REDEMPTION

Chapter 3: The chase is on!

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Outside the noise and frenetic pace of London carried on unabated. Inside however was a completely different picture.

The hotel suite, in central London, facing Hyde park, was the very epitome of understated luxury and class, with designer furniture and all the latest gadgets known to man adorning every conceivable nook and cranny. It cost an arm and a leg too, but money was something its current occupant had an excess of.

Dan sat at the table in a sweatshirt and a pair of old, worn jeans, and looked blindly at the latest bunch of emails on his laptop screen, absently going over the list of figures from his accountant. He wasn't paying much attention. For a guy whose bank balance was so very far off into the black, numbers didn't really mean much.

They'd struck oil on his land last year, and the money had come pouring in. He hadn't exactly been scraping the barrel before, but ever since that event his monetary trajectory had shot off into the stratosphere.

Overnight he became a millionaire, and the subsequent shrewd investments he since made as far as his property and business portfolio went, had only served to strengthen his financial position further.

It had been a thrill at first, Dan had finally made good, bought his ma a retirement home and invested heavily in the community he had grown up in. The new high school in Ellis Springs for one, owed quite a lot to his generosity. His Ranch had almost become an afterthought, it ran like a well oiled machine. Gone were the days of slaving away from sunup to sundown making sure everything was ticking along. The truth was Dan could pretty much just leave the whole thing to his foreman Jim and the dozen or so hands they had hired and it would keep on being productive for years to come.

For a man who had worked everyday since he was 14 years old, all this sudden wealth came as quite a shock to the system. Sometimes he yearned for the days when he didn't have a dime to his name and had to work like a dog just to keep food on the table. He felt distinctly ungrateful for feeling this way, given the recession and the dire straights most people faced on a daily, but there it was.

Dan knew he was at loose ends, his old, simple life in complete opposition to his new reality.

He wondered if he would ever get used to being a wealthy man, not a thought he could share with anyone, since everyone he knew envied him.

His ma and sister for one lorded over the rest of Ellis Springs as the new bastions of town society. Unfortunately Dan couldn't get in on the act, he didn't feel any different, he was the same person, even if everyone else treated him differently.

Sometimes he felt like people saw him as nothing more than an open check-book with legs. He had lost count of the many long lost friends and acquaintances who had scrambled up out of the woodwork over the last year, vying for his favour.

Dan was gruff, he had a short fuse, and had gotten into his fair share of bloody fist fights over the years. They didn't call him the town bad boy for nothing. But he was also a sucker for a sob story. He knew people were only too willing to take him for a ride and he didn't appreciate it. Especially not, when it came to the scores of beautiful women who had thrown themselves at him lately. Or the high society damsels his mother paraded before him with reckless abandon.

Not that he had had any issues in the lady department before striking it rich, oh no, he could attest to plenty of experience where women were concerned.