Free It's All Greek to Me by MacAlister Katie

want to ask how I became a . . . what did you call me?”
    “Gazillionaire? Yes, that’s actually what I was going to ask you. Were you born into it, or did you make it?”
    He gave her a long look. “Does it matter?”
    “Absolutely,” she said without a second’s hesitation.
    He watched her, fascinated by the play of light in her eyes. She must have thought she’d insulted him because she hurried to explain. “I’m not interested in how much you have, you know. I make a nice wad of money myself, and there’s just me to take care of, so I’m not looking for a sugar daddy or anything like that.”
    To his surprise, he didn’t question that statement at all. Normally he had a very good sense of when people wanted something from him, but she didn’t trigger any of those warnings in his mind.
    “But there’s a big difference between having something handed to you and earning it yourself,” she said, hesitating.
    “Do you think I inherited my money, or made it?” he asked her, curious to see how she would analyze him.
    “I think . . .” Her gaze searched his face. “You’re very comfortable with yourself, which makes me think you were born to affluence, and never had to worry about where your next meal was coming from. But at the same time, you strike me as a man who’s made his own way, one who isn’t afraid of working for a goal. So I’m going to go with you’re a self-made gazillionaire.”
    “‘Billionaire,’ I believe, is the correct term,” he said, struck by how well she’d done. “As it happens, I was born into comfortable circumstances, but my father lost his fortune shortly after that. When I came of age, I decided that I would restore what was lost, and I worked for twenty years to do that.”
    “But you went to school in England.”
    “And worked evenings and weekends to pay my way. My mother died at my birth, and my father grieved for almost fifteen years, until he met Elena and Theo’s mother.”
    She looked at him with sympathy. “That must have been difficult for both you and your father. Are you close to him?”
    “I was, until he died eight years ago. How about you—you said you were alone? You have no family?”
    “Only child of divorced parents. They’re both still alive, but I haven’t seen my father since I was about two, and my mother has her own life and her own interests. She lives in Arizona; I live in Seattle. . . . We call each other once a month.”
    “No friends?” he asked, unable to keep from stroking his thumb over the velvety soft smoothness of her sun-warmed cheek.
    “Of course I have friends. I’m not a hermit,” she said, leaning into his hand. “What about you? How does a man as successful as you weed out the people who just want something from you from the true friends?”
    His eyes widened at her perspicacity.
    She smiled at the look. “You forget, you’re talking to someone who gets e-mails from everyone who thinks they want to be a writer. Usually most of them just want advice, but some of them want to use me. I figured if it was that way for me, it must be a hundred times worse for you.”
    “I have a couple of close friends,” he said slowly, wondering at the level of comfort he had with this child of the sea. It was almost as if he’d known her for a very long time. “And there’re Theo and Elena. Harry?”
    “Hmm?”
    “I’m not going to be able to last all the way back to the island.”
    “Oh, thank god,” she said, her shoulders slumping with relief. “I didn’t want to just pounce on you in case you thought all I was interested in was your body, when really it’s your mind that’s so incredibly sexy, not that I don’t absolutely love your body, because I’d have to be dead a couple of years not to, but still, I didn’t want you to think that I looked at you as nothing more than an orgasm machine.”
    He stared at her, and the calm that he now realized came before the storm ended with a whoosh of his breath as he stood