Page 8 of Oops I Fell For The Billionaire Next Door

"Terrible plan."

"You laughed, though."

I set the mug in front of him. The cactus mug. His mug now, apparently, because I keep giving it to him. He wraps his hands around it, and the size difference between his palms and the ceramic shouldn't do anything to me. Shouldn't.

"Your sketches are good." He nods at the drainage plan spread across the table, the one I pushed aside to make room for his coffee. "That's the Nelson client?"

"Yeah. She wants a rain garden on a forty-degree slope with clay subsoil. Basically wants water to flow uphill."

"Can you make it work?"

"Already figured out the swale system. Three tiers, each one catches runoff from the tier above. Native sedges and rushes do the filtration. It'll look like it grew there naturally."

"Which is the hardest thing to design."

My eyebrows go up. He shouldn't know that. Nobody outside the industry knows that.

"I spent eight months working with landscape architects on my Vancouver office campus," he says. "The lead designer told me the best landscapes are the ones nobody notices. The ones that look inevitable."

"Who was the designer?"

"Miriam Chao."

"Miriam Chao did your campus?" My hand goes flat on the table. "She's one of the best ecological designers in the country. Her stormwater capture system for the UBC botanical garden is referenced in every hydrology textbook I own."

"I'll tell her you're a fan. She'd probably love your terracing work."

"Don't you dare tell Miriam Chao about me."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm sitting in a cabin with a leaky roof eating leftover rice for dinner. Let me at least have the Nelson project built before I get introduced to my professional hero."

He grins. My stomach flips. Traitorous organ.

We keep talking. About Miriam's campus design, about the problems with conventional drainage in mountain soil, about how his build site should've had a bioswale along the east face to manage the runoff his grading created. He listens differently than anyone I've worked with. Leans forward. Asks follow-up questions that prove he's actually processing what I said, not just waiting for his turn.

"You really did Google soil amendment at two a.m."

"I Google a lot of things at two a.m. My search history is a mess. Last week it was 'how to stop a stove from clicking' and 'what elevation do hummingbirds live at.'"

"Hummingbirds?"

"You have rufous hummingbird feeders on your porch. The red ones."

"You noticed my hummingbird feeders."

"I notice everything about your property." He says it simply. Then seems to hear himself, shifts in the chair, takes a long drink of coffee. "From an architectural perspective."

"Mmhm."

"Purely structural interest."

"Sure."

His neck flushes red above the blanket. The billionaire is blushing in my kitchen.

The conversation turns personal. His childhood in Ontario, a middle class family in a suburb outside London. Parents still married, still in the same house, still confused by the fact that their son who couldn't keep his room clean built a tech empire.