A Pawn in the Playboy's Game

But what had she done instead? She had let those eyes settle on her, mesmerise her, get her thinking all sorts of things about the perfectly adequate life she had been content to lead.

Wasn’t it better to live a little? To take a chance? Why fight the overwhelming attraction she felt for him? Why store up regret for missed opportunities? Why not get out of her comfort zone?

He had infected her with his cavalier way of thinking and she had yielded mindlessly.

She could control physical attraction, she had argued. If anything, it would do her good not to pigeonhole herself.

She’d never expected that she would become so entangled in his narrative to the extent that she lost track of her own.

And here she was now. Involved in a charade of a relationship for the benefit of her grandmother and his father. He might be able to take that in his stride but she wasn’t fashioned from such stern stuff.

Guilt nagged at the edges of her consciousness and she surfaced to find that a long weekend was being planned around her. A cup of tea had found itself in her hand and she sipped some hurriedly as she tried to gather herself and focus.

‘That house of yours!’ Roberto was booming with authority. ‘Made a big deal of it in the newspapers a few years ago! Bought with some of the petty cash from that oil-refinery deal of yours! Somewhere hot...escapes me where...’

‘The Caribbean,’ Alessandro filled in succinctly, amused and still startled at just how much information his father had gathered about him over the years. He looked at Laura, who was gulping down her tea as though her life depended on it.

‘Bet you’ve never stepped foot in the place!’ His father looked at him shrewdly and Alessandro decided on the spot that that was precisely where he would take her.

Why not?

He didn’t like the way he couldn’t stop thinking of her. He’d had enough upheavals of late without his work life suffering further because it was constantly being interrupted with visions of her in his arms, naked and spreading her legs, begging for him. He needed to get her out of his system, and once he’d done that he would allow a decent interval before letting slip that things, sadly, had not worked out. Life. What could you do?

In the meanwhile, a few days of uninterrupted sex should do the trick.

If she didn’t decide to throw obstacles in the way, and from the look of her stubborn little mouth, he wasn’t sure.

He banked down a spurt of irritation. ‘It’s been hard to find the time,’ he murmured. ‘Of course, it hasn’t been entirely unused. I reward top employees with the occasional holiday there. But you know what? I think a few days’ relaxation in the sun wouldn’t be a bad idea...’

‘But what about the house? The move? All the packing left to do?’ Belatedly, she remembered that she was supposed to have found the love of her life, and she tempered her borderline refusal with a smile. ‘Just saying...’

‘Taking those objections in order,’ Alessandro informed her comfortably, ‘the house is progressing smoothly, the move is scheduled to take place within the next three weeks and as for the packing...well, we’ve covered the better part of anything too valuable for the removal men. Why don’t we let my father and Edith take it from here? They may want to spend some time together without having us around as chaperones...’

‘I’m not sure about clothes...stuff for warm weather...’

Alessandro shrugged his shoulders as though that particular objection wasn’t worth answering. ‘Don’t tell me you only have a wardrobe of winter gear. I won’t believe you.’ He slanted her a smile of amused, indulgent warmth. ‘It may rain and snow a lot in Scotland but summer still occurs once a year. Correct me if I’m wrong. Shorts and T-shirt weather? Anyway, there are one or two shops on the island, if memory serves me. I may not have been there for a couple of years but I distinctly remember them catering lavishly for the tourists. Leave tomorrow morning, return Sunday evening. What could be more relaxing?’

Laura thought that it might have been very relaxing if they weren’t going to be labouring under a cloud of deception. As it stood, she could think of a million more relaxing ways of spending a weekend.