The Uncompromising Italian

She didn’t know whether to keep standing or to confidently head for one of the leather chairs in front of his desk so that she could sit down. She certainly felt as though her legs didn’t have much strength left in them.

Eventually, she only scuttled towards one of the chairs when he told her to sit, simultaneously glancing at his watch as though to remind her that, whilst she might have been offered a seat, she should make sure that she didn’t get too comfortable because he didn’t have a lot of time for her.

This was the guy she had fallen in love with. She knew she would have dented his pride when she had walked out on him, but still she had half-hoped that he might contact her in some way, if only to ask whether she had received the money he had deposited into her account.

Or else to fill her in on what had happened in his family drama. Surely that would have been the polite thing to do?

But not a word, and she knew that had she not arrived on his doorstep, so to speak, then she would never have seen him again. Right now, those brooding dark eyes were surveying her with all the enthusiasm of someone contemplating something the cat had inadvertently brought in.

‘So,’ Alessio finally drawled, tapping his rarely used fountain pen on the surface of his desk. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’ To his disgust, he couldn’t help but think that she looked amazing.

He had made one half-hearted attempt to replace her with one of the women he had dated several months ago, a hot blonde with big breasts and a face that could turn heads from a mile away, but he had barely been able to stick it out for an evening in her company.

How could he when he had been too busy thinking of the woman slumped in the chair in front of him? Not in her trademark jeans this time but a neat pair of dark trousers and a snug little jacket that accentuated the long, lean lines of her body.

On cue, he felt himself begin to respond, which irritated the hell out of him.

‘I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you,’ Lesley managed. Now that she was here, she realised that she couldn’t just drop her bombshell on him without any kind of warning.

‘I’m a busy man.’ He gesticulated widely and shot her a curving smile that contained no warmth. ‘But never let it be said that I’m rude. An ex-lover deserves at least a few minutes of my time.’

Lesley bit her tongue and refrained from telling him that that remark in itself was the height of rudeness.

‘I won’t be long. How is Rachel?’

‘You made this journey to talk about my daughter?’

Lesley shrugged. ‘Well, I became quite involved in what was going on. I’m curious to know how things turned out in the end.’

Alessio was pretty sure that she hadn’t travelled to central London and confronted him at his office just to ask one or two questions about Rachel, but he was willing to play along with the game until she revealed the true reason for showing up.

‘My daughter has been...subdued since this whole business came out in the open. She returned to London without much fuss and she seems relieved that the boarding school option is now no longer on the cards. Naturally, I have had to lay down some ground rules for her—the most important of which is that I don’t want to hear from anyone in the school that she’s been acting up.’ Except he had been far less harsh in delivering that message than it sounded.

Rachel might have been a complete idiot, led astray for reasons that were fairly understandable, but he had to accept his fair share of the blame as well. He had taken his eye off the ball.

Now, there was dialogue between them, and he had high hopes that in time that dialogue would turn into fluent conversation. Would that be asking too much?

He had certainly taken the unfortunate affair by the horns and sorted it all out, personally paying a visit to the boy’s parents and outlining for them in words of one syllable what would happen if he ever had another email from the lad.

He had shied away from taking the full hard line, however, confident that the boy’s parents, who had seemed decent but bewildered, would take matters in hand. They both travelled extensively and only now had it dawned on them that in their absence they had left behind a lonely young man with a drug problem that had fortunately been caught in the bud.

Rachel had not commented on the outcome, but he had been shrewd enough to see the relief on her face. She had found herself caught up in something far bigger than she had anticipated and, in the end, he had come to her rescue, although that was something he had taken care not to ram home.

‘That’s good.’ Lesley clasped her hands together.

‘So is there anything else you want? Because if that’s all...’ He looked at the slender column of her neck, her down-bent head, the slump of her shoulders, and wanted to ask her if she missed him.

Where the hell had that notion come from?

‘Just one other thing.’ She cleared her throat and looked at him with visible discomfort.

And, all at once, Alessio knew where she was going with this visit of hers. She wanted back in with him. She had walked away with her head held high and a load of nonsense about needing to find the right guy, wherever the hell he might be. But, having begun her search, she had obviously fast reached the conclusion that the right guy wasn’t going to be as easy to pin down as she had thought and, in the absence of Mr Right, Mr Fantastic Sex would do instead.

Over his dead body.

Although, it had to be said that the thought of her begging for him was an appealing one. He turned that pleasant fantasy over in his head and very nearly smiled.

He was no longer looking at his watch. Instead, he pushed the chair away from the desk and relaxed back, his fingers lightly linked together on his flat, hard stomach.

Should he rescue her from the awkwardness of what she wanted to say? Or should he just wait in growing silence until her eventual discomfort propelled her into speech? Both options carried their own special appeal.

Eventually, with a rueful sigh that implied that far too much of his valuable time had already been wasted, he said, shaking his head, ‘Sorry. It’s a little too late for you.’

Lesley looked at him in sudden confusion. She knew that this was an awkward situation. She had appeared at his office and demanded to see him, and now here she was, body as stiff as a plank of wood, sitting in mute silence while she tried to work how best to say what she had come to say. No wonder he wanted to shuffle her out as fast as he could. He must be wondering what the hell she was doing, wasting his time.

‘You’re—you’re busy,’ she stammered, roused into speech as her brain sluggishly cranked back into gear just enough to understand that he wanted her out because he had more important things to do.

Once again, she wondered whether she had been replaced. Once again, she wondered whether he had reverted to type, back to the sexy blondes with the big breasts and the big hair.

‘Have you been busy?’ she blurted out impulsively, almost but not quite covering her mouth with her hand in an instinctive and futile attempt to retract her words.

Alessio got her drift immediately. No matter that the question hadn’t been completed. He could tell from the heightened colour in her cheeks and her startled, embarrassed eyes that she was asking him about his sex life, and he felt a groundswell of satisfaction.

‘Busy? Explain.’

‘Work. You know.’ When she had thought about having this conversation, about seeing him again, she had underestimated the dramatic effect he would have on her senses. In her head, she had pictured herself cool, composed—a little nervous, understandably, but strong enough to say her piece and leave.

Instead, here she was, her thoughts all over the place and her body responding to him on that deep, subterranean level that was so disconcerting. The love which she had hoped might have found a more settled place—somewhere not to the forefront—pounded through her veins like a desperate virus, destroying everything in its path and making her stumble over her words.

Not to mention she’d hoped not to ask questions that should never have left her mouth, because she could tell from the knowing look in those deep, dark eyes that he knew perfectly well what she had wanted to know when she had asked him whether he had been ‘busy’.

‘Work’s been...work. It’s always busy. Outside of work...’ Alessio thought of his non-date with a non-contender for a partner and felt his hackles rise that the woman staring at him with those big, almond-shaped brown eyes had driven him into seeking out someone for company simply to try and replace the images of her he had somehow ended up storing in his head. He shrugged, letting her assume that his private life was a delicate place to which she was not invited—hilarious, considering just how much she knew about him. ‘What about you?’ He smoothly changed the subject. ‘Have you found your perfect soul-mate as yet?’

‘What did you mean when you said that it was a little too late for me?’ The remark had been playing at the back of her mind and she knew that she needed him to spell it out in words of one syllable.

‘If you think that you can walk back into my life because you had a bit of trouble locating Mr Right, then it’s not going to happen.’

Pride. But then, what the hell was wrong with pride? He certainly had no intention of telling her the truth, which was that he was finding it hard to rid his system of her, even though she should have been no more than a blurry memory by now.