Page 87 of The Reluctant Billionaire

‘I’m in,’ she says with a sexy smile.

‘Let’s see—favourite subject at school.’

‘Classics,’ she shoots back. ‘You?’

‘IT, obviously. And Maths. Why Classics?’

‘Dunno.’ She sticks out her delicious lower lip as she thinks. ‘I suppose a lot of it was Italian history, which I loved. But I think it was just learning about ancient civilisations. We’re so smug about how sophisticated we are—you know? But there was so much wisdom and insight back then. They had it a lot more figured out than we do. I ended up doing it at uni, too.’

This I did not know. ‘Where did you go to uni?’

‘Cambridge. Emmanuel College.’

‘Course you did,’ I say, smiling at her.

She laughs, and it’s fucking beautiful.Sheis fucking beautiful. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? That I’m awful and entitled?’

‘No. That you’re very fucking intelligent.’

She narrows her eyes at me. ‘Nice recovery. You were at UCL, right?’

‘Yeah, but I never finished. I dropped out, thanks to your Dad’s help.’

‘He told me why you started Totum,’ she says softly, stretching across the table to take my hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. I can feel myself stiffen at the thought of that poor, poor little fucker, Jerry Smith. He was a skinny little thing. Stunted. I look down at our conjoined hands.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Nothing to apologise for,’ I tell her. ‘It was a long time ago. I wasn’t in a position to be able to fight child abuse, not then, but I could sure as fuck do something about making sure the NHS never let that stuff fall through the cracks.’

‘It’s absolutely amazing, what you’ve done.’

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 ethicsand 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.’