She was unable to hide her bewilderment. ‘That soon? But my ticket is from Nice, and that’s miles away.’
‘We’ll be travelling by private jet.’
Her frown deepened. ‘How come?’
Again, his eyes pierced her with their brilliant light, but he was enjoying this sensation of anonymity far too much to break it. And besides, he wasn’t telling a lie. He was merely presenting the truth in a slightly different form.
‘My…employer,’ he elaborated casually, ‘is an exceedingly rich and generous man. And I’m a qualified pilot,’ he added. ‘So I can fly you home.’ There was a pause and his dark eyes captured hers in their ebony crossfire. ‘That is, of course, if you trust me to fly you home safely, cara?’
He had rescued her from the boat and ensured that she did not spend a night in the cells. He had cared for her while she thrashed around with fever—what was there not to trust?
And when he called her cara like that…
‘But can you just get up and go like that? Won’t your employer mind?’
‘Not at all. I have to do some business myself in England, and I can do it this week just as easily as next.’
She saw the gleam of anticipation that had lightened the night-dark eyes, the slow smile that had irresistibly curved his lips, and she could feel the erratic beat of her heart.
‘It’s very…sweet of you,’ she said.
The question why hung unspoken on the air.
He shook his head very slightly. It was a very English description, and one that had never been applied to him in his life. ‘Sweet? No, cara—it is something much more fundamental than that.’ He suddenly became aware of the irony of his words. ‘You see, I find that I’m just as susceptible to the lure of a pair of dazzling green eyes and a pair of petal-soft lips as the next man.’
Ella felt the heat rise in her cheeks. It was most definitely an overture. And what was she going to do about it? After all, what did she have in common with this all-action foreigner—with his jet-ski and his pilot’s licence and his ability to rustle up a delicious one-pot meal in the most basic surroundings? Who lived on a remote island far away from her world…
A shadow of a smile had flitted across the hard contours of his face. ‘Maybe you’d like to have dinner with me back in England?’ Breakfast would have been his meal of choice, but that would inevitably follow.
From the crashing of her heart against her ribcage someone might think that she’d never been asked out for dinner before—but quite honestly that was the way it felt. As though every invitation up until that moment had been a rehearsal for the real thing. And Ella found herself smiling at him with lips that she had never considered to be petal-soft before, but that now parted like a flower.
‘Why, thank you,’ she murmured. ‘I’d like that.’
CHAPTER FOUR
IT’S ONLY a dinner date, Ella told herself.
So why did she feel so jumpy? Why were the hands that smoothed the dress down over her hips so clammy and her lips so cool and pale? She rubbed a slick of lipgloss on
them and stared at herself critically in the mirror.
The silky black dress gleamed against the curve of bottom and breast, contrasting provocatively with the tiny covered buttons that ran in a demure line from neck to knee.
The spiky black sandals made the best of her legs, and her only adornment was a matching velvet choker at her neck, inlaid with jet as dark and glittering as Nico’s eyes.
For the umpteenth time she glanced at the clock, nervously tugging at the hem of her dress, her mind skipping back over the extraordinary events of the last couple of days, which had culminated in Nico flying her home on a private jet.
Ella had spent the flight sipping on a fruit cocktail and looking around her with a sense of disbelief. Whatever Nico’s boss did for a living, he must be enormously successful at it to own a plane like that.
She had glanced yet again to the cockpit, to see Nico sitting in front of a radar screen lit up like a Christmas tree, his fingers caressing the joy stick as if it was a woman’s body, and she had shivered, unable to prevent herself. There was something decidedly sexy about a man who could fly a plane—but there again, she’d never met one before!
‘Here you are. Home,’ Nico murmured as he came through into the cabin after a successful touch-down, his eyes shining.
When he flew a plane he always felt filled with a wild kind of exhilaration—it was the same when he sailed, or climbed, or dived deep to explore the beautiful coral reefs off Mardivino. Some people called it living dangerously—he just called it living.
‘Thanks,’ Ella said steadily, praying that he’d meant his offer of dinner. ‘It was a brilliant flight.’
‘So when am I going to see you?’ he drawled. ‘Tonight?’