Page 58 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

“Tell me another little thing.”

“So demanding.”

“It’s one of your favorite things about me.”

He’s right. It’s weird. Mr. Drummond is a tyrannical scientist, oblivious at work, yet he’s so observant on the phone at the crack of dawn.

“You won’t let me see you,” he continues. “You won’t let me meet you. Give me this. What would you do today if you could do anything at all?”

There’s something about the way he asks the question that makes me feel sad for him. Like a prison inmate asking what the air smells like on the outside. Does he never get to do what he wants? Or is he just tired?

“No, my turn. What time do you go to sleep?”

“Midnight,” he says.

“What? So you get four hours of sleep a night?”

“Four and a half.”

“Jesus,” I say. “That’s not enough.”

“It’s fine. I drink a lot of bulletproof coffee,” he says.

“As if that makes up for sleep,” I say. Everything about him has such a hard edge. He’s stern to his people, but apparently he’s even sterner toward himself. “Hold on, I know what you need,” I say. I pull up Facebook and scroll around for something.

“Are you there?”

“Yeah, hold on.” I find what I’m looking for. I text him the link.

“Hold on, here. You can text me, but I can’t text you? You get to call me and text me whenever you want, and the rest of the time you block me?”

“Correct. You cannot text me, but I can text you. You cannot call me, but I can call you.”

I can practically feel him bristling at this. Nobody pushes Mr. Drummond around.

“This is a video,” he says.

“Hit play,” I say. “I’ll only answer your question if you watch it.”

“It’s baby goats,” he says. “Why am I watching baby goats?”

I click play on my end, too. Baby goats hopping back and forth over a sleeping dog. “I think you just need it.”

I hear him exhale. “Okay. They pranced.”

“Don’t you love it? How they kind of pop up into the air? Watch the whole thing.”

A soft sniff.

I smile, imagining him watching it. It’s a really sweet one where the baby goats play with each other, all prancey little legs and faces.

Silence.

“Come on. How sweetly they play?”

He says nothing.

“With their cute little faces,” I say. “You need to see that not everything is about grim survival.”

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