Take Two: An Erotic Romance (Book 1) Read online

  “M-Mathis Côté?” I stuttered. It felt as though I had just been thrown backwards out of my comfortable seat and straight onto my butt. Mathis Côté! It had been so long since I had seen him – since he had disappeared entirely from my life. I looked around the room stupidly, as if I could possibly have missed him the first time around among the overly-starched businessmen peering at me as if I had just uttered a curse word. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  “Mr. Côté will be in charge of training you to take over your great uncle’s investments,” Mr. Williams repeated. “That is the request stated in your great uncle’s will.”

  As the meeting wound down, I couldn’t shake the feeling of confusion. Just an hour ago I had been worried about meeting my next deadlines at work and whether or not I had time to wash my hair before meeting my friend Sharon for drinks. Now I was the heiress to my Uncle Andy’s lifetime of investments and I was going to be trained by… Mathis. Our friendship had been so long ago, but I still remembered it vividly as a time in my life where I had felt completely happy and carefree. But the way it had ended… I had so many questions I didn’t know what to think.

  My thoughts drifted back to that day in his office again – the first time my uncle had trusted me to be a part of his work. I resolved not to disappoint him. I would learn everything I needed to protect his investments. But seeing Mathis again after all that time… I couldn’t imagine how it would feel.

  Chapter 3

  I stepped out onto the street after the will reading with a sense of overwhelming relief. Outside the fancy building, which seemed to have more stories than I have hairs on my head, somehow everything felt a little less overwhelming. I was Amanda again, and my life was still my life. My relief was complete as I heard the familiar honk of a car horn accompanied with a “Mandy – over here!” I looked in the general direction of the shout and saw my best friend Sharon’s shiny blonde bob and bright smile through the window of her little green Chevy.

  “Hey,” I said, grateful to see a friendly face after the bland business crowd in the lawyer’s office.

  “Get in,” Sharon instructed, leaning over and opening the door for me. “We’ll go to Dino’s and you can tell me all about the will reading.”

  “Yum,” I said eagerly. Dino’s was a real treat – the best Italian in the city, complete with the best wine. Since I was taking the day off work and Sharon worked as a wedding planner – which, she insisted, meant that drinking was practically a part of her job - I figured we could treat ourselves to a bottle.

  Sharon chattered on about her latest wedding as we drove to the restaurant, and I let her talk, happy to have a break from my own problems.

  “So the groom went out to get his tux without even consulting me, and came back with a cheap, awful thing which doesn’t go with the bride’s gown at all, and doesn’t even fit him right,” Sharon chattered as we pulled into a parking spot near the restaurant. “If I were her, I’d find a new man. I’m serious! Anyways, the problem is they always book the honeymoons right away, and then it’s too late to get a full refund…” she trailed off miserably.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I reassured her. “Love is blind and all that.”

  “Better have no sense of smell either,” said Sharon with a shudder. “When he took his shoes off to try on the pairs I’d picked out I thought I was going to hurl.”

  “Ew,” I giggled. “Gross.”

  “Well, enough about my troubles – how did the will reading go? Any holidays in the Hamptons in the hand you were dealt?” Sharon grinned suggestively.

  “Well,” I said, frowning. Sharon squealed with excitement.

  I paused.

  Sharon’s jaw dropped. “Oh my god, he left you a house in the Hamptons!”

  “No no, he didn’t,” I laughed at her ecstatic expression.

  “Well what did he leave you?” demanded Sharon. Then, crestfallen, “Oh god, I’m so sorry Mandy. Here I am being a complete money-grabber when your Uncle Andy’s just died. I know how close you were to him.”

  “It’s fine,” I reassured her as her bottom lip began to tremble. “We were close, but I think I’m ok. We spent a lot of time together when I was younger, but I didn’t see him very often in the last few years.”

  “Still, it must be tough,” Sharon said sympathetically, apparently ready to make up for her extreme excitement earlier with some best friend support.

  “It’s a little strange,” I admitted. “I remember all the times I went to stay at his place as a teenager. We’d take his boat out on the lake, just the – just us. We’d pack a picnic and some ginger ale in a cooler and just lounge around on the water all afternoon, telling stories and making jokes.”

  “That sounds magical,” Sharon sighed.

  “It was.” I frowned as I thought back to the times we had taken his boat out. It hadn’t been just the two of us most of the time. For that one summer, the one that stood out in my memory, it had been the three of us, me, Uncle Andy, and Mathis. Even back then, Mathis had been my uncle’s most trusted friend – almost like a son to him. Perhaps it was because of what I had just been discussing in the lawyer’s office, but for some reason, I hadn’t felt like mentioning his name to Sharon.

  “I’d love to take a boat out on the lake,” Sharon was saying, her head resting in her hands and her chocolate brown eyes dreamy. “Me and Ryan, floating gently on the sparkling water, sharing our secrets over a bottle of Champagne…”

  “Mmm,” I said vaguely. In my mind’s eye, I saw a young Mathis grinning at me, his baseball cap on at an angle, his button-down shirt slightly open, handing me a bottle of perfectly chilled ginger ale.

  “You need to start dating again, Mandy,” Sharon said. “Otherwise you’ll have to sail your new boat all alone. Or lend it to me,” she added coyly.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I said, giving her a small shove. “Uncle Andy didn’t leave me his boat. I think he put it away years ago, it’s probably a bucket of rust now. Besides, there’s nobody else I want to go out on the lake with.”

  “What about that last guy? Terry? Or was it Jim?”

  “Brad?” I corrected her. “He was… just not the right person.”

  “He was cute,” Sharon encouraged. “And he had a great job.”

  “He just… he just wasn’t the right fit,” I sighed. “He was nice and sweet and everything, but I just felt like something was missing – that sparkle that you’re supposed to feel when you’re in love. There was never any overpowering, animal need for Brad. Or Jim… or any of them. I don’t think I’m meant to be together with a guy. It just never feels right.”

  “It will,” Sharon said wisely. “When you meet the right person. I don’t necessarily feel any animal desire for Ryan after five years together. But I know he’s the right person for me, because going home always seems a little bit better when I know he’s there waiting for me. You’ll find it too.”

  “Maybe,” I said, non-committal.

  “You will,” Sharon repeated. “You’re gorgeous and smart and possibly filthy rich. On that note, will you please kill the suspense and tell me what happened at the will reading?”

  “It’s a little complicated,” I admitted. “Uncle Andy wants me to take over his hedge fund investments, but I have to be trained to manage them.”

  “Huh?” Sharon said. “Trained? Who’s going to train you?”

  “An old family friend,” I said, quashing the strange feelings which rose up in my stomach when I thought about Mathis. “Someone who worked with Uncle Andy.”

  “Is he young? Is he rich?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, unwilling to go into details while my feelings about Mathis were so muddled. “If he worked with Uncle Andy, I guess he’s a hedge fund type too. I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

  “It’s strange,” Sharon said, losing interest in Mathis almost immediately. “I wonder why your uncle gave you such a big responsibility. I guess he really thought a lot of you.”
r />   “I guess,” I said. “Whenever I stayed with him, he always talked to me about how he had become successful. ‘Never let anything break your spirit, Amanda,’ he’d say, ‘pursue your dreams and don’t let your past or your present get in the way of your future’.”

  “He sounds like a wise man,” Sharon said with a sympathetic smile.

  “He was,” I agreed.

  He’d always been a great mentor. I remembered how he had taken Mathis under his wing, even more so than me. I felt like every time he’d say something to me, like ‘follow your dreams’, he was thinking about Mathis, who had risen from a poor background to train as a hedge fund investor under my uncle. By now I was sure he was incredibly successful, much more so than me.

  Now that I had to see him again – would he even remember the girl he used to spend time with? Would he be the same person as the young man Uncle Andy introduced to me? Would he still feel the same way about me as… but that was stupid. We were different people, and besides, I don’t know how he really felt about me. Not after the way he left.

  “Hey – what are you thinking?” I snapped out of my reverie as Sharon waved her hand in front of my face. “You completely zoned out.”

  “Just nervous about this tutoring, I guess,” I said.

  “When do you have to start?” Sharon asked.

  “The lawyer is going to call me – the family friend – Mathis – wasn’t at the will reading, so the lawyer’s going to get in contact and arrange a meeting. Probably sometime next week.”

  “You’ll be amazing,” Sharon said confidently. “You’re an accountant. You won’t have any issue with a few measly investments.”

  “Yep,” I said with forced brightness. “No problems at all.”

  Chapter 4

  Once again, I was wearing my smartest clothes and waiting in the lobby of an incredibly sleek, enormous building which made me feel like a mouse in the Cheesecake Factory – tiny, out of place and a little bit envious. My awe was starting to melt into irritation, though, as the clock slowly created distance between the time of my appointment and the time I wanted to be out of the office and taking a long, hot shower back at my apartment.

  The suspense of meeting Mathis again had been bad enough even before I had entered the office. Now that I was sitting here, I was painfully on edge. Ever since I had been told that Mathis was going to be the person doing my training, I had been remembering the time we spent together in the past. His ready smile, his sense of humor and his seemingly inherent ability to do everything well, even if he had never tried it before, all stood out to me.

  A part of me even wondered if Mathis even felt the same way about me – if he ever thought about me or remembered the time we had spent together. The time where it had seemed as though he cared about me.

  The more I thought about it as I sat in this lavish, richly furnished lobby, though, the more doubtful it seemed. Here I was, a girl who worked in a cubicle and washed my hair with the shampoo my best friend saved for me every time she organized a wedding at a fancy hotel. I was wearing pants from the sale section of Target, and Mathis was a successful multi-millionaire who had risen from nothing. He probably got someone else to shampoo his hair for him. He probably had someone who made his own shampoo.

  It was ridiculous to even think about the possibility that he remembered me. Certainly after the way our friendship had ended. It was time to stop thinking about silly things and be a grown up. That is, if Mathis ever actually arrived.

  I took out my phone and rechecked the message for the fourth time in twenty minutes to reassure myself I’d got the right time and place – yep, 4pm, the Magnus Building, Mathis Côté’s office on the 30th floor. Except that it was now 4:35 and I was still cooling my heels in the lobby.

  The message had been cold and impersonal, exactly like a business memo – meet at 4pm re. investment training, don’t be late. Don’t be late, ha! I had been fifteen minutes early and I’d been waiting almost an hour.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee, Ma’am?” the little mousy-haired secretary asked me again, looking extremely apologetic for her boss’s bad behavior.

  “No thanks,” I smiled at her.

  “I can place a call through to Mr Côté’s cell if you’d like?” she offered.

  “It’s fine,” I insisted. “I’m sure he’s a busy man.”

  “Speak of the devil,” a deep, mellow voice said behind us. We both turned around. My face showed surprise while the secretary seemed to give a knowing nod.

  It was Mathis. There was no doubt about that. He still had that imposing presence which made everyone in the room turn to face him. Well over six foot, his broad, athletic build was still as lithe and elegant as ever. His tanned skin was complemented by his crisp white shirt, not starched and boring like the men at the lawyer’s office, but commanding and stylish, the top button undone and his tie – if he had been wearing one – nowhere to be seen, exposing his tan, muscular neck and just a hint of collarbone. His light brown hair was perfectly windswept. He was exactly as I remembered him, except for two small details.

  “Sorry to burst in like this,” Mathis said, his arms around the two small details - two leggy, gorgeous, and underdressed women in skyscraper heels with enough makeup between them to paint the walls of the lobby. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “Sir, Miss Taylor is your 4 o’clock,” the mousy secretary said in a professional tone. She seemed unfazed by his entrance.

  “Miss Taylor?” Mathis made a show of looking around the room, his eyes finally falling on me. “Ah yes, my after-hours assignment.” The two women on his arms snickered, and I blushed at the double-entendre.

  Although he looked the same, his manner was nothing like I remembered. For one thing, I had never so much as seen him look at a woman before. Not that I was surprised – he was undoubtedly attractive, and he obviously had enough wealth to support a whole harem of women if he felt like it. Still, something about his behavior bothered me. He had always been so courteous to me in the past, treating me with respect and kindness. This playboy who was openly mocking me, seemingly oblivious to his rudeness, was a total stranger.

  “Well, it looks like Miss Taylor has been waiting some time,” Mathis sighed, looking from one tittering showgirl to the other. “Why don’t you ladies spend a little time enjoying yourselves? Here,” he handed the blonder of the two a credit card. “Pick out a few outfits. I’m sure you have room in your wardrobes for one or two more dresses, hmm?”

  “But Matty, what about dinner?” the blonder bimbo purred. A flicker of irritation seemed to pass over Mathis’ face, but an instant later it was gone.

  “I’ll catch up to you later, Kathryn,” Mathis promised with a wide smile. “You just concentrate on finding something suitable to wear.”

  The two women clattered off in their heels, sweeping from the lobby like models leaving the runway.

  “Now,” Mathis said, his face expressionless now his arm candy had left the building. “Miss Taylor, why don’t we go into my office and get to business.”

  It wasn’t a question, and I followed behind him as he strode across the lobby towards a broad mahogany door.

  “Excuse the mess,” he said carelessly as he opened the door for me.

  It was really difficult not to gasp. Two of the walls were sheer glass, offering a splendid view of the city, the tall buildings and the sparkling water; magnificent and for our eyes only. The room itself was decadently furnished with glossy wood and stylish modern couches just big enough for one, a little too small for two, unless you wanted to get cozy. It made me feel small and insignificant, but it was breathtaking.

  He sat down on one of the little couches, gesturing at me to sit opposite him. All that separated us was a small coffee table, and for a moment, I felt like we were sitting on Uncle Andy’s porch, trading stories and eating sugar snap peas, laughing together about the events of the day. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him whether he remembered that time, or any o
f those times we had spent together as teenagers, but just as I opened my mouth, he leant forward and opened up a laptop, ignoring me entirely.

  “So, Miss Taylor, I assume you’ve been properly briefed about this business?” Mathis asked briskly. I frowned at his continued use of my last name; in front of other people perhaps that was proper business etiquette or something, but now it was just the two of us.

  “Call me Amanda, please,” I said. “It’s not as if we’re strangers.”

  “Amanda, then,” Mathis said, and it seemed like he hesitated for a moment as the name slipped past his lips. “Do you know anything about investments?”

  “Mathis – you know I don’t – no more than Uncle Andy taught me, at least, and you were there for most of that,” I said.