Start Us Up

Park Avenue Promise, Book 1

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About the book

From New York Times bestselling author Lexi Blake, discover The Park Avenue Promise Series...

Three young women make a pact in high school—

to always be friends and to one day make it big in Manhattan.

She’s a high-tech boss who lost it all…

Ivy Jensen was the darling of the tech world, right up until her company fell apart completely after she trusted the wrong person. Her reputation in tatters, she finds herself back in the tiny apartment she grew up in, living with her mom. When a group of angel investors offer her a meeting, she knows she has to come up with the new big idea or her career is over.

He’s an up and coming coder…

Heath Marino has always been fascinated with writing code. He’s worked on a dozen games and apps and is considered one of the industry’s more eccentric talents. But now he’s back in New York to spend time with his grandmother. She was known as one of the city’s greatest matchmakers, and he wants to know why. Surely there’s some kind of code in his grandmother’s methods, and he’s going to find them. 

When Ivy meets Heath it’s instant attraction, but she’s got a career to get back to and he just might be her on-ramp. It could be a perfect partnership or absolute heartbreak. 

**Selected by Apple Books as one of the Best Books of August!

**Selected by Barnes & Noble as one of five favorite indie books of the week!

**Selected by Kobo as one of Best of the Month books!

Excerpt

Chapter One

“I think you need to start dating again.”

The words hit me like I suspect a baseball bat to the head would. They make me a bit nauseous, and when I really think about the implications of following through with that particular suggestion, the world threatens to go fuzzy.

It’s like my body’s instinct is to shut down to protect itself.

“Ivy, are you okay?”

I look over the brunch table at my two best friends in the world and roll my eyes. Anika asked the question, but I turn Harper’s way since I’m sure she’s the one who made the suggestion that threatened to send me into a spiral. “Seriously? Do you remember what happened the last time I gave dating a shot? Should I call up any of the numerous articles detailing my downfall, or would you like an oral report on the current condition of my life and career?”

I don’t have much of either one, and a big part of that had been my choice in romantic partners.

Anika leans forward, avoiding her half-empty mimosa glass to put a hand on my arm. “We know what happened.”

That’s the trouble. She knows. Harper knows. The server probably knows. Everyone knows. My story is out there all over every tech journal and permeating the Internet like viral video gone wrong. My life dissected and turned into a cautionary tale.

Tech Goddess Brought Down by Dumbass Man Who Can’t Do Math

They’ll put it on my tombstone someday. Except I won’t have one. I’m totally choosing the cremation route, and hopefully someone throws a handful of me in Nick Stafford’s face and he chokes on me.

After all, I damn straight choked on the ashes of the company he single-handedly burned to the ground.

“That’s exactly why I think you need to try again.” Nothing deflects Harper when she gets an idea in her head. That stubborn will serves her well as a woman in the male-dominated industry of construction. “It’s been six months and you’re back home. You’ve done everything you need to concerning the sale of the company, and it’s time to move on with your life.”

She’s right about one thing. “I agree with you. Not about dating, but about moving forward when it comes to work. I’m going to Cecelia Foust’s cocktail party tonight.”

More words that threaten to shake my carefully constructed calm, but this is something I’m going to do.

Anika’s brows rise, and I can see she’s barely managing to avoid rolling those blue eyes of hers. “Cecelia? Really?”

I’d gotten a last-minute invite to the party that would be filled with some of the world’s wealthiest investors. Walking into that party is going to be rough, and it will take a whole lot of bravado I’m not sure I have anymore. After all, I’m the fallen freaking angel of the tech world, but I keep telling myself if Jobs could get fired from Apple and turn around and build Pixar and then march back in and take over Apple again, then I can figure out how to climb the mountain after a fall.

Besides, I owe CeCe. I’m calling her Cecelia like she hasn’t been important to me since I was a teenage girl. The truth is I’m as freaked about seeing CeCe as I am about facing a bunch of investors who know I got my ass handed to me. I’ve been avoiding CeCe, and when I got that invite, I realized she was done with letting me hide away.

“You know why Ivy’s doing it,” Harper says. “The more important thing is she accepted the invite.”

Anika’s eyes widen. “Wow. Are you sure you’re ready for this? Do you have an idea to pitch?”

My two best friends in the world might not understand everything about Tech World, but they know about pitching to investors. There’s not much I haven’t talked over with these two. Even when I lived in San Francisco and they were here in New York, we talked almost every day.

Now that I’m home again, they both offered me a place to stay.

There are days I wish my pride allowed me to take them up on that. Mostly the ones that end in “y.”

“I always have an idea,” I return.

That is not a lie. The problem is I don’t have a big idea. I have a hundred little ones. Tinkering ideas, as I like to call them. Sometimes I look at other people’s code and figure out how to streamline it, to make it work more seamlessly or to simply connect faster. When I started in the business, I was known as a fixer. I was the person who fixed other people’s ideas. Then I had a brilliant idea to build a company that did exactly that. I sold that one to chase after my next big dream—the one that came crashing down.

I couldn’t fix our cash flow problems because I hadn’t known they existed. Not that anyone in the industry believes me. After all, I presented myself as the smartest chick in tech.

Turns out I was a dumb girl who thought her boyfriend wouldn’t screw her over. A lot like the rest of the woman-identifying world.

“Are you sure you’re ready for something like this?” Harper puts down the perfectly made croissant she’s been enjoying. Her dark hair is up in a high ponytail, accentuating the delicate beauty of her face. No guy who meets her thinks she runs a construction company.

She likely could have been a cheerleader or prom queen if she’d fallen in with the right crowd. Unfortunately for her, she’d found us. Anika and I were the nerds of our school. I was big into robotics and coding at the time, and Anika was a card-carrying member of the AV club. She was now working her way up the ladder at a major network.

Harper hadn’t had time to be popular, though. After school ended, she worked with her dad. Every day. Weekends as needed. Summers had not been about vacations for Harper. They’d been about learning how to pour a foundation and install plumbing. Her father had built a business he could share with his sons, and when they hadn’t shown up and all he’d been left with was a daughter, he’d handed her a hard hat and put her to work.

The woman knows a thing or two about potential burnout, so I don’t ask her to stop mothering me. “I’m almost through all my savings. If I don’t find a new gig soon, I’m going to be fixing iPads at the mall or walking the aisles of Target asking how I can help.”

“I don’t think you would be good at that,” Anika says, her head shaking as though the vision is too much to take.

It would likely end up with me being fired or in jail. I’m not necessarily a people person. I accept this about myself. I’m better in virtual worlds.

Harper nods and seems to steel herself. “All right. Let’s hear it.”

I need more mimosa. I think seriously about asking the waiter to bring me one but without the orange juice, and to substitute whiskey for champagne. This is something I learned at CeCe’s always designer-clad feet. Alcohol helps. “It’s not one thing. When I get there, I’ll have a better sense of what they’re looking for and I’ll be able to put together a package for start-up funds.”

This, as they say in some circles, is not my first rodeo. I built my first business straight out of college. It was gaming. I developed the prototypes for several games that are still popular today. Not that I make that money anymore. I only developed the prototypes and wrote the base code and then sold those suckers for the seed money to start my second company. We went into school systems and government offices and streamlined the way they did paperwork. Fill out once and not again. That was when I took it to the big time. Jensen Medical Solutions. No one does forms like the healthcare industry.

CeCe Foust had been my first investor. She’d also been the one to tell me she thought my valuation wasn’t right and that I was too leveraged to survive. I hadn’t believed her because surely Nick had known what he was doing, and he was my boyfriend.

She’d been right.

And yet I’m going to walk into her Upper East Side brownstone this evening and boldly ask her for more.

Okay, maybe boldly isn’t the right word. But I am going to shove my stupid pride down and ask. Once I know what she’s looking for.

“Have you thought about going back to gaming?” Anika asks.

“I’m not some shut-in who has nothing better to do with her time than write pay to play apps,” I insist, although some can make a solid argument I’m all that and more. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old woman living in her mom’s rent-controlled apartment in the bedroom I’d grown up in. The one I vowed to never come back to. Even when I visited my mom, I stayed at a hotel. I told her it was because I usually brought someone home with me, but I think she knew the truth.

Maybe that’s why she seems equal parts bitter and strangely satisfied with the way everything’s gone down.

I believe her when she tells me I better start paying part of the rent or she’ll evict me. And this time she’ll toss out my Green Day posters, too, and turn that room into something called a craft room. I’ve never seen my mother do a craft in her life, but she’ll take up popsicle stick construction if it means proving a point to me. Of that I have no doubt.

“But you loved that,” Anika says, her mouth turning down in a frown. “I remember when you were coming up with the storyline and how much fun we had with it. I always thought one of your games could be made into a movie.”

Because Hollywood is so much easier than Tech World. Or maybe it is. I’ll never know.

The truth is I do love that work. I love it and it doesn’t pay. It doesn’t offer me the path I need to achieve my goals, the chief one being never having to live in that tiny apartment I grew up in again.

Actually, now that I think about it, Tech World is like a game. Chutes and Ladders. I work and work and none of it matters because I inevitably land on a chute, and not the golden parachute kind. The kind that deposits one back in the mud.

So it’s time to clean myself up and start climbing again.

“Ani, it’s not what I do now.” I love my friends but sometimes I wonder if they even know who I am anymore. After college, they’d stayed here in New York. I’m pretty sure Harper hasn’t left the city more than a handful of times. I’d moved to Austin for my first job, and then to San Francisco for most of my twenties. I’ve seen a lot of the world, and I know what it takes to make it.

Money.

Games are fun. Games might fill my soul, but they don’t fill the bank account.

We made a promise years ago. We promised we would be friends forever and that we would make it all the way to Park Avenue. I’m not going to get there writing gaming apps, no matter how much I love them.

“Ani wants to find a project that will let her work with someone she likes.” Harper sips her mimosa. “She’s got terrible bosses.”

“They’re not all bad,” Anika counters. “I’ve liked some of them. I think the boss I have right now is great. That’s why I don’t want to move.”

This feels better. I greatly prefer talking about my friends’ shitty existences rather than my own. “What did they do now?”

Anika started out as a production assistant. It’s pretty much another term for being everyone’s bitch. She’s worked her way up to one rung below running her own shows. She keeps bringing her ideas to the table, but so far she hasn’t gotten one through.

It’s a little like everything in the world. She needs money to back her dreams.

Only Harper had been given a whole company, and I’m so glad it seems to be her dream. There’s nothing my bestie loves more than taking a rundown piece of property and turning it into a gem.

Sometimes I wish she did the same for people. But then she tries and I get scared, so maybe she should stick to old brownstones.

“They want her to work as a PA on a reality show,” Harper explains. “It’s a huge step down.”

“Not exactly,” Anika hedges.

My cell buzzes, alerting me that I’m getting a text. I pray it isn’t CeCe realizing she made a terrible mistake when she invited me. Anika is explaining her latest job and I glance down at my screen.

I don’t recognize the number.

Hi, Ms. Jensen. My name is Heath Marino, and a mutual friend gave me your number. I was hoping to get some help with a piece of code I’m struggling with. I will be happy to pay for your expertise. If you’re interested and have the time, please ring me back at this number.

I’ve never heard of this dude, and he seems way too polite to work in my world. Also, he didn’t use a flurry of emoticons and acronyms only the hardest core of technophiles can decipher. I think about it because now the name does ring a very distant bell, but I can’t pin it down. Who is the mutual friend? Who has my number? I’d given up my work phone that I’d had for so long, and only a couple of people have the new one. The list of suspects is short, and they’re mostly here.

I look between the only two friends I have. “Heath Marino?”

I can tell immediately who has set me up with some dude who doesn’t know this is a setup. Or maybe he does, and that’s way worse. Anika’s expression is one of pure curiosity while Harper has gone stone-cold poker face on me.

After a moment she shrugs, obviously giving up. “His cousin works on one of my crews. He fixed a bug in my estimation software, and now he’s kind of my go-to guy when any of the tech goes down. He’s such a nice guy, and he’s working on this app.”

I manage to not groan. Everyone is working on an app in my world. Every single person I meet. If they aren’t actively working on an app, they have the idea for one, and hey, wouldn’t I like to work with them on it? But I know this isn’t really about work. “So you thought it would be cool to shove me into his arms or something?”

Harper sets down her fork. “He’s a nice guy, and he could use some help. If you don’t want to help him, I’ll let him know to leave you alone. See, I’m doing this thing where we’re all friends and sometimes we help each other out.”

There’s another scenario I haven’t considered. “If you like him, I’ll do it. I’m sorry. I don’t mind helping. I just don’t want to meet some dude who thinks I’m desperate and looking.”

Harper’s high ponytail shakes. “No, I’m not interested in him like that.” Anika sends her a look and they spend a couple of seconds communicating in a silent language of eyebrow raises and pursing lips. Finally, Harper sighs. “Fine. I did think you might like him, but he doesn’t know that.”

“He’s super cute,” Anika says with a nod. “I didn’t know about the setup thing or I would have warned you, but I have met Heath. He’s kind of adorable.”

I’m back to wanting to spontaneously combust so I can avoid all of this. “No.”

“You don’t have to date him.” Harper obviously gives up on me.

I’m cool with that. It’s not that I want my friends to wash their hands of me. To the contrary. I need them now more than ever. But I can’t even think about becoming involved with anything but my own looking-real-sad future.

You only get so many shots in my business, and fewer if you happen to have a vagina. If CeCe Foust had a penis, I doubt I would have gotten that invite. A man mentor would have already washed his hands of me and moved on to someone else.

I have to focus or I’ll live the rest of my life in that six-hundred-square-foot apartment, and I’ve gotten used to having more than one bathroom. My place in San Fran had four of those suckers, and I would migrate between them, each with its own loving Japanese toilet…

“Where did she go?” Harper asks.

“She’s probably thinking about bathrooms again,” Anika says, getting back down to the business of brunch. She starts to work on her eggs Benedict. “That’s the look she gets when she’s thinking about her place in San Fran. She’s got weird ideas about bathrooms now. I blame California.”

I have news for Ani. There are some spectacular bathrooms right here in New York. We’ve simply never lived in a building that had them.

I thought we would be there by now. I thought we would all be living on Park Avenue building our businesses, and one of us would catch maternal yearnings so the two sane ones left could have a baby to love and send back home. It was going to be great.

I don’t even have a dog.

When I’d had the money and space for a dog, I didn’t have the time. Now I have the time but nothing else.

And just so we’re clear, Park Avenue is a metaphor. We don’t have to live there. It’s simply the place we were when we realized there was more to the world than tiny apartments and parents who fought and bullies who made fun of us because we wore hand-me-downs.

Not that I would pass up Park. I wouldn’t, but the key to all of those childhood dreams was being together and having financial stability.

Maybe that had been the problem in San Francisco. I hadn’t had these two women with me. Maybe if I had, one of them would have said, hey that Nick guy seems like a dick who’s going to play around with the investment accounts and fuck you over.

They probably wouldn’t have said it like that. But they would have said something.

I need to make my stand here in New York this time. I need to rebuild here, and in the right way. Where my best friends can help me. Where we can watch out for each other.

I sit back as the revelation kind of flows over me.

Change has to start with me. And that sucks. I really wish it could start with someone else because I’m super tired.

“Will it help you out if I talk to this Heath guy?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

Honestly, I owe her because she’s going to have to pick up the tab for this overpriced brunch she talked me into. Not that she knows it yet.

“Yes.” Harper’s lips turn up in a satisfied grin.

She really thinks I’m going to take one look at this dude and melt at his feet.

I don’t melt anymore. I am Elsa, and the cold does not bother me. I quite like it. I would especially like it if we had an air conditioner that worked. It’s getting hot in the city.

“Then I will call him back and help him with his app.” I can suffer through for her. I’m sure I’ll need her to return the favor at some point.

If things don’t go well with CeCe tonight, I might need a job. I might be learning how to nail things into other things—a gross misrepresentation of what Harper does, but I know no technical terms when it comes to construction. She will have to teach me those too, so my fingers are crossed that tonight goes off without a hitch.

“Thank you so much, Ivy.” Harper grins, and it’s like the sun is back in the world.

I love my friends. How bad can this be?

“And thank you so much for this magnificent brunch.” I lay down the bad news.

She waves me off. “I knew I was paying. And I knew I had to do this when I caught you double fisting tacos from the street vendor on 50th. I don’t think it’s healthy to eat that much meat.”

They’re tasty and two for three dollars. She will take those tacos from my cold, dead hands. But I do appreciate the brunch. More than that I appreciate sitting in a pretty place surrounded by pretty things and waiters who actually get tipped so they don’t throw your food at you to save time because they’re already dealing with the next customer.

I’ve gotten good at catching those tacos.

My cell buzzes as Anika starts talking about the new reality show they want her to work on. I hear her saying something about a king looking for a bride, which makes me want to vomit a little.

And then I read the text and want to vomit a lot.

Hey, babe. Heard you’re going to be at the big party tonight. Maybe we can catch up.

Nick. Nick Stafford, the man who wrecked my life, is going to be at the party tonight.

Yeah, this could get real bad.

Copyright 2023 Lexi Blake