The Billionaire from Her Past Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€˜Sure...’ he said, sounding a little confused.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Not me,’ Steph had told him more than once. ‘Not even me.’
    Seb drained the last of