A muscle jerked low in his jaw. ‘This is my home.’
‘You know that’s not what I’m asking.’
‘I have other properties, yes,’ he said, eventually.
‘I see.’
His brows knitted together. ‘I haven’t lied to you.’
He hadn’t. Not really. Yet his every action had been a lie, of sorts, creating an illusion of something that didn’t exist. Beneath the veneer of this rugged, wild beast of a man was someone wealthy and cultivated, civilised, who might be every bit as at home in a suit as her husband had been.
His hands caught her hips then, turning her to face him, and his features held an intensity that took her breath away. ‘Who I am, on this island, is the real me. This, here. I chose this life, because it’s where I belong. What does it matter that I also have business interests?’
‘And money,’ she pointed out.
‘Yes, and money.’
‘I’ve just known people with money. It’s come to be a marker of what I want to avoid.’
‘And if we were anything more than this, I might understand why you were annoyed. But true or false, Genevieve—you are leaving this island as soon as you are safely able to do so. What should it matter to you how much money is in my bank account? It changes nothing.’
She opened her mouth to argue that, to dispute it, but he was right. It shouldn’t matter.
She looked down at his chest, swallowed past a strangely constricted throat. ‘I’m just…wary. After him.’
‘That is understandable.’ His own voice sounded raw, deep and husky. It set the hairs on her arms on edge with pleasurable anticipation. ‘I wasn’t born wealthy. If anything, my life was the opposite. I knew abject poverty. I knew what it was like to have to make clothes and shoes last far longer than they should. I was often hungry. I knew longing and need, the struggle of not being able to have things others did, of seeing my mother make unimaginable choices, just so we would have somewhere to live.’
‘What kind of choices?’ she asked, momentarily thrown off course.
He stared at her, long and hard, and she could practically see his cogs turning. She could feel his internal war as he decided how much of himself he was willing to share.
‘The sort of choices I would not wish on anyone,’ he said, eventually, the words dragged from him. Then his voice softened. ‘So what you see here, on the island, is far closer to who I am, in my heart. All the rest is just…trappings.’ He sounded so grim though, so angry.
She lifted her gaze to his face, trying to make sense of it.
‘Why does that bother you?’
He shook his head once. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
But it did to Genevieve. ‘Why can’t you answer?’
‘Because I don’t know how,’ he said, finally, simply.
She blinked at him, frustration curling inside her. She knew it was partly because of her journalistic training, and partly because of who she was—the latter had made her excellent at the former—but neither looked likely to be satisfied. Nikos was closing up like a drawbridge being raised.
He moved towards the kitchen, removing things from the small fridge, leaving her looking at this man, this contradiction in terms, with the sense that, even if she had all the time in the world, she’d never properly understand him, because he was determined to keep himself under lock and key.
She knew she should have been grateful for that. It was much harder to let herself develop fantasies around a man who kept her at an emotional arm’s length. And she was no longer blind to the inherent dangers of remaining on the island. For the longer she stayed, the longer she stayedwith Nikos, the harder it would be to remember that she never planned to let anyone else in.
Sex was sex, but, with Nikos, it was also the setting fire to her entire universe, and, with Genevieve in the centre of it, she knew that if she wasn’t very careful, she was going to get burned beyond recognition.
‘Okay,’ she said, over-brightly. ‘Let’s eat. Can I help?’
He hadn’t set out to hide so much of himself from her. Perhaps it had been partly because he needed to keep his private life private. His grief was his own to bear, and he had no intention of sharing it with anyone. Let alone someone like Genevieve, who might listen to his heartbreak and try to make him feel better.
He didn’twantto feel better.
Not better than this, anyway.
