Yasmin took a sip of her wine. She wasn’t a wine person, but she liked this one. It had a crisp fruit taste with a hint of something smoky. She set the glass down and looked at her date, who was watching her with a steady, unmoving gaze.

“Where are you from?” she asked brightly, hoping she didn’t sound as rattled as she felt.

“That is a complicated question,” he told her, rolling the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. “I’m from many places.”

“Talking to you is a bit like talking to a sphinx,” she told him. “Like trying to solve a riddle.”

He chuckled. “A sphinx. Interesting.”

“Where were you born?” she tried again to find out where he was from. “Where do you live now?”

She thought for a moment he wouldn’t answer, and if he didn’t, she was out of there. He was throwing up enough red flags that, rich or not, she wasn’t going to continue an evening with a man who refused to tell her anything about himself.

“I was born in Turkey,” he finally told her. “And I currently have four homes. The first is the home of my birth, in Istanbul. Another is in London, and another in New York. The fourth is on an island my family owns in the Mediterranean.”

She laughed out loud, then realized from the steady look he was giving her that he wasn’t joking. She covered her mouth with her cloth napkin. He owned an island. A whole freaking island.

If he wasn’t lying.

She watched the Tinder Swindler; she knew what people were capable of.

When she’d recovered enough to remove her napkin, she asked, “What’s the island called?”

“Isla Narina.”

“Did you name it when you bought it?”

“No, my father renamed it after my mother when he purchased it.”

“What does your family do that you can afford an entire island?” She didn’t know if it was rude to ask, but she had to know. Maybe islands weren’t as expensive as she thought? Then again, Volkan also owned property in two of the most expensive cities on the planet, London and New York.

“Do you disbelieve me, Yasmin?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s just so…” She searched for the right word and could only come up with, “Unbelievable.”

He nodded, but didn’t seem offended.

“You fear I’m… what’s the term? Catfishing you?”

She laughed and he smiled at her amusement. The word was so incongruous with his personality that she couldn’t imagine him even knowing what catfishing meant. He had an old-world charm that made him seem older than he was. She eyed him, realizing she didn’t actually know his age.

“Something like that,” she admitted. “But the more you talk about yourself, the less I feel like I’m being catfished. How old are you?”