But her mind refused to be reined in. Riccardo affected her. She wished it was simply a case of hate, which was what she had been at pains to imply, combined with a healthy dose of apprehension and resentment at the situation in which she now found herself, but there was something else. It was like a dangerous snake rustling in the undergrowth, and Charlotte knew that there was still an attraction there for her. Worse, she suspected that it had always been there, just lying in wait, and now that he had shown up on the scene it had surfaced and was gathering force.
Poor Ben. She had seen him the evening before and had apologetically told him that he should think of finding someone else.
‘I don’t deserve you, Ben,’ Charlotte had said truthfully, reaching across the table and linking her fingers through his. ‘You’re a nice guy, and you need a woman who doesn’t come with an armful of complications.’
‘You mean a woman who doesn’t come with a rival.’
‘No!’ She’d made a dismissive, snorting noise. ‘Riccardo? A rival? Not in a million years! But I’m in a messy situation just at the moment, and it’s not fair that you get caught up in the undertow.’
‘Maybe it’s a good thing that he knows about Gina.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew the man.’ She had been pleased and relieved that Ben had taken it so well. In fact, they had parted on the best possible terms, agreeing to remain friends. Later she wondered whether he could ever have been right for her, or she right for him, if breaking up had been such a painless affair.
The elevator shuddered to a stop. She was aware that Riccardo’s secretary had been making polite conversation with her, and she wondered whether she could get away with murmuring something vague because the last thing she needed was a chat with someone she didn’t know. Not when she was fighting to control her desire to run away. She wondered what the pleasant, middle-aged, grey-haired woman would say if she blurted out the truth: that she had come to discuss her boss’s parental visiting rights to his eight-year-old daughter. How much greyer could grey hair turn?
Riccardo’s office was at the very end of a long corridor, on either side of which thick doors alerted the uninitiated that the people sitting behind them were very important. The double-fronted wooden doors at the end of the corridor thereby sent the clear message that the person behind them was beyond very important.
And of course, Charlotte thought as his secretary pushed open the door, a beyond-very-important man wouldn’t do something as crazily simple as come to the door to greet them. He would be staring out of his virtually floor-to-ceiling glass windows at all those small, lesser folk tramping the city streets below, as Riccardo was now doing.
She heard the door shut gently behind her and took a deep breath as Riccardo slowly turned around. For him, the past few days had seen him suffer the agonies of confusion that everyone endures at various points in their lives, but which for him were novel and unwelcome emotions. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of hours’ sleep he had had, and he was functioning at work on automatic level.
He had given himself nearly a week to absorb the situation, because he really hadn’t trusted himself to return to her house and deal with it in a controlled and adult manner. Now he was glad that she had appeared on his doorstep, so to speak, because she was in his territory. He recalled that feeling of trying to walk in quicksand when he had been at her house, as he had watched the foundations of his orderly world disappear out of reach, and his mouth tightened.