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I clear my throat. “We going to start? I only have an hour.”Sixty minutes of hell.

Liam frowns. “I thought you were free—”

“I forgot I have a call with Hong Kong.”

“On a Saturday?”

“Our hotels and clubs are open every day, you know.”

He harrumphs and Alexis squints at me, her arms crossed over her chest.

Bullshit, she mouths. “Well, let’s not waste Ethan’s time then. I’msurehe’s very busy…running an empire and all.”

I narrow my eyes at her. She knows I’m undercover at Fleur. What the hell is she playing at?

She ignores me and stalks to the dining table next to the windows overlooking Central Park. “Nice view. Glad to know my brother isn’t living in a man cave.”

“Oh please, I’m an adult, Firefly. No more college frat boy lifestyle. And this fucker is anal about the apartment.” He jabs his thumb in my direction. “Don’t leave your shoes on the carpet. Limit the crap you put in your bodies. Don’t be a slob even though we have a cleaning service. I can go on.”

“How you live reflects on you as a person, dipshit. I swear, why are we sharing a place again? It’s not like you don’t have money.”

“Because you’re lonely, dumb fuck. I’m here to save you from becoming one of those reclusive billionaires who rots for two weeks in his fancy penthouse before anyone discovers his corpse. And you like having me around.”

“To drive me insane,” I mutter under my breath.

Alexis snorts and I snake a glance at her, finding her lips twitching in amusement. A smile curves up my lips and her eyes widen, the enticing flush blooming on her face once more.

God, I want to find a thousand ways to make her blush like that.

Forcing myself to look away, I set up my laptop at the dining table and pull up some notes I took from my Intro to Finance class back when I was a freshman.

“So, which areas have you covered and what parts are you confused about?”

Liam mumbles something about lunch and saunters back into his room as Alexis takes a seat next to me. Every inch of my body tenses when I smell the soft lavender and feel her body heat radiating in the tiny sliver of space between us.

We spend the next hour going over the various financial concepts and some basic terminology she’ll need to understand for the rest of the semester. She struggles with the numbers and math but seems to understand concepts as long as I use real world, everyday examples. Alexis is smart, and it pains me to see her doubt herself. I think she just hasn’t had the right teachers who’ll tailor their teaching approach to her.

“What about formulas? How are you with those?” I cross off a few of the syllabus items on the notepad in front of us.

“We’ve covered the basics. Some are familiar because of the class I took in senior year. But to be honest, none of this makes sense to me. Numbers and cents. Present value. Future value. Interest rates and cash flows. It might as well be Greek.”

“Hm.” I see where she’s coming from. Numbers have always been easy for me. Like science, they’re reassuring. There are rules. There’s order. But Alexis is a dreamer. She loves reading, traveling, and experiencing new things. She likes human psychology and feeling the expanse of human emotions.

She doesn’t know it, but my Nova thrives on the mess that is the world.

Your Nova?My stomach sours. I shove that thought away.

“So, when I first studied finance, I found mnemonics helpful, especially with formulas. Have you taken any East Asian languages before?”

She shakes her head.

“Well, Chinese characters are a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs, in a sense they’re based on pictures. Each word has its own character and, unlike English, you can’t sound it out. So, you have to memorize many words in order to be literate.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“Wo ke yi jiang zhong wen,” I reply, enjoying the way her mouth drops open. “I just said I can speak Chinese. The basics. Took seven years of it between high school and college.”

She’s still staring mutedly at me, and I add, “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Nova.”