* * *
Lesley left them after the initial setting out of the information. It was a sorry story of a lonely teenager, unhappy at boarding school, who had fallen in with the wrong crowd—or, rather, fallen in with the wrong boy. Piecing together the slips of paper and the stray emails, Lesley could only surmise that she had smoked a joint or two and then, vulnerable, knowing that she would be expelled from yet another school, she had become captive to a sixteen-year-old lad with a serious drug habit.
The finer details, she would leave for Alessio to discover. In the meantime, not quite knowing what to do with herself, she went outside and tried to get her thoughts in order.
Where did she go from here? She had always been in control of her life; she had always been proud of the fact that she knew where she was heading. She hadn’t stopped for a minute to think that something as crazy as falling in love could ever derail her plans because she had always assumed that she would fall in love with someone who slotted into her life without causing too much of a ripple. She hadn’t been lying when she had told Alessio that the kind of guy she imagined for herself would be someone very much like her.
How could she ever have guessed that the wrong person would come along and throw everything into chaos?
And what did she do now?
Still thinking, she felt rather than saw Alessio behind her and she turned around. Even in the darkness he had the bearing of a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and she instinctively walked towards him and wrapped her arms around his waist.
Alessio felt like he could hold onto her for ever. Wrong-footed by the intensity of that feeling, he pulled her closer and covered her mouth with his. His hand crept up underneath the tee-shirt and Lesley stepped back.
‘Is sex the only thing you ever think about?’ she asked sharply, and she answered the question herself, providing the affirmative she knew was the death knell to any relationship they had.
He wanted sex, she wanted more—it was as simple as that. Never had the gulf between them seemed so vast. It went far beyond the differences in their backgrounds, their life experiences or their expectations. It was the very basic difference between someone who wanted love and someone who only wanted sex.
‘How is Rachel?’ She folded her arms, making sure to keep some space between them.
‘Shaken.’
‘Is that all you have to say? That she’s shaken?’
‘Are you deliberately trying to goad me into an argument?’ Alessio looked at her narrowly. ‘I’m frankly not in the mood to soothe whatever feathers I’ve accidentally ruffled.’ He shook his head, annoyed with himself for venting his stress on her, but he had picked something up—something stirring under the surface—even though, for the life of him, he couldn’t understand what could possibly be bugging her. She certainly hadn’t spent the past hour trying and failing to get through to a wayward teenager who had sat in semi-mute silence absorbing everything that was being said to her but responding to nothing.
He was frustrated beyond endurance and he wondered if his own frustration was making him see nuances in her behaviour that weren’t there.
‘And I’m frankly amazed that you could talk to your daughter, have this awkward conversation, and yet have so little to report back on the subject.’
‘I didn’t realise that it was my duty to report back to you,’ Alessio grated and Lesley reddened.
‘Wrong choice of words.’ She sighed. Here were the cracks, she thought with a hollow sense of utter dejection. Things would go swimmingly well just so long as she could disentangle sex from love, but she was finding that she couldn’t now. She spiked her fingers through her short hair and looked away from him, out towards the same black sea which his villa down the road overlooked.
She could see the way this would play out: making love would become a bittersweet experience; she would be the temporary mistress, making do, wondering when her time would be up. She suspected that that time would come very quickly once they returned to England. The refreshing, quirky novelty of bedding a woman with brains, who spoke her mind, who could navigate a computer faster than he could, would soon pall and he would begin itching to return to the unchallenging women who had been his staple diet.
Nor would he want a woman around who reminded him of the sore topic of his daughter and her misbehaviour, which had almost cost him a great deal of money.
‘Would it be okay if I went to talk to her?’ Lesley asked, and Alessio looked at her in surprise.
‘What would you hope to achieve?’
‘It might help talking to someone who isn’t you.’
‘Even though she sees you as the perpetrator of the “searching the bedroom” crime? I should have stepped in there and told her that that was a joint decision.’
‘Why?’ Lesley asked with genuine honesty. ‘I guess you had enough on your plate to deal with and, besides, I will walk away from this and never see either of you again. If she pins the blame on me, then I can take it.’
Alessio’s jaw hardened but he made no comment. ‘She’s still in the dining room,’ he said. ‘At least, that’s where I left her. Claudia has disappeared to bed, and frankly I don’t blame her. In the morning, I shall tell her that my daughter has agreed that the best thing is to return to England with me.’
‘And school?’
‘As yet to be decided, but it’s safe to say that she won’t be returning to her old stamping ground.’
‘That’s good.’ She fidgeted, feeling his distance and knowing that, while she had been responsible for creating it, she still didn’t like it. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promised, and backed away.
Like a magnet, his presence seemed to want to pull her back towards him but she forced herself through to the dining room, little knowing what she would find.
She half-expected Rachel to have disappeared into another part of the house, but the teenager was still sitting in the same chair, staring vacantly through the window.
‘I thought we might have a chat,’ Lesley said, approaching her warily and pulling a chair out to sit right next to her.
‘What for? Have you decided that you want to apologise for going through my belongings when you had no right?’
‘No.’
Rachel looked at her sullenly. She switched on her mobile phone, switched it off again and rested it on the table.
‘Your dad’s been worried sick.’
‘I’m surprised he could take the time off to be worried,’ Rachel muttered, fiddling with the phone and then eventually folding her arms and looking at Lesley with unmitigated antagonism. ‘This is all your fault.’
‘Actually, it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m only here because of you and you’re in this position because of what you did.’
‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to some stupid employee preach to me.’ But she remained on the chair, glaring.
‘And I don’t have to sit here, but I want to, because I grew up without a mum and I know it can’t be easy for you.’
‘Oh puh...lease....’ She dragged that one word out into a lengthy, disdainful, childish snort of contempt.
‘Especially,’ Lesley persevered, ‘As Alessio—your father—isn’t the easiest person in the world when it comes to touchy-feely conversations.’
‘Alessio? Since when are you on first-name terms with my father?’
‘He wants nothing more than to have a relationship with you, you know,’ Lesley said quietly. She wondered if this was what love did, made you want to do your utmost to help the object of your affections, to make sure they were all right, even if you knew that they didn’t return your love and would happily exit your life without much of a backward glance.
‘And that’s why he never bothered to get in touch when I was growing up? Ever?’
Lesley’s heart constricted. ‘Is that what you really believe?’
‘It’s what I was told by my mum.’
‘I think you’ll find that your father did his best to keep in touch, to visit... Well, you’ll have to talk to him about that.’
‘I’m not going to be talking to him again.’
‘Why didn’t you come clean with your dad, or even one of the teachers, when that boy started threatening you?’ She had found a couple of crumpled notes and had quickly got the measure of a lad who had been happy to extort as much of Rachel’s considerable pocket money as he could by holding it over her head that he had proof of the one joint she had smoked with him and was willing to lie to everyone that it had been more than that. When the pocket money had started running out, he must have decided to go directly to the goose that was laying the golden eggs: pay up or else he would go to the press and disclose that one of the biggest movers and shakers in the business world had a druggie teenage daughter. ‘You must have been scared stiff,’ she mused, half to herself.
‘That’s none of your business.’
Some of the aggression had left her voice. When Lesley looked at her, she saw the teenage girl who had been bullied and threatened by someone willing to take advantage of her one small error of judgement.
‘Well, you dad’s going to sort all of that out. He’ll make the whole thing go away.’ She heard the admiring warmth in her voice and cleared her throat. ‘You should give him a chance.’