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‘You’re telling me that the only interest you have in my father is as fellow chess player and gardener.’
‘It’s not solely about the gardening.’ Laura bristled. ‘It’s the thrill of spotting rare plants, trying to produce interesting hybrids...’ She noted the blank expression on his face. ‘I don’t suppose you have any plants where you live,’ she tacked on. ‘Roberto says that you live in a flat.’
‘Penthouse apartment, and, no, no plants that I can think of offhand,’ Alessandro responded automatically. ‘So you play chess and talk about plants.’
‘Pretty much.’ The silence stretched between them until she began to fidget uncomfortably. ‘It’s called having hobbies. You must have some of those...’
‘I work,’ Alessandro replied shortly. ‘And...’ he suddenly smiled and just like that his face was transformed, the harsh, unyielding lines smoothed out to give a picture of mind-blowing sexiness ‘...I play. I consider both to be my hobbies...’
Colour had invaded her cheeks. Her green eyes were locked to his face. When she nervously licked her lips, she saw the way his eyes absently followed the movement and that made her go even redder. ‘Play?’ she asked feebly. Her brain seemed to have gone AWOL. He was still half smiling, his head inclined slightly to one side, and she was still beetroot red, uncomfortable in her own skin and not liking the sensation.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said smoothly. ‘I’m very good at playing.’
Laura blinked and came back down to earth. ‘Well, your father enjoys his chess and his plants and...’
‘And?’
‘This and that. He’s had to take it easy after the stroke and, of course, he’s only really now back on his feet properly after the fall, but he’ll be back in the swing of things in no time at all.’
‘What’s this and that?’ Trampolining? Abseiling? White-water rafting? He’d had no idea that his father was an active member of the local horticultural society so the this and that could literally, in his books, have applied to anything at all.
Laura shrugged evasively. ‘Usual. The point is that he can start back doing all the stuff he enjoys now. So you can go back down to London, safe in the knowledge that he’s well looked after. No need to feel duty bound to rush up here and check him over. Not to mention check over his friends and the people who work for him. No need for you to think that you have to keep an eye and give people the sack or dock their pay or whatever else you think might be necessary...’
Alessandro looked in wonderment at the pink-faced woman glaring defiantly at him. When was the last time he had encountered someone with such barefaced cheek? Actually, had he ever? Whatever angle women took with him, it never included being lippy.
‘Before we get on to the juicy bit of what I have to say...’ Alessandro relaxed back and crossed his legs, ankle resting lightly on his knee, hands linked on his lap. ‘I’m curious.’
‘What about?’ Laura didn’t care for his loose-limbed, relaxed pose because it resembled the looseness of a predator just before it homed in for a kill.
‘About what brought you back from London to this...’ he looked around him, as though in search of an inspiring adjective ‘...backwater.’
Laura bristled. He was doing it again. Turning her into a self-defensive, shrieking harridan, which was not her at all.
She breathed in deeply and tried to think Zen thoughts. ‘This isn’t a backwater.’ Her voice was quiet and even, even if her blood was boiling. ‘If you took the time to really look around you, you’d see that it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. There’s everything you could possibly hope to want in Scotland. There are castles, lochs, rivers and lakes, mountains... It’s a wonderfully peaceful place...’
‘Interesting travelogue. I’m more of an urban guy myself but is that an invitation to show me the sights and win me over?’
‘It most certainly is not!’
Alessandro laughed, really laughed, with humour, his dark eyes lazy and amused as they rested on her flushed face.
‘Shame,’ he mused pensively. ‘A personal tour might really go the distance in winning me over to its charms. So you moved here because there are castles and lakes and it’s peaceful.’
Laura didn’t actually think that her reasons for moving back to Scotland were any of the man’s business but would he keep pressing? Secrets always engendered curiosity in other people and naturally she didn’t care one way or another whether he was curious or not but still...why make things harder for herself?
‘Partly, and also because my grandmother had a turn...’ Which was somewhat true and left out the bigger part of her reason, namely her ill-advised, foolish love affair.
‘Had a turn?’
‘Was getting dizzy spells, suffering with her balance. She lives on her own and I wanted to be here for her.’ She looked wistfully off into the distance. ‘She was there for me when my parents died. I didn’t begrudge returning to be here for her.’
Alessandro swiftly dispelled the glaring contradictions between them. He was here on behalf of his father, to take him down to London even though he might protest the move. It was for his own good! For a start, there was just so much choice when it came to various medical treatments, and having had both a stroke and a fall, who knew what medical treatment the future held for him? In London, he would receive the best!
‘Big of you,’ Alessandro murmured. ‘I can only think that it must have been a wrench leaving the bright city lights and returning to all this peace and tranquillity. What was your job in London?’
He wasn’t interested. Not really. He was simply establishing her credentials, working out whether she was a threat to his father’s fortune or not. She knew that.
She wondered what had possessed her to come cycling here today and, having seen that SUV skewed in the courtyard, what had further possessed her to ring the doorbell, knowing that Roberto’s son would be on the premises.
Fate had really decided to have a laugh at her expense.
‘I worked as a PA.’ She lowered her eyes, a little flicker of movement that Alessandro’s keen antennae picked up.
‘What company?’
‘I don’t know what that has to do with anything!’ she snapped, bright spots of colour on her cheeks.
‘You’re right. It hasn’t. And I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known that I was getting too close to state secrets.’
‘It’s no big deal.’ And yet, for some reason, she was reluctant to say the name of the firm out loud. Was it because she would be reminded of Colin? And the mortification of finding out that he had been lying to her? The horror of realising just how naive she had been to have handed over her trust to a smooth-talker? The shame when she thought that he had seen how green round the gills she’d been and had known that she would have lacked the experience to figure out what a bastard he really was?
She surfaced to find Alessandro’s dark eyes pinned thoughtfully to her face and she tilted her chin stubbornly and told him the name of the company.
‘Not,’ she repeated, ‘that it’s any of your business.’
‘I know the company,’ he murmured, still looking at her in a way that made her feel as though he could see right down deep into the very core of her. ‘And naturally I’m interested in finding out about one of my father’s friends... Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘I didn’t think you were ever interested before,’ Laura pointed out. ‘I mean, you could have come to visit when there have been things going on...joined in...’
‘Things? What sort of things?’
‘Oh, you know...we yokels try to have a barn dance at least once a month and let’s not forget the annual hog roast while we all stand outside and admire the peaceful countryside...’
He burst out laughing. Suddenly those thoughtful eyes were dark with lazy appreciation.
Sexy, sharp-tongued, lippy...funny.
‘I prefer the barn dances in London,’ he told her with mock seriousness. ‘And the hog roasts are good, too, although, of course, we all tend to stand outside and admire the pollution. Happy times...’
Laura didn’t want to laugh but she had to fight the urge. ‘It’s good of you to visit him,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘I suppose you’ve been worried but, like I said, there’s no need. I try to check on him every day after work.’
‘Oh? You managed to find yourself another PA job here?’ He wasn’t even sure what companies existed in the small town. He definitely wouldn’t have put it down as somewhere with a flourishing employment sector.
‘I realised that working as someone’s personal assistant wasn’t what I wanted to do.’
‘No?’
‘When I came back here, I landed a teaching job and it’s very fulfilling. I teach at the local primary school. It’s small and there are only a handful of kids in each class, but it’s extremely rewarding.’
‘Teacher.’
‘The hours are convenient and, of course, there are the holidays and half-terms, and because it’s a small village school I know all the mums on a one-to-one basis.’ It was a terrific job, nothing to be ashamed of, and yet Laura couldn’t stop the feeling of being just a little drab, just a tiny bit of a country bumpkin.
‘Cosy.’
‘I expect you must find it all very boring, but not everyone is consumed with wanting to live in a city and make pots of money.’
‘I can’t recall saying anything about finding what you do boring, although I question how much personal satisfaction you must get in a place as small as this, especially after living in London.’
‘I got sick of the rat race,’ she told him shortly, and his eyebrows shot up.
‘Bit young to be jaded about that, wouldn’t you say? Normally that’s something that tends to afflict the over-forties. What about all the excitement?’
‘I’d had it with excitement.’
‘Ah,’ Alessandro murmured, and she shot him a sharp, narrowed look, which he returned with bland innocence.
‘Is that all? Have you finished questioning me? Maybe you could point me in the direction of your father, if, of course, I’ve passed the test.’
‘He’s in his greenhouse.’ Alessandro jerked his head in the general direction of the back gardens but his eyes remained pinned to her face.
So she’d returned to her grandmother to lick her wounds. Maybe her grandmother really had had some kind of turn but he was sharp enough to get the lie of the land...she’d had some sort of unpleasant experience in London involving a guy, probably someone she worked with, judging from the shifty way she had talked about her place of work. She might wax lyrical about the peace and tranquillity and lakes and rivers, but the truth was that she’d had her heart broken and had returned to her comfort zone to patch herself up.
He found himself wondering what sort of guy she had got involved with and promptly nipped his curiosity in the bud because after this weekend he doubted he would ever lay eyes on the woman again.
Which was something of a shame. In fact, something of a shame he hadn’t laid eyes on her before, on one of his rare forays into the Scottish wilds. She would certainly have made his duty visits a lot more alluring. Biting winds, depressingly bleak and empty countryside and his father’s challenged conversational skills would definitely have been easier to endure...
‘Right.’ Laura stood up and thought that she should be feeling more relieved to be out of the presence of this odious man than she actually was.
‘I wouldn’t bother having the food conversation, though.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You mentioned that you had cycled over to do your Good Samaritan duty...an offer to go food shopping for him, as if my father doesn’t have the wherewithal to pay someone to do that on his behalf. Actually—and I’m sure you know this—he could pay a chef to buy the food and cook it if he wanted. It would certainly spare him the stuff Freya churns out...’
Laura did her best not to agree with him. She had a good enough relationship with Freya, who occasionally cracked a half-smile in her presence, but no one could say that the woman produced haute cuisine.
‘Your father likes plain, simple food.’
‘Just as well. With sour-faced Freya at the helm, it’s all he’s ever likely to get.’
‘Why shouldn’t I ask him if he needs anything?’
‘Because there’s no point filling the cupboards only to empty them again in the space of a few days. Waste of time.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’ Laura stared at that drop-dead-gorgeous, arrogant face and subsided back into her chair like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been cut.
‘There’s a reason I’ve come up here,’ Alessandro explained calmly. ‘I’ve spoken to my father about this on a number of occasions, and I’ve emailed him...’ He sighed heavily and flung his head back, half closing his eyes as he thought about the frustration of dealing with someone who didn’t want to face the inevitable. It shouldn’t be like this. He knew that. Of course, history couldn’t be altered any more than the present could be changed...but it shouldn’t be like this, a constant uphill struggle.
‘I’m confused,’ Laura said urgently. ‘Spoken to him about what? Emailed him about what?’
Alessandro opened his eyes and looked at her in silence for a few seconds. ‘He hasn’t confided in you, then. Odd, considering you’re supposed to be best buddies.’
‘Please stop being sarcastic and tell me what’s going on.’
‘I’ve come up here to take my father back down to London with me.’
‘Take him?’ Laura looked at him in complete bewilderment. ‘Take him down for a few days?’
‘Not quite,’ he said gently. ‘Brace yourself. Roberto’s stint here in Scotland is at an end. I’m taking him down to London with me and he won’t be returning. The house will be packed up, necessities shipped down to London, the rest removed for auction. I’ve bought him an apartment in Chelsea. It’s the right size and if he’s in London I can keep an eye on him.’
Laura was finding it hard to keep track of what he was saying because none of it made any sense.
‘You’re kidding. Aren’t you?’
‘I never kid about things like that. Hasn’t he mentioned any of this to you? On any of your Little Red Riding Hood visits?’
For a second, Laura wanted to throw something at him. How could he just sit here, discussing the future of an old man, talking about it in a voice that was dry and cool and caustic?
‘You,’ she hissed in a driven undertone, ‘are the most...the most...’
‘Spit it out. I assure you I won’t take it personally.’
‘The most obnoxious person I have ever met in my entire life! It’s no wonder that...’
‘That what?’
They stared at each other in silence. Laura could hear the pounding of her heart, could feel the blood rushing hotly through her veins. ‘That nothing...’ she muttered, casting her eyes downwards. She had raced towards a cliff and almost flung herself over the side. What did she know of the relationship between father and son? She surmised. Roberto had never come out and said anything derogatory about Alessandro, but the cold distance between them was as obvious as a neon sign in a dark street.
The truth was that it was not really her business. And because the man sitting opposite her rattled her, it did not give her the excuse to say things that shouldn’t be said or to voice thoughts that should remain in her head.
Alessandro chose to let that go.
Did he really want to find out what might have been said about him behind his back? No! This was how it was between his father and himself but he wasn’t going to put himself through unnecessary irritation by having an outside party share their opinion on the situation. No way.
He looked at her coldly, noting her discomfort and choosing not to relieve her of it.
‘He hasn’t breathed a word of this to me or to... Well, I’m shocked. Beyond shocked. I can’t believe you’re going to try to wrench poor Roberto away from everything he...he holds dear and fling him into the mad chaos of London life. You can’t. You just can’t!’
‘No need to panic,’ Alessandro murmured in a soft voice that sent chills racing through her. ‘It’s a spacious three-bedroom apartment. All mod cons, including en suite bathrooms. I’m sure he’ll keep a bedroom free for his special friends.’ He was repulsed by the thought of her having anything to do with his father beyond the purely platonic. Yes, she had denied that connection, but if that were the case, why the horror and dismay?
Why the extreme reaction? She looked as distraught as Chicken Little when the sky was falling down.
His lips thinned and she knew exactly what he was getting at. Where was a heavy object when you needed one? she fumed.
‘And if he hasn’t mentioned anything to you,’ Alessandro inserted smoothly, ‘I put that down to denial. Because I’ve been having this conversation with my father for the past six months.’
Laura looked at him in stunned silence.
