Page 88 of The Reluctant Billionaire

I blow out a breath and plaster a smile on my face. ‘I want to be happy tonight. I’m sitting across a table from the most stunning woman I’ve ever seen, so I refuse to be a miserable bastard. Okay?’

She presses her lips together and smiles. ‘Okay.’

‘Why did you start Venus?’ I ask. ‘Where did the idea come from?’

‘I can’t take much credit,’ she says, twirling the stem of her wine glass between her fingers. ‘Gabe started it when I was in my final year at uni and he asked me to come on board. He felt there was a gap at the very top of the market for a design-led property developer that also refused to compromise on ethics and integrity. Some people that loaded don’t give a shit about the planet, obviously, but others, like you’—she gestures at me—‘care a lot and can afford to make the right environmental decisions, even if they cost a lot more than doing things the wrong way.’

‘How did you divvy things up? Was it just the two of you at the start?’

She laughs. ‘God, no. We had ago big or go homestrategy from the get-go. We each invested a chunk of our trust funds as start-up capital—I turned twenty-one that year so mine freed up at exactly the right time—and Dad invested through his incubator, as I think I told you, and personally. He also made introductions.’

She looks down at her glass. ‘So it was intense, but it wasn’t like it was for you, where you had to do it all yourself and start from scratch. We hired analysts and architects and planners—it was a big operation. We had alotof help.’

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s totally different. You can’t run your kind of start-up out of a basement. All I needed was me and a laptop, and some more computer scientists as I ramped up. You were building fuckingbuildings. It’s far more capital intensive. And at that end of the market you need to show a professional front from the outset.’

‘You’re right, I suppose,’ she says with a shrug.

‘Was all the branding your responsibility?’ I ask.

She grins. ‘It was, and it was so much fun. While Gabe was dealing with buying land and haggling with councils and fucking town planners’—she shudders—‘I was drawing up glossy brochures and commissioning beautiful artists’ impressions and schmoozing everyone in my network, so that before we had our first block ready to start building we could sell the whole thing off-plan. And we did. That ramp-up phase was fun.’

I return her grin. ‘Yeah. It really is. It’s such a rush. And I bet you were the best marketer ever. I mean, who’s going to say no to you?’

She rewards my compliment with a bat of her eyelids that makes me laugh. ‘No one.’

‘Exactly. I’m just wondering why I never got to meet you—that fucker Gabe kept me safely away from his little sister.’

‘Probably because you were an incoming. No need to get the marketing team on a client if they come to us. It’s a pity, though.’ She licks her lips. ‘I definitely would have enjoyed helping you seal the deal.’

‘And I would have greatly enjoyed any freebies you were willing to throw in,’ I counter. ‘Though if I’d turned up in a suit, without my power tools, you might not have looked at me twice.’

‘I’d have eye-fucked you even if you’d turned up in aMinionsonesie,’ she retorts. She leans forward. ‘And I know exactly where you keep your power tool, gorgeous. And how good you are at using it.’

‘Because you can still feel it,’ I say.

Her eyes are soft in the dim light. I watch her lips annunciatebecause I can still feel it.

33

LOTTA

When your jaw-droppingly beautiful boyfriend asks you to be his date at a ‘boring black-tie thing’—his words—and you find out it’s a super-important event for the tech industry in London, and that said boyfriend will be thekeynote speaker, and it’s your first official engagement together, you make an effort.

And when you set the bar pretty high with your daily sartorial choices, you know it’s time to pull out the big guns.

So you do.

It’s weird, because I’ve dated a lot of guys who are successful at what they do—even if that success has been handed to them on a plate. And, obviously, I attend a tonne of these sorts of things already in my capacity as a C-suite-level representative of a large company.

But Aide and I got together in an environment completely outside of all that corporate schmoozing and incestuous London networking, and neither of us were trying to impress each other with our professional credentials. Which is code forhe was entranced by my tits and I was entranced by his biceps and—at the time confusing—Big Dick Energy.

Which makes tonight’s little outing on his arm feel like a step-change for us. We’re doing something formal, work-related, as a professional couple.

That feels very grownup.

Happily, Ilookvery grownup, thanks to my sweet and insanely talented fashion designer friend, Astrid Carmichael. I only gave her a couple of weeks’ notice, but she’s worked her usual magic. The dress is emerald green super weight crèpe de Chine, which is her signature fabric. It hits the floor, but there’s plenty of skin on display thanks to an epic thigh slit, plunging keyhole neckline and cutaway waistline. It’s sensational, if I do say so myself, even if it’s not the most practical choice for a sit-down dinner.

The makeup artist I use for such occasions has excelled herself, giving me a fabulous smoky eye and applying highlighter to every inch of visible skin on my body. My hair’s in a sleek, low ponytail to one side, and the extensions my stylist added in have it falling in a silky snake almost to my hip. Green satin Louboutins, chunky gold hoop earrings and a pair of gold Chanel cuffs complete the look.

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