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‘Who taught you how to fix things? To build?’
‘Myself. Books...’ He hooked a brow. ‘The internet.’
‘And the London hotel?’ she asked. ‘Is that yours too?’
His eyes flashed and her stomach tugged.
‘Mine,’ he confirmed.
She nodded. It all made sense. Why he’d been there—why he’d been the one to find her. But it didn’t sound as if luck had been the catalyst for his success, and she told him so.
‘I don’t believe it was luck that guided you,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘What did, then?’
‘Tenacity.’
‘The boy I once was would have liked to hear himself called tenacious.’
‘And the billionaire?’
‘He wouldn’t care.’
He smiled, but still it didn’t reach his eyes. And she wanted to ask why he didn’t care. But he’d already revealed so much. Told her a story so honest that she had goose bumps on her skin beneath her jumper.
‘You asked me how I made my money,’ he reminded her, stepping backwards so that his black-sheathed body was framed by the view of the sea. The vastness of it. ‘Now I have told you. Are you ready?’
‘I’m ready,’ she told him—because she was. She’d lock away her feelings. Use the logical part of her brain to do what she needed to do. As she had been taught to do.As he had.‘I’m ready to take the pregnancy test now.’
Flora unbuckled herself and stepped out of the helicopter with an ease she didn’t really feel. Because it wasn’t about either of them, was it? This was all about a potential child.
Their child.
He moved to her and whispered, ‘Welcome home, Flora.’
‘Home?’ she echoed. ‘You livehere?’
‘Si,’he said.
She looked at his home. A floating kingdom of slick black and white lines and blue angles on a still ocean. With nothing but more ocean at its back.
She gasped, unable to hold it back. ‘It’s a palace!’
‘Three hundred feet of space,’ he confirmed without ego. Without a smile. ‘Multiple decks above and below sea level. Every toy at my disposal—every recreational device a billionaire could need. And twenty-plus staff to deliver everything on a silver platter.’
‘A multi-billionaire,’ she corrected, and smiled a smile she wasn’t feeling. Because inside she was crying for the boy who had saved a village.
Because who had raised him?
His mother hadn’t been able to look after him. His father had thrown him away, calling his illegitimacy shameful but doing nothing to fix it. Doing nothing to legitimise him. His father had hidden him away in a village where people relied on each other to survive.
The money...the opulence... None of it mattered, did it? But the story did. It was a story she’d like to tell her child.Ifshe was pregnant. The story of how their father had lifted a village below the poverty line and turned himself into a billionaire.
The reality of it all caused her temples to throb.
The hand resting beside his thigh was so big, so strong. But all she could imagine was a smaller hand, a cold hand, attached to a hungry body...
She wanted to wrap her arms around his neck and pull him close to her, whisper words for the little boy she’d never met. She couldn’t do that. But she could hold his hand.
