Below the Beltway

Alex Gantry is an independent, high-profile personal life coach to Hollywood's elite who's committed to her career and making a difference in people's lives. A clientele of actors, entertainment hot shots and corporate moguls, her clients include rising 20-something star Olivia Stark, who's gotten herself involved with bad boy Thomas Tanner, which is turning sour over impotence and a sex tape; and Samantha Stallings, producer & wife of a sports agent, who's headed for a big divorce, because she started doing what her husband Clark Stallings had done for years: sleep with someone else. Alex is in her late thirties and looking for a relationship for the first time that might go somewhere because work isn't enough anymore. Dating a Hollywood producer, Brian Marks, they met when he became a client and their love affair was hot and convenient for them both, but when our story begins it's over. Plotting her West Coast escape with Berkley Banks, her best friend, Alex is joining her firm as a new age addition to the marketing of high profile clients. Berkley is one of the hottest rising African American entrepreneurs in the Beltway and on every Washington, D.C. best-dressed list and one of the most eligible bachelorettes. She's having her own boyfriend issues, too. When she introduces Alex to T.J. Gale insults fly, as do sparks. T.J. Gale is a client of Banks & Associates, a principle at LSS, his new energy and environmental company. He's about to get a divorce from his wife, who doesn't want to let go. He's younger than Alex, early 30s, an Ivy League graduate with a genius I.Q. who gave up a Wall Street career to start LSS, which wasn't easy & required help from his father in law. T.J. loves the Beltway habitat, the Chesapeake Bay, knows the history of the Beltway, which is steeped in American history. With leading man looks, Brian Marks is not your typical A-type personality. He's not only persistent but also refusing to let go of Alex. A successful Hollywood producer with Oscars and Emmys who can have any woman he wants and has. Marks isn't used to losing so the ends to which he'll go to get Alex back are risky, dishonest and dangerous, though he has no idea what he's actually walked into. Lisa Gale is T.J.'s wife, a 5'10" blonde daddy's girl, who's whip smart and any man's equal. She's the right hand to her father, Davin Dalaney, and heir to Dalaney Enterprises, a devious international businessman who operates on the seedy side of things. Dalaney provided emergency funding for T.J.'s environmental company, cinching the marriage between T.J. and Lisa, which fell apart when she was caught cheating on her husband. Lisa thought women can play the game like men without the fallout, finding out that "It's just sex" works for men, but not for women. She broke T.J.'s heart. Phyllis Lawrence, a powerful player, and T.J. Gale's stepmother, is a woman who fights as dirty as any man. She's bedded ambassadors, senators and moguls, and knows Davin Dalaney well. With Ben Cates at her side, a much, much younger companion, she's not about to let T.J. get hurt, confronting Dalaney & his daughter as only she can. She taps Ben to call his friend Malcolm Steele, which introduces the security industrial complex into the plot, along with nefarious characters doing their worst. The story takes place in one of the most breathtakingly beautiful areas of America, the Washington, D.C. Beltway, a bountiful place where history is everywhere. A land teeming with marshes, bald eagles, deer, foxes, bunnies, a spectacular waterway paradise and wildlife adventureland, whose human occupants are looking for power and ways to get it while trying to navigate the human appetites of lust, love and greed without being drowned by their enemies in the Beltway swamps.