Page 89 of How to Bang a Billionaire

Ellery beckoned me to the staircase.

Somewhat nervous about the partially-open-no-banister aspect of it, I climbed. It got us to maybe the sixth floor, the noise of the street vanishing into the sounds of the building itself. Private music: the creak of wood and metal, the rush of the wind through the still-open spaces.

After that, we took to the scaffolding.

Which was when I also realized just how high up we were. And that normally people on building sites had safety equipment.

“Um, Ellery?”

“Yes?”

“What happens if we fall?”

She twisted on the bars with practiced ease, the wind catching at the hem of her skirt and ruffling it up to show the pink bows at the top of her fishnet hold-ups. “We’ll probably die.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Must be nice.”

“Seriously. Maybe we should go down again?”

“Just don’t fall.”

“Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”

She laughed, harsh and a little rusty, the sound of it swallowed up by the empty air, lost to the sky. Then she spun around and began climbing again.

I peeked between the bars.

Bad idea. Terrible idea. Terrible, terrible, idea.

Through the crisscrossing metal I could see the dark smudges of pedestrians and cars, the streets turned into ribbons, the buildings into toys.

Sweat burst across my palms and between my fingers, and I tightened my grip on the scaffolding before I was chasing pavements in a terrifyingly literal fashion. For a moment or two, I just clung there with my eyes closed. Going up and going down both seemed equally unpleasant just then…so I sucked in a breath of startlingly cold air and pulled myself onto the next bar.

Climbing was hard work once the novelty wore off. And even the fear got boring after a while. All I could hear was the clunk of Ellery’s boots and the wheezing of my own breath.

If I survived, I’d probably have to do something about my general fitness. Yoga just wasn’t cutting it.

Finally—somehow—I made it to the top. Hot, sweaty, on the verge of a heart attack, but triumphant.

Ellery was sitting on the edge of the roof. Feet dangling over the abyss.

On slightly noodly legs, I went to join her. Eased myself down very, very carefully. And stared out at the city. A chaos of light, green and gold and white and pink. Glittering reflections thrown haphazard across the Thames. The London Eye cast like a hula hoop against the horizon.

“That’s…it’s…” I raised a hand to brush the water from my stinging eyes. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s okay.” She deployed what I was coming to think of as her trademark shrug. “Sometimes I climb the crane.”

“Let’s not do that,” I said firmly.

She nodded.

I didn’t know how long we sat there. Long enough for the chill to set in deep and the dark to settle. But I liked it. I really liked it. It was peaceful. A city of eight million inhabitants reduced to distant noise.

There was something about Ellery that communicated the very strong impression that touching her without explicit invitation would be akin to sticking your hand into the lion enclosure at London Zoo. But I nudged my shoulder lightly against hers. “Thanks for bringing me here. It’s amazing.”

I didn’t think she even heard me. She was staring at her lap and plucking restlessly at her bracelets. “I did it wrong.”

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