Peggy Jaeger, Author

So the little snippet from today’s selection is from my NEW YORK SOCIALITES series, IT’S A TRUST THING, which was just released on APPLE AUDIO!

Nell Newbery has trust issues.

It’s hard to trust when you’re the daughter of a fallen financial scion who bilked people out of billions. Nell’s done everything in her power to keep away from men who see her as their ticket to fortune and fame. All she wants to do is run her ultra-successful business, HELPFUL HUNKS, in peace. But it wouldn’t hurt to find a guy who doesn’t know a thing about her father’s felonious past; one she can give her heart to and trust it won’t come back to her battered, bruised, and broken.

Is Charlie Churchill that guy? On the surface he seems perfect, all polished manners and quiet mirth. Nell’s convinced he knows nothing about her, other than she likes superhero movies and views junk food as a food group.

Can she trust him to be what he appears to be? Or is he just pretending?

For Nell, trust is everything in life…and in love.

SNIPPET…

That old expression if you want something done, give it to a busy person describes my life to perfection.

I was already late for the two-hour lecture I’d agreed to give at Columbia Business School. And I say agreed with my tongue in my cheek.

When Dean Arnold Dietrichson, an old friend of my mother’s from her cotillion days, emailed and asked me to fill in for a professor who’d requested time off to visit a sick parent, I ignored the missive. And the two follow-ups he’d then sent. When he called me directly, I couldn’t come up with an excuse fast or truthful enough to squeak out of it. Public speaking is the last in a long laundry list of things I never want to do. Having my fingernails removed one by one without anesthesia and shaving my head supersede public speaking, so that tells you how much I didn’t want to do what I was about to do.

A scheduling issue had disrupted my afternoon and I found myself two men short for a moving job I’d booked weeks ago for an extremely influential client. It took me two and a half hours, seven pleading phone calls, the promise of an extra day off, plus time and half for the two guys who finally agreed to come in.  I toyed with the idea to add sexual favors to the asking price if no one agreed.

That would have been an empty promise, but desperate times…you know?

My business, Helpful Hunks, rents gorgeous twenty and thirty-something between-jobs male actors and models by the hour to do all the things you can’t—or don’t want to—do.

Are you a woman living on your own and need shelving put up but don’t know the business end of a hammer from a screwdriver? Call me. Are you relocating from one small New York apartment to another and don’t want to pay the exorbitant cost a commercial moving business charges to move the meager stuff you own? Check out my website. Need heavy furniture rearranged? Boxes brought in from storage? Someone to help relocate mom’s belongings from her home to her new assisted care facility? Send me an email.

The idea for the business came to me in college. I was my first client. At a spit above five foot, and with a mother residing in a psych facility and a father who was a guest of the state, I had no one to help me lug all my stuff into the dorm room I’d be living in for the next four years.

When a group of upperclassmen who were involved in a project offered to help me in order to gain service points for their frat house, I readily agreed. Flirty, fit, and hunky-hot, the guys got all my crap moved in one one-hundredth of the time it would have taken me on my own. While I watched them heft and heave my trunks, luggage, books, and bed linens, a little idea wormed its way into my entrepreneurial brain.

Despite my father’s mortifying public trial and his subsequent incarceration, Dennison Newbery’s business acumen-laced DNA flowed through me.

Before sophomore year began, I’d already hired a few classmates over the summer break to aid anyone who needed help moving into dorms and student housing. For a nominal fee, of course. My profits that year paid for the next two years of my education.

Business school, a business loan, and a solid marketing plan after I graduated, and here I was.

And you can listen to a selection here: AUDIO