‘You live out in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have a car?’
‘No.’ She rested the tray against her hip and smiled, as if she were explaining elementary subtraction to a five-year-old. ‘A bike is much more practical round here.’
‘So what happens when you go to London—or the coast?’
‘I don’t go to London very often. And we do have such things as trains and buses, you know. It’s called public transport.’
He dropped another cube of sugar in his coffee. ‘I didn’t use any kind of public system until I was fifteen.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Absolutely.’ He glanced up at her. ‘Not a train or a bus—not even a scheduled airline.’
She stared at him. What kind of life had he led? For a moment she was tempted to offer him a glimpse of hers. Maybe she should suggest meeting tomorrow morning and taking the bus to nearby Milmouth-on-Sea. Or catching a train somewhere—anywhere. They could drink scalding tea from paper cups as the countryside sped by—she’d bet he’d never done that.
Until she realised that would be overstepping the mark, big time. He was a hotshot billionaire and she was a waitress and while guests sometimes pretended to staff that they were equals, everyone knew they weren’t. Rich people liked to play at being ordinary, but for them it was nothing but a game. He’d asked her to stay for a drink but, really, what possible interest could a tycoon like him have in someone like her? His unusually expansive mood might evaporate the moment she sat down. She knew he could be impatient and demanding. Didn’t the staff on Reception say he’d given them hell whenever he’d lost his internet connection—even though he was supposed to be on holiday and, in her opinion, people on holiday shouldn’t be working.
But then Ellie remembered something the general manager had told her when she’d first joined the hotel’s training scheme. That powerful guests sometimes wanted to talk—and if they did, you should let them.
So she looked into his blue eyes and tried to ignore the little shiver of awareness which had started whispering over her skin. ‘How come,’ she questioned, trying to make her voice sound cool and casual, ‘it took until the age of fifteen before you went on public transport?’
Alek leant back in his chair and considered her question and wondered whether now might be the right time to change the subject, no matter how easy he found it to talk to her. Because the reality of his past was something he usually kept off-limits. He had grown up in a pampered palace of a home—with every luxury known to man.
And he had hated every minute of it.
The place had been a fortress, surrounded by high walls and snarling dogs. A place which had kept people out as well as in. The most lowly of staff were vetted before being offered employment, and paid obscenely well to turn a blind eye to his father’s behaviour. Even family holidays were tainted by the old man’s paranoia about security. He was haunted by the threat of stories about his lifestyle getting into the papers—terrified that anything would be allowed to tarnish his outward veneer of respectability.
Crack teams of guards were employed to keep rubber-neckers, journalists and ex-lovers at bay. Frogmen would swim silently in reconnaissance missions around foreign jetties, before their luxury yacht was given the all-clear to sail into harbour. When he was growing up,
Alek didn’t know what it was like not to be tailed by the shadowy presence of some burly bodyguard. And then one day he had escaped. At fifteen, he had walked away, leaving his home and his past behind and cutting his ties with them completely. He had gone from fabulous wealth to near penury but had embraced his new lifestyle with eagerness and hunger. No longer would he be tainted by his father’s fortune. Everything he owned, he would earn for himself and that was exactly what he’d done. It was the one thing in life he could be proud of. His mouth hardened. Maybe the only thing.
He realised that the waitress was still waiting for an answer to his question and that she no longer seemed to be in any hurry to get off duty. He smiled, expectation making his heart beat a little faster. ‘Because I grew up on a Greek island where there were no trains and few buses.’
‘Sounds idyllic,’ she said.
Alek’s smile faded. It was such a cliché. The moment you said Greek island, everyone thought you were talking about paradise, because that was the image they’d been fed. But serpents lurked in paradise, didn’t they? There were any number of tortured souls living in those blindingly white houses which overlooked the deep blue sea. There were all kinds of dark secrets which lay hidden at the heart of seemingly normal lives. Hadn’t he found that out, the hard way? ‘It looked very idyllic from the outside,’ he said. ‘But things are rarely what they seem when you dig a little deeper.’
‘I suppose not,’ she said. She transferred the tray to her other hand. ‘And does your family still live there?’
His smile was slow—like a knife sinking into wet concrete. His family? That wouldn’t be his word of choice to describe the people who had raised him. His father’s whores had done their best, with limited success—but surely even they were better than no mother at all. Than one who’d run out on you and never cared enough to lift the phone to find out how you were.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The island was sold after my father died.’
‘A whole island?’ Her lips parted. ‘You mean your father actually owned an island?’
Another stab of lust went kicking to his groin as her lips parted. If he’d announced that he had a home on Mars, she couldn’t have looked more shocked. But then, it was easy to forget how isolating wealth could be—especially to someone like her. If she didn’t even own a car, then she might have trouble getting her head around someone having their own island. He glanced at her hands and, for some reason, the sight of her unmanicured nails only intensified his desire and he realised that he hadn’t been entirely honest when he’d told her he wasn’t planning to drag her away to a dark corner. He thought he’d like that very much.
‘You’ve been standing there so long that you’ve probably come to the end of your shift,’ he said drily. ‘You could have had that drink with me after all.’
‘I suppose I could.’ Ellie hesitated. He was so persistent. Flatteringly so. She wondered why. Because he’d been almost friendly since he’d helped with the little boy who’d cut his knee? Or because she’d displayed a degree of reluctance to spend time with him and he wasn’t used to that? Probably. She wondered what it must be like, to be Alek Sarantos—so sure of yourself that nobody ever turned you down.
‘What are you so scared of?’ he taunted. ‘Don’t you think I’m capable of behaving like a gentleman?’
It was one of those life-defining moments. Sensible Ellie would have shaken her head and said no thanks. She would have carried the tray back to the kitchen, unlocked her bike and cycled home to her room in the nearby village. But the moonlight and the powerful scent of the roses were making her feel the opposite of sensible. The last time a man had asked her on a date—and you couldn’t really call this a date—was over a year ago. She’d been working such unsociable hours that there hadn’t been a lot of opportunity for down time.
She looked into his eyes. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘Well, think about it now. You’ve been waiting on me all week, so why not let me wait on you for a change? I have a fridge stocked with liquor I haven’t touched. If you’re hungry, I can feed you chocolate or apricots.’ He rose to his feet and raised his eyebrows. ‘So why don’t I pour you a glass of champagne?’