The Uncompromising Italian

She stole a glance at his sexy face, lazy and amused at the little show of rebellion.

‘I came to do a job for you, thinking that I would be in and out of your house in a matter of a few hours and now here I am, days later, boarding a plane for Italy.’

‘I know. Isn’t life full of adventure and surprise?’ He waved aside an awe-struck air hostess and settled into the seat next to her. ‘I confess that I myself am surprised at the way things unfolded. Surprised but not displeased.’

‘Because you’ve got what you wanted,’ Lesley complained. She was so accustomed to her independence that she couldn’t help feeling disgruntled at the way she had been railroaded into doing exactly what he had wanted her to do.

Even though, a little voice inside her pointed out, this rollercoaster ride was the most exciting thing she had ever done in her life—even though it was scary, even though it had yanked her out of her precious comfort zone, even though she knew that it would come to nothing and the fall back to Planet Earth would be painful.

‘I didn’t force your hand,’ Alessio said comfortably.

‘You went into the office and talked to my boss.’

‘I just wanted to point out the world of opportunity lying at his feet if he could see his way to releasing you for one week to accompany me to Italy.’

‘I dread to think what the office grapevine is going to make of this situation.’

‘Do you care what anyone thinks?’ He leant against the window so that he could direct one hundred per cent of his undivided attention on her.

‘Of course I do!’ Lesley blushed because she knew that, whilst she might give the impression of being strong, sassy and outspoken, she still had a basic need to be liked and accepted. She just wasn’t always good at showing that side of herself. In fact, she was uncomfortably aware of the fact that, whilst Alessio might have shown her more of himself than he might have liked, she had likewise done the same.

He would not know it, but against all odds she had allowed herself to walk into unchartered territory, to have a completely new experience with a man knowing that he was not the right man for her.

‘Relax and enjoy the ride,’ he murmured.

‘I’m not going to enjoy confronting your daughter with all the information we’ve managed to uncover. She’s going to know that I went through her belongings.’

‘If Rachel had wanted to keep her private life private, then she should have destroyed all the incriminating evidence. The fact is that she’s still a child and she has no vote when it comes to us doing what was necessary to protect her.’

‘She may not see it quite like that.’

‘She will have to make a very big effort to, in that case.’

Lesley sighed and leaned back into the seat with her eyes shut. What Alessio did with his daughter was really none of her business. Yes, she’d been involved in bringing the situation to light, but its solutions and whatever repercussions followed would be a continuing saga she would leave behind. She would return to the blessed safety of what she knew and the family story of Alessio and his daughter would remain a mystery to her for ever.

So there was no need to feel any compunction about just switching off.

Yet she had to bite back the temptation to tell him what she thought, even though she knew that he would have every right to dismiss whatever advice she had to offer about the peculiarity of their relationship, if a ‘relationship’ was what it could be called. She was his lover, a woman who probably knew far too much about his life for his liking. She had been paid to investigate a personal problem, yet had no right to have any discussions about that problem, even though they were sleeping together.

In a normal relationship, she should have felt free to speak her mind, but this was not a normal relationship, was it? For either of them. She had sacrificed her feminist principles for sex and she still couldn’t understand herself, nor could she understand how it was that she felt no regrets.

In fact, when he looked at her the way he was looking at her right now, all she felt was a dizzying need to have him take her.

If only he could see into her mind and unravel all her doubts and uncertainties. Thank goodness he couldn’t. As far as he was concerned, she was a tough career woman with as little desire for a long-term relationship as him. They had both stepped out of the box, drawn to each other by a combination of proximity and the pull of novelty.

‘You’re thinking,’ Alessio said drily. ‘Why don’t you spit it out and then we can get it out of the way?’

‘Get what out of the way?’

‘Whatever disagreements you have about the way I intend to handle this situation.’

‘You hate it when I tell you what I think,’ Lesley said with asperity. Alessio shrugged and continued looking at her in the way that made her toes curl and her mouth run dry.

‘And I don’t like it when I can see you thinking but you’re saying nothing. “Between a rock and a hard place” comes to mind.’ He was amazed at how easily he had adapted to her outspoken approach. His immediate instinct now was not to shove her back behind his boundary lines and remind her about overstepping the mark.

‘I just don’t think you should confront Rachel and demand to know what the hell is going on.’ She shifted in the big seat and turned so that she was completely facing him.

The plane was beginning to taxi in preparation for taking off, and she fell silent for a short while as the usual canned talk was given about safety exits, but as soon as they were airborne she looked at him worriedly once again.

‘It’s hard to know how to get answers if you don’t ask for them,’ he pointed out.

‘We know the situation.’

‘And I want to know how it got to where it finally got. It’s one thing knowing the outcome but I don’t intend to let history repeat itself.’

‘You might want to try a little sympathy.’

Alessio snorted.

‘You said yourself that she’s just a kid,’ Lesley reminded him gently.

‘You could always spare me the horror of making a mess of things by talking to Rachel yourself,’ he said.

‘She’s not my daughter.’

‘Then allow me to work this one out myself.’ But he knew that she was right. There was no tactful way of asking the questions he would have to ask, and if his daughter disliked him now then she was about to dislike him a whole lot more when he was finished talking to her.

Of course, there were those photos, cuttings of him—some indication, as Lesley had said, that she wasn’t completely indifferent to the fact that he was her father.

But would that be enough to take them past this little crisis? Unlikely. Especially when she discovered that the photos and cuttings had been salvaged in an undercover operation.

‘Okay.’

Alessio had looked away, out through the window to the dense bank of cloud over which they were flying. Now, he turned to Lesley with a frown.

‘Okay. I’ll talk to Rachel if you like,’ she said on a reluctant sigh.

‘Why would you do that?’

Why would she? Because she couldn’t bear to see him looking the way he was looking now, with the hopeless expression of someone staring defeat in the face.

And why did she care? she asked herself. But she shied away from trying to find an answer to that.

‘Because I’m on the outside of this mess. If she directs all her teenage anger at me, then by the time she gets to you some of it may have diffused.’

‘And the likelihood of that is...?’ But he was touched at her generosity of spirit.

‘Not good odds,’ Lesley conceded. ‘But worth a try, don’t you think?’ He was staring at her with an expression of intense curiosity and she continued quickly, before he could interrupt with the most obvious question: why? A question to which she had no answer. ‘Besides, I’m good at mediating. I got a lot of practice at doing that when I was growing up. When there are six kids in a family, a dad worked off his feet, and five of those six are boys, there’s always lots of opportunity to practise mediation skills.’

But just no opportunity to practise being a girl. And that was why she was the way she was now: hesitant in relationships; self-conscious about whether she had what it took to make any relationship last; willing not to get into the water at all rather than diving in and finding herself out of her depth and unable to cope.

Only since Alessio had appeared on the scene had she really seen the pattern in her behaviour, the way she kept guys, smiling, at arm’s length.

He was so dramatically different from any man she had ever been remotely drawn to that it had been easy to pinpoint her own lack of self-confidence. She was a clever career woman with a bright life ahead of her and yet that sinfully beautiful face had reduced all those achievements to rubble.

She had looked at him and returned to her teenage years when she had simply not known how to approach a boy because she had had no idea what they were looking for.

For her, Alessio Baldini was not the obvious choice when it came to picking a guy to sleep with, yet sleep with him she had, and she was glad that she had done so. She had broken through the glass barrier that had stood between her and the opposite sex. It was strange, but he had given her confidence she hadn’t really even known she had needed.