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I’m twenty-five,’ she supplied.
‘Twenty-five.’ He took a sip of whisky. ‘Ends up working in a place like this.’
‘It’s a great hotel.’
‘Quiet location.’
‘I like that. And it has a training scheme which is world famous.’
‘But what about...’ he paused ‘...nightlife? Clubs and boyfriends and parties? The kind of thing most twenty-five-year-olds enjoy.’
Ellie watched the bubbles fizzing around the ice cubes he’d put in her cola. Should she explain that she’d deliberately opted for a quiet life which contrasted with the chaos which had defined her childhood? Somewhere where she could concentrate on her work, because she didn’t want to end up like her mother, who thought a woman’s ambition should be to acquire a man who was a meal ticket. Ellie had quickly learnt how she didn’t want to live. She was never going to trawl the internet, or hang around nightclubs. She had never owned a thigh-skimming skirt or push-up bra. She was never going to date someone just because of what they had in their wallet.
‘Because I’m concentrating on my career,’ she said. ‘My ambition is to travel and I’m going to make that happen. One day I’m hoping to be a general manager—if not here, then in one of the group’s other hotels. Competition is pretty fierce, but there’s no harm in aiming high.’ She sipped her cola and looked at him. ‘So that’s me. What about you?’
Alek swirled the whisky around in his glass. Usually he would have changed the subject, because he didn’t like talking about himself. But she had a way of asking questions which made him want to answer and he still couldn’t work out why.
He shrugged. ‘I’m a self-made man.’
‘But you said—’
‘That my father owned an island? He did. But he didn’t leave his money to me.’ And if he had, Alek would have thrown it back in his face. He would sooner have embraced a deadly viper than taken a single drachma of the old man’s fortune. He felt his gut tighten. ‘Everything I own, I earned for myself.’
‘And was that...difficult?’
The softness of her voice was hypnotic. It felt like balm being smoothed over a wound which had never really healed. And wasn’t this what men had done since the beginning of time? Drunk a little too much whisky and then offloaded on some random woman they would never see again?
‘It was a liberation,’ he said truthfully. ‘To cut my ties with the past.’
She nodded, as if she understood. ‘And start over?’
‘Exactly that. To know that every decision I make is one I can live with.’
His cell phone chose precisely that moment to start ringing and automatically he reached into his pocket, glancing at the small screen.
Work, he mouthed as he took the call.
He launched into a long torrent of Greek, before breaking into English—so that Ellie couldn’t help but sit there and listen. Though if she was being honest, it was very interesting listening to a conversation, which seemed to involve some high-powered forthcoming deal with the Chinese. And then he said other stuff, too—which was even more interesting.
‘I am taking a holiday. You know I am. I just thought it wise to check with the New York office first.’ He tapped his finger impatiently against the arm of the chair. ‘Okay. I take your point. Okay.’
He cut the connection and saw her staring at him. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.
She shrugged. ‘It’s none of my business.’
‘No, I’m interested.’
She put her drink down. ‘Don’t you ever stop working?’
His irritated look gave way to a faint smile which seemed to tug reluctantly at the corners of his lips. ‘Ironically, that’s just what my assistant was saying. He said I couldn’t really nag other people to take holidays if I wasn’t prepared to do so myself. They’ve been pushing me towards this one for ages.’
‘So how come you’re taking business calls at this time of night?’
‘It was an important call.’
‘So important that it couldn’t have waited until the morning?’
‘Actually, yes,’ he said coolly, but Alek’s heart had begun beating very fast. He told himself he should be irritated with her for butting in where she wasn’t wanted, yet right then he saw it as nothing but a rather disarming honesty. Was this why people went on vacation—because it took you right out of your normal environment and shook you up? In his daily life, nobody like Ellie would have got near him for long enough to deliver a damning judgement on his inability to relax. He was always surrounded by people—people who kept the rest of the world at arm’s length.
