One Night to Risk It All(20)

“There are some incredible ruins on this island. Colonial and Ottoman.”

“I was just in Greece. Ruins, we have them.”

“I am aware,” he said. “I was trying to make conversation.”

“Do you live in a ruin? Or do you have an actual house?”

“I have a house, but some people would argue I live in ruin.”

She snorted. “At this point, some people would argue that I do, too.”

“You are giving off a bit of a fallen-woman vibe,” he said dryly.

“Am I?” She sniffed her wrist. “I don’t feel any different.”

He turned and looked at her. “Not at all?”

Her cheeks flushed a deep rose. “No.”

“Interesting. Would you like to walk to the house or drive?”

“You’re in a tux,” she said. “You’re hardly dressed to walk.”

He looked down. “Indeed not. I’m a little disoriented. Could be because in New York it’s early morning. Which means I’ve technically been up all night.”

“You came from New York?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He looked at her, at those cheeks, still flushed from the sun and from...from whatever memories had come into her mind when he’d looked at her. “I came for you.”

“That simple?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come for me?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and it was the honest truth. “Because I don’t want him to have you. Because I want you for myself. Because I think you’re beautiful and as of now you’re the only woman I can imagine having in my bed, and considering I would like to have sex sometime soon that’s very inconvenient, and even more so if you were to marry another man.”

She blinked. “That’s almost flattering.”

“Almost. A walk, I should think.” He took his jacket off and cast it onto the sand, then rolled his shirt sleeves up. “It might do something to shake off the time change.”

“Lead the way then.”

He started down a path that took them down near the beach and could have sworn at the absurdity of getting sand in his custom-made shoes. Shoes he’d bought with his own money and not the money earned by other people’s suffering. There, a reminder that he had transcended his blood in some way.

“So what do you do in New York?” she asked.

“I gamble with other people’s money.”

“What?”

“I deal in investments,” he said. “And I’m very good at it.”

“Isn’t that a bit unstable?”

“Sure. Can be. But I’ve made enough of a profit that I’m sitting on stable assets of my own, and I’ve made some wise purchases and investments myself.”

“Including an island.”

“I won this,” he said.


“You won it?”

“In a card game. It was one of the more interesting gambling experiences of my life. Yes, I was a literal gambler there for a while. At first with other people’s money.”

“How?”

“Card counting is a particularly useful skill. I happen to have the gift. I was a kid living on the streets doing card tricks for tourists and a rich guy picked me up, offered to kit me out to play in the casinos with his money, for a cut. I said ‘of course,’ naturally.”

“Naturally,” she said.

“I won a lot of money. And I got to keep part of it. Rented myself an apartment, started offering up an underground service. Until I had enough money to go gamble for myself at least once a week.”

“And?”

“I ended up in a high rollers’ game. There were things in that pot by the end that you wouldn’t believe, including a night with a man’s wife, which I turned down, by the way. But the island... I took the island.”

She looked hard at him, blue eyes glittering. “You’re really twenty-six, Alex?”

“Yes. And I was eighteen when I was doing that. From there, I figured I better decide what to do with the money I’d earned. So I walked away from the casino and started looking into investing. And I proved to have a knack for that so I thought...why not do it for other people? An extension of where I came from.”

“A self-made man,” she said.

He laughed. “None of us are really self-made, Rachel. We’re made with the aid or misfortune of other people. In my case, people had to lose money so I could gain it. Now, the people I make money for are aided by me, as I am by them. You are made by your father, by the media, and you were to be finished by Ajax, am I right?”

“Finished?”

“It’s how you were going to spend the rest of your life in comfort. You found a man who would close the loop neatly on everything you’ve built.”

“I don’t think of it that way.”

“No?”

“No.” She wobbled in the sand and he reached over and caught her arm, holding her steady. She froze for a moment, her eyes falling to his lips. She swallowed hard. “I don’t think of it...of him...that way. It’s not how it is.”

“Then how is it?”

“I don’t know. He’s a friend. And...maybe like a brother, almost, which I can see right at this moment is so ridiculous it’s... I don’t know why I thought I could marry him. I don’t know why at all. I thought caring could be enough. I thought it was enough.”