A Pawn in the Playboy's Game

Alessandro sighed heavily and threw her a very quick look before focusing on his father once more. ‘What I’m saying is that this is...different...’

Laura’s mouth fell open.

‘Laura and I have a very special connection. She’s not one of my fly-by-night trollops.’ Alessandro thought wryly that some of the catwalk models he’d dated, whose faces adorned high-end fashion magazines, would have been appalled to have been described as fly-by-night trollops.

‘Special connection?’ He humphed and looked between them.

‘This is serious,’ Alessandro said gravely, and Laura made an effort to rescue her jaw from where it had fully dropped to the floor. Her feet remained nailed down as he moved smoothly to where she was standing and linked his fingers through hers in a gesture that was oddly chaste.

‘How serious?’ Roberto asked, eyes narrowed, his voice still bearing the traces of lingering scepticism, and Laura, frankly, couldn’t blame him. She only hoped that he didn’t turn to her for confirmation of what Alessandro had said, because she had no idea where this was going.

Although she did know where it had come from.

He and his father had arrived at a fragile truce after more than two decades of a civilised but frosty relationship. A door, formerly closed, had opened between them. Not fully but enough, and she guessed that Alessandro wasn’t about to jeopardise that now. Throw into the mix the fact that Roberto’s health was not as robust as it might have been, and she could understand why Alessandro might have found himself in an impossible situation.

‘Very serious,’ Alessandro said seriously.

‘In that case, I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt!’ He eyed Laura. ‘Edith know about this?’

‘No,’ Laura said truthfully. As far as she was aware, her grandmother didn’t even know that she and Alessandro had anything going on between them but a purely working relationship, but who knew?

‘Then if you lovebirds will excuse me...might just go and fill her in.’ He waved his hand between them and headed out of the kitchen, leaving in his wake utter and complete silence, which Laura was the first to break.

‘What the heck did you just go and do?’ she cried, pulling away from him to stand by the table, arms tightly clasped around herself.

Alessandro took his time answering. ‘I salvaged your reputation,’ he drawled, with such barefaced arrogance that she was momentarily stunned.

‘You salvaged my reputation by pretending that we have some sort of serious relationship that’s actually going somewhere?’ She laughed shortly, although her heart did a treacherous little flip inside her. She didn’t want a serious relationship with him...did she? A fine film of perspiration broke out on her skin. This wasn’t what this was about. This was about lust. Lust was simple. Anything more than that was a dangerous minefield.

‘Did you really want my father to think that you were the sort of girl who would jump into bed with a guy just for the hell of it? You don’t have to be a genius to see that my father’s placed you on some sort of pedestal. I might have known that a lot sooner if we’d had the sort of father-son relationship where meaningful conversation played a part, but we didn’t, so I never even knew of your existence until I came here. But as soon as I saw the interaction between the two of you, I knew that he...maybe looks on you as the daughter he once had.’ Alessandro’s voice was gruff and he began to prowl restlessly through the kitchen, pausing only to lean heavily on the counter by the kitchen sink, where he stared out of the window for a while at the acres of open fields and cultivated gardens outside, barely visible in the thickening snow.

‘Did you...’ he turned to face her ‘...really want me to shatter those illusions?’

‘Maybe not, but to lead him on like that...’

‘It’s not a complete lie. We do have a relationship.’

‘Of sorts, Alessandro. We have a relationship of sorts.’ And she wasn’t going to make the mistake of turning that into anything else. ‘We have the sort of relationship that’s going to fizzle out the minute you leave here and return to London. That’s something we both knew from the very beginning.’ She was proud of the way her voice was low but calm, urgent but composed.