Free Interview with a Playboy by Kathryn Ross

questions…’ He shook his head. ‘And I thought you said you could do better.’
    The mocking words made her skin flush with colour. ‘It’s the question people are interested in.’
    ‘It’s two years since my divorce, Izzy. You’d think people would have moved on.’
    There was an undercurrent to the words that she couldn’t work out. Was it anger? Sadness? Or just plain irritation?
    Their eyes held. ‘Are you going to give me an answer?’ she asked hesitantly, and he shook his head.
    ‘Not right now…no.’
    The reply took her by surprise. ‘But you invited me here specifically to interview you about your life—’
    ‘My life is more than my divorce, surely?’ He fixed her with that mocking look that completely unnerved her. ‘I think you should work up to that question.’
    ‘Do you?’ She looked at him archly. ‘Is this let’s-make-the-journalist-jump-through-hoops time?’
    He laughed. ‘You know, I like the sound of that!’
    Stella interrupted them again as she came to clear the table and serve the desert—a
crème brulée
with a thick, creamycrust that Isobel would have enjoyed if she hadn’t completely lost her appetite now.
    ‘So, what questions am I allowed to ask you, Marco?’ she murmured as they were left alone again. ‘I suppose it’s OK to dwell on your life in the fast lane, with your planes and your yachts?’
    ‘I thought you said you didn’t exaggerate? It’s one plane and one yacht,’ he corrected her with a smile, and then sat back in his chair to regard her steadily. ‘And am I to gather from that note in your voice that you disapprove of my—as you call it—life in the fast lane?’
    ‘It’s not my place to disapprove or approve. I’m just making an observation.’ She shrugged.
    ‘Oh, is that all it is?’ He laughed. ‘And your
observation
is that I have no idea what real life is like? Is that it? That I don’t know how poverty can bite to the bone?’
    She shrugged. ‘Well, now you come to mention it—’
    ‘Izzy, I spent the first eight years of my life living in the back streets of Naples. We had nothing.’
    She frowned. ‘But I thought you came from a wealthy family.’
    ‘My mother was from a wealthy family, but she was cut off without a penny when she married my father because he had committed the ultimate sin of being born poor. It was only when my father died that we were received back into the fold.’
    ‘I didn’t know that,’ Isobel said in surprise. ‘The blurb on your background always says that you are from a wealthy dynasty.’
    ‘Well, there you are, you see—you don’t know everything.’ Marco’s mobile phone started to ring, and he lifted it up to look at the screen. ‘Excuse me, I’ll have to take this. It’s a business call.’
    Isobel watched as he leaned back in his chair, noticing how his Italian tones blended attractively into the warmth ofthe night. His revelations about his family background had surprised her—how was it that no one had found out this information before? she wondered. And what else didn’t she know about him?
    Stella came over to the table to see if they were finished and to ask if they wanted coffee. Isobel tried to communicate with her in her stumbling French, thanking her for the meal and declining coffee as she was still enjoying the delicious wine.
    ‘Ah, the wine is from Marco’s vineyard in Provence,’ Stella said in broken English. ‘It is good, yes?’
    ‘Très bon,’
Isobel replied and then tried to say that she hadn’t realised that Marco owned a vineyard.
    Unfortunately Stella replied in such rapid French that Isobel couldn’t understand a word, so she just nodded as she watched her clearing the table, and then said a quick thank-you in French before she disappeared.
    She caught Marco glancing over at her with that amused look in the darkness of his eyes. Probably laughing at her lamentable attempt to communicate. But not everyone was bilingual. Really, the guy was perfectly