‘I can swim.’
‘Not with me deep inside you, agape mou,’ he drawled lazily. ‘Trust me, you would have lost the will to live rather than let me go.’
She managed the knot. He had a feeling it cut off the circulation, it appeared so tight. And her cheeks went a deep shade of pink. He liked that. However, the look she sent him should have shrivelled his ego like a prune. It didn’t though. The physical part of his ego remained very much erect and full.
‘Such confidence in your prowess,’ she mocked, stalking past him to scoop up the rest of her things. ‘Don’t they always say that those who boast about it always disappoint?’
‘I will not disappoint,’ he assured with husky confidence.
‘Well, if you wait until it’s dark to prove that, I can always pretend you are someone else, then maybe you won’t.’
And with the pithy comment to cut him down to size where he stood she put the hat on her head and walked off towards the path.
A lesser man would react to such an insult. A lesser man, Xander told himself as he watched her walk away, would go after her and drag her down in the sand and make her take such foolish words back.
The better man picked up his socks and shoes and followed her at a leisurely pace, while he plotted his revenge by more—subtle methods.
Then a frown creased his smooth brow when he remembered something and increased his pace, only becoming leisurely again once he’d caught up with her and tempered his longer stride to hers.
Hearing him coming, Nell pushed her sunglasses over her burning eyes and increased her pace. She received a glimpse of sun-dappled white shirting, black trousers and a pair of long brown bare feet as he came up beside her, but her mind saw the naked man and her tummy muscles fluttered. So did other parts.
‘I grew up on this island,’ he remarked casually. ‘As a small boy I used to walk this path each morning to swim in the cove before being shipped across to the mainland to attend school. Diving from the rocks is an exhilarating experience. The snorkelling is good out there, the fishing too—though I do not suppose the fishing part is of any interest to you.’
‘You, used to fish?’ Nell spoke the words without thinking then was angry because she’d been determined to say nothing at all.
‘You think I arrived on this earth all-powerful and arrogant?’ He mocked her lazily. ‘In the afternoons I used to fish,’ he explained. ‘Having been transported back here after my school day was finished, with my ever-present bodyguard as my only playmate.’
Now he was playing on her sympathies by drawing heart-string-plucking pictures of a small, lonely boy protected and isolated from the world because of his father’s great power and wealth.
‘My parents were always off somewhere doing important things so I rarely saw them,’ he went on. ‘Thea Sophia brought me up, taught me good manners and the major values of life. The fishing taught me how to survive on my own if I had to. I used to worry constantly that something dreadful was going to happen to those who lived here on the island with me and I would be left alone here to fend for myself. I knew that my father had powerful enemies that might decide to use me in their quest for revenge. Before the age of six I had all my hiding places picked out for when they came for me …’
‘Is there a point to you telling me this?’ She would not feel sorry for that small, anxious boy, she wouldn’t.
‘Ne.’ He slipped into Greek, which didn’t happen often.
Xander was a man of many languages. Greek and Italian both being natural to him, the rest because he was good at them, and in the cut-throat, high-risk world he moved in it paid to know what the people around you were saying and to be able to communicate that fact.
‘You think that you are the only one to have lived a strange, dysfunctional, sheltered life but you are not,’ he stated coolly. ‘I have lived it too so I can recognise the person you are inside because I am familiar with that person.’
Nell clutched her book in tight fingers and tried hard not to ask the question he was prompting her to ask, but it came out anyway. ‘And what kind of person is that?’
‘One who hides her true self within a series of carefully constructed shells as a form of self-defence against the hurts, the fears, the rejections life has dealt her from being small and vulnerable—like myself.’
Well, he certainly knows how to top up my feelings of rejection! Nell thought angrily. ‘What rubbish,’ she snapped out loud. ‘And spare me more of this psycho-babble, Xander. I have no idea where you’re going with it and I don’t want to know.’
‘Towards a deeper understanding of each other?’ he suggested.
‘For what purpose? So you can eventually get around to bedding me before you fly off to pastures new—or old,’ she tagged on with bite. ‘In case you didn’t notice, I was easy prey out there in the water.’ God, it stung to have to admit that. ‘That means you don’t need to achie
ve a greater understanding of me to get what you want.’
‘You have always been easy prey, cara,’ he hit back. ‘The point at issue here is that I have always managed to avoid taking what has always been there to take.’
Nell pulled to a simmering stop. The hat and the sunglasses hid her expression from him but there were other ways to transmit body language. ‘I think you’re into humiliation.’
‘No,’ he denied that. ‘I was trying to …’
She walked on again, faster, her breath singing tensely from between her clenched teeth as she pumped her legs up the final stretch of the hill.