Page 1 of Valentine's Day Daddy

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“There he is,” Mimi croons as she steps into my office.

“I’ve been here for an hour and a half already,” I reply grumpily.

Laughing softly to herself, Mimi Hollins saunters into my office with a couple of cups of coffee from Starbucks and sets one down in front of me, then drops into the chair in front of my desk. Long, lean, and stunningly beautiful, she’s one of my oldest friends. We survived middle school, prep school, and college together, forging an unbreakable bond. There were a few minutes back in college when we both thought there might be something more between us, but we realized quickly that our friendship was the most important thing to both of us.

After we graduated and I took over my family’s media company, she was a natural fit to bring in and basically run the place. I’m the CEO of course. Nominally speaking anyway. I have the freedom to do a lot in the development arena. Mimi has always been better than me at the nuts and bolts, day-to-day operation side of things. She’s more organized and if I’m being honest, is smarter than me. Or at least, she’s more interested in the internal functioning of the company than I am. I find the Xs and Os to be boring as fuck. But she seems to enjoy it, so more power to her.

Mimi is well-grounded in reality but she’s also an innovative and outside the box thinker. She’s helped usher the company my family built almost a century ago into the twenty-first century. She’s made us more streamlined, efficient, and of course, vastly more profitable. That she’s taken such firm control and has us running like a well-oiled machine has enabled me to search for new ways to keep the company growing and expanding into areas we don’t have much of a footprint. I like to say that I’m the idea guy while she’s the implementation gal.

We’ve got our fingers in print, digital, and broadcast media—that was what we were founded on. But eventually, as the company grew more successful, we branched out into music and movie production, and even have a network television broadcast company. We are all things for all people. And with my ideas, Mimi’s hard work behind the scenes to implement them, the Mullen Media Group continues to see unprecedented growth and evolution as we keep branching into areas my forebears could never have foreseen.

“I take it by your grumpy demeanor that your date didn’t go well last night,” she says.

“Next time somebody wants to set me up, slap me then remind me just how grumpy I am today,” I tell her.

“And how am I supposed to differentiate it from how grumpy you usually are?”

“I hate you so much,” I say with a chuckle.

“Yeah, but you’re kind of stuck with me now.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“So, seriously, what happened with your date?”

I roll my eyes. “It was a fucking train wreck from the word go. We’ve got absolutely nothing in common and had even less to talk about. She wasn’t even interesting enough to take home,” I tell her. “Why Tommy thought we’d be a good match is fucking beyond me. Remind me to kill him.”

“I’ll put it on your calendar,” she replies dryly.

I grab the coffee she brought me and take a drink as I sit back in my chair. Mimi is just sitting there looking at me with a smug little grin on her face, practically about to burst from holding in whatever it is she wants to say. I roll my eyes again and she laughs.

"You've got something you want to say, so spit it out," I tell her.

“Oh, I was just thinking how much easier things might be if there was a company that specialized in matching people with common interests, values, similar personalities—you know, a company that might be able to use a complex and cutting edge algorithm to link people who would be ideal matches for one another. It’d be so much easier.”

I laugh softly. “You’re such an asshole.”

One of my latest ideas was to build upon existing technology to create a dating website that’s better than anything out on the market today. A dating website that gets it right when it came to creating matches. It was just a pet project I thought up when I’d had a few one night. Something I thought would be fun and would require minimal investment while returning maximum profits. And on that count, I was right. The site, “Soulmates.com” is making money hand over fist and has been almost from the start. Yeah, it seems like there’s no shortage of people out there looking for their soulmates.

Initially, Mimi had been skeptical of my idea. Probably because I’d been drinking with her the night I dreamed this up. She didn’t think I was serious. But I was and once we went live and people were flocking to sign up, she saw the potential and started to back it up with more of the company’s capital, established an advertising department, and brought in a pair of geeks to maintain the system. Soulmates.com is now the biggest dating site on the Internet and has thousands of testimonials from people who met… well… their soulmate.

“Have you done what I told you to do and signed up on the site yet?” Mimi asked.

“I’m not going to sign up on my own site,” I say. “I didn’t create it to be my own little playground.”

“Then why did you create it?”

“Because I’m a romantic.”

“And I’m Captain of the USS Enterprise. No, wait. I’m the Queen of England. No, I’m Wonder Woman,” she replies. “Oh, this is fun. Okay, your turn.”

“Have I mentioned that I hate you?”

“Yeah, you might have mentioned that a time or two,” she replies. “Seriously, what is the point of creating this big, successful matchmaking site if you don’t use it yourself?”

“To make money, of course.”

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