1. Ares
A res~
It was past midnight, but the wealthy didn’t sleep; I certainly didn’t.
I worked, then worked some more, and on occasion, I made an effort to get laid, but then I immediately went back to work.
The competitive nature that controlled me left me no real choice.
Honestly, if it weren’t for fucking Kingston Industries always neck-and-neck with The Cormac Corporation, I’d be able to get some goddamn rest.
Nonetheless, when I did take a few precious moments out of my day to just exist, I always did it on the pier, looking out at the private lake that used to belong to my paternal grandfather.
Upon his passing a few years ago, he’d left me everything, including his secluded manor on the outskirts of Portal Lands.
Over any other place in the world, this was my most favorite place to be, and it’d been ever since I’d been a kid.
There was also the fact that my father, Justin Cormac, had officially retired from TCC two years ago, and so I was solely in charge of making sure that the million-dollar contracts kept coming in to keep the family living in the style to which they’d become accustomed, and that was a full-time job in itself.
While my father had been CEO of The Cormac Corporation, my mother, Taylor, had been a charity organizer, so keeping up appearances were still very important to her.
Even if she was no longer putting the event together, she liked to attend, pretending that she and my father still had significant standing within the community, and I supposed that, to some degree, they did.
As for the rest of my family, my father was an only child, so no aunts or uncles to contend with on that end, which was a good thing with an inheritance as vast as my grandfather’s had been.
Now, my mother did have one sister, but she’d fallen in love with some do-gooder doctor eons ago, and all she did was follow him around the world as he cured poverty-stricken health victims. Yeah, what he did was noble as hell, but it was hard for me to respect people that didn’t bring anything to the table, and that was my aunt.
I mean, I imagined that she might make his life better, but that was the extent of her contribution to society.
Speaking of useless people that didn’t bring anything to the table, that was both my brother and sister.
At thirty-eight-years-old, I was the oldest of the three Cormac children, and it was something that my mother made sure that I never forgot.
While Dalton was happy to just live off his shares of TCC, Didi was.
..I couldn’t even say what my sister was.
Like Dalton, she had her own money, but unlike Dalton, she had no idea what a budget was, and it was no wonder why she wasn’t married.
Two minutes in her company, and you wanted to snap your own neck; that’s how insipid she was.
It also wasn’t talking shit about my siblings when it was the truth.
There was also no escaping that they were my siblings.
I was six-foot-one with brown hair and topaz eyes, the eyes which I’d gotten from my maternal grandfather, but I favored my father in everything else, even the dimple in my left cheek.
Dalton was thirty-six, and while he was also six-foot-one with brown hair and our father’s facial features, he’d gotten his blue eyes from our mother.
As for Didi, she was the spitting image of our mother, so she had light blonde hair, blue eyes, and was built very slim and fragile.
In fact, she looked like a very delicate and expensive doll.
Now the only other person in my life that posed any kind of significance was my best friend, Perry Henderson, and a lot of the talent that worked for TCC was owed to him.
Perry was a corporate headhunter, and he was damn good at his job.
He was also married to the love of his life, forty-years-old, had intelligent brown eyes, and his brown hair was always braided by the best. We also had enough tattoos to be deemed inappropriate in the corporate world, but those were stories from our younger years.
At any rate, unlike me, Perry also had children, and so it took an effort to keep in touch when we were both so busy, me with TCC, and him juggling a demanding career and a family.
Still, the holidays at the Henderson’s were much-needed reminders that healthy families did exist, and not all of them experienced what I’d had to inside the walls of the Cormac household.
Reaching over, I grabbed my glass of bourbon, the only liquor that I was really a fan of.
I liked the slow burn, and it helped with the constant noise in my head.
Honestly, if it was possible to balance life with work and still be sane, I’d spend more time out here.
The penthouse that I had in the city was convenient and close to the TCC offices, but it wasn’t home; it was more of a permanent hotel room.
If someone wanted to really see inside my life, they’d have to visit the manor to see anything personal, and that wasn’t going to happen.
Apart from my family, no one had an open invitation to visit me out here because, being one of the richest men in the nation, my life was in the public eye more than I’d like, so I guarded the manor fiercely.
I also had a very strict rule of never inviting pussy back here or to my penthouse in the city.
I made enough money to be able to afford hotel rooms if the woman wasn’t comfortable inviting me back to her place, and if I was being completely honest, I preferred hotels.
Hotel rooms were impersonal, so that immediately set the tone for the expectations of the night.
Now, while I didn’t mind repeats, the second that a woman started feeling entitled to more than just my dick, I ended things.
After years of watching my parents fight like it was their favorite hobby, I had no desire to get serious with anyone.
Ever.
As for the Cormac legacy, I had no problem leaving it all to a variety of charities.
Dalton and Didi would get their share of TCC, but the rest of it could go to those that really needed the money, and I wouldn’t feel regretful about it one bit.
In fact, for as much as I loved my wealth, status, and power in this city, no one person needed billions of fucking dollars.
Honestly, if Brantley Kingston would just fucking retire to be a family man, I’d slow down exponentially.
However, instead of doing me a solid, the man seemed to be thriving, despite having to juggle his time between work, his marriage, and young son.
Of course, if I had a wife like Keris Bishop, I could probably be ruling the world, too.
Now, much to Kingston’s dismay, his wife and I were somewhat friends, and I reveled in how that got under his skin.
He also wasn’t the only one that didn’t care for me, but that was probably because I wasn’t very likeable, and I didn’t try to be.
While Kingston didn’t care for me because I had crossed the line with his wife at one point, his best friend, Onyx Mercer, just hated me on principle.
His loyalty ran deep, so he didn’t care for me just by association alone.
Kingston’s other best friend, Magnus Saint, had never cared for me for the same reasons, but his hate for me had only gotten worse after finding out that I’d slept with his wife.
Granted, Dylan hadn’t been his wife at the time, but Magnus wasn’t letting that significant detail stop him from wanting to murder me every time that he saw me.
It also didn’t help that I got along well with all of their wives, which was something that I wasn’t going to stop doing just for them.
With Dylan Finnick crossing my mind, it had me thinking of the last time that I’d gotten laid, and since I couldn’t remember, that was a sign that I needed to visit a hotel room soon.
No matter what anyone said, there was nothing like sex to chill someone the fuck out, and if it was a choice between meditation, yoga, boxing, or sex.
..I’d pick sex every fucking time. There was no greater joy in this world than sinking in between a woman’s thighs, and I’d dare any man to argue.
After setting my tumbler of bourbon back on the end table, I reached for my phone, and after dismissing all the texts and messages that I’d been ignoring for the past hour, I scrolled through my contact list until I found what I needed.
With words being unnecessary, I fired off a text, ready to send it off again if needed.
Me: R u available 2morrow?
As expected, I got an immediate reply.
Hannah: Of course
Me: I’ve got time at around 5
Hannah: The Cloudsleep?
Me: That works
Hannah: I’ll c u then
Me: C u then
The Cloudsleep was very famous for their discretion, so it was the hotel that I preferred. In fact, it was the hotel that most of the powerful men in Portal Lands preferred, so the last thing that the staff was going to do was anything that would jeopardize that level of revenue.
Setting my phone back down, I knew that I needed to get to bed soon. I had an early-morning meeting at seven, so that would have me up at five, giving me a good four hours of sleep.
Perfect.