Cole’s P.O.V

I groaned and ran my hands through my long dark brown hair as I packed away the last of the day’s paperwork. I had finally finished the paperwork that I had to get done today, could I have stayed longer? Absolutely, but all the words on the paper started to blur and mesh together. That’s when I decided that it would be a good time to call it a day and headed home.

As I reached to check the time my phone lit up with a reminder going off from my calendar that Nancy updates constantly.

5 AM video call with Singapore QA executive for confirmation on the CMT of the new line.

(QA = Quality Assurance)

(CMT = Cut, Make and Trim)

Fuck. I frustratedly dragged my hand down my face, feeling my five o’clock shadow roughly scratch across my hand. It was already after midnight and by the time I got home and having to come in early tomorrow morning, I’d be lucky if I could get even three hours of sleep.

I allowed my eyes to wander around my office, considering for a moment just sleeping on the plush leather couch for the night. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d done so and definitely, wouldn't be the last. I shook my head, I had to get home.

I hurriedly locked up the office and made my way to the elevator, ignoring the greeting from the security guard. Honestly, I was too tired to move a muscle and I was still supposed to drive home, although I think it might be safer if I just called my driver.

Getting home took longer than I thought it would, because, of course, New York is a city that never sleeps and so I somehow managed to get stuck in traffic just after midnight. By the time I finally managed to get home it was well after 1 AM.

“Alexa! Set an alarm for 4 AM,” I yelled at my Alexa device as I stripped off my hand-tailored, black Armani suit with its lining of Royal Red silk.

“Alarm set for 4 am,” Alexa called back.

I draped the jacket over my forearm as I dragged myself to the master bedroom. My apartment had a modern minimalistic feel, with a color theme that stayed in the white, grey and black color scheme. I threw my jacket over the black leather ottoman that was placed in the center of my walk-in closet. The rest of my clothes closely followed behind and before I knew it, I was under my 30,000 thread count black Egyptian-cotton sheets, and I was asleep before my head even hit the pillow.

“BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEP!”

“Alexa, I’m up.” I groggily mumbled from the comfort of my pillow.

“BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEEP!”

“Oh, shut up would you?” I half screamed, half groaned out as I stumbled out of my bed and straight into my walk-in glass shower. Sighing in relief when the irritating noise of my alarm finally stopped as Alexa got the hint.

I fumbled around for the tap to turn on the shower and crank the temperature of the shower to high. Hoping that the steaming hot shower would ease the tension in my shoulders and my back. I couldn’t help but try to roll my shoulders back and forth, feeling the tightness of my body easing with the application of heat and stretching of my muscles. Recovery after being at the gym for back and shoulder’s day was never a fun one. It didn’t help always being hunched over my desk.

I stepped out of the shower finally and strolled through to my bedroom and into my closet. All my suits are arranged on the left-hand side of the closet. The plush white carpets contrasted perfectly with the dark oak drawers and complimented the shelving. I shoved them aside to grab my favorite dark-gray Burberry suit and a black trench coat.

Changing quickly, I ran some light gel through my hair and hoped it would keep my hair at least vaguely in place. I did not feel like flicking my hair out of my eyes all day.

I grabbed a tub of fruit salad out of the fridge as I started up my phone to check any emails that may have come in during the 3 hours I was asleep.

I decided that the fruit salad was going to have to be good enough for breakfast. I didn't have the time for my housekeep Martha to make me breakfast or to stop and buy some. I had emails I needed to complete, my driver, Jackson, wasn't working today, something about his daughter being sick and it is his week with her. I swiftly typed an email to Nancy.

To: Nancy (PA)

Morning, please organize me a driver today, Jackson's kid is sick. Also, what is my schedule for today?

-C

To: Cole

Will do. Your schedule today is as follows:

5 AM: Conference call to Singapore to talk to the QA executive for confirmation on the CMT of the new line. 7 AM: Meet with the models and the design team to go over the final garments for the opening fashion show tonight 9 AM: Meet with The LimeLight manager to go over final concerns and any other possible issues. 10 AM: Models for the fashion week line come in to try on mockups. 1 PM - 2 PM: break for lunch 3 PM: Meeting with Mia; handing over the past week's work. 4 PM - 6 PM: Free 7 PM: Dress rehearsal fashion show 8 PM: Dancers warm-up / Dress rehearsal 9 PM: The LimeLight Nightclub officially opens 10 PM: Opening speech followed by a late dinner during the fashion show

-Nancy

Thankfully the replacement driver arrived swiftly.

“Good Morning Sir,” my driver greeted me with a nodded head as he opened my door for me.

“Morning,” I greeted back curtly, my nose already buried in my phone. Traffic was light so it didn't take long to get to the office. I honestly did not have time to waste this morning.

Once I got into the office I glanced over my schedule for the day again. It wasn't too bad I decided. I just hoped everything would run smoothly, or that I would at least be able to deal with random Gremlins and that Mr. Murphy was on vacation.

Not that I’d ever admitted it out loud, and it didn't seem to matter how many times I opened up a new nightclub, I was still rather nervous. This was something completely different from anything I’d tackled before and I'd spent months of my time trying to organize everything to make sure that it was perfect. I could only hope that everything would flow smoothly.

Hours and multiple stressful conversations later, it was nearing 5 pm and I knew that the traffic was always unpredictable in New York. I messaged the driver Nancy had hired letting him know that I was ready to head over to the club.

I had a habit of rather being early than late, and besides, I was rather eager to see how everything was going and what it looked like with all the final changes that I had approved about a week ago.

Walking over to Mia’s office, I knocked and popped my head in, "Mia, I'm going over to LimeLight now. I was wondering if you want to come?"

Mia nodded her head, "Yeah, okay sure. Just let me pack up my stuff quickly. I'll get ready there. I'm sure one of the girl's makeup artists can fit me in. She waltzed over to the oversized cupboard and threw it open “I’ve got my dress here anyway."

Mia grabbed the garment bag and a few other necessities, so of course, it took us another 20 minutes to leave the office. We slid into the back of the car and raced off towards the club.

“Take us to the back entrance, Anthony,” I called out to the driver as I was scrolling through the final invite list. As we drove into the back entrance of the club I could see the mob of paparazzi waiting around to get a photo of any of the celebrities that will be attending the fashion show tonight.

Backstage was crazy. The air was polluted with some awful sticky chemicals. So much so I could barely breathe. I'm pretty sure I started to get high on the fumes. Turns out that it was hairspray. How girls use and breathe around it I do not understand. The air around me tasted like chemicals.

Girls were running around in all variations of undress, some were already in the underwear for the show tonight, others still in dressing robes or changing.

It looked like a makeup store exploded in there, makeup cases were lying everywhere and tubes of whatever that gunk is that girls put on their faces lying scattered all around them.

There were at least twenty hair straighteners, in use, with the associated smell of burning hair, and some more just lying around.

The usual girly pop songs blared from a Bluetooth speaker that belonged to one of the models or makeup artists. Everyone was yelling and trying to be heard in all the chaos.

Suddenly a bra was flung across my face. Right, so that was my cue to leave. I snatched the bra off my face and let it fall to the floor.

I normally wouldn’t be complaining about girls throwing underwear in my face but generally, that was followed by sex with some rather attractive model or models. That was not the case here, unfortunately.

There was way too much estrogen in one room. I thought I'd go check on how things were going elsewhere. I'd let Mia handle the crazy girl hell that was going on backstage, she was more equipped to handle this than I was.

How girls handle that I don't know, I barely spent five minutes in there and I almost choked to death on hairspray, had a hair straightener almost burn me twice and someone's high heel and bra almost hit me in the face and another bra that actually did... I had spent more time than I needed to in the craziness of the backstage.

Walking out of the dressing room I walked straight into the main VIP dance floor, on the third floor of the club. Except we had transformed it just for the night. A large portion of the middle of the room was taken up by a slightly raised long white platform. This was the catwalk for the evening and it looked pretty impressive, lit up as it was with bright lights.

The event planner I had been working with had co-opted Mia and I and we had draped these little white lights, called fairy lights apparently, as well as long pieces of white fabric from the ceiling and down the walls.

Surrounding the catwalk were large circular tables for our guests to sit as they had dinner and watched the show unfold before them.

The whole point of all the white was to make sure the black lingerie stood out, as tonight's line was entirely black.

All the models would be dressed in the black lingerie as well as black lace masks, all slightly different and unique. The dancers of tonight would be dancing in black ensembles I had especially designed while dangling from long white fabric. It seemed fitting considering tonight's opening had a black and white theme.

A blur of bright platinum blonde hair came hurtling my way, sending people flying as if the blur was a hurricane. Turns out it was just my one club manager, Cameron, who also happened to be my younger brother. He was just finishing up business school and needed some decent work experience, considering he had spent his summers since he was fifteen waitressing and bartending, I decided to let him work for me as my club manager.

The general area was only officially opening the second night as tonight was only for the exclusive guests to see the fashion show and then to be the first ones to experience LimeLight. Knowing this crowd, I expected all of them to would want to party after the show and considering we had used the main dance-floor of the VIP area for the fashion show, we were using the general area dance-floor for tonight's quests.

“Woah, Woah! Slow down there Cam,” I called out as I reached out and grabbed his arm. I dragged his body in front of mine, “What's got you running all over the place?” I raised my eyebrow in question.

“I was looking for you actually, the smoke machines aren't working. I've been trying to get the repair guy on the phone for an hour now and he’s not answering and I know you had that friend in high school whose dad owned a smoke machine company. I remember that the two of you used to play around with them and even fixed up a few so I was hoping you could take a look, please. I know you’re super busy but I can't get ahold of the guy, and you’re the only other person I can think of that can fix them.”

It took me a few seconds to parse the long breathless speech for meaning. “Ahh, sure yeah I'll take a look at them. I’ll make sure to get the guy down here tomorrow or at least find someone else. I can’t have them failing on my opening night” I growled out as I felt my fists started to clench. Of course on the night of my biggest club opening to date, the smoke machines had to stop working and we weren't able to get a hold of the guy to fix them. I mean seriously, I'm pretty sure I was paying him to be on standby in case something like this happened. I just hoped everything else would run smoothly. ‘Mr. Murphy, why couldn't you just be on holiday..’ I thought quietly to myself.

Cameron thanked me and then ran off to make sure the waitresses and bartenders were ready for tonight, while I started to take apart the first smoke machine, trying to figure out what on earth was going on with it that it wasn't working. I mean they were brand new. I had only bought them a few weeks ago and they'd been used a few times since then and that was for dress rehearsal and once when the DJ was going through his set to make sure that everything worked for tonight. They were working earlier but then they stopped.

Before I knew where the time had gone, and I had finished making my rounds around, checking if everything else was running smoothly, which thank goodness everything was, the guests started to arrive.

‘Showtime it is then,’ I thought silently as I made my way up my private elevator to the top floor where I would make my entrance down the giant staircase onto the stage at the beginning of the catwalk. That’s where it was planned for me to give an opening speech about my line and the opening of the club.

The guests slowly filled into the room, and started to fill up the tables. Once we could see that everyone had arrived and was seated, Mia stood up and made her way onto the stage to introduce me, “Good evening everyone. Thank you all for coming. I know it means a lot to my brother and I look forward to your reaction to seeing the new line by ‘You’re Worth it’, ‘The Ebony Collection’ designed by the man himself, Cole Wentworth, so let's give him a hand.”

As Mia finished up her short introductory speech I made my way down the grand staircase, “Thank you for that introduction, Mia.” I said as I hugged her. She walked off as I turned to the crowd with the mic in my hand, “As Mia said, thank you all for coming. Tonight is going to be something a bit different from normal. You see we are presenting the new lingerie line from ‘You’re Worth It’ called ‘The Ebony Collection’, which I am quite proud of if I do say so myself.

You will notice the dancers, who will be performing all over the club, will be wearing some of my favorite pieces as well as our wait-staff are all dressed in elements from the collection.

Not only is tonight special because of the new line but we are proud to announce that this is the opening for my new adventure, The LimeLight Nightclub, which, unlike any of my previous clubs, will have two floors of exclusive access only and another two floors that will be available to the general public. Everyone here has been granted premium membership access so to celebrate we thought we’d give you all a sneak peek before we open properly tomorrow night. I hope you all enjoy tonight and without further adieu let the fashion show commence!” I finished my speech with a slightly raised voice so I would be heard above the applause and then ran off to the side of the stage.

The white curtains that had been hanging behind me floated up towards the ceiling, the lights lowered and the beginning notes of ‘Or Nah’ by Ty Dolla $ign filled the air and the first girl started her walk.

The audience gasped as she walked down the catwalk, legs that went on for miles made taller by six-inch midnight black stilettos, meeting together to be encased in very delicate lace g-string, with a thin strip of lace used to hold it all together carefully placed just above her hips, framing her perfectly toned stomach.

A line of stuck-on little diamonds led the eye up to the completely organza bra', her nipples only covered by carefully embroidered flowers that started in a concentrated pattern in the middle and then appeared scattered out toward the edges.

Covering the top half of her face was a black masque made from a similar lace as the bra she was wearing. Her blonde hair was woven into a very complicated large bun at the back of her head, with a few loose curls hanging out to frame her face.

She reached the end of the catwalk, paused just long enough for everyone to take in her ensemble, then did a slow turn and started to make her way back up the other side of the stage. The next girl appeared posing at the opening of the runway as the first girl was walking back.