A Pawn in the Playboy's Game

His dark eyes dropped to her mouth and he deliberately let them linger there, and the way she nervously licked her lips was also telling him something.

The fire that had been running through his veins like a deep, underground, fast-flowing river began surfacing.

He wasn’t into self-denial when it came to sex. What was the point? If it was there, he took it. It was there now. Did she even know that? Was she even aware of the attraction she felt towards him or was she too busy trying to analyse him and probe beneath the surface?

‘And, yes, it’s important you really get to...er...you know, find out about Roberto before you do anything that could...um...really throw him into turmoil...’ Laura’s eyes skittered away from his, although her skin felt as hot as fire. She could still feel those deep, dark eyes of his locked onto her and it was rousing stuff in her that she didn’t want.

Alessandro Falcone was off limits and it had a lot more to do with the complicated situation between them.

He was off limits because he was just plain wrong on every single level.

He was everything she didn’t want in her life. When she’d walked away from London, from her job and from a guy who had strung her along with his charm and his dashing good looks, she had made a quiet resolution to herself that she would not get involved with anyone who wasn’t open, sincere and basically just like her. Normality was what she wanted in a guy. Even if she were to have a fling, it would be with someone whose values she shared and who wasn’t out to get what he could. It wouldn’t be with one of life’s takers.

So why was it that she felt naked and exposed when he looked at her like that?

‘We could spend the rest of the night discussing my father,’ Alessandro murmured. He moved, strolled to the window, which offered the view of a pitch-dark night outside, strolled back to the table and resumed his position, perching on it but this time closer to her. Close enough for her breathing to feel a little restricted.

‘But let’s talk about you instead. You’ve done a lot of low-level, amateur psychoanalysis on me... Fair’s fair. What was my father referring to when he mentioned your shenanigans in London?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Please tell me that you’re not one of those hypocrites who are forthright and direct when it comes to mouthing off their opinions on other people’s lives but clam up the second someone tries to get a straight answer out of them about their own lives. That would be disappointing...’

Laura glared at him angrily. Hypocrite? That was one accusation that had never been levelled against her! Too outspoken, yes. Naive, yes. Too honest for her own good, definitely! But hypocritical? No.

‘Lost for words?’ Alessandro asked silkily. ‘And yet you’ve been so vocal up until now...’

‘You know what the older generation is like,’ she hedged through gritted teeth. ‘They gossip.’

‘I never took my father for a gossiper,’ Alessandro commented truthfully.

‘Well, he is when he’s with my grandmother. And you know...people of that generation think that walking in a park holding hands with someone if you’re not engaged to be married comes under the heading of shenanigans!’

‘Have you buried yourself here to escape a broken relationship?’

The mildness of his voice was disconcerting because his eyes were shrewd and perceptive.

‘I don’t consider this a graveyard.’

‘So you had an ill-advised fling with someone you worked with. It fell apart at the seams. It happens.’

‘Who told you that?’ She looked at him narrowly. ‘I suppose Roberto let slip.’

‘Like I told you, my father and I are not on such familiar terms. I guessed and it seems that I was right.’

She looked away. Her hands were trembling and she linked her fingers together, stilling them. She didn’t want to talk about this, wasn’t going to talk about it, and yet wasn’t he right when he’d said that she had felt free to probe but when the shoe was on the other foot, she wasn’t quite so ready to confide?

Was this her Achilles’ heel? The place where her insecurities lay? Being brought up by her grandmother had been good, better than good, but she had never really caught on to make-up and feminine wiles—not in the way her other classmates had. Her grandmother had simply been beyond all that by the time Laura had hit her teens. When it came to the art of flirting, she was at a loss and so Colin and the way he had used her inexperience had hit her hard, had reinforced all those insecurities.