BLAKEThree straight days of working nonstop with Aston and her team was paying off. Breakfast on Saturday morning was packed and people were still streaming into the lobby. I sat on one of the new couches, waiting for Aston to finish up with a meeting.We still had a lot of work ahead of us, but I was satisfied so far. California had a lot of potential. I didn’t know why we hadn’t paid this kind of attention to it before. Three days of focused, driven promotion of the branch and there was already an increase in traffic.And the company hadn’t even really thrown its weight behind the branch. Not yet, anyway. In my next report to my father, I was definitely telling him that this could, and should, be one of our biggest branches. With Aston at the helm, this branch could make a turnaround for sure. Fuck making cuts here, we should be looking at increasing their capacity instead of decreasing it.The increased traffic made Aston a lot busier, but I enjoyed seeing her on top of her game.

ASTONThe hotel was insanely busy and I loved every second of it. I finally felt like I was doing my job and not simply being a placeholder management used to keep everyone happy.I was making a difference, and trying to save people’s jobs. It was an amazing feeling.As curious as I was about how Blake knew everything he knew, I couldn’t deny that I would never have pulled this off without him. He was not only the one who brought the need for these changes to my attention, but he was also the one who was instrumental in making everything happen. With everything going on, we hadn’t had a chance to talk yet.Since he’d asked me to lunch, I was hoping we could take the little bit of time we would have to finally get to that talk. There were a couple of things I had to check on in my office before I could give him an answer about lunch though.Pulling up my emails, I checked on the arrival time of the new coffee we’d ordered to stock the rooms with. Blake somehow made a deal where we got

BLAKEIt was late by the time I landed in Florida. My mind was in a daze. It felt like I was stuck in a bad dream. I replayed the morning over and over again in my mind, trying to change the way it ended. But it never changed.All I could hear was Danny’s voice telling me our father was in the hospital. That he’d had a stroke and I had to come home. To my dad’s home, anyway. I didn’t really have a home anymore. I guess I thought of Florida as home because that was where my father was.If anything were to happen to him—my throat threatened to close up. Breathing was hard enough as it was without those kinds of thoughts.It felt like it took ages to get to the hospital, but in reality it was only a matter of hours. Unless my watch was broken and it had, in fact, taken as long as it seemed.The roads were quiet this time of night around here. Dad’s neighborhood was one of the quieter ones and the hospital Danny told me they were at was right on the outskirts.It was dark except for the p

BLAKE“How’s it going today, Dad?” I sat down beside the bed in the intensive care unit, checking the wall of monitors hanging behind my father. It had to be the world’s most depressing headboard. The machines beeped and blinked rhythmically, the only sound in the glass bubble that was my father’s bedroom for the time being.I touched my hand to his forehead.It was clammy, cool.My stomach rolled. I hated seeing him this way. The man was a titan of industry, a legend whose name was associated with success and spoken with the highest regard the world over.It was getting harder to remember that with each passing day. Lying in his metal framed hospital bed, he was wasting away right in front of my eyes. More worrying still was that he hadn’t yet opened his own.It was day three of my own personal hell, waking up to come spend the day with a man who wasn’t even conscious. The doctors still couldn’t say if he ever would be again.We were playing a waiting game, waiting on a man I’d never

ASTONSighing, I tossed my phone down onto the bed beside me and let my back fall to the mattress. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. I was so damn tired, but I couldn’t sleep anymore.Sleep was getting harder to come by the longer I didn’t hear from Blake. At first, it was worry about my job that kept me up at night. Sleeping with the son of the owner of the hotel was the single most unprofessional thing I had ever done, and I hadn’t even known it at the time.I was terrified I was going to get fired for being the worst manager the hotel chain had. I told Blake the truth about being a virgin before we slept together, but jumping into bed with a guest wasn’t a great first impression.Another worry was that he didn’t believe me about being a virgin. At first, I wondered if he was avoiding my calls because he thought I slept with guests all the time and was processing the paperwork to have me removed from my job.There was nothing in our company policies that specifically proh