It wasn’t going to do. She had talked to him about not getting involved. Hell, he wanted her involved. He wanted her to belong utterly and entirely to him. He didn’t want her thinking of anyone else. With supreme confidence, he knew that, as always, what he wanted he would get.
CHAPTER SIX
MEGAN propped herself up on her elbows and watched him. He made a great sleeper. He didn’t snore, and he didn’t thrash around the bed the way she did, so that in the morning the bedsheets were all over the place and at least one bit of her body was hanging over the edge, however big the bed happened to be.
And his was a big bed. Much bigger than her double bed. Big enough, in fact, to throw a party on it.
She sighed, slipped out from under the covers and headed for his bathroom. After nearly three weeks she was familiar with the layout of his house. She wasn’t sure whether that was a good development or not.
She had had ample warning from Charlotte. Have sex in haste, she had been told, and repent at leisure. Even though Megan had told her repeatedly that it was all just about the sex, so there would be nothing to repent over at leisure.
What she had tactfully omitted to mention was that small sprig of hope which seemed to have taken root inside her, burrowing in between all her good intentions, finding the little crack where resolution met control and growing every day.
At the back of her mind was the notion that this time they were both different. She was older, and hopefully a little wiser. He had fulfilled his ambitions and maybe, just maybe, was ready for a proper relationship. It wasn’t as though she was now standing in the way of him and his dream of conquering the world! He had already conquered it!
And then there was the business of Victoria. Hadn’t he tried the path of finding the ‘perfect woman’ and come up short? Hadn’t he told her that the perfect woman had not proved as satisfying as the imperfect one?
Maybe not in so many words, but Megan’s fertile mind had busily read between the lines, and now…
Now she looked at her reflection in the mirror and sighed again.
‘What are you doing in there?’
Megan started. She lived in daily fear that he would somehow read the thoughts in her head. It was one thing thinking the impossible. It was another thing should that weakness be exposed. Would he run a mile? In her crazy daydreams he wouldn’t, but daydreams were a far cry from reality, and she was still managing to preserve a healthy scepticism—at least on the outside.
She peered round the door. Alessandro was now sitting up, sprawled amid ivory sheets, the purest of Egyptian cotton. ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she told him. ‘And then I’m heading home.’
‘It’s Saturday. Why are you heading home?’
He frowned. Three weeks ago he had considered it a pretty safe bet that she would be running at his beck and call the minute they were lovers. Indeed, Alessandro had taken that as a given. He had also thought long and hard about why he still wanted her and had come to the conclusion that it was because, as he had told her, she was his unfinished business. He had broken off their relationship because of circumstances, and of course had been right to do so, but sexually she was without compare, and he needed to have her before she cleared his system, so to speak. It made sense.
Unfortunately, whilst they were as rampant as teenagers and the sex was as satisfying as he had ever experienced, he wasn’t reaching her. They met only on predetermined days, and on the one occasion when a meeting had taken him out of the country, she had smilingly but firmly refused to reorganise her calendar for the following evening. What, he had thought, could be so important in her life that she couldn’t shuffle a few things about?
But when they did meet he had to admit that he was never disappointed. The sex was everything he could have wanted. It was familiar, and yet blazingly new at the same time. But there was always a part of her that she seemed to be holding back. And, call it a challenge to his male ego, he was determined to reach that part and scoop it out.
‘Well?’ He tried to pose it as a light question, but the demand was there, just under the surface. ‘What’s so important that you have to fly off at the break of dawn on a Saturday morning?’
‘It’s not the break of dawn. It’s after ten.’
‘That’s quibbling over detail.’ He patted the side of the bed invitingly. ‘Come back to bed and we’ll do something.’
‘You’re insatiable!’ Megan laughed. ‘I’m beginning to feel like a sex slave!’
‘Not precisely what I was thinking of, but are you saying that you don’t like the role?’