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“I’m glad you like it.”
“Who wouldn’t?” She murmured, with a soft shake of her head. The same gentle breeze lifted her hair now, so the fragrance of vanilla and jasmine wrapped around him. He put a hand in the small of her back, a jolt of awareness shocking him as they moved to the table his assistant had reserved, by the edge of the restaurant, with incomparable views.
“Of course, this is our table,” she said, as they were seated. “Always the best for you.”
“My assistant arranged it.”
“Ah. And the necklace?”
“That was me.”
She glanced down at the table, her throat shifting visibly as she comprehended that.
“What a fascinating life you lead, Anastasios.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Look at what we’ve done today,” she said, with bemusement. “Taking your jet ski off your enormous floating palace, cruising the Italian coastline, dressing up like Cinderella, a bucket of diamonds wrapped around my neck, a helicopter to Rome followed by a chauffeured car to dinner. What next? I literally can’t think of anything to top this.” She was quiet a moment, her lips pulling to the side. She hesitated, searching for words.
A waiter appeared, brandishing menus and Anastasios wanted to tell him to get lost—he was far more interested in whatever Phoebe had been about to say. But when the waiter disappeared, the moment was gone.
“You said you wanted to see a little of the world.”
“Are you now my guardian angel?” She prompted.
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
She turned to look at the view. “I never would have thought I’d be sitting here like this.”
“How come you haven’t travelled,” he pushed. “England is not far from the continent. A train or flight can be easily arranged.”
“I know,” she said with a lift of her shoulders. “But I never seem able to justify it.”
He remembered then what his friend Tommy had said, that Phoebe’s financial circumstances were stretched. “Surely your job pays well enough? And your accommodations are presumably affordable.”
“They are,” she said with a small lift of her lips. “You’re just like your father,” she said quietly. “He could never understand why I make the sacrifices I do.”
He hated the comparison. In that moment, he even hated his father, just a little. “I see.”
She sighed, reaching out and putting her hand on his. “Until I explained my circumstances to him properly,” she said with a shake of her head. “The thing is, I have a lot of debt.”
He braced, wondering if this was how it had begun. The part of his brain still capable of rational thought heard the line and tried to marry it with the woman opposite him, with a bald-faced request for help. But she sighed softly.
“I ran away from home, two years after my brother did. He was living on the streets of Melbourne when I arrived.”
He was frozen still, the confession the last thing he’d expected.
“I’d planned to get enrolled in school—I was fifteen and had no concept of the fact I’d need somewhere to live and food to eat. I was so naïve. And with Dale being on the streets, I just sort of fell into life beside him.”
Anastasios could have been knocked over with a feather. This was the last thing he’d been expecting.
The waiter returned to take their drink order and Anastasios barked a command for mineral water then thrust the menus back at him, telling him to bring whatever food the chefs recommended.
“So you lived on the streets, too?”
“Yes.” Her eyes had a faraway quality, and she focused on a point over his shoulder. For his part, Anastasios was filled with a need to do something. To shout at someone, to punch something, at the very idea of this delicate, kind, beautiful young woman having ever found herself in those circumstances. “At first I thought it would just be a few weeks. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Dale was spending all our money—not very much, anyway—on drugs and alcohol. He’d become an addict, since I’d last seen him, and he was too far gone to simply break the habit.”
Anastasios swallowed a curse, leaning forward and doing the one thing he could, flipping his hand to capture hers, weaving their fingers together. “You must have been very scared.”
