A Scandal Made At Midnight

He shrugged. ‘I moved past it.’

‘Does anyone move past that sort of thing?’ she mused. ‘My father was a gambler and a wastrel, but he was fun and he loved me. He...accepted me as I am. I still miss him.’

‘Then you have finer feelings than I do.’ And, judging by the even more sorrowful look on her face, that pithy remark had revealed more about him than he’d meant it to.

‘I’m still sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘As I would be for any little boy who lost his mother. Ella lost her mother when she was a baby—did you know?’

‘It didn’t come up in conversation.’ They’d kept their chat light and easy, which was how he suspected both of them liked it. Yet here he was, spilling secrets with Liane. It didn’t make sense...and yet it did.

‘Well, it’s something you have in common.’ She spoke as if she were reminding herself of something, and Alessandro wasn’t sure he liked it. He realised he didn’t particularly want to be thinking of Ella just now. Liane slipped past him, back into the bedroom, her slender figure moving gracefully past the bed piled high with pillows and silken sheets—and for a second Alessandro could picture her there, lying languidly among the pillows, the spill of her white-gold hair like spun silk against the smooth sheets, her eyes at half mast, her body...

At the door she turned back to him, her expression carefully blank. ‘Ella will be wondering where we are,’ she said, and it seemed almost as if there was a warning in her words.

Shaking his head as if he had to wake himself from a dream, Alessandro followed her.