Lauren (Silicon Valley Billionaires 1)

“So nice to finally meet you!” Hannah exclaimed, shaking his hand and jumping up and down as if she were an excited puppy. “Take good care of my sister!”

“I intend to.” Gabe nodded at her indulgently and turned back to me. “Are you ready?”

I nodded and accepted the arm he offered. “Bye, Hannah.”

“Have fun!” she squealed.

I sighed in relief when we walked down the stairs, away from her. I leaned in toward Gabe, loving the smell of him—clean and masculine.

He leaned toward me, too. “We’re going to Saratoga, in case you want to let your security know.”

“Thank you.”

He led me to his fancy electric car and opened the door for me. “Text them the address in case I drive too fast for them.”

I sighed as I slid in. “You know, even though I’m a scientist, I’ll never figure out that door.”

“I sort of caught on that cars weren’t your thing. What type do you have, anyway?”

I wrinkled my brow. “A BMW?”

He laughed as he pulled out of my driveway. “Are you sure?”

“A BMW…sedan. I think.” I sighed. “My sister picked it out. I don’t—”

“Have time for those sorts of things,” he finished for me. “I get it. Nothing to be ashamed of. Your sister seems nice, by the way.”

“She is nice…even though she’s a little excitable. We live together. She’s my publicity director.”

“I know. I spoke with her when I was trying to set up my meeting with you. She was much more accommodating than you were about that.”

I shrugged. “She’s a lot more carefree than I am, which is a good thing. She should enjoy being twenty-two.”

“What about you? Did you enjoy your early twenties?”

I didn’t answer for a moment. A lot had changed for me in the past few years, including the loss of my parents. Since then I’d felt an urgency to live life to the fullest. For me, that meant finding my life’s true purpose and throwing everything I had into building it.

“I was building my company then, sleeping on a futon in my lab every night. But yeah, I enjoyed it. It was a time of a lot of growth for me, a lot of breakthroughs.”

“I love how passionate you are about your work. But did you relax? Did you have fun back then?”

“Of course not—not the type of fun my sister’s having. I had fun with my beakers and spreadsheets, and she has fun shoe shopping and going to trendy restaurants. But Hannah and I want different things, and I support that. I don’t want her to feel like she has to work all the time just because I do.”

“Have you always lived together?”

“Just since she finished college. Our parents died when I was nineteen and she was sixteen. She wanted to finish high school in Michigan while I was still at MIT. Then I moved out here. She chose to study at Stanford so we could be close to each other. When she graduated, she helped me pick out the house. She said it was time to stop sleeping on a futon.” I didn’t want to talk about this, all of these personal nuts and bolts, but it just came out. Sometimes, it was hard to hide the bald truth.

“I’m sorry about your parents.”

“It’s okay. It was hard to deal with then because it was sudden. They died in a car accident.”

“That’s horrible, Lauren.”

“You already knew about that, though.” I could hear it in his voice.

“Of course I did. Everyone knows.”

“So, is that one of the things people say about me? That I’m a recluse workaholic whose parents tragically died? I sound like a lot of fun.”