When she turned around, it was to find him standing so close to her that she gave a little stumble back, almost crashing into the sun lounger behind her.
‘Steady.’ Alessio reached out and gripped her arms, then left his hands on her arms. ‘I should really talk to you about what’s brought me back here. I’ve got quite a bit of work to catch up on and I’ll probably work through the night.’
Lesley found that she couldn’t focus on anything while he was still holding her.
‘Of course,’ she eventually managed to croak. ‘I’ll go and have a shower, and then shall I meet you in the office?’ She could smell him—the clean, chlorinated scent of the swimming pool combined with the heady aroma of the sun drying him as he stood there, practically naked.
‘Meet me in the kitchen instead.’ Alessio released her abruptly. Just then every instinct inside him wanted to pull her towards him and kiss her, taste her, see whether she would be as delectable as his imagination told him she would be. The intensity of what had shot through him was disturbing.
‘I...I didn’t expect you to return; I told Violet that there was no need to prepare anything for me before she left. In fact, I let her go early. I do hope you don’t mind but I’m accustomed to cooking for myself. I was only going to do myself a plate of pasta.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
‘Right, then,’ Lesley said faintly. She pushed her fingers through her hair, spiking it up.
She left him watching her and dashed upstairs for a very quick shower.
She should have found his unexpected arrival intensely annoying. It had thrown her whole evening out of sync. But there was a dark excitement swirling around inside her and she found that she was looking forward to having dinner with him, stupidly thrilled that he was back at the house.
She told herself that it was simply because she would be able to fill him in on all sorts of discoveries she had made and, the faster she filled him in, the sooner she would be able to leave and the quicker her life would return to normal. Normality seemed like a lifetime away.
He wasn’t in the kitchen when she got there half an hour later, with all her paperwork in a folder, so she poured herself a glass of wine and waited for him.
She couldn’t think what might have brought him back to his country estate. Something to do with his daughter, she was sure, but what? Might he have discovered something independently? Something that would make it easier for her to tell him what she thought this whole situation was about?
He strolled in when she was halfway through her glass of wine and proceeded to pour himself a whisky and soda.
‘I need this,’ Alessio said heavily, sinking onto the chair at the head of the table and angling it so that he could stretch his legs out whilst still facing her. ‘My mother-in-law called when I was in the middle of my meetings.’
‘Is that unusual?’
‘Extremely. We may well be on cordial terms but not so cordial that she telephones out of the blue. There’s still that ugly residue of their manipulation, although I will concede that Bianca’s mother was not the one behind it. And it has to be said that, for the duration of our divorce, it was only thanks to Claudia that I ever got to see Rachel at all. I can count the number of times that happened on the fingers of one hand, but then Claudia never was a match for her daughter.’ He caught himself in the act of wanting to talk more about the destructive marriage that had made him the cynical man he was today. How had that happened?
‘What did she want?’ Lesley eventually asked.
‘Rachel has been staying with her for the past four weeks. Pretty much as soon as her school ended, she decided that she wanted to go over there. She doesn’t know a great deal of people around here and only a handful in London. The down side of a boarding school out in the country, I suppose.’ He sighed heavily and tipped the remainder of his drink down before resting the empty glass on the table and staring at it in brooding silence.
‘Yes,’ Lesley contributed vaguely. ‘It must be difficult.’
‘At any rate, the upshot appears to be that my daughter is refusing to return to the UK.’
Lesley’s mouth fell open and Alessio smiled crookedly at her. ‘She’s refusing to speak to me on the telephone. She’s dug her heels in and has decided to set up camp with Claudia and, Claudia being Claudia, she lacks the strength to stand up to my daughter.’
‘You must be a little put out.’
‘That’s the understatement of the hour.’ He stood up and signalled to her that they should start preparing something to eat. He needed to move around. For a small window, he had been so preoccupied with her, with arriving back and surprising her in the swimming pool, that he had actually put the gravity of the situation to the back of his mind, but now it had returned in full force.
Strangely, he was thankful that Lesley was there.
As if knowing that he would return to the topic in his own time, Lesley began preparing their meal. She had earlier piled all the ingredients she would need on the counter and now she began chopping mushrooms, tomatoes, onions and garlic.
For once, his silence didn’t send her into instant meltdown. Rather, she began chatting easily and pleasantly. She told him about her lack of cooking experience. She joked that her brothers were all better cooks than she was and that two of them had even offered to show her the basics. She could sense him begin to unwind, even though she wasn’t looking at him at all and he wasn’t saying anything, just listening to her rabbit on aimlessly about nothing in particular.
It was soothing, Alessio thought as he watched her prepare the vegetables slowly and with the painstaking care of someone who wasn’t comfortable in the arena of the kitchen.
Nor was he feeling trapped at the thought of a woman busying herself in his kitchen. He cleared as she cooked. It was a picture-perfect snapshot of just the sort of domesticity he avoided at all costs.
‘So...’ They were sitting at the kitchen table with bowls of pasta in front of them. She had maintained a steady flow of non-threatening conversation, and it had been surprisingly easy, considering she was always a bundle of nervous tension whenever she was in his presence. ‘When you say that Rachel is digging her heels in and doesn’t want to return to the UK, are you saying for ever, or just for the remainder of the summer holidays?’
‘I’m saying that she’s decided that she hates it over here and doesn’t want to return at all.’
‘And your mother-in-law can’t talk her out of that?’
‘Claudia has always been the pushover in the family. Between her bullying husband and Bianca, she was the one who got dragged into their plot and now, in this situation, well, it’s probably a mixture of not wanting to hurt or offend her only grandchild and wanting to go down the path of least resistance.’
‘So what are you going to do about that?’
‘Well, there’s simply no question of Rachel staying out there and going to school.’ He pushed his empty plate to one side and sat back to look at her. ‘I could have waited until tomorrow to come back here and tell you this but...’
‘But...?’ Lesley rested her chin in the palm of her hand and looked at him. The kitchen lights hadn’t been switched on. It had still been bright when they had started preparing dinner, but the sun had suddenly faded, giving way to a violet twilight that cast shadows and angles across his face.
‘I have a favour to ask of you.’
‘What is it?’ Lesley asked cautiously. She began standing to clear the table and he circled her wrist with his hand.
‘Sit. Tidying can come later, or not at all. Violet will do it in the morning. I need to ask you something and I will need your undivided attention when I do so.’
She subsided back into the chair, heart beating madly.
‘I want you to accompany me to Italy,’ Alessio said heavily. ‘It’s a big ask, I know, but my fear is that, short of dragging Rachel to the plane and forcibly strapping her to the seat, she will simply refuse to listen to a word I have to say.’
‘But I don’t even know your daughter, Alessio!’
‘If I cannot persuade my daughter to return to the UK, this will spell the end of any chance of a relationship I will ever have with her.’ He rubbed his eyes wearily and then leaned back and stared blankly up at the ceiling.
Lesley’s heart went out to him. Was that how it would be? Most likely. And yet...
‘There’s something you should see.’ She stood up and went to the folder which she had brought down with her. This was the point at which she should now point out that she had gathered as much information as she could and it was up to him to do what needed to be done. In the end, it had been fiddly, but not impossible.
‘You’ve found something?’ Alessio was suddenly alert. He sat forward and pulled his chair towards her as she began smoothing out the various bits of paper she had found and the pages she had printed out over the past couple of days she had been at the house.
She had only given him a rough, skeleton idea of her findings before, not wanting to build any pictures that might be incorrect.
‘I collated all of this and, well, okay, so I told you that I didn’t think that this had anything to do with your wife...’