Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 13: Two Puppies

Ryan got there twenty minutes early.

He told himself it was to check the place was as good as the photos suggested, which was partially true. The Langford’s restaurant was everything he’d hoped — dark wood paneling, low warm lighting, the kind of ambient noise level that filled silence without intruding on conversation.

Tables spaced generously. A wine list that came in its own folder. The kind of place that understood the difference between atmosphere and affectation.

He ordered water and waited.

Sophie arrived at seven past seven.

He saw her before she saw him, which gave him approximately three seconds to compose himself before she spotted him across the room, which turned out to not be nearly enough time.

The dress was black. That was about as far as his brain got on first pass before it stopped processing specifics and just responded to the overall situation. It was fitted through the waist and hips in a way that made it difficult to think linearly, with a neckline that revealed a stretch of her collarbone and the upper curve of her chest without being theatrical about it. Her hair was down and slightly wavy, her heels adding maybe three inches she absolutely didn’t need.

She moved through the restaurant with the easy confidence of a woman who knew she looked good and had decided that was simply information rather than performance.

Ryan stood as she reached the table. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"Hey." She smiled, leaning in so he could kiss her cheek.

"Hey." He pulled out her chair. "You look—" he paused, the available adjectives briefly insufficient. "Incredible."

Sophie looked down at the dress, then back up. "This old thing."

"You just bought it."

"You don’t know that."

"I know that."

She sat, the smile still on her face, and picked up the menu. Ryan sat across from her and made a reasonable attempt to focus on his own.

---

They ordered drinks first — wine for both, a bottle the waiter recommended that Sophie approved with the confidence of someone who knew the difference. The bread came and Sophie tore into it without ceremony, which Ryan appreciated.

"This place is fancy," she said, looking around the room. The high ceilings, the candlelight, the particular hush of a room where everyone was engaged in something that felt important.

"Good fancy or bad fancy?"

"Good fancy. Bad fancy has too many forks." She picked up her wine. "There are only two forks here. That’s the right number of forks."

They ordered — Sophie got the sea bass without looking at the price, which Ryan took as a good sign. He got the steak. They talked about nothing in particular for a while, easy and unhurried, her foot briefly touching his under the table at one point before she moved it back without acknowledging it.

At some point Sophie set down her glass and looked at him with the expression of someone who’d been patient long enough.

"Alright," she said. "What’s the business?"

Ryan took a sip of his wine. Set it down.

"I’m starting a company."

Sophie looked at him for a moment. Something moved across her face — surprise, recalibration, and then a kind of impressed reluctance.

"I know we talked about the whole revenge success plan," she said slowly. "But Ryan. You move fast."

"Sometimes hesitation kills dreams."

She pointed at him. "Okay. That’s true, I agree with that." She sat back. "But starting a company that ends up being more than just a name on paper takes more than determination. You need ideas, you need funding, you need a team of people passionate enough to actually execute. It’s a lot."

Ryan smiled.

Sophie watched him smile and narrowed her eyes slightly. "Why are you smiling like that."

"That’s why I called you."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she set her wine down and sighed, not unkindly.

"Ryan. I like how determined you are about this, genuinely. But I’m not in a position to give a startup the attention it deserves without gutting my own work. I’ve built my client base over—"

"Sophie." He said it gently. "I’m not asking you to come work for free on a maybe-succeeds startup."

She stopped.

"I want to give you a job."

She raised a brow. "A job."

"A well-paying one."

She was quiet, reading his face for the joke. "Okay."

"You’d be lead designer. Full creative flexibility — I mean that, not the corporate version of it where flexibility means you can choose which box to be trapped in. Actual freedom. The company’s look, the product design, the brand. Yours from the ground up."

Sophie turned her wine glass slowly on the table. "How well paying."

Ryan leaned in slightly. "A hundred and twenty thousand a year."

The table went quiet.

Sophie didn’t move for a moment. Just sat there with her wine glass half-raised, looking at him with an expression he’d never seen on her before — the specific frozen quality of someone whose brain has received information it’s not yet certain how to file.

"I’m being pranked," she said.

"You’re not."

"There’s a camera somewhere."

"There isn’t."

She set the glass down carefully. "Let me make sure I have this right." She spoke slowly, with the deliberate precision of someone testing each word before they said it. "You are telling me to come work as a designer, for the company you are making, for a salary of a hundred and twenty thousand United States dollars."

"Yes."

"That’s what you’re saying."

"That’s what I’m saying."

She stared at him. "Are you a secret millionaire."

"No. I just have—" he paused, "—funding."

Sophie looked at him for another long moment, something working behind her eyes. Then: "What’s the catch. There’s a catch."

"There is one thing."

"Okay."

"I also need an assistant. For the first few months, maybe less depending on how fast things move. Just someone to help manage the administrative side while I’m building everything else." He held her gaze. "I’d add a thousand a week on top of the salary. But you don’t have to say yes to that part."

Sophie blinked. "Why wouldn’t I say yes to that."

"I just thought you might not want work outside of design—"

"Ryan." She looked at him like he’d said something slightly absurd. "You’re asking would I rather have a puppy or two puppies. Obviously I want two puppies."

He laughed.

"I hated my corporate work because it was ten hours a day behind a miserable desk doing things I didn’t care about for terrible pay," she said. "Everything you’ve just described is the complete opposite of that." She picked her wine back up. "I’m in."

"Yeah?"

"When do I start."

"I’ll send the employment contract tomorrow. First payment same day if you’re ready."

She shook her head slowly, still processing, but smiling now. "This is the strangest month of my life."

"Mine too," Ryan said. "By a significant margin."

---

The food arrived and they ate, the conversation loosening into easier territory — Ryan telling her about Danny, about the napkin diagrams and three hours in a bar that had felt more productive than three years at Meridian. He mentioned there were two more team members he was still figuring out. Sophie asked questions, real ones, leaning forward over her plate with the focused attention of someone who’d just signed onto something and was now taking it seriously.

Her dress, in the candlelight, was doing things to his concentration that he was managing with what he considered admirable professionalism.

Admirable being relative.

He kept his eyes on her face through most of dinner. Most.

There was one moment, mid-conversation, where she reached across the table for the bread and the neckline of the dress shifted slightly and Ryan lost the thread of whatever he’d been saying for a full two seconds before recovering.

Sophie didn’t notice. Or she noticed and was polite about it.

By the time dessert had come and gone and the wine bottle was mostly finished, the restaurant had thinned to a handful of other tables, couples mostly, the particular late dinner quiet of a place winding down.

Ryan became aware, for approximately the fifteenth time that evening, of the neckline situation showing just enough of her boobs to make him lose focus.

Sophie caught his eyes.

She looked down briefly at herself, then back up at him, a slow smile arriving.

"You wanna touch them."

It wasn’t a question.

Ryan held her gaze for a moment. "You know I do."

Sophie shook her head, the smile widening. "Too bad. We’re surrounded by people and we’re not perverts."

Ryan glanced around the room. Then back at her. "It’s quite convenient, then, that this restaurant happens to be inside a hotel." He held her eyes. "With rooms. Where people aren’t."

The smile stayed on Sophie’s face as the implication arrived. Then her expression shifted into something between amused and genuinely caught off guard, a faint warmth moving up her neck.

"You planned this," she said.

Ryan stood, buttoning his blazer with what he hoped was a casual energy. "Give me a sec, darling."

He walked toward the lobby.

---

The moment he was through the restaurant door and out of Sophie’s sightline, a single bead of sweat made its way down his temple.

He had absolutely not planned this.

He approached the reception desk — marble-topped, a woman in her thirties with the composed professionalism of someone who had handled stranger requests than whatever he was about to make.

"Hi," Ryan said. "I’m wondering about room availability for tonight."

She typed something. Looked at the screen. "I’m sorry, our reservations require at least several hours advance booking through our online system. We don’t have any walk-in availability tonight."

Ryan nodded slowly.

Panic made a brief appearance somewhere behind his sternum. He showed it the door.

Then the idea arrived.

"What’s your standard rate for a room?" he asked. "One night."

She glanced at the screen. "Our available room category would be four hundred dollars."

Ryan reached into his jacket and produced his card. He set it on the counter.

"What if I paid the four hundred," he said, keeping his voice even, "and tipped you eight hundred on top of it." He held her gaze. "I’m sure in that scenario something could be arranged."

The receptionist looked at him. Then at the card. Then at him again.

A silence that lasted exactly long enough to make Ryan’s heart rate do something uncomfortable.

"In that scenario," she said, her expression perfectly professional, "I believe we can find something available."

Ryan exhaled through his nose. "Brilliant."

She began typing.

> + $1200 awaiting returns