Page 47 of The Billionaire's Seduction Revenge

“Two people? Hardly everyone.”

“I’m serious. Just how often do you go into that jewellery store?”

“It’s not so often so much a question of how much I spend there,” Vasilios pointed out.

“Which is?”

Vasilios shrugged. “Evidently, enough.”

It brought questions to Emma that she didn’t want to voice, and yet, Vasilios had admitted his jealousy to Emma, and knew how she’d felt when she’d seen the picture in the paper of him and Veronica in New York. It wasn’t so unrealistic that she should find his admission troubling.

“Who do you buy for?”

“Friends.”

“Women friends?”

“From time to time.”

This brought a frown to her face. “I thought you were against relationships that were predicated on your wealth.”

“I am.”

“But you still buy women jewellery.”

“This isn’t the same as splitting billions of dollars.”

“Ahh,” she concluded with a smile. “So it’s all relative. A fifty thousand euro necklace is one thing, so long as that’s the extent of it.”

“It’s not a lot. For me.”

“As I said, it’s all relative. To most people, that’s a hell of a lot.”

“To you?”

“To most people,” she underscored. “Way, way too generous for what we are,” she added for good measure, feeling the need to highlight the status of their relationship after the intimacies they’d started to share. The moment on the grass, near the Eiffel tower, was etched in her mind as a moment of true importance, when they’d shared something more than history. It was personal and important and somehow life changing. So she wanted to change it all back. To remember what they’d agreed to right in the beginning.

Whether he’d been going to respond or not wasn’t clear, and she never found out, because the man from the Louvre re-appeared brandishing guidebooks and ice-cold water bottles.

“So that’s why the guy in the jewellery store looked like he was salivating at the sight of you. What about here? You can’t buy necklaces at the Louvre, right?”

His smile was enigmatic.

“I’m serious,” she prompted, when he said nothing, but it was becoming difficult to hold her train of thought in the face of such an incredible collection of paintings. “This is amazing.”

He put a hand in the small of her back, guiding her through the gallery, and they walked in silence, looking at the artwork, admiring. When Emma wanted to stop, they stopped. At the end of the hall, they turned, walked a different direction, and now it was the artwork on the walls as well as the view from the windows that totally captivated Emma. The building they were in was itself incredible. She was totally overwhelmed.

“Some years ago, I became a sponsor,” he said. “This is one of the most impressive art collections in the world. More than that, it’s history. I wanted to contribute to its preservation.” His expression was impossible to read but she had the sense he was holding something back, so she waited, and was rewarded with a tight smile. “My mother loved it here.”

Emma reached down and squeezed his hand. “I don’t have many memories of her. More just fragments—her smile, the feel of her hand holding mine, the sound of her voice, the way the light was on a particular day when we went for a very long walk—so long my feet were sore—and this place.” He shook his head a little. “She brought me here whenever we came to visit my Grand-mère. We didn’t have any art in our home, so I can’t say if it was because she appreciated the beauty of it, or if it was something else. Like if being here made her feel reverential for the enormous expanse of time, perhaps.” He shifted his head, as if to clear the thought. “Anyway, I donate now in her name. It’s not much but it’s a way of not letting her be totally forgotten.”

“What was her name?” Emma asked softly.

“Chloe.” He paused. “Chloe Valenti.”

“She kept his name?”

“It was my name too.”

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