After This - Liora Blake Page 0,2

Relations and Community Impact,” but that’s only because it sounds more professional than “Good-Times Cruise Director.”

My easygoing personality is a big part of why my job here is to make Mason Enterprises look good. It doesn’t hurt that I was also blessed in the looks department, enough that Houston magazine put me on their sexiest bachelor list for the past five years. Those lists don’t make any difference when it comes to how I live my life, but they are good for the PR side of our business—even if that once involved letting a photographer shoot pictures of me shirtless, holding a sledgehammer in one hand and a hard hat in the other.

When I’m not half-dressed between the pages of a magazine, my job entails making sure we throw the best fundraising galas, host the most exclusive grand openings, and charm the hell out of every business journalist between Houston and Dubai. And while my job probably seems like a lot of fluff and flash, our family’s reputation matters to me, which is why I’m the best person for this job.

That said, I’m also the worst person to do anything related to acquisitions. I’m the last guy we should send in to close a deal even when I have all the right college degrees to do the job. But despite that and how I practically grew up in my parents’ offices, I’m not made for the cutthroat dynamics of sales. All that drama isn’t my style—and everyone in this room knows that.

I close the folder and take a deep breath.

“But why? Tate is basically a jackass dressed up in a good suit, so this isn’t the first time he’s blown up a deal. There has to be someone on his team or a regional rep better suited to this. Hell, you could send Marissa. She knows more about how to get a deal to the table than I do.”

“Send me where?”

Mom glances toward the open doorway at the interruption. My sister strolls in, wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and work boots, carrying a hard hat in one hand and a set of rolled-up site maps in the other. Our dad is a few paces behind her, dressed the same way, sans the hard hat. Instead, he has a tan Stetson perched on his head. Both of them have streaks of oil on their shirts and a sweaty, windblown look about them that indicates they’ve been out on a drilling site, probably since dawn.

Marissa tosses the site maps to Dad. He catches them in one hand while removing his hat and running a free hand through his graying blond hair. At nearly sixty, Dad still looks and behaves a lot like the college kid who would have made it to the NFL if a shoulder injury hadn’t destroyed his career. Instead, Byron “Buzz” Mason finished his geology degree, went to work in the oil fields, and then started his own small drilling company. Forty years later and he’s the head of a national conglomerate with drill sites from coast to coast.

He and Marissa are cut from the same cloth. The two of them love nothing more than tromping around in the oil fields, praying that the ground will give up what they’re betting it will. But Marissa is also next-level smart, with more engineering degrees than any one human being needs. She’s also an avid knitter, a CrossFit junkie, an expert trap shooter, and a collector of obscure, dorky vintage cartoon memorabilia. Basically, my sister is a hundred different high-performing people, all rolled into one.

Marissa flops into the chair next to mine and starts to loosen the laces on her work boots. Mom quietly mutters a few oaths in Italian when she spots the mud Marissa and my dad tracked into the office yet again.

Mom sighs. “No. I need Alec to go to Colorado. This doesn’t play to Marissa’s strengths. It requires more finesse. Someone who’s more…” She pauses, searching for the word she wants. “Agreeable. Being agreeable isn’t your forte, my dear.”

Marissa tugs on the elastic holding her hair up in a messy bun and then shakes out her long, wavy dark hair. “Agreeable? Yeah, that’s absolutely not my fucking forte.” She stands up and starts out of the office, patting me on the head as she walks past. “This one is all you, little brother. Although if you need me to come out there and be disagreeable, send me an SOS. Hell, that way while I’m there, I can