was talking about a basic business model. It was about buying and flipping properties. I didn’t want to flip houses, but I got to thinking about businesses on the verge of bankruptcy.”
“What about them?” she asked.
“I lived next door to a laundromat. It was up for sale for over a year. I called the owner, asked what they were selling it for, and then made a lower offer. The guy resisted at first, but I knew he was desperate to sell. He took my offer after some convincing. I fixed the broken stuff myself. Slapped a coat of paint on it and cleaned the place top to bottom. I sold it two months later for a much higher price than what I bought it for.”
“You did the work yourself?”
I nodded. “I did. The loan I was able to get was just enough to buy the place. I had to do all the work myself.”
“Wow. And now you own two more laundromats?”
I smiled. “I do.”
“And will you sell them?”
“Once I find another business to invest in,” I said.
“So, you’re looking?”
“I am. It has to be the right one. I have a couple where I’ve talked to the owners, but they aren’t willing to sell—yet.”
“Are you hounding them?” she asked with a laugh.
“No,” I said a little too firmly. “I will not act like some don from the mob. My father does business like that. He’s this powerful man and he thinks everyone needs to bend to his will. He intimidates people. He bullies people into doing what he wants.”
“Like you?” she asked.
“Like me until I walked away and never looked back.”
“That must have been hard,” she said.
“It was the easiest and best thing I ever did,” I said.
“Do you have a relationship with him now?”
I shook my head. “Nope and I don’t mind.”
“That’s too bad.”
“It’s for the best. He was going to keep me under his thumb until I was crushed. I had to get away from him.”
“Was he mad?”
I laughed. “Oh, you could say that. He let me know I wasn’t welcome back and that I would get no help from him. He called me a loser and said I would never make it. He bet me I’d be crawling back in less than a year.”
“How long has it been?”
“Eleven years,” I answered.
She looked surprised. “Wow.”
“It’s taken a little longer than I hoped to make my money. I’m going