Page 30 of The Reluctant Billionaire (Love in London #5)

‘I mean, I get that,’ Lotta muses. ‘If she’s raised her family here, she’s probably got strong ties. Roots, even.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t think she’s staying purely for the right reasons.

Sure, she knows this place—she didn’t want to start from scratch, which I get.

But it’s also that shame thing again. She’s super proud of me, but when the neighbours start whispering about how Veronica Duffy’s getting too big for her boots because her son was on the news, or on breakfast TV, or any of that crap?

‘Her way of dealing with that is to show them she’s exactly who she’s always been, and she’s not going to put on airs and graces just because I’m doing well for myself.

I swear to God, every working class person I grew up with seems to be terrified of putting on airs and graces , which is what I would call self-improvement or dreaming big, and it really fucks me off. ’

Lotta’s quiet for a moment. Then she says, ‘Well, that’s shitty for her, because she’s kind of cutting off her nose to spite her face, but it must be really hard for you, too. I bet it makes you a lot more conflicted about what you’ve achieved than you’d probably like to be.’

I lie there and drink her in. The dark tendrils of hair curling over her neck.

Her shoulder. That jaw-dropping face, its full lips parted and huge eyes fixed on me.

Her extraordinary beauty makes it tempting to dismiss her as anything more than a stunning facade, but I’ve begun to think differently for a while now.

‘You nailed it,’ I say more lightly than I feel.

‘I mean, you do seem to have a lot of airs and graces.’

I laugh. ‘I should probably work on being less of a poncy twat.’

She smiles at me, and it’s breathtaking. ‘You’re definitely too big for your boots. Maybe it’s time to remember your roots.’

‘She rhymes, too,’ I mutter.

‘Seriously. Do they give you shit for it? Or maybe it’s just you giving yourself shit for it. There’s no way it’s easy to make the kind of money you’ve made and not have it raise a bit of existential angst.’

‘All of the above,’ I say, tugging her against me. She throws a long leg over my thigh and nestles closer.

‘Poor little rich boy. Do you have a therapist?’

‘Yep. I bore the shit out of her every week.’

‘Good.’

‘What about you, poor little rich girl? Do you lie in that fancy bedroom of yours every night full of existential angst?’

‘Nope,’ she says, popping the p , and I laugh. ‘But I grew up with it. It’s all I know. And you might think I’m over-privileged, but I’ve worked my arse off to be where I am. So, no. I’m very comfortable with my millions of pounds, thank you.’

‘You never worry about that sense of entitlement?’ I ask. When it comes out, it sounds more dickish than I intended it to, but she speaks before I can qualify my question.

‘Aide.’ Her plush lips are so close to mine.

‘Mmm-hmm?’ I ask dreamily.

‘Entitlement is not a dirty word. I know society’s turned it into one. If you’re asking me if I take my wealth for granted, no, I do not. But if you’re asking me if I’ve ever known anything different, also, no. I’ve never expected handouts, and my dad was never going to be that guy.

‘Yeah, his incubator gave me and Gabe our seed capital, but you should have seen them put us through the mill. It was terrifying. Our business plan was like a Harvard Business School case study. So, in my mind, we’ve earned every pound Venus has made for us and we are entitled to that money because we’ve earned it with a tonne of work and all-nighters and sacrifices.

’ She pokes my pec lightly. ‘Just. Like. You.’

The world Carlotta inhabits is easy. Fair. Where hard work reaps just rewards. To use her own words, she is entitled to that perspective because it’s been born out of her own experience.

But I’ve seen another world.

A world that isn’t fair or just.

Where the relationship between hard work and success is not linear.

Where people slave away all day long in factories and hospitals and on building sites just to keep the fucking lights on.

Where the stakes are sky high and the margin of error paper-thin.

Where hardworking men get sick, and there’s no insurance or critical illness cover to allow for that.

Where hardworking women have almost no time for sleep between caring for their patients at work and at home.

I have a foot in both camps. I’ve been straddling that uneasy divide for a decade, and I still have no fucking clue where I belong in the world.

Any hope people might have that the UK is becoming a classless society is utter bullshit. There’s social mobility, yes. I’m proof that if you take a chance on someone, they can come good. But, while the money has made my life easier in many ways, it’s also made it more complicated.

It strikes me that, in the small microcosm of the world that forged me, there’s more shame in having too much than in having too little. Poverty can be born with quiet dignity, if you choose.

It’s wealth that destroys you. Money, rather than the lack of it, that people fear the most.

Now that’s fucked up.

Lotta is the kind of girl who’ll end up with a minted twat. Some guy with a hedge fund and a yacht. Obviously, I’m minted now, but it’s not who I am in my essence. Whatever she wants to think, and however hard she’s worked to be where she is now, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

She was always going to be okay.

I’ve soared in my professional life, but the tethers that bind me to my roots are far fucking stronger and more insidious than I’d like.

Twenty-year-old me took one look at Carlotta Montefiore-Charlton and knew she wasn’t an option for me. Knew that to touch her would be to play with fire.

I’ve come so far. Yet it seems my twenty-year-old self was wiser than the guy I am today in a lot of ways.

Unfortunately, knowing all this and acting on it are two very different things, because I cannot. Stay. Away.