‘I’m proud to announce that my mother has been a man-free zone for three years. I feel she might be cured of her addiction to looking for love in all the wrong places.’
‘And what about you?’ Alessandro murmured huskily. ‘Are you a man-free zone at the moment?’
His thoughts veered wildly into uncharted territory. He pictured her with a man. He pictured her with him. The face she chose to show the world was not the sum total of the person she was. In fact, scratch the surface and the cool, marble exterior gave way to swirling, unpredictable currents.
He had a driving, crazy urge to test those waters.
He had his own reasons, he knew, for the choices he had made and continued to make. His own parents and their all-consuming love had left little room for a kid and no room at all for common sense. Theirs had been a world with room only for each other, and their ridiculous choices had seen their joint family fortunes whittled away into nothing thanks to rash decisions, stupid blunders, irrational money-making ventures.
Control? They had had none of that. He did. He controlled every aspect of his life, including his love life, but suddenly all those beautiful, vapid, utterly controllable women who had cluttered his life seemed like safe, dreary options.
Insane. He had never mixed business with pleasure. Never. This woman was off limits.
But she had kick-started his libido and he felt the thrust of a powerful erection pressing against the zipper of his trousers, bulging and uncomfortable.
Kate detected something in his voice that sent the thrill of a shiver racing through her and desperately tried to squelch it.
How the heck had this happened? How had the conversation swerved from George and his misdeeds to questions about her private life? What on earth had possessed her to start sharing her life story like an idiot?
‘I’ve been very busy getting my career up and going,’ she said briskly. ‘I haven’t had time to cultivate relationships.’
‘All work and no play...’ Alessandro murmured. ‘Personally, I’ve always found that a little bit of play makes the work go a helluva lot faster.’
‘That approach doesn’t work for me. It never has.’ She winced at the tenor of her voice—cold, prim, defensive. ‘And now I think we ought to get the bill. I...it’s later than I expected... I don’t think it would be fair on George if we shoved our discussion of his plight into a few minutes tacked on to the end of a meal. I realize you’ve written him off as a master criminal, but I feel he deserves better than that.’
She automatically felt for the bun at the back of her head. Still firmly in place. Unlike the rest of her.
Alessandro mentally waved aside the topic of hapless George and his unfortunate wrongdoings. Tomorrow was another day. He would deal with that later. They would deal with that later. Right now...
‘What approach doesn’t work for you?’
Kate pretended to misunderstand his question.
‘Ah. You’ve decided to retreat behind your professional mask. Why?’
‘Because we didn’t come here to talk about me. We came to talk about George.’
‘But we didn’t,’ Alessandro pointed out with remorseless logic. ‘We didn’t end up talking about George, as it happens.’
‘And that was a mistake.’ She breathed a silent sigh of relief as the bill was brought to them, and then breathed an even bigger sigh of relief when the proprietor approached and began enthusiastically quizzing them on what they thought of their meal, his sharp black eyes dancing between the two of them.
So she hadn’t answered his question. And he wasn’t sure why he wanted to find out anyway. But he did. What was it they said about wanting what you couldn’t get?
He watched as she rose, terminating all personal conversation.
‘I shall get a taxi home,’ she told him firmly.
He ignored her. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
He ushered her out into a much cooler evening—suitable weather finally for her starchy suit and jacket. He made a call on his cell phone and his car, complete with driver, appeared from nowhere. It pulled over and he opened the passenger door for her. When she was inside, he leant down so that he was looking at her on eye level.
‘You’ll be happy to know that you’ll be spared my company.’
He grinned, and she had one of those intuitive moments of knowing that he knew exactly what had been going through her head.
‘I’ll get Jackson to drop you home and we can pick up where we left off at a later date.’
‘What later date?’ She worried at her lower lip. If she could stick a few definite meetings in her work diary then she would be able to get a handle on seeing him again. And over her dead body if it was going to be in another cosy little restaurant.
‘I’ll get back to you on that one.’
‘But don’t you want to get this mess sorted out as quickly as possible?’
‘You can keep an eye on all the business accounts for suspicious activity, but if there’s none then why not let George enjoy his last supper, so to speak?’ He stood up, slapped the hood of the sleek, black Maserati, and remained watching as it disappeared from view.
He hadn’t felt so invigorated for a long time.
And what, he wondered, was a guy to do about that?
CHAPTER THREE
FOR THE PAST few years Kate had seen her place of work as a refuge. There, she had felt in charge of her life, had worked hard at putting together all the building blocks that gave it definition and purpose.
Now she felt jumpy. On tenterhooks. Always on the lookout for Alessandro who, for the past couple of days, had often appeared to talk to her. About a client with a thorny tax problem, two overseas companies whose vast returns had generated questions about splitting them into smaller fragments, an acquisition that would mark a significant branching out from electronics, shipping and the leisure industry into publications...
‘Cape would normally handle this, but seeing that he’s on an extended holiday abroad, and seeing that that extended holiday is likely to become permanent, you’d better start getting acquainted with some of his responsibilities...’
This at five-thirty earlier today, when most of her colleagues had mentally switched off in preparation for leaving and had been all agog at the appearance of the big man.
She had kept as cool and collected as she could but her nerves had been all over the place. Surely the head of finance should be handling this situation? she had ventured, watching askance as he had perched on the side of her desk and then dragging her eyes away from his muscular thighs and the way the fine fabric of his trousers was stretched taut over them. But, no. Watson Russell was swamped by several huge ongoing deals—and besides, these matters would qualify as fairly small peanuts for him.
Afterwards, some of the girls had hovered, waiting for her to emerge from her office, and had proceeded to ply her with questions. None of the questions had had anything to do with work. They had wanted her opinion of him. As a hunk. Kate had made it a point never to engage in conversations like that, but she had been pinned to the wall and had found herself admitting that he was all right but not her type.
So how come he’s been around so much...is something going on...?
Argh! She had become just the sort of giggly, girly type she had never been, and it had left her all hot and bothered.
And he still hadn’t committed to a meeting so that he could look through what she had found out—which, as it turned out, was not very much at all. George had been dipping his hands in the till, but it hadn’t been going on for very long and the amounts, in the big scheme of things, weren’t that significant.
She would talk to Alessandro about that—try and find some compassion in him for the older man—but she didn’t hold out much hope.
Now, at home far earlier than she normally would have been, on yet another hot summer evening, Kate looked at her work computer with jaundiced eyes.
It wasn’t yet six and she couldn’t face sitting in front of her computer and picking up where she had left off during the day.
Wandering through her very nice little ground-floor flat, she had plenty of time to think about the social life she lacked.
The back door was flung open and she could smell the neighbours barbecuing. Aside from the pleasant couple with two kids living next to her, she had no idea who her neighbours were.
At work, having almost given up on asking her, two of her colleagues had invited her to go to the pub with them and she had felt a little surge of panic because...
Because her whole life was devoted to work.
How had that happened? Okay, she knew how, and she knew why, she just didn’t understand how it had all run away with her so that she had lost all her perspective.
Not only was her social life practically non-existent, but where was the guy she should be dating? Where was the exciting sex life she should be having?
She had had one boyfriend, three years previously, and he had fallen off the face of the earth because he had wanted more attention than she had been prepared to give. He hadn’t understood that she had been taking professional exams and had had to study when she wasn’t holding down the demanding job at the accountancy firm she had left as soon as she had qualified.
At the time she had been miffed—because how hard would it have been for him to just give her some breathing space? Surely it had been enough that they’d had fun on the weekends? But he had wanted more than just fun on the weekends.