Brenda Harlen - Her Seven-Day Fiancé

“Any particular reason for the dating hiatus?” Jason wondered.

“Not really,” she said. “I just have other priorities right now—including a test for my senior calculus class this morning.”

Jason took the hint. “Well, good luck with that,” he said, moving around to the driver’s side of his truck and climbing behind the wheel.

She waved as he drove away, then decided that her mother’s ongoing matchmaking efforts meant it was time for her to implement plan B.

Chapter Two

“The warehouse. Eighteen hundred hours. Tonight.”

Jay shifted his attention from the spreadsheet on his computer to Carter Ford, his best friend of nearly two decades and now his right-hand man at Jason Channing Enterprises. Carter stood in the doorway of Jay’s office, which also served as the staff lounge and lunch room of Adventure Village.

He glanced at the papers spread out on his desk and, with sincere reluctance, shook his head. “It’s going to take me forever to sort this stuff out.”

“What stuff?” Carter asked.

“Invoices to pay, booking requests to log and emails to answer.”

His friend crossed the concrete floor and dropped into one of the visitors’ chairs, then lifted his feet onto the seat of another. “Isn’t that Naomi’s job?”

“It was supposed to be,” he admitted, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Until I realized that we were two months behind on our insurance payments and we missed out on the opportunity to host a corporate team-building exercise for fifty people because the email was ignored.”

The missed opportunity was an annoyance; the potential loss of liability insurance could have shut down their business.

“I thought you’d set up preauthorized payments for the insurance,” Carter said.

He nodded. “For the first six months, the payments were coming out of my personal account, to give the business a chance to turn a profit. Then the automatic debits were supposed to be switched over to the Adventure Village account, but Naomi didn’t send the paperwork to the bank.”

Carter swore. “Tell me again why we’re giving her a paycheck every two weeks.”

“She got her last one today,” Jay told him.

His friend’s brows winged upward. “You fired your cousin?”

“Yeah.”

“Your aunt’s gonna be so pissed.”

“Yeah,” he said again, already braced for the fallout.

But he trusted that, if it came down to a family battle, his father would be on his side. Because Benjamin Channing had been the one to urge Jay to find a job for his cousin at Adventure Village so that Ben wouldn’t have to make a position for her at Blake Mining. Naomi had an extensive work history, but she’d never managed to hold on to any job for very long. “And while I’m not opposed to nepotism, I am opposed to incompetence—and that’s why I’ve got to deal with this paperwork,” he explained to his friend.

“C’mon, Jay, you can take a break for a few hours,” Carter urged.

“Maybe tomorrow night,” he suggested.

“It has to be tonight,” his friend insisted.

“Why?”

“Because it’s our first anniversary.”

Though he was aware of the significance of the date and knew his friend was referring to the business, he couldn’t resist joking, “So where are my flowers?”

“The shop was out of yellow roses,” Carter bantered back. “And I know they’re your favorite.”

“Tell me you at least got a card.”

“Mere words cannot express my feelings,” his friend said.

Jay snorted.

“But I’ll buy you a beer after paintball tonight,” Carter offered. “And we’ll toast to year one.”

“And account ledgers written entirely in black ink,” Jay added, sitting back in his chair.

He believed in working hard and playing hard, and he considered himself lucky that there was a fair amount of overlap between work and play for the CEO of Adventure Village, Haven’s family friendly recreational playground.

When he’d bought his first property—two acres of dry, dusty terrain that included an old abandoned shoe factory—several of the townsfolk had scratched their heads as they tried to figure out why he would throw his money away. Few people gave him credit for having a plan; even fewer believed he might have a viable one, especially when he acquired the undeveloped parcel directly behind the old factory.

He didn’t talk about his project except with those who’d been chosen to work on the development. Because Jay knew that the best way to create buzz about what he was doing was to say nothing. The less people knew, the more they tended to speculate—and then share their speculation with friends and neighbors, who passed it on to other friends and neighbors.

When Adventure Village opened, he’d hoped all the doubters and naysayers and everyone else would understand that the land he’d purchased was an investment—not just in Jason’s future, but that of the whole town. As one of only three cities in all of Nevada where gambling was illegal, Haven saw a steady exodus of residents to the casinos in neighboring areas on evenings and weekends. And who could blame them when there was no action in their hometown?

But now the residents of Haven had another option. And not only were fewer people heading out of town on weekends, there were more people heading to Haven from other places.

Jay understood that part of the draw, at least in the beginning, was the newness and novelty of his facility. In a state where most people came to fritter away their money at the tables or in the bordellos, a facility that offered a variety of wholesome physical activities for all ages was an anomaly—and week after week, that anomaly was adding to his status as one of the wealthiest men in Haven.

And that was definitely cause for celebration.

“What’s the plan?”

“Assassins,” Carter immediately replied, proving that he’d already given the matter some thought. Or maybe it was just that Assassins was always his game of choice whenever they geared up and took to the field.

“Who’s in?”

“Kevin, Matt, Nat, Hayley, me and you.”

Jay looked at the papers on his desk again.

“You started this business because you wanted to have fun,” his friend reminded him.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “But I didn’t realize that fun could be so much work.”

“And that’s why you need a break.”

“Why can’t that break be tomorrow night?” he wondered.

“Because after the game, Kev wants to head over to Diggers’ to put his moves on the hot new bartender, and she doesn’t work Saturdays.”

“Kev has no moves,” Jay noted. “And what he thinks is hot is usually only lukewarm.”

“You’re right about the moves,” his friend agreed. “But his description of the bartender was actually ‘sizzling.’”

“Now you have my attention.”

Carter grinned.

Jay decided the unpaid and undocumented invoices would still be there tomorrow.

* * *

Alyssa loved her job at Westmount High School. Teaching was her pride and her passion, and helping young minds understand scientific laws and mathematic formulas was incredibly fulfilling. But despite a full timetable and the prep and marking to be completed outside of regular school hours, when she walked out of her classroom at the end of the day, she found that she had a lot of free time on her hands.

So she’d looked for opportunities to meet people and get involved in the community. She joined a book club, but the required readings and once-a-month meetings did little to fill her empty nights. She tried a pottery class but had more luck throwing her misshapen vessels into the trash than throwing clay on the wheel. She tried to teach herself to knit but got the needles hopelessly tangled—not just in the wool she’d bought for her project, but in the sweater she’d been wearing. As a result, she’d filled most of her empty hours through the long winter binge-watching Netflix.