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‘You keep saying it’s nothing, when it’s quite clearly something.’

Her face heated, which was silly. ‘I mean, it is nothing, isn’t it? It’s not that special. I’m not that special.’

He ignored that. ‘You don’t like being complimented, either. You’re very dismissive of it.’

The conversation was making her angry for reasons she didn’t particularly want to go into, so without thinking, she said, ‘And you don’t like talking about Neve.’

Instantly, his expression shut down the way it had upstairs, and a wave of guilt went through her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Libby began. ‘I shouldn’t—’

‘We can talk about her,’ Kai interrupted, his voice flat, his attention on the snowflake he was cutting out. ‘Though there’s not much to say.’

Libby’s breath caught. Did he really mean that? Because the issue was that she wanted to know. She wanted to know everything about this woman who had such a hold on him. This woman whom he’d once loved and who’d very likely groomed him.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked carefully.

‘Yes.’ He kept his attention on the paper he was cutting. ‘It’s no big deal.’

The words sounded as dismissive as the ones upstairs had been, and it was tempting to ask him why, but she could hardly call him on that when she hadn’t been able to deal with her own minimization.

So instead, she asked, ‘She brought you up, didn’t she?’

‘She did.’ He began carefully cutting another pattern into the paper he was holding. ‘We lived in Copenhagen, then I went to university at Oxford. After that, I took a position in one of her companies to learn the business from the ground up.’

He said the words with no discernible emotion, a series of dry little facts about his life, nothing more. But Libby remembered the news reports and articles, and the gossip column inches she’d read, all dedicated to speculation about the real relationship that Kaius Frost had with Neve Aarsland.

She had never thought it would be true, yet… Years ago it had been. And that relationship had ended up hurting him, badly. The thought made pain twist in her chest, and she wanted to tell him that what Neve had done to him was wrong, and did he know that? Given the question he’d thrown back at her upstairs, some part of him did know. But perhaps he didn’t want to acknowledge it. Perhaps he didn’t want to accept it.

He was a strong, powerful man. The billionaire CEO of a massive finance company. Would any man like that want to acknowledge that they’d been taken advantage of by a woman? No matter how young they’d been?

‘Did you enjoy learning the business?’ she asked, deciding to keep her questions as neutral as possible.

‘Yes.’ A piece of paper floated down from the shape he was cutting. ‘I enjoyed the energy industry and still do. But my real facility is with numbers. Financial analysis to be precise.’

‘Is that why you have your own companies?’

His gaze flicked up and caught hers, glittering slightly. ‘If you’re asking if Neve gave them to me, no, she did not. What she did was challenge me to go and start my own, to prove that I had the ability to grow a company and manage it.’

‘So you did.’

‘Yes. I did.’

‘People said you were her right-hand man,’ she said, again carefully. ‘Kind of like her bodyguard even.’

He gave a nod. ‘She was a powerhouse in the boardroom, but sometimes it’s difficult to do everything yourself. Sometimes it’s useful to have someone else be the villain of the piece, so to speak.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean? Like good cop/bad cop?’

‘Let’s say it was useful to her to remain above the fray. She needed someone to get his hands dirty from time to time, and that someone was me.’

‘Why you, though?’ she asked. ‘When she came into the home that day, she made a beeline for you.’

A shadow passed over his face then was gone, like a cloud moving over the sun. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She’d been looking to adopt a boy to carry on her legacy, that’s what she told me, and that she’d reviewed my school records and was impressed. She liked my mind.’ He slowly cut a circle into the paper, his attention dropping to it, his expression softening. ‘I do remember the day she came. As soon as I saw her, I remember hoping that she was here for me. And she was.’

Libby’s throat closed, an old and forgotten grief clutching around her heart. He hadn’t looked back when he’d left with her; she remembered that, too. Not once. Neve had taken him away and changed him beyond recognition.

She stared down at her own snowflake, trying to think of questions that would skirt the quagmire she could sense lay just beyond those questions. ‘What was growing up in Copenhagen like?’

‘It was fine,’ he said. ‘I was given everything I needed. I wanted for nothing.’