Page 57 of Return Billionaire to Sender

Get Malcolm thrown in jail? That’s what I was threatening him with?

It’s so not me. But Malcolm thought that’s exactly what I was doing. I smile, leaning back on a building, watching the sunset, phone in hand, admiring the woman that Malcolm seems to think I am.

15

Malcolm

It’s a day of meetings,morning to night.

I find I’m excited for it.

I haven’t felt this excited about my business in a very long time. Or maybe it’s just life. I don’t know. I’d felt bored in the past year or so, and now I don’t.

I make Elle ride in the limo with me—that’s the only way I can fit in my sessions with her. Twenty minutes here, ten minutes there.

She settles into the back next to me. Being in this small space with her is more intimate than the hotel. I feel like we’re alone together, cut off utterly from the world, even though my driver is on the other side of the security panel. Somehow that makes it hotter.

Out the window, the city glides by, but my attention is homed in on the freckle on the side of her lips. I draw in her sweet, bright coconut-berry scent, letting it fill me. The tips of her eyelashes, I notice, are covered in clumpy black mascara, but up close, you can see the pale roots of them, sandy brown like her hair. Every detail of her is more delicious than the last.

She’s wearing one of her pantsuits and yet another butterfly bow tie, and something else that’s new: a raincoat with a crisscross line design, but when you look closely, the lines are made up of tiny hedgehogs. It looks worn, well loved.

This is definitely a woman who doesn’t do a lot of shopping, but it’s not that she doesn’t enjoy fine things—I have a front-row seat for that during our coaching sessions when our treats cart comes. And I saw the way she drank in the grandeur of the hotel lobby that first day, mesmerized by the luxury. And from time to time I still overhear her gushing about how comfortable the bed in her room is. Nearly two weeks we’ve been here and she’s still into it.

Yet she didn’t take the money.

Why not take the money? So much about her just doesn’t add up. I find it strangely thrilling.

“You’rein a good mood,” she says.

“I have a lot of meetings today,” I say. “And one negotiation. And I’m expecting them all to go very well.” I’m also, perversely, looking forward to my session with Elle.

“What is it about meetings and negotiations that you enjoy so much?”

“The interaction. The challenge, I suppose,” I say. “The element of the unknown. I like to predict what people are going to do, but they sometimes surprise me.”

“You enjoy when people surprise you?”

“Are you doing my technique on me?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, smiling.

“I enjoy finding out about people. I suppose most people walk into a negotiation seeing potential foes and obstacles arranged around the table, but I see a kind of journey of discovery. As annoying as they are, people really are kind of fascinating sometimes.”

“Is it possible you’re a people person and you just don’t know it?” she asks.

“Nope,” I say.

She snorts. “Is it possible you are just so full of bull?” she asks prettily.

I grin. “Nope,” I repeat, becausenopeis just the kind of answer Elle would hate. Elle is a cat who doesn’t like a closed door.

True to form, she rolls her eyes, frustrated.

“It’s called a business skill,” I add.

“You tell yourself that. Just a business skill,” she says, ever hopeful. This woman, always looking at me like I might be a good person.

“Is that a requirement of coaches, to be perversely optimistic about people based on no evidence whatsoever?” I ask.

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