Page 20 of The Reluctant Billionaire (Love in London #5)

Aide

‘ H ow’s Gaz doing?’ Mum asks.

‘Good, I think,’ I reply absently as I fetch the ancient rattan placemats from their drawer in the dresser.

Yesterday evening was weird.

Amazing, but weird.

Either Carlotta is far more of a fuck ‘em and leave ‘em type than I would have guessed, or I did something wrong. She seemed happy, or as happy as three orgasms can make a person, but she shot me down when I suggested staying.

Maybe she just likes her own space.

Maybe blowing hot and cold is normal for her.

Maybe she came, saw conquered—or rather saw, conquered, came—and promptly lost interest.

It made a change from clingy post-coital women, but still. I’m a little pissed off, to be honest.

Should have got her number. At least we could have flirted over the weekend.

Fuck, she was hot. I knew she would be. Knew she’d be even more stunning when I got her naked. I suspected, from the way she got her tits out for me the other day with the unselfconsciousness of someone shaking my hand, that she’d show me a good time in the bedroom.

But she was so much more than that. She was passionate and responsive and willowy and lithe and hot for me.

A mental image of her bent over in the shower, my dick disappearing between her smooth, pert cheeks, assaults me.

Another one for the spank bank, as was the moment she swiped my pre-cum off the tip of my cock and sucked her fingertip between those beautiful lips.

Second time around was different. Slower. More intense.

Caging her in.

Pinning her down.

Unable to look away from each other as I moved inside her.

Jesus Christ.

I wish she’d let me hang around for round three. I could have managed it after a brief recovery period in Lotta’s beautiful but totally fucking OTT bedroom.

I subtly adjust myself as I pull out the napkins. Mum would have an aneurism if we sat down for dinner without napkins.

Oh, shit. She’s saying something.

‘Huh?’

‘She means the nail, you wanker,’ my brother Pete says, earning himself a clip around the ear from mum. ‘Ow!’

‘I will not tolerate language like that in my home,’ Mum tells him. She turns to me. ‘I can tell when your head is in the clouds. I’m asking how Gaz’s hand is.’

‘Oh.’ I return to the present moment with a bang. ‘Yeah. Dunno. He seems okay. Turned up for work yesterday, and all. I read him the riot act, but he said he’d taken the time off work and wanted to get stuck in, so I let him do a bit of painting.’

‘I expect he’d be bored stiff at home,’ Mum muses. ‘He can’t come to any harm with a paintbrush.’

I raise my eyebrows. ‘You’d be amazed. He was out last night, though. When I left, he was getting Judy fu—trolleyed.’

‘That woman is a marvel,’ Mum says.

‘She really is,’ I agree. ‘She hasn’t stopped all week. But she and Carlotta have got through far more work than I thought they would.’

The second Carlotta’s name is out of my mouth, I regret it. Well, I regret it with everything but the tiny part of me that gets a kick out of hearing her name on my lips.

Her name is just like her. Beautiful. Elegant. Exotic. Classy.

‘Who’s Carlotta?’ my twelve-year-old nephew, Woody, pipes up. He and his mother, Laura, are by far my waste-of-space brother’s biggest achievements.

I turn back to the dresser and count out five knives, forks and spoons. Not that any of us will use knives except Pete, because even Woody is civilised enough to know you use a spoon to twirl your spaghetti around your fork when you’re eating spag bol.

Not Pete.

He still likes to cut his up into little bits.

I’m surprised he doesn’t still ask Mum or Laura to do it for him.

‘She owns a company called Venus,’ I tell Woody, keeping my voice natural. ‘They build houses and flats, and they’re helping us on the project. They’ve donated all the equipment, and a team of them have been helping out all week. They’re good guys.’

‘Is she fit?’ Pete asks, a sneaky tone to his voice that makes me want to punch him in the face.

I mean, it’s not his tone that makes me want to punch him. It’s his spectacular lack of maturity, of accountability, that makes me despise my brother.

All the other shit is just icing on the fucking chocolate fudge cake that is his life.

‘She’s pretty,’ I concede in what I hope is my most off-putting tone. ‘But, you know, high maintenance. She’s from a very wealthy family.’

‘What’s her full name?’ Laura asks. Clearly, my off-putting tone needs work.

I sigh. If my brother was asking, I’d shoot him down, but I can’t be rude to Laura. She’s far too lovely, and she has enough on her plate dealing with Pete day in, day out.

‘Carlotta Montefiore-Charlton,’ I say. ‘She’s Paul’s daughter, Mum. You know, my mentor.’

Mum purses her lips. While I’m sure she’s grateful to Paul and Chiara for everything they’ve done for me over the years, I know the wealth level of people like that make her incredibly uncomfortable.

Her eldest son may be worth ten figures, but in her eyes, I’m still me.

It helps that I do everything humanly possible to act the same when I see her.

My net worth is an abstract concept to her, and she’d prefer to keep it that way than deal with the inevitable change that comes with life-changing money.

It’s difficult for me. It’s not like I won the fucking lottery and became rich overnight. I worked and worked and made decisions and took steps and worked some more and got lucky. My rise may have been what The Economist likes to call meteoric , but it’s been gradual enough for us to accommodate.

Unless you’re Veronica Duffy and you’ve been brought up in a culture that teaches you never to abandon your religion or your political stance or your social class, even when they no longer serve you.

So she’s stayed staunchly Catholic and Labour-voting and working class all her life.

And, if I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to think I let her down by finding professional success and ‘abandoning’ my honest, working roots.

Even this house is a joke. Yeah, it’s better than the shithole I grew up in, the one I persuaded her to sell after Dad died. But it’s still a small terraced house in an uninspiring road in North Kensington.

I’ve done the best I can. I never expected her to up sticks and move somewhere swanky, so I bought her the best house I could.

It’s secure, and clean, and not damp. It has double glazing and a nice little garden and a kitchen that had been newly installed when we bought it.

When I look around, I feel I’ve failed her, but here’s the thing.

She would never allow herself to upgrade more than this. To ‘move up in the world’. Because, God forbid, her small-minded, backwards-looking friends and neighbours would think she’d got too big for her boots.

Just like I have, apparently.

Pete’s another matter entirely. To say my brother has embraced my wealth is an understatement, and that’s caused more friction than anything else.

‘I’ve seen their house in Hello! magazine,’ Mum says now. ‘It’s very tacky. Money can’t buy taste, you know.’

‘I don’t remember it,’ I say, even though I do.

I was definitely too young and too skint to understand taste levels in the way I do now.

All I knew back then was that the Montefiore-Charlton home was a palace.

Everything glittered. But I have no interest in perpetuating this conversation, because Mum seems determined to be mean-spirited about the people who gave me my first shot at success and worked hard to deserve their own.

‘Oh my God,’ Laura says. ‘She’s gorgeous , Aide.’

I steel myself and lean in to look at the phone she’s waving in my and Pete’s direction. It looks like Carlotta’s Instagram account, which is a roundabout way of saying I know it’s her Instagram account because I feasted my eyes on it over the weekend before finally following her.

To say her feed is a reflection of the hedonistic bubble the woman I bedded lives in is an understatement.

Everything in her life, from her clothes to her friends and her holidays, is beautiful.

She’s radiant in every fucking photo, but natural, too.

It’s not like she’s sporting some Kardashian-esque pout.

She’s beaming and moving and shining in all of them.

Just like in real life.

‘This is what pisses me off,’ Pete says, grabbing the phone off his long-suffering partner. ‘You become a billionaire and suddenly you have all these smoking hot women hanging off you. It’s so fucking wrong. It’s not like you’re a rapper—you’re a fucking tech nerd. Do they even realise that?’

‘Language,’ Mum spits.

Pete shrugs.

Woody grins.

‘Pete,’ I say, exasperated, ‘I met her on a community project , for God’s sake, not a super yacht. She’s ‘hanging off’ Gaz and Judy more than me. If you could be bothered to get off your backside and volunteer, then you’d get to meet her, too. But you can’t be arsed.’

It’s true. I asked my brother to help out, and he laughed in my face.

He doesn’t even have a job at the moment, as far as I know.

His concept of needing to work has become far too skewed since I started gifting my family money, and while it’s a struggle to get Mum to take a penny, Pete’s bank account is a black fucking hole.

I grab Laura’s phone off him and hand it back to her. She scrolls wistfully through Lotta’s feed, and I feel a pang towards this woman who’s living with my fuckwit brother and managing to raise an amazing kid.

I make a note to do something nice for Laura—something I’ll pay for directly so Pete can’t intercept the money with his dirty mitts. Maybe a spa day one weekend, or lunch for her and her girlfriends. An overnight, even.

No Pete. No Woody. None of the scabby teenagers she teaches science to.

I’ll ask Tish to look into some options later.

‘You’re gorgeous, too,’ I tell her, partly because it’s true and partly to piss my brother off. Laura has that natural, girl-next-door prettiness that Pete and I have always gravitated to.

Or at least, I did until I was bewitched by a Mediterranean stunner with a penchant for six-grand trainers and athletic shower sex.

Pete rolls his eyes. ‘So you gonna bang her or what?’

‘Peter!’ Mum exclaims. ‘Stop that right now. Aide. Parmesan.’

‘I’m not going to gratify that with an answer,’ I say with the moral outrage of a man who absolutely did not spend his Friday evening banging the woman in question.

‘Aide doesn’t go for girls like that,’ Mum says, bustling over with the saucepan of drained spaghetti and putting it on the cork mat in the middle of the table. ‘She’s far too fancy for him. He should stick with what he knows.’

And there you have it.

Predictable as clockwork.

My mother’s total refusal to accept that I may be deserving of choosing my own future.

My own place in this world.

And my own companion in it.

Now, all that remains is to sit down for dinner and place a private wager on how long it’ll take my brother to pitch me the latest harebrained investment scheme he wants me to fund on his behalf.

I stand at my place at the same kitchen table we’ve had since I was a kid, the table whose varnish has long been scrubbed off, and proceed to dole out the spaghetti.