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talk yourself out of it, Seven.” His stern tone brought me back to the other side of the desk, but didn’t help with my confidence at all. “You can and you will do this. You are going to walk into that boardroom with me on Monday morning and you are going to make those old men your bitches. Just like we have done together for the past year. There is no room for second guessing yourself now. Not in this board room or in life.”
    I nodded in agreement, and began to sign the papers; the paperwork that would forever change my life. Overnight I would go from being a nobody to holding the reins on one of the largest communication conglomerates in North America. The hunger for power seeped through my soul as I signed my name on every highlighted line.
    “And Seven, it’s all yours. Everything. The penthouse, the company, my money. I only ask one thing of you.” His voice was quiet, meek, as if he was finally handing over his power.
    “Anything, James.”
    A tear slipped from the corner of his eye while he took a deep breath.
    “Stay with me, and take care of me in my last days. I don’t want to die alone.”

James White passed away on a Tuesday afternoon in the comfort of his own home. I laid in bed with him, holding his hand while he drifted off into the peaceful sleep of eternity. The sun shone through the floor to ceiling glass in the room, and as the life slipped from his body I swear the few clouds in the sky parted, welcoming a new soul into where I think heaven would exist.
    James was a saint; a generous man under the disguise of a ruthless businessman. He would have given a homeless man the jacket off his back in the middle of a snow storm. But, he would have never been seen doing it. It would have ruined the asshole persona he projected to the rest of the world. I was lucky enough to see him in his weak moments. The moments that made me realize he was just human, like the rest of us. The moments that made me fall in love with him and the person he really was under the rough exterior and kink.
    I live with a lot of regrets about my life with James when he was here, my biggest one being the fact that I said no to him. I should have said yes, even if I knew it was wrong. And had I known he was sick when he asked me to marry him, I never would have said no. I never would have doubted myself enough to keep my walls up when he needed me the way he did.
    But, in the end I would have only been heartbroken from him leaving me, like every other man has ever left me. It is unfair to say. It wasn’t his fault, but grief does funny things to people. There were nights I would cry myself to sleep in his bed, the same bed he died in, blaming him for leaving me alone in this world. I know it was wrong, but to me that is how I felt right then and there.
    Abandoned just like poor little Seven James always had been. But I know now that if James had a real choice, he would have moved heaven and Earth to get better instead of leave me. He would have never willingly let me go and trying to tell myself that has always been the key.
    Death had never touched me as closely as it had with James. I had never shed a tear over another person. I had never become so connected with someone that I would feel the sense of loss when they were no longer in my life. James changed all of that for me. James White broke me as a woman.
    I worked, and I made White-Woods Global my bitch. It wasn’t the walk in the park that James had insisted it would be for me though. People were rude assholes. Men three times my age weren’t comfortable with me calling the shots, and repeatedly tried having me removed from the company with no success. The paperwork James had drawn up with his estate attorney was iron clad. Had he been a witness to what was going on in our boardroom he would have rolled in his grave.
    But I continued to truck on, even as these douche biscuits threw every trick in the book my way in hopes that I would fail, or walk away from the company