Looking Real Good

by C. Morgan

  Looking Real Good

  C. Morgan

  BrixBaxter Publishing

  Contents

  Description

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  More Good Reads

  Come Swoon With Us

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Description

  I’m the guy every woman wants to go home with at the end of the night.

  One problem though. I don’t have time for romance.

  Hell, I can barely squeeze in a one-night stand here and there.

  As a self-made billionaire in the tech space, my work is my life.

  Unfortunately, my reputation as a rich jerk precedes me and isn’t entirely off.

  Thankfully, my sister is a successful public-relations consultant and has an idea, a way to soften my image a little.

  Her best friend is the answer.

  But the woman that shows up to help me with philanthropy looks nothing like the girl I remember.

  She’s rocking her jeans and T-shirt in ways that leave me wanting far more than I should.

  Pretty soon, the lines are blurred between me wanting to help my company and me wanting to help myself to another serving of her.

  I’m all for looking like a good guy to help my profits soar, but I’ve got bad boy things on my mind.

  This woman is stealing my attention. She’s looking real good.

  God help us both.

  Dedication

  To my awesome readers! I’m so blessed by you guys. Never in a million years would I have thought I could spend my life telling stories and reminding people that love is always the answer. And I’m only able to do it because of you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you a million times! I love you guys.

  C. Morgan

  Chapter 1

  Lukas

  My public-relations consultant flicked off the lights in the conference room. She held a remote in her hand and pointed it at the projector at the far end of the conference table. She clicked through a couple of slides, each one lighting up the room in the predominant color of the slide. Red, blue, white, green. Finally, she stopped clicking, and she read the words aloud on the presented screen.

  “The negative shift in media and public opinion toward tech billionaires,” she said. Lisa’s tone was monotonous but assertive, and her gaze slid toward me as if to double-check that I was in fact paying attention.

  I nodded for her to continue.

  Lisa, my PR consultant and younger half-sister, clicked past the index page of the slideshow she’d created to inform me just how out of favor I had fallen. According to her, wealthy men and women like myself were being seen more like villains than successful business people. She’d been breathing down my neck about how I needed to do better.

  Better than building my own empire from the ground up? Better than providing a stable work environment for my employees with full-ride benefits and generous salaries? Better than the property and the mansion I owned? Better than pulling myself out of the slums and becoming one of Seattle’s wealthiest and most eligible bachelors?

  Not that I had time to date.

  We’d bickered about this nonsense for weeks now—possibly months. She wouldn’t relent, and neither would I, so she’d not so subtly sabotaged me in my own damn conference room this morning with a slide show she’d prepared. Her intention, it seemed, was to showcase how disliked I was.

  It was a great way to start my Monday.

  A picture of dozens of families leaving a rundown apartment somewhere downtown filled the screen. Lisa didn’t flip to the next slide. She turned to me with one hand on her hip. She set the remote down on the conference table and stared expectantly at me.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Your kind are seen as responsible for this.” She gestured at the screen. “Money-hungry elites are driving up rents in big cities. Consequently, low-income or no-income tenants and their families are driven out onto the street with nowhere to go. The consequences of this are severe, Lukas.”

  “I haven’t evicted anyone.”

  My half-sister carried on like I hadn’t even spoken. “Perhaps not directly. Regardless, other millionaires and billionaires are portrayed as making fortunes and then failing to give back to their communities. They’re instead choosing to continue lining their pockets. They disregard any and all negative repercussions of them pursuing yet more wealth and—”

  “Lisa,” I said dryly, “are you trying to tell me I’m a jackass?”

  My sister blinked impassively at me. “Perhaps.”

  “You’ve been telling me the same thing since we were kids.”

  “And I was right all along. Imagine that?”

  I scoffed without humor.

  Lisa sighed. “Lukas, just let me get through my presentation, okay? I know you don’t want to sit around and listen to this, but please try to learn something from it. I’m not telling you this as your sister. I’m telling you this as your PR rep. I’m doing my job. You know, the job you hired me to do?”

  I sighed. “Fine.”

  Lisa flipped through a couple more slides. They flashed images of more people being evicted from low-income housing apartments and townhomes. Next came pictures of wealthy CEOs, many of whom I knew in the flesh, who had bank accounts as overflowing as my own. She stopped flipping through slides and landed on a picture of my face.

  I recognized the picture. It was of me sitting in my office in this very building. Across the top of the image were the words “Success at Whose Cost?”. In the picture, I wore a bespoke dark gray suit and a smirk. The Seattle skyline sat behind me against a backdrop of blue skies. The article had not reflected well on me, and Lisa had been doing damage control over the last three months since it had been published.

  “That was a good suit,” I said as I stroked my chin.

  Lisa huffed. “Focus, Lukas. Articles like this have swayed public opinion. You’re being lumped in with bankers, oil barons, and Wall Street tycoons. Tech CEOs like yourself are the new whipping boys in the court of public opinion.” She moved through a few more slides, all of which were pictures of me. “The fell swoop that led to your decline was when you demolished the old building that used to stand right here so you could build this office tower in the historic district. Yes, you have a nice view, but the people who were born and raised here never wanted this building here, Lukas. It’s an eyesore.”

  “An eyesore? Have you looked at this building, Lisa? It’s the definition of modern and exquisite architecture.”

  “It’s obnoxious.”

  “You’re obnoxious,” I muttered.

  My sister sighed and dropped the remote control on the table, leaving the final image of my face o
n the screen. “You’re being accused of everything from gentrification to negative environmental impact.”

  “Oh, come off it. The building that was here before I started development was a vacant health hazard. The mold and asbestos were off the charts. That alone was enough to get rid of it. It was infested with rats and vermin. It was lowering property values in the neighborhood. And you want to talk about a health risk? Teenagers were breaking in all the time, breathing that shit in. If anything, I did this community a favor by eliminating a dangerous environment.”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “What is the point then?” I asked sharply. I was getting tired of this nonsense. I had other things to do.

  “The press is against you right now. You need to polish your image.”

  I arched an eyebrow as my attention slid back to the ten-by-ten-foot image of me shining on the screen at the far end of the conference room. “Looks pretty polished to me.”

  My half-sister rolled her eyes. “Not your physical image. You’re impossible, you know that? You need to polish people’s perception of you.”

  I liked grinding her gears. “Perception?”

  She nodded. “Your bottom line will drop if public perception continues to be negatively affected by the negative press. Here, for example.” She clicked through a few more slides and paused at a familiar chart. It displayed last quarter’s profits which had started to dip despite a recently launched upgrade. “Your profits should have been in an upswing after your last upgrade. But they’re not.”

  “Because people don’t like me?”

  “And they don’t trust you.”

  “I’m not a politician,” I said, straightening my suit jacket. “I’m a businessman. Since when did my success equate to being trusted and liked?”

  “Since forever. Look, Lukas. You hired me because you knew something wasn’t working and you needed help. This is my forte. I’m the professional here and I need you to trust me. I’m your sister. I want to help you—even though you already have more money than any one person could spend in an entire lifetime. Or eight.”

  I stayed in my seat as my sister turned off the projector and moved to the door, where she flicked the lights back on. I squinted and shielded my eyes as she packed up her things into her work bag.

  She dropped into the chair beside me. “Did any of that get through to you?”

  I didn’t answer her question. Instead, I returned one of my own. “I assume with all the effort you put into this to change my mind that you have a game plan?”

  “Of course, I do.”

  “Let’s hear it then.”

  Lisa sat proudly and lifted her chin a little. She and I had an unconventional history compared to a lot of siblings. We shared the same father but different mothers. At twenty-eight, she was two years younger than me, and just like me, she was the outcome of our father’s serial philandering. He lived in a rundown neighborhood that he treated like his own personal whore house. He maintained affairs with several women—some married, some single, some somewhere in between—and managed to keep his indiscretions under wraps until two pregnancies were tied back to him: mine and Lisa’s mothers.

  He got the hell out of Dodge after that so he didn’t have to pay child support or be a father.

  My sister and I grew up as neighbors. It was unconventional, sure, but it worked for us. Our mothers became allies after what our father put them through and, in turn, best friends. Sunday mornings were spent alternating between each apartment for breakfast and we’d have at least three dinners a week together as a family.

  Things had changed a lot since then.

  “The plan is for you to institute some kind of charitable-giving campaign,” Lisa said.

  “A giving campaign?”

  “Yes, Lukas. A giving campaign. It’s time for your business to give back to the community instead of just reaping the benefits. According to my research, CEOs are more favorable to their audiences when they take a hands-on role. Said audiences prefer when this hands-on charity work is done to help those in need within their own cities. So with that in mind, I want to show you a couple of proposals of some projects you could dive into.”

  Lisa pulled a portfolio out of her bag and flipped it open. There were dozens of charts in there, as well as more articles.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose as she began laying them out on the table in front of me. “Lisa, I have other meetings today. Just tell me the bottom line.”

  Lisa glanced up at me. “What?”

  “You tell me what I should do. Don’t present me with all these options. Like you said, I hired you as my public-relations expert. I don’t have time to hear out all of these.”

  My sister leaned back in her chair. “Fine. I have connections to a non-profit organization here in Seattle that does excellent work. I can set up a meeting with their director to fit your schedule.”

  “Talk to my assistant. I have a conference call to hop on.”

  Lisa started packing her things back up as I got to my feet and moved to the door. “Lukas?”

  I turned back to her.

  “I’m on your side, you know?” she said.

  “I know.”

  I left my sister in the conference room and moved down the pristine hallway to my office. I closed the door behind me and went to stand in front of my floor-to-ceiling windows. Gazing down at the city streets below and the rooftops of the historic district, I thought about the things Lisa had said.

  There was a time when I had nothing. My sister knew that better than anyone. She hadn’t had anything either. Our mothers had struggled to put food on our plates. I remembered how it felt being sent off to school with two quarters in my pocket. My mother always asked me if it was enough. Could I buy lunch with fifty cents?

  I always told her I could. And it was always a lie.

  My first day of high school hadn’t been easy with those quarters in my pocket, hand-me-down clothes, and a notebook I’d found at a garage sale with a kitten on the cover. I’d swiped pens from places that always had dozens of them in holders on their counters, like the print shop or the DMV. At the time, I’d thought I was going in prepared, but all I was walking into at school was four years of torture at the hands of merciless bullies who terrorized me for my clothes, school supplies, lack of a father, and how poor my family was.

  I came home with more black eyes than my mother ever could have dreamed of.

  And now?

  Well, I’d worked hard to amass my billions. I’d sacrificed leisure time and relationships to build my software and find success. I had no intention of giving those billions away and leaving myself or my mother vulnerable again. She needed me more than anything, especially now.

  Chapter 2

  Kayla

  I secured my hair in a low bun before pulling my hairnet over it. I tucked the net up under the bun, slid two bobby pins behind my ears to secure it in place, and plucked my apron from the magnetic hook on the side of the industrial refrigerator. The soup kitchen was bustling this afternoon and they needed all hands on deck. I’d been more than happy to take the call from Rodney, the kitchen manager, begging me to come in for a couple of hours to help them get through the lunch rush.

  Rodney had taken over washing dishes and was up to his elbows in bubbles when I brushed past him to make my way out onto the floor.

  “Thanks again for coming in, Kayla,” he said, flashing me a smile over his shoulder. He had a nice, bright, white smile, and he wore it often. His light brown hair was cut short on the sides and he was in need of a trim on top. Little strands poked through the top of his hairnet and stuck every which way, making him look permanently frazzled, which I supposed he was. Rodney was a busy man.

  “No problem at all. You know I’m always happy to help.” I tied my apron behind my back and started to adjust the strap behind my neck. These things were always far too long on me due to the fact that I was only five feet tall. My jeans were cuffed for the same reason—so I
didn’t trip over them. I had my working shoes on, complete with insoles to avoid foot cramping and aches. Even though Rodney had only asked me to come in and cover the lunch rush, I fully expected to be there well into the evening. That was how these things went.

  The buckle on the neck strap of my apron wouldn’t slide. I let out a frustrated growl and decided to take it off and try a different apron.

  Rodney turned off the sink and dried his hands on the faded red towel draped over his shoulder. “Hold on. I’ve got you.”

  I turned my back to him so he could tighten the strap for me. His fingers were hot and still a little damp from washing dishes, and I wondered how long he’d been at it for. Hours most likely. Once he tightened the strap, he put both hands on my shoulders.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. Now get out of here before I try to talk you into dish duty.”

  I laughed and hurried to rush through the swinging doors. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

  The soup kitchen hall was packed. Nearly every seat at every table was taken, and there was a line against the far wall that wrapped all the way around to the double doors that led out onto the street. I was sure the line continued for at least a block, perhaps more, and I hoped deliveries from caterers were all on time and we wouldn’t have any gaps in between putting out fresh dishes. I hated having to delay people who’d already waited for hours to put food in their bellies.