guessing what you’ll say next?” He still chuckled as he led her through a meeting area, where staff hovered in the background, to the spiral staircase leading to the upper deck. “So you consider this jet too pretentious? A waste of money better spent on worthy causes?”
“Any personal ‘item’ with a price tag the length of a phone number ranges from ludicrously to criminally wasteful.”
“Even if it’s a utility that I use to make millions of dollars more, money I do use to benefit humanity at large?”
“By advancing science, protecting the environment and creating jobs? Yeah. You forget how I started my working life. I’ve heard all the arguments. And seen all the tax write-offs.”
“But you started your working life with me, so you know I’m not in this to make money or to flaunt my power or status.”
“Do I? Solid experience has taught me that I know nothing about the real you.”
He didn’t answer that as he walked her across an ultrachic foyer and through a door that he opened via a fingerprint-recognition module. It whirred shut as he let her lead him into what had to be the ultimate in airborne private quarters.
The sheer opulence hit her with more evidence of the world he existed in. The world he now maintained she could choose to enter, or not.
He guided her to one of the tan leather couches by huge oval windows and tugged her down with him. She hit the soft surface and it shifted to accommodate her body in the plushest medium she’d ever sat on. Not that she could enjoy the sensation with his body touching hers, making her feel split down the middle, with the half touching him burning and the other half freezing.
She tried to ignore him and her rioting senses by looking around the grand lounge drenched in golden lights, earth tones and the serenity of sumptuousness and seclusion. At the far end of the huge space that spanned the breadth of the jet, a wall was decorated in intricate designs from the blend of cultures that made up Castaldini: Roman, Andalusian and Moorish. A double door led to another area. No doubt a bedroom suite.
A ghost of a touch zapped through her like a thousand volts. His finger feathering against her face, turning it to his.
“Regarding the ‘real me,’ as you put it,” he said, his eyes simmering in the golden lighting. “If you insist you don’t know him, let me rectify this.” He sank deeper into the couch, taking her with him until their heads leaned on the headrest, their faces close enough for her to get lost in the pattern of his incredible irises. “The real me is a nerd who happens to have been born in a royal family then inherited lots of money. He owes not squandering said fortune on his research and impractical ideas to the teachers he’s been blessed with, who tutored him in business practices, and directed his research and resources into money-making products and facilities. He, alas, never had the temperament or desire to become a corporate mogul.”
“Yet ‘he’ became one, and as ruthless as they come.” To her chagrin, her denunciation sounded like a cooing endearment.
“‘He’ basically found himself one. And I must contest the ruthless part. Though ‘he’ makes too much money, it’s not by adopting cold-blooded bottom-line practices. It just happens that the methods those people taught him are that efficient.”
Her own fundamental fairness got the best of her. “No one could have helped you make a cent, let alone such a sustained downpour, if you hadn’t come up with something so ingeniously applicable and universally useful.”
“And I wouldn’t have gotten any of that translated into reality without those people.”
Her heart hammered at his earnest words. At the memories they exhumed.
She’d once poured all her time and effort into providing him with a comprehensive plan for his future operations. He’d already had an exceptional head for business when he applied his off-the-charts IQ to it, but it hadn’t been his specialty or his focus. And he had had some unrealistic views and expectations when it came to translating his science into practice. So she’d insisted on educating him in what would come after the breakthrough, how his R&D and manufacturing departments would sync and work at escalating efficiency and productivity to streamline operations and maximize profit.
That had been another of the injustices he’d dealt her as he’d discarded her, evaluating her only based on her sexual role, as if she’d never