Ringing in Love Read Free Page A

needed at this point in her life, it was something that was both. Between her rapidly growing business and her equally fast growing teenaged son, she had enough complications and risk in her life. More, in fact, than at any other time in her thirty-eight years.
    Though she’d been a stay-at-home mom after Noah was born, when he’d entered kindergarten she’d been eager to return to work at the PR firm where she’d been an account exec. Andy, her then-husband, had said he wanted her to continue focusing on their child. After a tough negotiation, he’d grudgingly given in to the idea of her taking on a few clients as a freelancer. Developing public relations and advertising campaigns for a client or two would not only help her keep up with the world she’d left when she’d become a mother, but also give her a creative outlet for her talents.
    It was all that and more. The freelance jobs she picked up from her old company increased with every month. Then she started attracting clients on her own. She had to hire an assistant—which was how she met Melody Mason—to keep it all going. Then a second creative type. And another.
    Her business model changed as she became interested in, and acquired a reputation for skill at, developing effective marketing and community engagement campaigns for socially responsible companies. She was subcontracting more and more with freelancers she wished she could hire full time. But she didn’t have a place for them to work. Proper office space was obviously what she needed.
    The month she moved her business out of the basement was the same month her husband left her. While she was juggling home, child, and business (effectively, she thought), he was even more effectively juggling home, job, and mistress. The affair had been going for several years. They’d been so careful hiding it, no one, including Catherine, had suspected.
    It took over eighteen months to negotiate the divorce. Noah was ten by the time it was final, and he was not happy to have his father gone. It showed in his behavior—he acted out at school, let his grades drop, refused to take seriously the detentions he earned. The only thing he did well and regularly was play soccer.
    Which left Catherine overseeing the growth of a business, now the main source of income for her and her son, as well as helping Noah come to terms with the divorce. It took a while, but by the time they celebrated his thirteenth birthday, he seemed to have settled into their new life. His grades improved. She stopped getting phone calls about the classes he’d cut.
    Now, after what felt like a long time and a lot of work, all parts of her life seemed to have fallen into place. Well, two parts of her life. The third part, a personal life, didn’t really exist. Catherine went from home to office and back again in a pattern that hadn’t varied in years. Her extracurricular activities were family events with her mom and sisters.
    Not that she’d been looking for any sort of serious relationship. She wasn’t sure when she’d be ready to trust a man to get that close to her again. But she was beginning to think some male company might be nice. Maybe it was time to take her personal life off the back burner. A pleasant, safe, lobby-and-elevator relationship with the sexiest man in Philly seemed like the perfect way to practice her rusty skills. The ones she’d been using so infrequently she thought he smelled of gingerbread instead of something a little less domestic and a bit more dangerous.
    • • •
    Thanks to a long and complicated history with women which included a brief marriage in his twenties as well as a relationship in his thirties that had turned out almost as badly, Dominic Russo was a cautious man, but his patience was beginning to wear thin. He couldn’t remember when he’d worked as hard to get a response from a woman as he had to get one from Catherine Bennett. Usually, when he showed interest in a woman, she responded in some