Chapter One

Caught with Your Pants Down

It was Friday morning, and Prodigy Banks was running just as late as he had the other four days of the week. After hitting the snooze button for the fifth time, he reluctantly arose at 7:20 a.m., pulling up his tired body and sitting on the side of his honey-oak sleigh bed. He then placed his head in the palm of his hands and proceeded with his morning ritual: trying his best to come up with a good lie to let his supervisor know he wouldn’t be in the office that day.

It was not like he was ill; he just didn’t feel like going to work, and now he was running out of excuses. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d said his grandfather died. In fact, his grandfather did die, but that was in 1978. After realizing he had already used all of his good excuses, he conceded. He forced himself up and into the bathroom.

Prodigy had never been a morning person, which was why he had to get out of the Army. He realized Uncle Sam’s boys really did do more before nine a.m. than he planned on doing all day long. Plus, Simone, his manager and lover, spoiled him. She always covered for his tardiness.

Right now, she was the only one he was kicking it with, sort of. Slowly, Prodigy was trying to minimize his workload of women. He’d been with so many that it wasn’t much fun anymore. Plus, he discovered that more than half of the women he dealt with didn’t have anything going for them anyway. After sex, there wasn’t much left for them to talk about.

Now he was shifting gears by trying to focus on a single relationship that was mentally as well as physically stimulating. His new motto was to