Page 24 of The Grumpy Billionaire

“Are you being funny, Hugo?”

“No.”

She turns to me. “You know what’s so weird? I have a whiteboard at home, but it’s for getting one percent worse every day. My goal is to be negative a hundred.”

“Funny,” I say, unamused.

She turns back to the board. “Don’t you think life is too big and unpredictable to be quantified by numbers?”

“Nope,” I say. “I can put numbers to anything.”

Stella gives me a look I remember well: an exasperated sideways glance that communicates utter disagreement.

“Anything.” I go back to my desk and sit down. When I glance back up, her face is beet red. God knows what she’s imagining. Some people really cannot control their thoughts.

“Soooooo…” She points at the card. “Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

She puts her hands on her hips, a motion that widens the V of her button-down shirt, drawing the eye in the direction of her chest.

“I’ll open it later.” I turn to my screen, ignoring the V.

Most women leave those top two buttons unbuttoned, but on Stella, it’s highly distracting. A less disciplined man might imagine pressing his hand to that V of skin, to feel the warmth there, and maybe even imagine sliding it downward, to the edge of where her breast begins to swell, the edge of whatever lacy undergarment…

I jerk my mouse to wake up my screen, expecting that my abrupt focus on my computer will give her the message to leave.

Of course Stella in a business suit is a kind of dissonance after so many years of seeing her in jeans and T-shirts. Except when it was time for her to go out with her dubious girlfriends, at which point she’d wear a sequined tube top or strappy little dress or whatever else she could find that was inappropriately revealing.

I look up. No sign of getting back to her job anytime soon. I’m used to people monitoring me for signs of displeasure and instantly reacting, but Stella isn’t like other people.

I give her a look that would send most people packing.

She smiles. What is she waiting for? An engraved invitation to leave?

“We’re done here,” I finally say.

“Is that how the prince dismisses people?”

“Other people know better than to bother me.”

“Come on! Aren’t you gonna open it?”

“What? The card? I’ll open it later.”

“Why not now?”

“Because opening cards with the person standing right there staring at me is in the category of things I no longer do.”

She looks amused.

I shouldn’t be surprised. The set of individuals who find me amusing contains exactly one member: Stella.

Why did I get involved in her life? Why?

“Hugo.” She lowers her voice and turns up the conspiratorial energy to ten. “You have an entire category of things you no longer do?”

“And now you know one item that’s in it.” I say this more harshly than I meant to, but this has to end.

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