“Hey,” Cole said as he sat in one of the visitor chairs opposite Mason. “What’s up?”

“Thanks for coming in, Cole,” Mason said, sounding businesslike and formal and yet as if he truly appreciated it.

“It’s been a while. A couple of decades since I’ve been here. Kind of a mind fuck.”

Mason looked around briefly, as if trying to see it through Cole’s eyes. “Things have changed, huh?”

“And yet they haven’t.” Cole shook his head, again trying to escape the unexpected emotions that swept through him—surprisingly, not all of them bad. “You said you had something urgent.”

Mason grinned. “Straight to business. I like that.”

“Have to admit I’m curious.”

Mason straightened in his chair, pulled up closer to the desk. “I told you we’re working on expanding outside of the state. It’s happening even faster than I expected. Today we finalized a deal for four new stores, two in Florida and one each in Alabama and Kentucky.”

“Congrats,” Cole said, not surprised at all. When Mason set his mind to something, he did it. Always had.

“Thanks. All four locations are existing buildings, and they need various amounts of work. We’d like to get at least two of them open before the holidays.”

“Christmas is only six weeks away. Are you talking you just need to clean things up and put up signage or—”

“The insides need to be gutted on two and partially renovated on the other two. We’ve already been working with architects and the plans are close to finalized.”

“No way it could happen before Christmas if they weren’t,” Cole said.

“We took a gamble and proceeded before the deals were finalized. Happy to say everything worked out. Now we need someone to oversee all four renovations, and that’s why I called you.”

Cole raised his eyebrows, intrigued in spite of himself.

“I don’t have the time to do it, and neither does anyone else. Besides that, I don’t have the expertise that will come in handy to get these turned around so quickly. You do.”

Cole nodded, waiting for Mason to say more.

Mason grabbed a manila folder from the side of his desk, opened it, slid a couple of sheets of paper across to Cole’s side. It was an offer of employment for the position of special projects manager.