Page 168 of The Billionaires

I match his eyeroll. “You don’t say. Let me guess—you like The Witcher books. I must be psychic.”’

“I enjoy cooking,” he says grudgingly.

“Now that’s more like it,” I say but privately wonder why anyone with a private chef would want to cook. Though maybe I wonder that because I can’t cook to save my life and don’t enjoy it. “Anything else?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t have time for anything else. There are one hundred and twelve waking hours in a week, and I work eighty of them. Of the remaining thirty-two, I spend seven on exercise and about twenty-one on eating and other bodily functions. That leaves only four hours of free time, which is about half an hour per day. Most hobbies require a greater time commitment, but reading is perfect, as is cooking when you don’t have to.”

I’m not sure if I should mock or pity a billionaire who has so little fun in his life. “What about taking walks on your giant estate?” I ask. “Fishing in the lakes you own, or kayaking? How about watching movies in your personal movie theater? Or swimming—be it in that giant pool you own or your private beach? Or how about?—”

“No time,” he says. “But I might do all of those things. One day.”

I exhale an exasperated breath. “It’s like all your money is wasted on you.”

His jaw muscles tick. “If I were interested in having fun, I wouldn’t have all this money.” He gestures around the fancy limo.

I wave his point off as if it were an irksome fly. “If you don’t stop to have fun, what’s the point of making all this money? And besides, your parents are rich, so you would have money even if you didn’t work like a maniac.”

He scoffs. “I think you misunderstand the difference between billionaires like me and millionaires like my parents.”

I can’t believe he said that with a straight face. “I’m sure said difference is not as vast as the difference between millionaires and people like me.”

“Wrong,” he says. “If you make a middle-class salary, you can make a million in twenty or so years. To make a billion, it would take twenty-two thousand years.”

“I think we’ve found your hobby,” I say. “Useless math and hoarding more money than you could possibly spend.”

He smirks. “The proletariat has spoken again.”

“So has the bourgeoisie,” I retort with a huff.

The limo stops, and I sneak a peek out the window.

That’s not the zoo. Given where we are, we haven’t actually left the enormous estate yet.

“That’s the helipad,” Bruce explains.

I unbuckle my seatbelt. “The helicopter is a dead giveaway.”

“Sorry it took so long to get here,” Bruce says. “I should have built the helipad closer to the house.”

“Yeah, I hate it when I have to drive to my helicopter too. What does a chopper have to do with the zoo?

He smirks. “It will get us there.”

I unbuckle Colossus’s seat. “You realize we just drove almost half the distance it would’ve taken to get to the zoo.” As in, he’s taking the whole “do it the most expensive way” much too far.

Bruce unbuckles his seatbelt. “We’re not going to the Palm Beach Zoo.”

“Oh?”

“I prefer the one in Miami.” He holds the door for me as the driver grabs the cooler.

“Miami?” I whisper to Colossus. “I was half expecting him to say we’re headed to Zoológico de Chihuahua—in Mexico.”

Exiting the car, we head over to the helicopter where a pilot is already waiting.

“Has Colossus ever flown?” I ask Bruce as we take our seats.

“A few times,” Bruce says. “I think he likes it.”

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