Beck always looked like he’d just stepped off a Milan runway, and I was sure his real girlfriends didn’t own PJs.
But I wasn’t his real girlfriend, so what did I care what I looked like? I buzzed him up and left the door on the latch. Should I have given him a key b
y two months? No, that was a little much.
“Have you ever lived with a woman?” I called as I heard him come through the door. Had he seen women other than when they were perfectly made up, hair blow-dried, with their best underwear on?
“Well, hello to you too, Stella. And no. Never lived with a woman.” He appeared in the doorway to my kitchen just like he had when he’d come to pick me up last night. Already he looked at home, but Beck was the kind of guy who was probably comfortable wherever he was.
“Have you ever given a woman a key to your flat?” Beck was right—I wanted this design job. I wanted to stop this circle of disappointment I’d been in since I’d found out about Matt and Karen. But we were going to have to up our game. Especially after my phone call with Florence. “You want coffee?” We were going to have to pack in a lot in a very short amount of time. Scotland was only a few weeks away.
“No to the key question. Although I’ve had it suggested to me a couple of times. And water if you have it. Tap is fine.”
“You don’t drink coffee?”
He shook his head and I took a deep breath. We had a lot to cover. “You need to tell me these things. Not drinking coffee is a big deal.”
“It is?”
“Of course, it is. Do you drink tea?”
“Nope. Can’t bear the taste. Coffee either. And anyway, I don’t like to be high on caffeine.”
“Caffeine gets you high?” It was possible that Beck was one of those oh-so-dull men who didn’t know how to enjoy himself. There had to be a catch.
“Not high, but it can amp up your mood. I don’t drink much alcohol either.”
“Whoa. Really? Not at all? Are you an alcoholic? Do you take drugs?” I had ten million questions. This was never going to work.
He chuckled. “No, not an alcoholic and I don’t take drugs.”
“I thought you said you went to university for a good time. Can’t have been that great for you if you didn’t drink or do drugs—not that I did drugs, but I drank my fair share.”
“I didn’t go to university.”
I stopped, my teabag balanced on my spoon, and turned to look at him to see if he was serious. “You didn’t? How come?” In my circle of friends, everyone went to university.
He shrugged. “Wasn’t my thing. I wanted to be out making money.”
“Well, you’ve clearly done that.”
“Exactly. I had my eye on the prize.”
“And your parents didn’t mind?”
He rolled his eyes. “No. Neither of my parents went.”
I’d made assumptions about Beck that I hadn’t even realized. I’d thought he’d come from a privileged upper-middle-class background, just like my friends and I had. But he was changing the picture I had unknowingly built up of him.
“You got into real estate straight away?” I asked. Did he have Russian backers or family money or something? Perhaps his business was a front for mob money laundering. Did London even have the mob?
“Sort of. Worked a lot of different jobs, saved a little money, took out a loan to buy a flat in Hackney, flipped it. Did it again. And again. You know.”
But I didn’t know. My friends were lawyers and doctors or helped run the family business. Flipping flats in Hackney was not part of my world. “So from a flat in Hackney to a development in Mayfair?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked me in the eye. “Apparently.”
“Your parents must be proud,” I said, hoping to coax out of him more about his background.