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‘If you’re thinking of running to Ray with a sob-story of what a brute I am, hoping that he’ll kick me out and tell me never to darken his door again, forget it. He already knows our history together. I told him who I was the first time we met.’
Fortunately, Nina hadn’t picked up the scalding dish. ‘What do you mean, you told him who you were?’
He shrugged. ‘Basically, I told him that I didn’t have amnesia, that I was here in order to get the love of my life back. He was the one who came up with the idea of having me work on his house, to give me an excuse to hang around you.’
‘You devil!’ As a pre-emptive strike, it was masterful. Ray, for all his pride in his crusty bachelor status, was a romantic at heart.
The love of his life. How beautifully lyrical Ryan made it sound, but in all his earlier talk of passion and desire and body chemistry and biological equations, he had never even hinted that his heart was involved. He had never tried to flatter her into believing that he had been in love with her. Why? Because he obviously knew it wouldn’t have been convincing. He might persuade an old man who had never met him before that he was an old-fashioned, swashbuckling romantic hero, but Nina was made of sterner stuff.
He grinned. ‘It always pays to stack the odds. I think you’ll find Ray’s on my side in this one.’
When she marched across to deliver the steaming dish, she discovered he was right.
Ray looked at her from under lowered bushy eyebrows when she stiffly expressed her hurt for his part in the deception.
‘It’s past time,’ he said gruffly. ‘Ryan’s right—you can’t keep hiding things from yourself, pretending that a part of you doesn’t exist. The past has come right back to meet you, girl. You have to deal with it before you can properly get on with the rest of your life. And if this lad is the one to help you do that, well, good on him.’
Nina couldn’t find it in her heart to be really angry with the old man when it was clear that he was stubbornly convinced that he had her best interests at heart.
‘You certainly did a good snow job on him,’ Nina began when she slammed back into the house a few minutes later. ‘What’re you going to do with that?’
Ryan was spooning a portion of scallops and a smothering of sauce onto a plastic plate. ‘It’s for Zorro.’
‘You can’t give him all that,’ she protested as he set it down on the floor. ‘It’s got wine and cheese in it. It’ll be far too rich for his stomach!’
They both watched as the scallops disappeared in a twinkling of an eye, following by a noisy sucking of sauce and a credible attempt to eat the plate.
‘You can be the one to get up in the night when he’s whimpering with a stomach-ache,’ she said sourly.
There was a split second of silence, a mutual holding of breath, then life moved on again, and Nina decided she had imagined the splinter of pain that had entered her heart before the echo of her words died away.
Much as she would have liked to turn her nose up at Ryan’s meal, it turned out to be delicious, and the glass of wine she had fully intended to spurn was the perfect accompaniment. She limited herself to one confidence-inspiriting glass, however, since she badly needed to keep her head.
With darkness pressing in on the windows around them, the low, pendant light centred over the table and the glowing fire in the grate were the only illuminations, creating a bubble of intimacy that made Nina vibrantly aware of the man across the table, acutely conscious of the spell he was weaving as he set out to be a relaxed and entertaining companion, talking art until she warmed to the lively discussion and making her laugh when she should have been guarded and wary.
He watched her greedily eat every bite of his meal with no sign of gloating. ‘Actually, I thought I might become a chef once,’ he confided, pouring himself the rest of the wine. ‘As a teenager, I worked in the kitchen of a hotel-casino. Only that’s when I discovered I had more of a flair for the front of the house than the rear,’ he said wryly. ‘I learnt to deal cards and never looked back.’
‘Easy money?’ she gibed.
He considered the question seriously. ‘No, I wouldn’t say it was easy. It takes intense concentration, skill, practice, persistence and, of course, a certain amount of luck to beat the house odds. I always knew that it wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was looking for a stake I could use to enter the next phase of my life. It was serendipity that the stake turned out to be the next phase. Among the dubious benefits of being the son of a con man was that I was exposed to lots of fine art in public and private collections while we were racketing around Europe pretending to be rich.’
