She had loved every minute of her storytelling until it had occurred to her that she had fallen in love with a man who didn’t really know a thing about her. The fact that she had been married was just one of the many facts she had kept hidden. By then, it had been too late to retract any of what she had said, and she hadn’t wanted to. She’d been enjoying their furtive meetings too much. Okay, so she knew that they would never come to anything, but she still hadn’t wanted them to end.
And now...
‘My parents...er...moved to Australia a few years ago.’ She hated doing this now but for the life of her she didn’t know what to do. At least, she thought, sending her non-existent parents on a one-way ticket to the other end of the world would prohibit him from trying to search them out.
Although, why on earth would he do that? The answer came as quickly as the question had: revenge. Find her weak spots and exploit them because he hated her for what he imagined she had done to him. She felt sick when she thought of the number of ways he could destroy her if he set his mind to it and if he had sufficient information in his possession.
‘Really?’
‘It was...um...always a dream of theirs.’
‘To leave their only child behind and disappear halfway across the world?’
‘People do what they do,’ she said vaguely. ‘I mean, don’t you ever want to disappear to the other end of the earth?’ Although she was making sure to stare straight ahead, she could feel his probing eyes on her, and she had to resist the temptation to lick her lips nervously.
‘I disappear there quite often, as it happens. But only on business.’
Chase could think of nothing worse than travelling the globe in the quest for more and more money and bigger and bigger deals. Stability, security and putting down roots had always been her number one priority. She had managed to begin the process, and she shuddered to think of him pulling up any of the roots she had meticulously put down over the past few years.
‘I’m surprised that after all these years you haven’t become tired of trying to make up for your parents’ excesses.’ It slipped out before she could think and Chase instantly regretted the momentary lapse. The last thing she wanted to do was establish any kind of shared familiarity. ‘My apologies,’ she said stiffly. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
The reminder of just how much she knew about him underscored his bitterness with a layer of ice. He had never understood how that had managed to happen, how he had found himself telling her things he had never told anyone in his life before.
But then, she had been different. He had never met anyone like her in his life before. Still and yet wryly funny; guarded and yet so open in the way she gazed at him; composed and brilliant at listening. Between the inane yakking of the students—who, at the end of the day, were only a few years younger than him, even though he had been light years removed from them in terms of experience—and the pseudo-bored sophistication of the people he mixed with in his working life, she had been an oasis of peace. And, yes, he had told her things. For a relationship that struggled even to call itself a ‘relationship’, he had confided and, hell, where exactly had it got him?
He clenched his jaw grimly. ‘I’m really not interested in psychobabble,’ he told her.
‘That’s fair,’ Chase returned. ‘But if I’m not allowed to talk about your history then I don’t see why you should talk about mine.’ For starters, the last thing she needed was detailed questions about her so-called parents and where exactly they lived in Australia. And how dared he imply that they somehow didn’t care about her simply because they had fulfilled their lifelong dream of emigrating? She almost felt sorry for them...
She half-grinned at that and Alessandro’s eyes narrowed. What was going through her head? He had a fierce desire to know.
‘So the shelter...’ He interrupted whatever pleasant thought had made her smile.
‘The shelter...’ Chase breathed an inward sigh of relief because this was a subject she was more than happy to talk about. He ceased being a threat as she began to describe life at Beth’s House. She smiled at some of the anecdotes about the women who came and went. She told him about the plans Beth had had for upgrading the premises, and then assured him that he could see for himself what she was talking about as soon as he got there. She told him that he had a heart of stone for wanting to knock it down to build, of all things, a stupid mall for people who had more money than sense, but found it was impossible to generate an argument because he hadn’t taken her to task for voicing her opinion.