CarpeDiem 1

Elizabeth Wakefield is an Investment Consultant VP at Barnes Blake, who has on her prospect list Prescott Hamilton; who she has failed to convert into a client although she has been sending him appropriate information for 3 years. He is a man of privilege, accustomed to being a disturbingly handsome, sexually active womanizer; while also the professionally feared, demandingly successful, unpleasant, high maintenance workaholic corporate head of Global Communications. His instruction to his staff to dispose of the junk mail and block the calls from the annoying broker was the reason for her failure, until the last one gets through and his sudden need for a new broker for his company’s Pension Account changes his disposition. When they meet they both are magnetically attracted to each other, though they behave in different ways. Liz hides hers behind her professionalism because she wants his phenomenal career impacting business more than a relationship with him; in addition to the fact that she senses that she is 20 years his senior, though she doesn’t look it and he is unaware of. By the end of their meeting, she knows that she has become his newest target, as the prospect of an interracial relationship intrigues him as well as the prospect of being intimately familiar with her voluptuous body and the strange sensation he experiences when in her company shocks him.
But resisting her natural tendencies and the advances of Prescott Hamilton without offending him and jeopardizing losing his business; plus the age schism issue and its short and long term issues; are not the only problems impacting her. Before the painful and humiliating destruction of her 32 year marriage by her divorce demanding college sweetheart can completely cauterize her heart, he dies suddenly from a rough sex induced heart attack encounter with his young, former beauty queen mistress. At the same time, her professional advancement and parity with male colleagues is being stymied by a bigoted chauvinistic branch manager. Upsetting her further is her separation from her four precious adult children, who are suddenly relocating to distant cities across the nation, Atlantic Ocean and even to the South Pole, leaving her feeling that at 60 she is alone, being forced to start life all over again.
Thus begins the challenge, cajoling, maneuvering, and resistive counter positioning to Prescott and also suddenly 3 other competing men, to romantically capture her. Despite her best efforts of limiting her interactions with him to reporting the Pension Account’s performance or public business networking functions, her platonic relationship with her client is compromised when she succumbs to become his intimate birthday gift, which pleases him but generates the ire of his disapproving Mother who’s intent is to eradicate Liz’s social damage to her son,. It also coincides with a series of life threatening attacks against Liz, which at first seems inadvertent but soon becomes blatantly clear that some is targeting her and wants her very dead.