Aidan shook his head. As if he wasn’t already surrounded by enough blissful lovebirds to mess up his mojo for years to come!
He couldn’t begrudge Dad and his beloved Sally their nuptials, though. The two had found each other after years of living alone, so Aidan was happy for them. Still, all of his problems had seemed to start around the same time that everyone began to get happy and fall in love.
Dad and Sally had decided to conduct the ceremony right here on Alleria next month, so that was one more item that needed to be coordinated. In the meantime, Aidan was scheduled to fly to California this coming weekend to take care of some legal business that had to be finalized before Dad married Sally Duke.
“Damn.” He’d forgotten to get started on those documents for his father. What the hell? It wasn’t like Aidan to forget something like that. Was he losing his grip? Hell no, but he had lost his secretary. She’d abandoned him to marriage, too. Just when he’d needed her most, his trusted ally had fallen in love and gone off to Jamaica to marry her sweetheart. Why did the woman have to quit the same week Logan left town?
At the risk of repeating himself, what was the deal with all these weddings lately?
All that creeping happiness had begun to close in on him and he was pretty certain it had caused the balance of nature to shift. The end result was that Aidan kept forgeting stuff. It made an odd sort of sense, really. Aidan would never in a million years have anything to do with the state of matrimony himself, and yet here he was, surrounded by weddings. It was downright bizarre. No wonder Aidan had taken his eye off the ball. Everything in his carefully organized world was going up in smoke lately.
He pulled out his smartphone and compared his electronic calendar with the written schedule he kept on his desk, checking to see if anything else had fallen by the wayside lately. Ordinarily, he was on top of every single detail of Sutherland Corporation business, but as he checked his calendar, he noted that since Logan’s wedding a week ago, he’d allowed a few things to drift. They wouldn’t cause any major problems, but that didn’t excuse his forgetfulness.
The Erickson deal, he noted, would have to be handled within the next three weeks. With Logan away on his honeymoon, Aidan decided to hand the project off to Ellie. He’d been doing that a lot lately, he admitted to himself, but only because he was knee deep in other plans and strategy involving the boutique hotel the Duke brothers were about to break ground on a few miles away on the north shore of the island. The Dukes were his cousins and were experts at negotiating with the unions, but they weren’t here on the island. Not yet, anyway.
And frankly, Ellie would handle the deal better. While there were no better negotiators on earth than Aidan and Logan, Ellie brought an extra touch of nuance to any discussion. She could handle Erickson, the union bosses and the Dukes with no problem, he thought. Not that he would pile all that on her, but the fact was, if she was in charge, they’d get done. Clearly, with all that was going on, Aidan had to admit he couldn’t depend entirely on his own memory right now.
As a rule, Aidan thrived on meticulous attention to detail. And didn’t that sound like he walked around with a giant stick up his ass? He didn’t. He was cool, calm and laid-back at all times, damn it. An easygoing guy. But he still expected things to run smoothly and he paid his well organized team a lot of money to make sure they always did.
“Knock, knock.”
“What?” he demanded, whipping around to glare at whoever was here to aggravate him.
“Ooh, not a good time?”
“Ellie.” Aidan relaxed instantly at the sight of Eleanor Sterling, his senior vice president, standing at his office door. “Come in. Sorry I barked at you.”
“Something not going smoothly?”
“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” he said. “A little mix-up over at the construction site, but we’ll work it out. In fact, you’re just the person I wanted to talk to about it. But you go first. What’s on your mind?”
“I have a list of things to go over with you,” she said, holding up the small, sleek computer tablet that was never out of her sight.
“Of