Stirring Up Trouble (Inspiring the Greek Billionaire) by Shelly Bell Read Free Book Online

totally package it and rake in the dough. Get it?” She laughed and Braden couldn’t help but do the same.
    He relaxed into the chair thinking of the possibilities. It wasn’t a bad idea to package the baklava and sell it to the local markets. He’d have to play around with the recipe at home and see if he could recreate the results. Next batch he’d test on the two of them.
    “Before we do anymore baking, I want to teach you how I keep the books. Do you know anything about accounting?”
    Her face screwed up tight as if she’d eaten a sour lemon. “No.”
    “Computers?”
    “Sure. I’m addicted to Twitter. That’s the only way to get the news.”
    “I keep all the day’s receipts and everything you need on that computer in front of you.” He pointed to his laptop. “Go on and power it up.”
    She opened it and pressed the ‘on’ button then twirled her chair in a circle. “I love this chair.”
    Lola really got pleasure out of anything. To him that chair represented responsibility and success. He spent hours sitting in it while on the phone with suppliers, entering in the daily receipts, and doing countless and endless mundane tasks, and never once did he ever spin his chair around. It wasn’t his nature.
    He rose from his chair and dragged it to the other side of the desk to sit next to her. After a few minutes of lecturing on the ins and outs of accounting, she exhaled. Loudly.
    He looked up at her. “What?”
    “Do you have a book?” She shifted in her chair, moving it back and forth as if she were nervous.
    “A book?”
    “Yes. On accounting.”
    He kept his books above the credenza. He stood and opened the small cabinet door, finding the book on basic accounting he’d bought for his sister, hoping she might someday join him in running the restaurant. She’d handed back the book right before she informed him she was moving to attend film school in New York.
    Braden offered Lola the book and took the seat on the other side of the desk. “Would this do?”
    She flipped through the pages. “Is this what I’d need to know for the auditors?”
    “It’s a good start. I’d still need to show you how to apply the information specifically to the restaurant and our system. But we don’t have a lot of time for you to read though it and try to teach yourself.”
    She worried her lip and her fingers played an invisible piano on his desk. “There’s something I should tell you, something nobody else knows. Not even Portia.”
    A twinge of guilt had him shifting in the uncomfortable chair. “Go on.”
    “I have a photographic memory. Not only that, I’m really good with numbers. I mean, not Rain Man good, I can’t count cards, though I haven’t tried, and if you dropped a box of toothpicks I couldn’t tell you how many were on the ground unless the box was empty and I knew how many were in there to start, but that’s cheating and I don’t cheat.”
    “So you’re not an autistic savant. Good to know. When you say you’re good at numbers, what do you mean?”
    “I can look at a column of numbers and add them up in my head really fast and without a calculator. Come on, give me a math problem,” she begged, a shy smile on her face.
    “Okay. What is the square root of fifteen thousand?”
    Her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling. “Can I round up?”
    He nodded and grabbed his calculator.
    “One-hundred twenty-two point five.”
    His jaw fell and he dropped the calculator to the desk. “That’s incredible. Why do you keep it a secret?” He moved his chair closer to her, wondering how many layers there were to the woman.
    “When I was younger, I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal. Once I caught on, I knew I had to keep it a secret. Can you imagine what Reina would have done if she knew I had this special gift? I didn’t want to find out. It made things easier on me since we moved from school to school. I didn’t have to play catch up and I was able to help Portia with her homework. She