it’s a prop.’
‘You mean it’s not real.’ Rose didn’t know whether she was disappointed or relieved.
‘My father would spot a fake at twenty feet.’
‘Then it is real. You father sounds scary.’ Considering his son, genetically speaking this was pretty much a foregone conclusion.
‘This might help,’ he said.
Rose glanced with a frown at the file he had placed in her hand. ‘What is this—another itinerary?’
‘Some things about my father … his likes, his dislikes, things you might find useful.’
Rose, her expression incredulous, shook her head. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to learn Greek on the flight over as well? Mathieu, if you wanted covert operations you took on the wrong person,’ she told him bluntly. ‘If I was your fiancée I wouldn’t be interested in pleasing or impressing your father.’
‘Just me.’
Rose pretended not to hear his sly insertion. ‘It would probably be more useful if I knew something about you other than how you like your steak and how prettily you smile for the camera. It’s all so … shallow …’
‘It or me?’ he said, sounding unconcerned. ‘I’m sorry if you feel neglected, but you can spend the next few days learning all my unplumbed depths.’
Rose rolled her eyes while her heart did a double flip. ‘I can hardly wait,’ she grunted. What had she let herself in for?
He accepted the file without comment when she distastefully handed it back to him, though he actually sounded serious when he said, ‘You’ve got a point—it is probably best if you try as much as possible to be yourself.’
‘Well, it would be kind of hard to be anyone else, wouldn’t it? And what would be the point?’
He gave her a strange look. ‘Most people, Rose, spend most of their life pretending to be someone they’re not.’
‘Well, I—’ She stopped dead as she saw the private jet that was waiting for them. ‘Oh, God!’ she groaned. ‘This is so not me. I will never carry this off. I’m just not billionaire’s bride material.’
Mathieu grinned at her dismay and nodded to the man who greeted them. ‘Don’t knock it until you try it, ma petite.’
Rose slung him a disgruntled look. ‘Some things, you know, don’t fit without trying.’
‘Oh, I think we fit perfectly.’
Not unnaturally his purred comment reduced her to red-cheeked silence. It was a silence that Mathieu seemed in no hurry to break.
By the time the private helicopter circled the island five hours later she doubted that she and Mathieu had exchanged more than a dozen words. He had been immersed in his laptop for the entire journey totally oblivious, it seemed, to her growing resentment.
It wasn’t as if she expected him to hold her hand, but neither had she expected him to tune her out. Every time she had made an attempt to initiate conversation he had given a monosyllabic response. In her opinion it would have occurred to anyone with an ounce of sensitivity that she was nervous, that she required a little reassurance.
‘So we’re here, then.’ Mathieu looked up as if finally remembering she was there.
She looked in the direction he indicated, taking in the long, low, sprawling villa built into the rock and surrounded by acres of manicured grounds.
The private jet that had brought them to Athens, the transfer by helicopter, and now the private island retreat—it was just hitting home how seriously off-the-scale rich the Demetrios family was.
Her smooth brow pleated as she caught her full lower lip between her teeth and nibbled nervously. Nobody, she thought, staring down at the island retreat—not the other guests and, more importantly, Andreos Demetrios—was going to swallow the engagement story.
Mathieu lived in a different world from the one she inhabited. She fought to maintain her calm as panic nibbled at the edges of her composure.
She slid a surreptitious sideways glance towards her travelling companion, who had abandoned his computer and was also looking through the window. She supposed the wealth thing should have been a consideration earlier. Rose supposed she hadn’t really thought about it earlier because, unlike many people who needed to flaunt their wealth and position to establish their superiority, Mathieu didn’t labour the fact he was staggeringly wealthy.
Not because he had any leanings towards modesty and self-deprecation. In fact, thinking of Mathieu and those worthy qualities in the same sentence made her lips twitch into a wry smile.
No, Mathieu didn’t need to remind people of who he was because he was one of those rare people who possessed a confidence that went bone-deep—a confidence that would have been there if he hadn’t had a penny to his name.
Besides, far from wanting to be an object of envy or surrounding himself with fawning flunkies, he had a genuine disregard for what anyone thought about him, too arrogant to much care what anyone thought about him.
‘I can see now why you don’t just tell your father to mind his own business …’ Honesty was the best policy in theory, but it would take an unusual man to risk losing all this.
‘There’s no chance of me losing all this,’ Mathieu said, his voice just loud enough for her to hear above the noise. ‘I own it.’
‘You own what?’
‘The island.’
She turned and tilted her head back to look into his face. ‘You own the island …’ she echoed, shock stripping her voice of all expression. Her eyes slid to the vista below and she gulped. ‘All of it?’ she added faintly.
He nodded and explained. ‘It never belonged to Andreos, it belonged to my stepmother’s family. She had originally intended that Alex and I share it, but he …’ He stopped, swallowing, the action causing the muscles in his brown throat to ripple, and said, ‘It came directly to me after she died.’ Andreos had been furious, taking the bequest as a personal slight.
Her head was spinning. ‘It didn’t occur to you to mention this to me?’
He raised his brows and looked mildly surprised by the heat in her husky enquiry. ‘Why should I? It isn’t relevant.’
‘I like that you thought it might be relevant for me to know what your father’s favourite colour is but you didn’t think it relevant to mention you own a whole damned island paradise.’ She flung up her hands in exasperation and glared at him.
‘It is only paradise now that you are here, mon coeur,’ he drawled, clasping a hand dramatically to his chest.
Rose took an irritated swipe at him, which he evaded with a laugh. ‘If you keep that up I will just laugh in your face,’ she warned him, wishing with all her heart that laughter, instead of the heavy weakness that affected all her limbs, were her response to his mocking endearment.
CHAPTER
