‘That’s the last time you’re going to insult me by bracketing me with your loser ex!’
‘Why? You seem to have a fair few things in common! Why didn’t you just tell me who you were?’
Because I was enjoying the novelty of being with someone refreshingly honest... Because in a world where wariness and suspicion are bywords, it was a holiday not having to guard every syllable, watch every turn of phrase, accept instant adulation without being able really to distinguish what was genuine and what was promoted by a healthy knowledge of how much I was worth...
‘When you’re as rich as I am, it pays to be careful.’
‘In other words, I could have been just another cheap, tacky gold-digger after your money!’
‘If you want to put it like that...’
His dark eyes were cool, assessing, unflinching. She could have hit him. How could he just sit there and admit to lying to her without even batting an eyelid? As though it was just perfectly acceptable?
Although...
The man was a billionaire. He owned a million companies. He had a hand in pretty much every pie and he had come from money. There were no limits to his wealth, his power, his influence, it would seem. She could reluctantly understand that suspicion would be his constant companion.
That thought instantly deflated her and she had to summon up some of the old anger she had felt at the thought that he had cheerfully lied to her.
‘I feel sorry for you,’ she told him scornfully and he stiffened.
‘Do I really want to hear you explain that remark?’ No one, but no one, had ever felt sorry for him or, if anyone had, they had been at pains to conceal it. Money engendered quite the opposite response. Money combined with good looks—which was something about himself he accepted without any vanity whatsoever—was even more persuasive a tool in affording him the sort of slavish responses he got from other people. Particularly from women.
He looked at her carefully. She was as volatile and as unpredictable as a volcano on the point of eruption. It should have been a turn off and it was mildly surprising that it wasn’t.
‘How can you trust that anyone likes you for you?’
‘My point exactly. But, before we deviate down some amateur psychobabble road, there’s a reason I have brought this up.’
Milly stilled. There would be a reason, of course there would, or else he would have stayed a couple of nights and pushed on leaving her none the wiser. Certainly he would have spared himself the sort of awkward conversation he clearly wasn’t relishing.
But before he got to that... She finally grasped the thought that had been niggling away at the back of her mind.
‘At that café,’ she said slowly, ‘The owner... I wondered why he was so eager to please...why he said that I didn’t have to pay the bill.’
‘I’m known here.’ He offered an elegant shrug. ‘I don’t come often but when I do I’m high-profile.’
High-profile and made of money. What had he thought of her? Babbling on and taking him for being a ski instructor? He must have thought that she was crazy. A crazy woman who chattered non-stop and had ruined his seclusion by landing on his doorstep.
‘Why did you decide to come over?’ she asked, feverishly pursuing her train of thought so that she could join the pieces of the puzzle together and get the complete picture.
Lucas hesitated. It was for the very reason that he had decided to descend on his ski lodge that he was now having this conversation. ‘Everyone needs a break,’ he informed her silkily. ‘Alberto and his annoying family had pulled out and I decided that a bit of skiing would be just the thing. And, in case you’re wondering, the Ramos family were over here as a favour to my mother. Alberto works for me.’
‘Which was why you could engineer to have me paid for this this two-week holiday. You just had to pick the phone up and tell him and he had to obey. Is that what happens in your life, Lucas? You snap your fingers and people jump to attention and obey you?’
‘In a nutshell.’
Milly wondered how she hadn’t noticed before the way that he was sheathed in an invisible aura of power, the sort of power that only the super-rich had. Or maybe she had noticed but, in her usual trusting way, had shoved that to the back of her mind and chosen to take him at his word: Mr Ski Instructor who did a bit of this and that when he wasn’t teaching people like the Ramos family to ski.
Maybe, just maybe, she would wake up one day and realise that people were rarely who they said they were.
‘Sit down, Milly.’ He waited until she was back on the sofa. Her eyes were guarded, the cheerful smile wiped off her face. He had done that. Whatever he told her, he would be just someone else who had lied to her. His mouth tightened; for once, he was finding it hard casually to dismiss someone else’s emotions. Habits of lifetime, however, came to his rescue and he swept past his temporary discomfort. So he had punctured some of that bubbly sparkle. Cynicism was healthy. It prepared you for life’s adversities. She would return to this very point in time and, in the years to come, she would thank him for bursting her bubble.
‘I told you that I came here because I needed a break. Partially true. I’m responsible for the running of...countless companies that stretch across countless countries. I employ thousands...and I’m responsible for them, as well.’
So many revelations were piling up that she felt faint. He was a one-man employment agency. He was a guy who ruled the world, someone who dropped in now and again for a bit of skiing when he needed to unwind, someone who had the most amazing ski lodge on the planet, which he used for a few days in the year. She would stake her life on him having a house in every country, places like the ski lodge that he could use when and if it suited him.
‘What do you mean when you say partially? You said that it was partially true that you came here to unwind. What other reason would you have for coming here?’
‘I have been experiencing a few problems with an ex,’ Lucas said heavily. Unaccustomed as he was to accounting for his actions, he was decidedly ill at ease with explaining himself to the woman sitting opposite him, but explain himself he had to.
‘No, let me guess.’ Milly’s voice was a shade higher than normal. The whole situation felt surreal. In fact, the past few weeks had felt surreal. You’d think I’d be used to dealing with surreal by now, she thought with an edge of bitterness that was alien to her. ‘The ex wasn’t ready to be an ex. Did the poor woman start getting ideas about settling down with you?’
Lucas found it difficult to think of Isobel in terms of ‘the poor woman’. She was anything but a helpless, deluded damsel with a broken heart. She was a sophisticated, hard-as-nails, six-foot model who had capitalised on the fact that, very slightly, she was acquainted with his mother. She had mistakenly figured that the connection carried weight. His parents had known her parents, both wealthy families living in Madrid, both mixing in the same social circles. The relationship had fizzled out when his father had died but she had done her utmost to resuscitate it during their six-month fling in the hope that familiarity would somehow guide him to a flashbulb moment of thinking that what they had was more than what it actually
