Perfect Fit - Brenda Jackson [3]
Late that evening Gabe entered his apartment, went straight to the kitchen, grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator and took a swig. His mother had been too busy lavishing her attention on her surrogate grandchild to remember to harass him any more that afternoon. But he wasn’t crazy enough to think she was through with him. With Christopher married that meant Gabe was now the recipient of all of her attention. As soon as she could, she would try playing matchmaker again.
Walking down the hall to his bedroom, he smiled as his thoughts fell on his partner and best friend. Christopher had begun working for Gabe’s father’s construction company at eighteen. Omar Blackwell had taken the young, hard-working loner under his wings and become not only Christopher’s boss, but a mentor and father figure. The Blackwells had offered Christopher things he’d never had before, family ties, trust, respect and complete love.
Gabe knew his parents considered Christopher their other son, and since the two boys were the same age, they had talked Christopher into furthering his education right along with Gabe. They both had graduated with MBAs at the top of their class. Christopher had a degree in Industrial Design, and Gabe had earned a degree in Structural Engineering. And when Omar Blackwell retired six years ago, signing ownership of the company over to Gabe and Christopher, they had taken it in a whole new direction, one that was now world known. The Regency Corporation had built numerous upscale shopping malls, industrial office parks and department stores all over the United States in the past five years. Their biggest contract to date was the Landmark Project, which involved building a multimillion-dollar ski resort near Anchorage, Alaska. Plans were to start on it by the first of the year.
The fact that a deal of that magnitude had been awarded to a company owned by two African-American men had made headlines. He and Christopher had been featured in several newspapers and magazines, and had even made the covers of Black Enterprise and Ebony, as well as being the recent recipients of Black Enterprise’s prestigious Minority Businessmen of the Year Award a few months ago. At the age of thirty-two, they were the youngest individuals to receive such recognition.
As Gabe began stripping off his clothes, he thought about his mother’s fixation with marrying him off. It was as if she was on some sort of mission. Unfortunately, it was one he was having no part of. He had tried placating her by dating a few of the single women from her church, but since it seemed the majority of them had issues that he refused to deal with, he continued to make his work the top priority in his life.
Now that Christopher was a family man, their roles in the company had switched. Gabe did the majority of the traveling these days as well as working most of the international deals. Christopher was the one who stayed in the office and ran things on the home front, and the few times he did travel, he took his wife, Maxi, and the baby with him.
Gabe sighed deeply. The new demands of the job had taken over his life. He didn’t have time to develop any sort of serious relationship with a woman other than a brief fling, which was just fine and dandy with him. Anything else took time and energy he couldn’t spare.
Stepping into the shower, he couldn’t help but appreciate his on-going affair with Debbie Wells. Like him, she was a successful professional who preferred a sex-only relationship; no romance, no commitment—just raw physical contact and sexual release, which was an invigorating way to work off stress.
Over the past three years, after his disaster with Lindsey Jefferson, he’d found that a nice unencumbered, noncommitted sort of relationship with a woman was what he needed. It definitely had its advantages. There wasn’t a chance you would fall in love, and neither party had expectations of anything turning serious. There was no room for jealousy