Page 73 of The Reluctant Billionaire

‘Yep. I bore the shit out of her every week.’

‘Good.’

‘What about you, poor little rich girl? Do you lie in that fancy bedroom of yours every night full of existential angst?’

‘Nope,’ she says, popping thep, and I laugh. ‘But I grew up with it. It’s all I know. And you might think I’m over-privileged, but I’ve worked my arse off to be where I am. So, no. I’m very comfortable with my millions of pounds, thank you.’

‘You never worry about that sense of entitlement?’ I ask. When it comes out, it sounds more dickish than I intended it to, but she speaks before I can qualify my question.

‘Aide.’ Her plush lips are so close to mine.

‘Mmm-hmm?’ I ask dreamily.

‘Entitlement is not a dirty word. I know society’s turned it into one. If you’re asking me if I take my wealth for granted, no, I do not. But if you’re asking me if I’ve ever known anything different, also, no. I’ve never expected handouts, and my dad was never going to be that guy.

‘Yeah, his incubator gave me and Gabe our seed capital, but you should have seen them put us through the mill. It was terrifying. Our business plan was like a Harvard Business School case study. So, in my mind, we’ve earned every pound Venus has made for us and we areentitledto that money because we’ve earned it with a tonne of work and all-nighters and sacrifices.’ She pokes my pec lightly. ‘Just. Like. You.’

The world Carlotta inhabits is easy. Fair. Where hard work reaps just rewards. To use her own words, she is entitled to that perspective because it’s been born out of her own experience.

But I’ve seen another world.

A world that isn’t fair or just.

Where the relationship between hard work and success is not linear.

Where people slave away all day long in factories and hospitals and on building sites just to keep the fucking lights on.

Where the stakes are sky high and the margin of error paper-thin.

Where hardworking men get sick, and there’s no insurance or critical illness cover to allow for that.

Where hardworking women have almost no time for sleep between caring for their patients at work and at home.

I have a foot in both camps. I’ve been straddling that uneasy divide for a decade, and I still have no fucking clue where I belong in the world.

Any hope people might have that the UK is becoming a classless society is utter bullshit. There’s social mobility, yes. I’m proof that if you take a chance on someone, they can come good. But, while the money has made my life easier in many ways, it’s also made it more complicated.

It strikes me that, in the small microcosm of the world that forged me, there’s more shame in having too much than in having too little. Poverty can be born with quiet dignity, if you choose.

It’s wealth that destroys you. Money, rather than the lack of it, that people fear the most.

Nowthat’sfucked up.

Lotta is the kind of girl who’ll end up with a minted twat. Some guy with a hedge fund and a yacht. Obviously, I’m minted now, but it’s not who I am in my essence. Whatever she wants to think, and however hard she’s worked to be where she is now, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

She was always going to be okay.

I’ve soared in my professional life, but the tethers that bind me to my roots are far fucking stronger and more insidious than I’d like.

Twenty-year-old me took one look at Carlotta Montefiore-Charlton and knew she wasn’t an option for me. Knew that to touch her would be to play with fire.

I’ve come so far. Yet it seems my twenty-year-old self was wiser than the guy I am today in a lot of ways.

Unfortunately, knowing all this and acting on it are two very different things, because I cannot. Stay. Away.

28

LOTTA

---