The Platinum Collection: A Diamond Deal: The Flaw in His Diamond / The Purest of Diamonds? / In the Brazilian's Debt

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just that I don’t know too much about you apart from what I read in the newspapers.’

‘And that’s largely lies and exaggeration.’

She shrugged and smiled briefly as their glances met and held for an instant. ‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’

A long moment passed, and then Roman said, ‘My adoptive mother died—my blood mother too...of the same illness.’

‘Fate can be very cruel sometimes,’ she said gently, treasuring his confidence in telling her what he had.

‘I still can’t believe it all these years on.’

Roman seemed lost to her for a moment. ‘It was a terrible coincidence,’ she said quietly, not wanting to intrude on his painful memories.

‘I still blame myself,’ Roman revealed as he stared out across a deceptively placid-looking ocean.

‘You can’t blame yourself for their illness.’

‘I blame myself for causing them the stress that might have provoked it,’ Roman explained. ‘I grew up the trophy son, praised to high heaven by my adoptive parents, but when I found out the truth about my birth on my fourteenth birthday, all I wanted was to be accepted by my blood family, but when I went to find them, they shut the door in my face.’

‘It was too late and your mother had died?’ she guessed.

Roman’s smile lacked any humour. ‘Worse. It was the day of her funeral, and having her fourteen-year-old son turn up out of the blue was the last thing her grieving family had expected. She bore more children after me, and it was just too much for them, my turning up, and at the worst time possible. They told me to my face I had no place there.’

‘So you believed you didn’t belong anywhere.’

‘My adoptive parents took me back without question and with open arms.’

‘But that was good, surely?’

Darkness still lurked behind his eyes. ‘They had never shown me anything but love—and how did I repay them? By becoming increasingly cold and unfeeling.’

‘But you were so young. You must have been so full of anger and bewilderment.’

‘And now it’s too late.’

‘It’s never too late,’ she whispered.

‘All I wanted was to make them proud.’

‘And don’t you think you have?’

‘I should have loved them more at the time, and then thought about making them proud of me. My adoptive mother fell ill, but I didn’t even notice I was so self-obsessed.’

‘Most teenagers are,’ Eva pointed out. So this was what had put that haunted look in his eyes. Her heart ached for him. ‘You’ve never forgiven yourself, and yet you must have been broken-hearted too. What a terrible shock for you, and teenage boys don’t deal too well with emotional upheaval—’

‘Which of course you know all about,’ he snapped, resenting her intrusion into his hidden world, she guessed.

‘I do know, as it happens. I have a brother, Tyr, remember? I only have to think back to remember Tyr rampaging around the house, yelling at everyone when he was young because he had no other outlet for his feelings.’

‘So that’s how you learned to shout,’ Roman said, slowly coming out of his black mood.

In that moment, things changed between them. An understanding grew that hadn’t been there before. ‘My personality has nothing to do with my brother, Tyr—though, like most sisters, I blame him for lots of things, but not that.’

‘So you just grew this way?’ Roman suggested, a smile curving his lips.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, acting menacing.

‘I think you do know, Eva.’

This was too much—too much emotion—too much understanding of what made her tick. She chose not to meet Roman’s penetrating stare, and stared out to sea instead, to where the heat-bleached horizon met the intense blue-green of deep water.

Perhaps if Tyr had stayed home rather than answering the wanderlust that had always plagued him, things might have turned out differently, but like Roman she couldn’t turn the clock back. She didn’t want to. Things were as they were, and she was as she was, and for once in her life, sitting here next to Roman, that didn’t seem such a very bad thing.

CHAPTER TWELVE (#u11a576c4-5736-534e-838f-114ca7b79675)

STANDING UP, HE held out his hand to Eva. She hesitated. Then she smiled and reached out to him. He drew her with him, pausing only at the counter to pay.

‘We’ll be back.’ Roman narrowed his eyes when it struck him that the gaze of the smiling waiter taking his money was fixed longingly on Eva’s face.

His hackles rose. He smoothed them down again. Who could blame the youth when Eva looked as she did—a little bewildered and surprised she could enjoy herself and relax as she had with him? She was endearingly dishevelled from the stiff breeze blowing off the sea, and her face was flushed from the warm sun on her winter pale skin. She looked beautiful. She looked beautiful and vulnerable and desirable, yet strong. She was as strong as he was, maybe. But she was tender too, and sensitive. He had never told anyone the history of the chain he wore, or his backstory. Only the two men in the consortium knew that, and they had known him since school. And though they had hardly known each other long, he trusted her, and for no better reason that he knew his diamonds, and Eva was a pure blue-white in a grimy world. She was everything he had dreamed about as a teenager, and as a man could never find.

‘Where are you taking me now?’ she asked him as they headed back towards the helicopter.

‘That depends on whether you’re prepared to call a truce or not,’ he teased her, drawing her along by the hand, wondering if he had ever felt quite so relaxed or so happy with a woman. ‘Personally, I think you owe me for showing you around.’ His face relaxed in a smile as he stared down at her.

She met his gaze and smiled. ‘I’m not sure I’m quite in the same league as you, Roman. I don’t have a helicopter to whisk you away, or a multimillion-pound facility to blow your mind.’

‘How about a return trip to Skavanga?’

‘Are you serious?’ The smile died and was replaced by something far more touching.

‘Never more so,’ he said.

‘Then it’s a date,’ she said, brightening at once.

There weren’t many women who could persuade him to change his plans. Eva could, because he wanted to please her. But he still wasn’t sure he could break the habit of a lifetime and learn to feel again, so for Eva’s sake he had decided on a delaying tactic he thought she might enjoy before they made the trip to Skavanga. ‘We’re going somewhere else first.’

‘Where?’ she asked him when they reached the helicopter.

‘Get in and I’ll tell you.’

‘Roman?’ she prompted while he was buckling her in.

‘Close.’ His lips curved in a smile as he settled the headphones on her head. ‘We’re going to Rome.’

She looked at him. ‘Why not Rome?’ He shrugged, stood back and closed her door.

‘Explain,’ she demanded through the headphones the instant they were in the air.