One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) Read Free Page B

happened, sure, but that was an entirely different matter.
    Still, he couldn’t get his mind off of her. Why had he never seen her before? She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and he was pretty sure he knew just about every available female in Palm Springs—the straight ones anyway. He wasn’t necessarily fond of partying, but his role as his mother’s only son and his business as a developer of small hotels, condos and single-family homes required a lot of schmoosing with builders, sub-contractors, and their girlfriends and their girlfriends’ girlfriends.
    And, those girlfriends were always trying to set him up. Ever since his divorce a year before from Beautiful Betty—that was his nickname for his wife, even before they were married—they had been hounding him to get to know someone they knew would be perfect for him. Just perfect!
    Beautiful Betty was indeed beautiful. What was sarcastic about the name wasn’t that it wasn’t true. It was that beauty was all there was to her. He had fallen for her for two very good reasons: great sex and the fact that she wasn’t at all interested in his business. Those had been his two most important criteria, after good-looking, of course, and she had definitely fit the bill.
    “Good morning, Mr. D’Matrio!” Rick’s receptionist called out as he pushed through the front door of his modest office building.
    “And to you, Sandra,” he said, nodding stiffly in her direction and hurrying into his office. Sandra was bright as well as cheerful, but he was still a little miffed at her for refusing to take the job as his administrative assistant when Gloria left. Sandra said the job supporting him was one that took far more than forty hours a week, and would require her to be on call virtually every waking hour—even some non-waking ones. She said that was why Gloria had quit. Sandra had better things to do with her life than support his obsessive work habits twenty-four seven. He could tell that she had tried to say it nicely, but the effect was the same: he was without an assistant, and that made him grouchy.
    Rick closed his office door behind him and dug through his office junk drawer for a pet-hair roller. He hadn’t used one since his own dog, Cletus, had died two years before, but he was sure there were still a couple of sticky rolls at the back of the drawer.
    He located the blue plastic handle and pulled off the outer sticky sheet, still covered with Cletus’s long brown hairs. He fought back against the sting in his eyes as the sight of it brought back memories of that faithful mutt. Didn’t that dog he just delivered to the emergency vet remind him of Cletus too?
    “No time for such silliness,” he reprimanded himself, running the sticky roller up and down on his suit. “I need to focus on my meeting.”
    “Did you say something, Mr. Ellington?” Sandra’s voice crackled over the intercom on his desk. Rick realized he must have left it on the evening before after his quick conversation with her right before she left for the day. He was always doing that. Someday, it was going to bite him in the ass.
    “No,” he called out. “Sorry. Just talking to myself.”
    Besides, the intruding thoughts of the dog were nothing compared with the way the image of that waitress kept flashing across his mind. What was it about her? He shook his head again and plopped down behind his desk. He flipped off his intercom microphone.
    “Now, let’s get to work.”
    The bankers were coming to discuss financing of a small six-room inn he was hoping to develop out of a run-down little motel just south of downtown. There shouldn’t be any problem securing the loan; he had enough retained earnings to do it himself, but he liked spreading the risk by leveraging his bets with other people’s money. Not that there was much risk these days. Palm Springs’ tourist industry was about as healthy as it had ever been.
    Rick loved this business. It wasn’t so much the design aspects of