No More Yesterdays (The Heirs #3)

Chapter One

Nothing drove home one’s single status better than Valentine’s Day.

By noon, more than half of the female employees on the executive floor had flowers sitting on their desks.

Cupid had wielded his arrow like an automatic weapon in the break room, which was where all the women trying to diet placed their gifted boxes of candy for anyone and everyone to dig into.

Not to mention about a quarter of the staff members were expected to escape the office earlier than normal.

Alex saw hearts and roses, either physically or metaphorically, everywhere she looked.

And it was scratching on her last nerve.

She tapped down her jealousy like a child used a soft hammer while playing Whac-A-Mole. Then she’d turn the corner, see another floral display, and the damn mole would show its toothy grin once again.

Alex vacated her office and smiled at her painfully shy, overachieving assistant, Dee ... past a dozen roses. “I need to see Chase. I’ll be back before my ten o’clock.”

“Yes, Ms. Stone.”

Alex passed by the reception desk on the top floor on her way to the bank of elevators.

Kira, the receptionist, smiled at Alex through the stems of purple orchids as she walked by.

Alex attempted a smile, knew she sucked at it, and called the elevator.

Only after she entered the empty elevator did Alex release a woeful breath and allow her composure to fall.

She made a mental note to work from home next year on the Hallmark holiday.

Her brief reprieve from fake smiles didn’t last long. The elevator stopped halfway down the building as two men in suits joined her.

She didn’t recognize either of them.

But they most definitely knew who she was.

Their chatter halted the second they spotted her. The younger of them nodded, smiled, and turned away as fast as he could. The older man, probably in his forties, said a simple “Ms. Stone.” And that was it.

“Hello,” she offered back.

The doors closed.

No one talked.

The next floor pulled in two more employees, and the entire dance repeated.

That was the problem with being the CEO and co-owner of a billion-dollar hotel empire.

A status that Alex hadn’t had the previous Valentine’s Day.

No, last year Alex sat behind a desk in the Acquisitions and Mergers Department at Regent Hotels, where she was doing everything she could to help Regent dominate her father’s company.

Then the man up and died, leaving her and her brothers to pick up the pieces of Stone Enterprises.

Bastard!

The elevator slid to a stop on the third floor.

Alex cleared her throat, and the people she employed separated like the Red Sea when Moses passed.

As the door began to close behind her, the collective sigh from the remaining occupants reached her ears.

Alex couldn’t help but wonder if the employees’ reaction to her presence would ever ease.

She moved past the much less formal entry to CMS, her brother’s shipping company, and immediately felt lighter.

On this floor, Alexandrea Stone was not the boss.

While everyone treated her with respect, none of them stopped talking when she passed by or quickly snapped back to their computers as if to prove they were working.

Most simply ignored her or greeted her with a genuine smile and hello. Here, she was only Chase’s sister.

Alex liked that.

She rounded the corner to Chase’s office and let him know she was there by a rap of her knuckles against his glass door. “Hey.”

He was on the phone.

Chase waved her in and placed a single finger in the air.

“That all sounds good to me. I’ll have Busa take this over from here. Yeah ... I appreciate that,” Chase said into the receiver to whomever it was he spoke to.

Alex closed his office door behind her and took a seat across from her brother.

“She’s amazing.”

Alex could tell by the soft smile that passed Chase’s lips that he was talking about his two-and-a-half-month-old daughter, Hailey.

“Oh, trust me, she already rules the house ... Thank you.” Chase said his goodbye and disconnected the call.

“Rules the house, huh?”

Chase rubbed his eyes. “Day and night.”

Alex made herself more comfortable, crossed one leg over the other. “Any sign of sleeping through the night yet?”

“If by sleeping through the night you mean five hours intermittently between ten and six, then sure.”

Chase stretched out his back and opened his mouth wide with a full-blown yawn.

“I don’t think I could do it,” Alex said truthfully.

“Last night, Hailey decided to sleep three hours in a row.”

“That’s progress.”

Chase shook his head. “Piper woke up in a panic and rushed to the nursery on the second hour. Scared me to death.”

“What panic?”

“She dreamed that Hailey had stopped breathing.” Chase ran a hand through his hair.

An ache settled in Alex’s chest with the thought. “That’s awful.”

Chase agreed with a nod. “Mom said it’s normal. She did the same thing.”

“Still don’t think I’m cut out for that kind of stress.”

Chase pushed forward in his chair and placed his elbows on his desk. “So, what brings you down here?”

She blew out a breath and said what had to be said. “The holidays are over. The first quarter isn’t looking any better than the last. We need to squeeze the trigger and make the cuts.”

There wasn’t a need to reference what she was talking about. Through no fault of their own, Stone Enterprises had expanded too fast under their father’s reign, risking the health of the company. Alex had put off making the official decision to bring to the board until now.

“I’ll back you in any decision you make,” Chase told her, his eyes never leaving contact with hers.

“Thank you.”

“Where exactly do we need to cut? And how?”

“I think the best approach is to unload the last acquisition Dad made. We sell ... at a loss, and use the deficit as a tax deduction to offset the damage.”

“How much are we talking?” Chase asked.

“That’s hard to tell without knowing what the company will fetch. I know for a fact there were three other players in Dad’s last acquisition. Regent’s bid was solid. I was pissed when Dad got it.” She laughed under her breath. “Now I have it and want nothing to do with it.”

“Who on the board is going to scream the loudest?” Chase asked.

Alex shook her head. “I have Dee bringing up the minutes of the meetings leading up to the acquisition so I can figure that out. Schedule some lunches ...”

“Golf?” Chase teased.

Golf was the one thing neither of them could bring themselves to do. It seemed, however, to be the spot where many corporate decisions took place outside of the boardroom. At least according to their soon-to-be stepfather, Gaylord Morrison.

The man had his own hotel empire and had rekindled an old friendship with their mother in the past year. His proposal took place at Christmas, and the wedding was set for April. Exactly one month after Chase and Piper’s public nuptials.

Alex’s brother and sister-in-law had tied the knot in between Piper’s contractions while Hailey was being squeezed out into the world.

A very spur-of-the-moment ceremony prompted by Piper freaking out about what would be written on Hailey’s birth certificate.

For Piper, the mother’s and father’s names needed to be the same.

“Lunch at the nineteenth hole is as close as I’ll come,” Alex told Chase.

“I could just ask Piper who the biggest obstacle is going to be?”

Piper worked as the executive assistant to their father before his death. The woman knew more about Stone Enterprises than the two of them put together.

“And if she doesn’t remember off the top of her head, she’d be tempted to log in to the system and look it up herself. Then she’d see Dee’s attempt at utilizing Piper’s calendar and freak. Next thing you know, she’s calling and trying to control what Dee is doing—”

He lifted his hands in surrender. “Understood.”

“Dee is doing a much better job than I anticipated. Be sure and relay that to your wife.” Alex uncrossed her legs and scooted to the edge of her chair.

Chase tilted his head to the side. “You know I’m going to be upstairs the rest of the week, right? You didn’t have to come all the way down here to have this discussion.”

Chase only spent one day, sometimes only half a day, in the office of his shipping company. The rest of his time was in the upstairs office beside hers.

“I needed the walk.”

The sad smile on Chase’s lips forced Alex to her feet.

They both knew she took on the majority of the weight of Stone Enterprises. With Chase’s newfound fatherhood role, Alex didn’t want him to feel pressured into picking up more.

Neither of them aspired to be the kind of man their father had been. An egotistical, narcissistic, womanizing asshole who put his family at the very bottom of his list of priorities.

“We can go over more details tomorrow,” Alex said.

Chase nodded before she walked out the door.

With each step, her spine felt as if it were clicking into place, one vertebra at a time.

She slapped on a partial smile like one would lipstick and waited for the elevator.

The doors opened, and the occupants inside parted much like the ones she’d joined on her way down.

She stepped inside with a sigh.

“I’ve seen you in the same blazer and skirt in three different magazines. We need to go shopping.”

Alex sat in a foaming tub of hot water with her hair up in a bun and a glass of white wine in her hand. Candlelight flickered against the mirror of her bathroom, and the scent of the floral bath bomb she’d put in the tub filled the room with a mixture of jasmine and lavender.

The sliding-glass-enclosed bathtub and shower combo wasn’t anything special. It was the kind of bathroom layout you’d expect in a condominium complex that said “average and affordable.”

The complex that Alex could afford on her Regent salary.

She’d considered moving a dozen times since inheriting her father’s fortune. But change didn’t come easy for her, not to mention time was limited for exploring her options.

Her best friend Nick spoke from her cell phone that sat on the floor.

“Three magazines from the same walk down the street.” The media loved taking meaningless pictures of whomever they deemed famous and plastering them all over their pages. She liked to play a little game when Nick made these calls. “What are the headlines saying now?”

Nick hummed. “Let’s see. Dr. Zee Weighs In on Alexandrea’s Depression. Ms. Stone’s Weight-Loss Goals Are Out of Control. Give This Woman a Sandwich .”

“Let me guess. I was in the tan suit we bought last fall.” She sipped her wine and waited for Nick’s reply.

“Bingo.”

She’d forgotten her sunglasses that day when she’d left the office for a long lunch. A lunch at which, ironically, she had eaten a sandwich.

“You are looking a little frail,” Nick told her.

“It’s Photoshop. I haven’t changed.”

“Still, we need to shop. And when’s the last time you had a pedicure?”

Alex lifted a foot from the water, shrugged, and put it back in. “I’m good.”

The sound that escaped Nick was a cross between a huff and a tsk. “No, no, no. Saturday. I’m picking you up at ten.”

“I have to research—”

“Don’t finish that sentence. I’m picking you up at ten, and we’re not coming back until midnight. If you’re going to look tired and starving in a tabloid, it’s going to be because of a hangover. Bring your credit card and sunglasses.”

“Nick, I—”

“Love you, bye.”

And he was gone.

There was no use in fighting the man. He was more suited for her bank account than she was.

Her gay bestie was addicted to shopping, spas, and glamming up for the camera.

It was just the kind of man he was. Nick was the reason the closet in her condo overflowed with clothes.

He was a stylist and a photographer who wielded his sexuality like a sword.

It didn’t matter what environment he was in, he always dominated.

He was equal parts charm and funny. He was just as comfortable in a tuxedo for a gala event as he was dressing up as Dobby the house elf with a hint of drag for a Pride parade.

He was the best girlfriend she’d ever had.

His words, not hers.

He embodied the phrase “The good ones are either married or gay.”

Nick was about as lucky in love as Alex was, however. Oh, the man didn’t want for sex. No one Alex knew in the gay community did. With GQ features and a body sculpted by healthy food and exercise, Nick had all the sex he wanted.

Alex was jealous and told Nick as much every time he talked about another escapade.

There was no use complaining about her deficient sex life when she couldn’t be bothered to even try and find someone to fill her bed.

She worked a minimum of sixty hours a week and had to be told to take a day off by either Nick or her family.

And looking for anyone more than a bed warmer was a pipe dream she’d given up the day her father died.

A woman’s appeal to the opposite sex was greatly reduced by the increased size of her bank account and intelligence.

All the studies couldn’t be wrong. And even if they were, Alex knew firsthand that men didn’t approach her.

At the risk of inflating her ego, it wasn’t because she wasn’t attractive.

Most men simply didn’t want to be upstaged by a wealthy, influential woman like herself.

So, the bubble bath and wine were a Valentine’s gift to herself.

No one had to point out that she was lacking balance in her life.

A whole day off with Nick leading the charge sounded like heaven.

In her head, Alex shuffled the rest of her work week to squeeze it all in.

The tip of her big toe peeked out from the bubbles.

Yeah. She needed a mani-pedi in the worst way.