A Pawn in the Playboy's Game

‘I don’t know why you have the relationship you have with Roberto,’ she was startled to hear herself say, ‘but if you try to force his hand, it’ll backfire. You might end up dragging him down to London but it would be against his will and he’ll resent you for it for the rest of his life.’

‘I don’t recall asking for your opinion.’

‘Do you ever ask for anyone’s opinion?’

‘No.’

‘Sometimes it pays to hear what other people have to say.’ She felt some of her Dutch courage ooze away in the face of his icy stare. ‘You can’t be a rock all of the time...’

Except he was and always had been. He’d grown up knowing that he was on his own and he had acquired the necessary independence from an early age. She, it would appear, had not. Even though...

‘How old were you when you lost your parents?’ He gave in to the curiosity that had been nibbling at the edges of his consciousness. He didn’t encourage deep and meaningful conversations with women because deep and meaningful unfailingly gave rise to awkward forward thinking on their part. There was nothing he disliked more than a woman with plans and too much interest from him engendered plans. But...this was different. Exceptional circumstances. Curiosity was permitted.

‘Seven.’ She was startled at his digression.

‘And then you moved in with your grandmother.’

‘She was my closest living relative and we’d always been close.’

‘And despite the loss of your parents, you remain an optimistic, upbeat person. That...’ he sat forward, scarcely believing that he was having this conversation ‘...is because your grandmother was a constant. I think you’re viewing the relationship I have with my father through rose-tinted spectacles.

‘He paid the exorbitant school fees for my boarding school, lavished as much pocket money on me as any boy could possibly want or need, paid for ridiculously expensive holidays, which I took with various trusted members of staff, and those were the constant. His presence wasn’t because I seldom laid eyes on him and when I did, we were forced into agonisingly polite conversation that we were both very happy to bring to an end as soon as we could.’ He couldn’t believe he had said as much as he had. It was so unlike him to confide in anyone. It made him feel annoyed and uncomfortable at the same time but he told himself that it had been necessary, if only to combat her perky optimism. She was a one-woman cheerleading team.

‘What about your mother?’ Laura’s heart went out to him. In fact, she wanted to close the distance between them and place her hand over his.

‘What about her?’ This was a subject that was closed to all. It was something he rarely thought about. He had put to bed all questions about his mother a long time ago. His mother had died when he had been young enough not to have remembered her...an unexpected heart complication that had sprung from nowhere. That was the sum total of what he knew.

‘Your father has never mentioned her,’ Laura said wistfully. ‘I know he came here without a wife all those years ago. No one saw much of him at all. He was never around. He lived in the big house and half the time no one knew whether he was in the house or not.’

‘And no doubt everyone had a theory.’

‘I don’t know. I was busy at school, then I went away to university and then down to London. By then he had stopped working, I guess, and had begun to appear in the town with a little more regularity.’

‘I’m struggling to picture my father strolling into the village on a Sunday morning for a cup of tea and chit-chat with the locals.’

‘That might be because you don’t really know him.’

Alessandro’s lips thinned. ‘And it’s so important to really get to know people, isn’t it?’ he remarked with smooth assurance. He strolled to pour them both another drink and she half-heartedly swatted the offer away.

‘I have to drive back.’

Alessandro didn’t answer that. He perched on the table, which meant that she had to look up at him, and their eyes met. The slow flush that crawled into her cheeks was telling him something and he never, ever, got it wrong when it came to those little signals women emanated.