Alex Reid (Rich & Single #1) Read Free Page B

reminded himself that he needed to call Mark. The missed call notices were piling up, and he couldn’t ignore his brother forever. Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow, he would bite the bullet and make the call.
     
     
     

Chapter 2
     
    Alex woke to the first tentative rays of summer sunlight slipping through the blinds. A moment later, the shrill ring of his alarm had him bounding from the bed to turn it off. He stood, stretching both arms upward and arching backward until he heard something pop, and then he shook the weight of sleep from his hands and went to dress. There wasn’t time for a leisurely breakfast; there never was. He grabbed a coffee on his way in to the office.
    An hour and a half later, he was beginning to wish he had just stayed in bed.
    It was one of those days where everything that could go wrong seemed to be falling utterly to pieces. Paperwork had been misfiled, forms weren’t coming in on time, and someone had forgotten to call the head advisor for the Richards family and confirm a meeting. It was one of those not-so-rare days where Alex wished he had two hundred of himself to run the business with, or at least a clone he could use to keep track of all the things he needed done, because no one else seemed to be able to do it competently. Why was it so utterly impossible to find decent people who could do whatever it was they were supposed to be doing without being coddled and coaxed through it?
    That was a sentiment, he would admit to himself when he wasn’t so busy, that wasn’t entirely fair to his employees. They were good at their jobs; they just weren’t as good as he was. Very few people were. It was why, despite urging from the few friends he actually kept in some regular contact with, he hadn’t hired a personal assistant yet. He just didn’t trust one to properly keep track of his schedule.
    “Ms. Campbell,” he called out to the front. “I need you to double check that last email with the Richards’ firm. Make sure that everything has gone through.”
    He hit the button to bring the phone conversation back online.
    “Yes, Mr. Barret. We’ve sent you the information. The face-to-face meeting will be next Monday. Everything should be in order now.”
    The man on the other end of the phone line didn’t exactly sound satisfied, but he eventually let it go and finally hung up. Alex dropped his own phone carelessly on the desk top and rubbed slow circles against his temples with two fingers. What a fiasco. Something was really going to have to be done about the new hire down in client relations. Things like this hadn’t seemed to happen nearly so often before he signed on. Maybe that earlier thought about inept employees wasn’t entirely unfair to every member of his work force.
    By lunch time, at least, things seemed to have cleared themselves up for the most part. People retreated to offices to nurse the wounds of tongue-lashings and check and double check to make sure that any part they’d had in the mix-ups wasn’t a part they would have again. Alex, unlike the rest of them, didn’t have any such luxury. He had a meeting. That meant dragging himself from the quiet of his office and the comfort of his chair to drive downtown through the lunch hour traffic in order to seal a deal with a new client. At least there would be food.
    After lunch, there was more paperwork. There were more phone calls to be made, and more meetings to attend. The utter disasters of the morning did not, at least, repeat themselves, but Alex still found himself more frustrated than was probably reasonable to be at every snag. Maybe what he needed was a vacation.
    By the time he made it home, Alex was hardly in the mood to speak to his brother, let alone voluntarily call him. He dropped into a chair in his kitchen with a sigh, then pulled himself out of it again to go see what had been left in the fridge for him. His cook was a patient man, but not endlessly so. On days that Alex didn’t come in until