Leah Ashton - The Billionaire From Her Past

‘Good morning—’ she began, then stopped. It was Seb. ‘Hi!’ she said, with a wide smile. Mila still wasn’t sure if reconnecting with Seb was a good idea—but she couldn’t deny that she was pleased to see him.

Seb lips quirked as he glanced at the forgotten teacup in her hand. ‘Busy day?’ he teased.

Mila shrugged. ‘I’ve had a flood of online orders this morning, actually, after one of my pieces was used in a feature in the latest Home + Home mag.’ She’d swallowed her pride over a year ago and accepted her sister April’s offer to feature one of her indoor planters on her hugely popular lifestyle blog. The subsequent interest from stylists and interior decorators hadn’t abated. ‘The store makes up a pretty small amount of my income,’ she continued, pointedly, ‘leaving plenty of time for guilt-free tea.’

‘That’s my favourite type of anything.’ He grinned. ‘And, really? “A pretty small amount”?’

‘Eighteen point two-three per cent. Down one point nine per cent from the previous quarter.’

‘There you go. Mila and her numbers.’

‘I had to be halfway decent at something at school, otherwise Mum would’ve completely disowned me.’ She hadn’t had much interest in anything other than maths, and had been truly terrible at pretending.

‘She probably wouldn’t have, you know.’ Ivy leant casually against the workshop doorframe, her eyes sparkling with curiosity as she glanced between Mila and Seb. ‘Probably.’

A pause, and Mila knew her sister had taken in Seb’s unfamiliar work clothes. ‘I didn’t realise you were visiting Perth. It’s good to see you.’

Under better circumstances. It went unsaid, but the fleeting reference to Stephanie still made Mila’s heart ache.

‘Not visiting,’ Seb said. ‘Back. For good.’

Those last two words he directed at Mila, and her awful, disloyal heart flipped over.

No. In the same minute her throat constricted at the memory of her friend. She was not allowed to get all fluttery about Sebastian. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, but that was completely ineffective. Instead, while Seb filled Ivy in on his new business venture, she deposited her teacup on the counter, then needlessly wiped a cloth over the vases in shades of teal and grey that were silhouetted like a skyline in her shop window.

‘Mila?’

She didn’t even look up at Seb’s voice, instead focusing her attention on a non-existent mark on a blue-green glaze.

‘I’m sorry—now isn’t really a good time,’ she said. Maybe if she appeared suitably busy he’d go away—and so would her inappropriate heart-flipping.

‘For what?’

She straightened to face him, once again crossing her arms. Aware that Ivy was watching, Mila didn’t really know what to say. What could she say? It’s not a good time for me to still be attracted to my best friend’s husband?

Accurate, but never, ever to be articulated.

At her continued silence, Seb leant a little closer. That didn’t help anything.

‘I thought you were okay with us being friends again?’

‘I am,’ she said. And she was. It wasn’t Seb’s fault she had faulty hormones—or whatever it was inside her that just would not quit when it came to Seb Fyfe.

Seb needed her right now. But she needed space. More time, maybe? To recalibrate to a world where she co-existed with Seb without the fact of his being her best friend’s husband to stall any heart-flipping or tingling of skin.

He will always be Steph’s husband.

She’d 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.