A Pawn in the Playboy's Game

After a night of beyond-fantastic sex, safe in the knowledge that he hadn’t yet lost interest, there wasn’t a single woman he could think of who wouldn’t have been planning just how to hold and maintain his interest. Any woman would have shown up in her sexiest house-clearing clothes, feather duster in hand and a very good idea of what she was going to do with it.

A quick glance was enough to tell him that underneath her layers and layers and yet more layers of clothes Laura was probably fully kitted out in her most sensible underwear. He didn’t imagine she even owned a feather duster, and if she had it would have been used strictly for dusting.

So they weren’t going to get wrapped up in any sort of happy-ever-after scenario, but nevertheless...

He leaned nonchalantly against the door frame and folded his arms. ‘There’s always time to back up and leave the way you came,’ he said coolly. ‘Wouldn’t want you to be trapped here by falling snow. Happens in this part of the world. I’ve been told often enough by my father.’

Laura’s eyes skittered away and she felt a lump form at the back of her throat.

‘You don’t want me here, in other words,’ she said flatly.

‘Come in.’ He stepped aside, allowing her to brush past him. Was she going to pretend that they hadn’t made love? he wondered. The mere thought that she might go down that road staggered him.

‘Where’s Roberto? I’d love to go and have a chat with him. I haven’t seen him properly to talk to for a while.’ She glanced beyond his shoulder because it gave her eyes time to take a rest from their compulsive staring.

‘He’s in his greenhouse, having a quick chat to his plants to make sure they’re up for the upheaval of moving.’ Roberto? Roberto? She shouldn’t be asking about his father! She should be taking advantage of their brief window of privacy to source the nearest empty room!

Women chased Alessandro. He had never really had any need to try. He had the looks, he had the money and he had that all-important invisible aphrodisiac called power. He had always been able to enjoy his position of strength from the top of his ivory tower, safe in the expectation that people would come to him and never, ever the other way around.

He had trained himself to enjoy his formidable independence, had liked the fact that he had never had to adjust any part of his life to accommodate anyone else.

His boarding-school experience, pleasant though it had been, had turned him into someone who needed no one and sought no one’s approval. The one thing to be said for an absolute lack of family life was that it gave you strength of character, and as far as Alessandro was concerned, that was more important than anything else.

So it was as frustrating as hell to now find himself on the back foot while she continued to frown and scour the hallway as if he had deliberately hidden his father from her.

‘Perhaps I could go see him, take him a cup of tea before we get down to the business of clearing...’

There was nothing she had just said that Alessandro was interested in hearing.

‘How is he dealing with...? How are you both dealing with everything that’s happened? I hope you don’t mind but I’ve told my grandmother some of what you said to me, and it seems that she did know bits and pieces...’

Alessandro relaxed. This was more like it. Sympathy...tears glistening in eyes...a trembling hand gently laid on his arm...

Under any other circumstances he would have been repelled at having his private life regurgitated for the purposes of speculation. It had to be said, though, that he would never have confided in anyone else and the only reason he had felt the need to confide in Laura was because of her connection to his father. And the fact that she was raising the subject now...well, he wasn’t going to shoot her down in flames, even though he wasn’t about to oblige her by launching into some long, tear-jerking, over-sentimental nonsense. In fact...

‘He’s fine. We’re both fine. It’s been...an eye-opener, hearing what my father has had to say.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen. ‘I always wondered why the kitchen was so full of old furniture. It seems that when my father moved from the cottage where he and my mother lived, the kitchen furniture, along with the oven, were the only reminders he took of the life he left behind.’ He frowned, not sure whether he had intended saying so much.