Free Start Me Up by Victoria Dahl

Brett Wilson’s new home. The two-acre lot halfway up Aspen Mountain was flat and perfect for building…aside from the fact that Brett wanted a view of his favorite ski run from his living room. A ski run that sat on the wrong side of a jagged wall of granite.
    “Buy another lot,” had been Quinn’s first suggestion upon walking the land. The builder had insisted that Brett Wilson would pay a premium if Quinn could make it work.
    Quinn would be collecting on that premium now, though it had been the challenge of the project that had driven him to take it on rather than the money. He’d spent days turning possibilities over in his head, but the swimming had finally unlocked the puzzle for him, as it often did. Something about the rhythm and the echoing solitude worked like meditation for him.
    He was picturing the cantilevered jut of the suspended living room when his cell rang. The sound tossed a sudden thought into his brain, where it exploded like a white-hot cherry bomb.
    It might be Lori.
    “Holy crap. ” Quinn scrambled to grab the phone, but the front wheel hit a slight buckle in the shoulder of the road, and when he jerked the car back onto the blacktop, the phone skittered away.
    “Shit.” He’d forgotten to call her. “Shit, shit, shit.”
    He pulled into a lot, threw his car into Park and dived across the seat to grab the phone.
    “Hello?” he nearly shouted.
    “Good morning, Mr. Jennings.” The cool voice of his office manager flowed across the ether. Jane. Just Jane.
    Collapsing back into his seat, Quinn let his head hit the headrest. “Morning, Jane.”
    “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I wanted to remind you of your schedule in case you were heading straight to a site this morning.”
    “No. No, I’m coming in. But remind away.” He raised one eyelid to glance at the clock—8:30 a.m. Yes, he’d most definitely missed Monday by a mile.
    “Here we go,” Jane said, just as she always did before running through his appointments. “You’ve got a preliminary consult with Jean-Paul D’Ozeville at ten this morning. Lunch with Peter Anton of Anton/Bliss Developers at twelve, a conference call at three about the lecture in Vancouver, and then the benefit dinner with Tessa Smith at seven.”
    “The what?”
    “The fund-raiser for the Aspen Music Foundation. You bought tickets weeks ago. I believe Ms. Smith wanted to meet Sting.”
    Quinn thought he could detect a sardonic hint in her words, which would have surprised him if he hadn’t been busy reeling over the shock she’d just delivered.
    “Tessa and I broke it off last week.”
    “Well, she called yesterday to be sure you hadn’t forgotten.”
    “Uh…right.” He vaguely remembered Tessa’s shouted assertion that she was not going to let him back out of such an important event.
    “And,” Jane continued, “she went to dinner with you on Friday?”
    “Yeah. Apparently I forgot to cancel that, too.”
    His office manager cleared her throat. “I don’t see any more dates on your schedule. As long as you don’t accidentally agree to any other shared meals, this should be your last evening with Ms. Smith.”
    “Good. I’m not—Jane, are you laughing at me?”
    “Certainly not, Mr. Jennings. If there’s nothing else I can do for you, I’ll see you in a few minutes.” The line clicked dead, confirming his suspicion that she was, indeed, laughing at him. As he deserved. What kind of man found himself on not one, but two accidental dates?
    Of course, Tessa was defined by her persistence. Quinn wasn’t normally apt to notice when women flirted with him, but women like Tessa didn’t wait for a man to notice, they simply assumed their place. So it was that one evening Quinn had looked up and found he was dating a big-breasted blonde who wore frighteningly tall heels. His developer friends had been impressed. Quinn had simply been too apathetic to break it off until Tessa had gotten clingy. Then it had been an easy