“I envy you,” she said to Natalia.

“Really?” Natalia asked. “Why?”

Gwen struggled to find an explanation for this strange emotion. “I’m jealous,” she admitted. “Your friendship with Count Sokolov is charming.”

Natalia leaned forward and kissed Gwen’s cheek. “It is indeed,” she said, then flitted away to greet Oscar and the other bankers.

“It’s not real,” Patrick said.

“What’s not real?”

“Her supposed friendship with Count Sokolov. It’s just rich people wasting money on expensive telegrams.”

Her whimsical musing about Natalia and her lonely Russian count evaporated. Just because Natalia’s friendship was unlikely didn’t mean it wasn’t real. Sometimes love and friendship blossomed despite barriers of time and distance and class. Patrick might refuse to believe it, but that was his shortcoming, not hers. Frustrated annoyance with him boiled over.

“Patrick, you are the biggest snob on this yacht, and considering Poppy is aboard, that’s saying a lot.”

She walked away before she said something even more unkind.

Patrick watched in astonishment as Gwen stormed away. He was a man of the people! He didn’t have an ounce of snobbery or entitlement and had dedicated his life to serving the poor. Temptation to follow Gwen and demand an explanation clawed at him, but Liam foiled his chance.

“Yo, Patrick!” Liam called from the stern of the ship, where he was clustered with some of Gwen’s pretentious cousins. “We need your saintly wisdom to settle a legal argument.”

Patrick shoved his frustrations aside to join Liam and several of the Blackstone cousins from the third generation. Joshua, whose face had fully healed from his brush with the wild gunshots, seemed much friendlier today than he’d been before.

“Three percent of the bank’s shares are owned by a bunch of monks in Spain,” Joshua said. “How do priestly vows of poverty reconcile with the riches they’re likely to start earning from U.S. Steel?”

“I’ve got no insight for you,” Patrick admitted. Aside from the fact that they had been tightfisted about the seeds Gwen wanted, he didn’t know a single thing about those Spanish monks. “Monastic finance isn’t something I have experience with.”

“Really?” Joshua asked. “I thought you were an expert on church finances. That you holed up with Father Murry’s church in Pittsburgh every night to set up a special accounting system.”

It took a moment for Patrick to digest that statement. Everything Joshua said was true, but the details of those long afternoons with Father Murry weren’t something he’d shared with anyone aside from Liam. Patrick’s heart rate picked up a notch, but he kept the tension from his voice as he spoke directly to Joshua.

“How do you know about my work with that church in Pittsburgh?”