The Billionaire From Her Past. Leah Ashton
been a terrible friend to Steph for too long. That stopped now.
‘Do you still play tennis?’ she said, a bit more loudly than she would have liked.
‘On occasion.’
‘Great!’ she said, even louder. Dammit. ‘Let’s hire a court later this week. Have a hit.’
This was a genius plan. Physical distance. Smacking of objects.
‘Sure...’ he said, sounding a little confused.
‘Great!’ she repeated. ‘Great!’
Then finally he left, with a tinkling of the doorbell, and from Mila a significant sigh of relief.
Ivy marched over, every inch the billionaire businesswoman demanding to know exactly what was going on. But before she could open her mouth a low, sleepy cry reverberated from the workshop.
‘Later,’ Ivy threw over her shoulder as she jogged back to Nate.
Seemed Mila owed Nate another one: Nice work, Nate.
Now she had time to work out something to tell Ivy—to explain whatever her sister had thought she’d witnessed. Because Ivy had never known about Mila’s unrequited teenage crush. Nor April, for that matter.
And no one was ever going to find out about this silly adult version either.
* * *
Seb propped his shoulder against the front wall of his shop. Inside, the sounds of building activity thumped and buzzed through the open door, and a lanky apprentice chippy carted rubble in white plastic buckets to the large skip that hunkered at the kerb.
His meeting with the foreman had gone well. So well, in fact, that Seb knew it wasn’t even close to necessary that he checked in with the man each day. Richard had thirty years’ experience and knew exactly what he was doing. He knew more than Seb, actually—although to be perfectly honest that wasn’t particularly hard for anyone in the construction industry.
This bothered Seb. He’d known from a very young age that he would one day own his father’s company. Just like for Mila’s older sister Ivy it had been his destiny, and he’d done everything in his power to be worthy of following in his dad’s footsteps.
That had included actually knowing what his staff did.
He’d graduated with honours in his Computer Science degree so he could write code like his developers. Then he’d done an MBA as he’d begun taking over from his father. And he’d attended each and every course before he’d sent his staff—whether it be marketing, customer service, project management or system development. He’d known that he didn’t get to stop learning just because he was the boss, and he hadn’t been about to waste his team’s time on a course he wasn’t prepared to do himself.
He hadn’t pretended he could do every job in his mammoth company—and he hadn’t needed to—but he’d figured he should be able to walk into any meeting, at any Fyfe office in the world, and not feel as if his staff were talking in a foreign language.
He still had a long way to go when it came to his new venture.
It bothered him that he didn’t know enough about joists and sub-floors and ceiling-fixing and roofing and I-beams and...
In fact, his entire prior experience in the building industry involved demoing the bathroom of the London flat he’d owned with Steph prior to its—outsourced—renovation, a disproportionate interest in power tools for a man who didn’t have a shed—or a back garden to put one in—and many good intentions to attend a tiling/carpentry/plastering workshop one day.
He’d always been interested in tools and building things. He’d just funnelled it in a technological direction. Steph had encouraged him to take some time off—to do a weekend course, to paint their home rather than having professional decorators return three separate times to get the flawless finish he’d demanded. But that was the problem with being a work-obsessed perfectionist—he hadn’t been about to take time off from Fyfe.
Nothing had been worth that. Certainly not a bit of DIY.
‘Not me,’ Steph had told him more than once. ‘Not even me.’
Seb drained the last of his coffee, his fingernails digging ever so slightly into the takeaway cup’s corrugated cardboard outer shell. He stared at nothing—at the sky, at the passing traffic—and finally at the stencilled company name on the side of the battered skip, letting his gaze lose focus.
He’d read somewhere—or heard, maybe, on a podcast or something—that grief hit you like a wave. At first the waves just kept on pounding. Pounding you down and down, with barely a breath of air before you were sucked back under again. But then, over time, the gaps between the waves would grow. They would still hit just as hard—and be just as shocking—but in between you could begin to breathe. To exist again.
Sometimes you even got better at handling the waves, at bracing yourself and swimming back up to the surface. Not every wave though. Some would always sneak up on you and drown you as brutally as the first.
Every memory of Steph...every reminder of his many mistakes...what he could have done...should have done... It wasn’t getting easier.
Seb had discovered that the waves didn’t stop coming. He had just got better at swimming.
Footsteps drew his attention back to his surroundings. He looked up to see Mila striding along the footpath, her gaze on the screen of her phone. Her eyes flicked upwards as she approached, and the moment her gaze locked on his it skittered away again.
It was just like yesterday: that same unexpected and suddenly closed expression. He had absolutely no idea why.
But then her gaze swung back, as if she was really looking at him now, and her long strides came to a halt in front of him.
‘I didn’t see you there,’ she said.
He had a feeling if she had she would have exited via the rear of her shop. The realisation frustrated him. Why was she keeping her distance?
But now she was studying him carefully, as if attempting to translate what the sum total of his face and posture actually meant.
He pushed away from the wall and rolled his shoulders back, uncomfortable with whatever Mila might have thought she’d seen.
‘Are you okay?’
He nodded sharply, not quite meeting her eyes. ‘Of course.’
‘You don’t look okay,’ she said—which shouldn’t have surprised him. Mila wasn’t one to accept anything at surface value.
She took a step closer, trying to catch his gaze.
He knew he was just being stupid now, but for some reason he just couldn’t quite look at her—the knife-edged echo of Steph’s remembered words was still yet to be washed out to sea.
She reached out, resting her fingers just above his wrist. Her hand was cool against his sun-warmed skin.
‘Last night,’ she said, as he focused on the deep red shade of her nail polish, ‘do you know what I did? I found that photobook Steph made after our trip to Bali when we were about twenty. Remember? Our first holiday without our parents. We thought we were so grown-up.’
He nodded. They’d gone with a group of his and Steph’s friends from uni. Mila had just dropped out of her umpteenth course, but that had been back when she and Steph had done everything together. There’d never been any question—of course Mila would go with them.
‘Do you remember that guy I met? From Melbourne?’ She laughed. ‘Oh, God. What a loser.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, last night I wanted to see Steph—see her happy—with you and...uh...me, of course.’
Her words had become a little faster, and he was finally able to drag his gaze to hers. She must be wearing boots with a heel, as she looked taller than he’d expected—actually,