Words he had spoken came back to her. ‘Yet you speak all three languages?’
He shrugged. How much to tell her? How long to continue this delicious game of anonymity? How long could he? ‘Indeed I do.’
‘And your English is perfect.’
‘I know it is,’ he agreed mockingly.
This time she would not be deterred by the soft, seductive voice. Ella leaned across the table, challenging him with her eyes. ‘Just who exactly are you, Nico?’
CHAPTER THREE
THE strangest thing was that Nico was really enjoying himself. It was like a game, or a story—the one where a prince disguised himself as a beggar and no one recognised him.
For a man whose life had been composed of both light and dark fairy tale aspects, it was a new and entertaining twist. And if he told her…then what? Nothing would be the same, not ever again. Her attitude towards him would change irrevocably. No longer would she speak to him as if were just a man—an ordinary man.
When he was a little boy, had he not sometimes wished to be made ‘normal’, just for the day? And even when he had been at college in America, doing his best to blend in, people had still known of his identity. It had been inevitable—security had arrived before he had, to make the place fit for a prince.
And since when had he been asked to make an account of himself? To explain who he was and his place in the world?
Never.
He leaned back in the wooden chair. ‘How does a man define himself?’ He asked the question as much of himself as of her. ‘Through his possessions? His achievements, perhaps?’
Ella gave him a bemused look. ‘Are you incapable of giving a direct answer to a direct question?’
Probably. In the world he inhabited he was never asked a direct question. Conversation was left for him to lead, at whim. It was forbidden by ancient decrees for others to initiate it. When he spoke people listened. He had never known anything else, had accepted it as the norm, but now—with a tug of unfamiliar awareness—he recognised that total deference could be limiting.
‘I am Nico,’ he said slowly. ‘You know my name. I’m twenty-eight and I was born on Mardivino—a true native of the principality.’ His eyes glittered. ‘So now you know everything.’
‘Everything and yet nothing,’ she challenged. ‘What do you do?’
‘Do?’ His eyes glittered. How could he have forgotten that in her world people were defined by what they did for a liv
ing?
‘For a living?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ he said evasively. ‘I work for a very rich man.’
That might go some of the way towards explaining things. Maybe that was why he seemed so impressively self-assured. Perhaps he had picked up and now mirrored some of his rich employer’s characteristics, as sometimes happened. That might also explain the extravagant soaps in the bathroom—he might be the recipient of a rich man’s generosity.
Ella gestured towards the humble interior. ‘And is this your home?’
There was a pause. ‘No. No, I don’t live here. It’s just a place that belongs to my…employer.’
‘And the jet-ski?’
‘You remember that?’ he questioned.
The food and the shower had worked a recuperative kind of magic, and more fragments of memory now began to filter back. She recalled being clasped against a firm, hard body and the comforting, safe warmth of him. Then fast bobbing across the water, with spray being thrown against her fevered skin.
‘Kind of.’
‘What about it?’ he asked carelessly.
‘Is it yours?’
Inexplicably, he felt a flicker of disappointment. Would that matter, then? A top-of-the-range jet-ski was a rich man’s toy. His habitual cynicism kicked in. Of course it would matter—things like that always did. You were never seen for who you were but what you owned and what you possessed. Take away the trappings and what was left?