Page 26 of How to Bang a Billionaire

I was fucking terrified of her. Everyone was. She had this scrawny black cat called Pongo (who called their cat Pongo?) with Gollum-like eyes that exactly matched her own. He was rumored to be a demonic manifestation of her will. And he wasn’t here now, which, to my mind, confirmed it.

“Ah.” She showed her teeth in something that, in a human, might have been a smile. “Mr. St. Ives?”

Oh God. I hated the way she addressed everyone with this strained, borderline sarcastic courtesy. “Oi, Shithead” would, at least, have had the virtue of authenticity.

“Sorry I’m late. I didn’t, um—”

“Have a seat.”

I had a seat. It was a small seat. Made me feel like a fucking Goomba. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Oh, but you have, Mr. St. Ives. You’ve been very busy indeed.”

Fuck. She knew about the blow job. Wait. How could she possibly know about the blow job? I stared wretchedly at the rug at my feet, which was emblazoned with the college crest and its (deliciously defaceable) motto Mens Conscia Recti. I didn’t know what to say.

She rose suddenly. She wasn’t a tall woman but, damn, she gave good loom. I just about managed not to cringe visibly. “Would you care for coffee, Mr. St. Ives?”

“N-no thank you.”

Dame Frances was known universally as Damn Frances. Apparently there’d been a typo somewhere once—nobody could remember the details anymore—but the appellation had stuck. She stalked past me to the posh cafetiere waiting on one of the sideboards and proceeded to make coffee in a manner I found subtly disturbing.

It smelled good though. Classy.

And that was probably exactly what Persephone thought when she saw that pomegranate.

“Um, Damn…Dame Frances…can I ask what this is about?”

She turned, cup in hand, and did the teeth thing again. “I wanted to thank you for your work for the telethon.”

Breathing. I suddenly remembered it was a good idea. “Oh, no problem. Anytime. Can I go now?”

“Of course, Mr. St. Ives. I have no intention of keeping you long.” I was halfway to the door for maximum looking like an idiotness when she continued. “You know, you were our most successful fund-raiser. By quite a significant margin.”

“Team effort. Probably nothing to do with me at all.”

“Oh really?”

I nodded frantically.

“Then perhaps you’d better take a look at this.”

I heard the rustle of papers behind me. I couldn’t really run out of the room, however much I might have wanted to, so I sloped sheepishly back to the desk and picked up the document the Master had laid out for me. It was numbers. Lots of big numbers. The sort of numbers that made me feel like I was failing GCSE maths all over again. “What’s this?”

“It’s a full scholarship to be awarded yearly to an exceptional undergraduate experiencing financial hardship.”

“Cool.”

“We’re calling it the Arden St. Ives Scholarship.”

“You’re what?” As ideas went, it was so far out of left field it wasn’t even near the grass anymore. I tried to understand what something like that might mean, but it just slithered out of my brain, unable to connect with anything already in there. The Arden St. Ives Scholarship? Holy fuck. “You don’t have to do that.”

“On the contrary”—her evil cat eyes met mine over the paper—“Mr. Hart was quite insistent.”

“Mr.…wait. Caspian? Caspian did this?” That wouldn’t fit in my brain either. Why would he…Oh fuck, no. I hadn’t asked him for anything. “Why?”

She gave me what, in the heat of the moment, I interpreted as an I know what you did last supper look. “You must have made quite an impression on him.”

I probably mumbled something.