“Give it up, Gracie . . . who is he?” her mom asked.

“Oh my God. Seriously, he’s no one.” Her family was like a dog with a bone.

Silence ensued and all the eyes were on her.

She set the knife down with a sigh. “He’s a guy.”

“We figured that,” Colin said with a laugh.

“A client. He’s a land developer . . .”

Still the room was silent.

Then Erin spoke up. “Who called you from Facebook.”

Now the room started to buzz.

“He did what?”

“Can you do that?”

“Who calls someone from Facebook?”

The questions came so fast she couldn’t answer them all. Instead she stared at Erin. “Thanks, friend.”

Erin lifted her hands in the air. “Hey, I think he’s a stalker.”

That’s all anyone needed to hear.

Everyone started talking at once.

Grace stood back and took a big drink of wine.

It wasn’t until her father asked for Dameon’s last name that Grace ended the conversation. “Enough,” she shouted.

Even Scout stopped licking himself and turned to stare.

“Dameon is not a stalker.” She put her wineglass down. “He is a guy I met completely by accident before I knew he was a land developer and showed up at the office. And before you ask . . . no, nothing happened. We met in a coffee shop.”

“And at the wedding,” Erin corrected her.

“He was at the hotel, not the wedding. And we didn’t meet then. We just . . .” She stopped talking, knowing what she was about to say would get everyone going again.

“You just what?” her mom asked.

“Noticed each other.”

Parker sighed and leaned against the counter, all smiles. “You mean like across the crowded room noticed?”

In that second, Grace remembered him standing inside the hotel watching her.

“Someone is blushing,” Matt teased.

“Am not!” She looked at Erin.

Erin shrugged her shoulders and nodded.

Grace put the back of her hand to her warm cheek. “It’s nothing, okay? He’s a flirt.” She picked up the knife again and started working. “Not to mention it’s completely inappropriate. He’s working with the city on permits and zoning changes for his massive project. It’s a conflict of interest.”

“The denial is strong with this one,” Matt said in a deep Yoda voice.

Grace picked up a walnut and tossed it at her brother.

“Does he wear a hard hat or a suit?” her dad asked.

“A suit.”

There were several sighs.

“Can’t trust a man in a suit,” her dad affirmed.

“Then it’s a good thing he’s nothing, cuz he wears them. Now can we please talk about someone else? Like, hey, Matt . . . when are you going to make Erin an honest woman?”

If there was one thing about her family, it was their ability to dish it out. And since Erin had added just enough fuel to the fire to make Grace squirm, it was her turn to make sure the woman felt a little of the heat.

“Third quarter was shit, and the fourth is even worse.”

Dameon sat with his executive board staring down at the financial report. He ignored the tension crawling up his neck and asked the hard questions. “What’s the projection for the next six months?”

“Damn, Dameon . . . since when do we only look six months ahead?” His CFO and longtime friend, Omar, tossed the report down and stared.

“Since Maxwell bailed and the cushion his bank afforded us went with him. We knew it was going to be tight. The question is, how tight?”

Omar glared. “Our asses are going to squeak when we walk.”

Dameon leaned forward. “But are we still standing?”

“We’re standing, but the ground is shaky. We need the Rancho project to finish and start bringing in revenue if we’re ever going to get the Santa Clarita project going. Even then, I don’t know that we’re going to have the funds for the scale we originally proposed.”

Locke Enterprises had a dozen other commercial projects going. All in various stages from acquisition to construction. Rancho was half the scale of the Santa Clarita project, but the largest of the ones close to completion.

“We need the Santa Clarita project to get us back where we were,” he reminded them.

“We don’t want to be like Fedcon with half-built projects in the middle of the desert,” Tyler added.

Fedcon was a well-known developer that went belly-up in the middle of a three-hundred-home subdivision out past Lancaster. The houses sat in various stages of construction for five years until another developer swept in and made a killing.

“We’re not going to let that happen,” Dameon said. “If anything, I want us to be the ones who come in and take over lost projects that make sense.”

Omar turned to Chelsea, who ran the public relations and marketing departments. While it sounded vast, the reality was that she managed less than five employees.

“I have a suggestion on the Rancho property,” Omar started.

“I’m listening.”

“I know the original idea was to hold on to the properties and triple net lease the commercial space. But at this time, a clean flip might give us what we need to see the black for another year. At least get us breaking ground in Santa Clarita.”

Much as Dameon didn’t like the idea, he had to give it merit. They’d made a significant amount of money flipping properties from the beginning. Only after they started holding on to them in order to generate a steady flow of money did Locke Enterprises start to rise. With that rise meant more staff and bigger budgets.

Chelsea tapped her pen on the papers in front of her. “Another idea would be to bring in an investor.”

“So they can pull out after we exceed the depth of our coffers?” Dameon asked. “I’d like to avoid that.”

“With the right contracts and lawyers, we can circumvent any of those issues,” Omar told him.

Yeah . . . Maxwell had been more of a handshake deal with very little written down. That’s the problem when you join forces with your college friends who have family money. One bad argument and it was game over.

And over a woman, no less.

“Omar, I need numbers that show our status if we had stayed the course we started last January. Chelsea, I want a list of interested parties as well as the going rate for what we have out there in Rancho. I want reality, not dreaming numbers.” He pointed to the closed door. “There are a lot of people out there that depend on us to pay their bills. And I really don’t want to be handing out pink slips this time next year.” He paused. “And as much as it pains me to even ask for it, I’d like a list of potential investors.”

His team seemed to like that the most since they all smiled at each other.

Dameon called the meeting over, and Tyler and Chelsea left the room.

Omar hung back. “We’re going to make this work,” he assured Dameon with a pat on the back. “We started this with grit and guts.”

Dameon laughed. “We started it at a bar, drunk off our asses.” Omar had been an accounting major and had switched to business finance. Maxwell was the aforementioned trust-fund kid who was taking business classes because his father told him to. And Dameon had already gotten his contractor’s license and was getting a degree in business so he didn’t have to pound nails for the rest of his life.