Page 31 of The Grumpy Billionaire

“You’re still at the board,” Wulfric grumbles.

“I’ve gone down a lot of paths.”

“Down a lot of paths? If you do this thing by the process of deduction, we’ll be here until 2060.”

“Good thing that’s not how I’m doing it,” I say.

Wulfric’s a big man—a brazen Wall Street cowboy with a bright blond crew cut, the build of a linebacker, and one of the fiercest intellects I’ve ever encountered.

He gives me a hard look and I throw one right back. You never show Wulfric weakness.

“I’ve put a lot of chips on this, and it’s not close,” he says. “You promised this could fly.”

“It’s moving.”

“Any ETA?” he asks.

“If I had an ETA, it would be cracked.”

He turns back to it. “A lot of chips.”

As if I didn’t know. I’ve already gotten an extension from him, and we’re screaming up on the big presentation.

He asks me about one of the side elements, and I explain. Wulfric doesn’t know math like I do, but his market knowledge is keen as a diamond-tooth saw.

Everybody warned me not to work for Wulfric, but I knew he’d give me the freedom to call my own shots, and that’s what I care about. In the end, it was the right decision. The model I created made us a fortune, and more importantly, it broke new ground. Models going forward were largely based on mine.

Lola wears a neutral expression. I wonder, and not for the first time, how much she’s seen. Wulfric checks the time on his phone, and the two of them blow out as quickly as they swept in.

The goal I’ve set for myself is ambitious. Some might say I’ve bitten off more than I could chew, that I should just settle for iterating on my old model.

No way.

Settling and iterating is what a lazy thinker does.

It only takes a second to make a breakthrough. One stroke of the marker.

I force myself to review the board from Wulfric’s eyes; sometimes that’s the way to get back in. But after ten minutes, I realize that I’m just pretending to review the board while Stella is simmering on the back burner.

What was I thinking? I roll out the red carpet for Stella Woodward, and here she is, invading my sanctuary and taking up precious space in my brain.

Stella Woodward, who lives to throw monkey wrenches and knock things down; Stella, who can always be counted on to laugh at the most inappropriate times, and whose favorite artist is Salvador Dali, and have you seen the works of Salvador Dali? I can think of no artist more inane than Salvador Dali with his ridiculous melting clocks and warped reality.

She is not without her charms, as established, but she is the opposite of women I go for.

There are not enough permutations of the word wrong to cover Stella Woodward.

ChapterFifteen

Stella

I sawthis movie once where a guy liked watching women crush bugs under their shoes. He would lie on the floor and watch it.

It was a strange and oddly chaste fetish that, if the script writers are to be believed, originated in the man’s childhood thanks to an incident of him watching his mom crush a bug under her heel.

I guess I should be glad that watching men crush bugs isn’t my thing, being that it would really limit my prospects on the ole dating scene and sound bad on a Tinder profile, but I suppose you could argue that my thing is worse because of how men like Hugo have crushed my heart.

I pursued several Hugo types in college, but the rejection was swift and fierce. Until Arjun, a nerdy but brilliant—and of course icy—perfectionistic chemist. He had a great laugh, and he shared my love of hiking andGilmore Girls. Things were good with us.

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