THE UNCOMPROMISING ITALIAN

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Long enough to realise that it’s been a while since I used that pool. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I stepped foot in it.’ Water droplets were like tiny diamonds on her eyelashes and he wished she would look at him so that he could read the expression in her eyes. Was she genuinely annoyed that he had disturbed her, shown up unexpectedly? Or was she all of a dither because she had been caught off-guard, because he was seeing her for the first time without her armour of jeans, flats and faded tee-shirts? Clothes that neutralised her femininity.

  He wondered what she would say if he told her just how delicious she looked, standing there dripping wet with only a towel that barely covered her.

  He also wondered what she would say if he told her that he had been standing there for the better part of fifteen minutes, mesmerised as he’d watched her swimming, as at home in the water as a seal. He had been so wrapped up in the sight that he had completely forgotten why he had been obliged to drive back from London.

  ‘Wait right here,’ he urged suddenly. ‘I’m going to join you. Give me ten minutes. It’ll do me good to get rid of the London grime.’

  ‘Join me?’ Lesley was frankly horrified.

  ‘You don’t have a problem with that, do you?’

  ‘No...err...’

  ‘Good. I’ll be back before you can get back in the water.’

  Lesley was frozen to the spot as she watched him disappear back through the sprawling triple-fronted French doors that led into the conservatory.

  Then, galvanised into action—because diving in while he watched was just out of the question—she hurried back into the water. What choice did she have? To have told him that she was fed up swimming and wanted to go inside, just as he was about to join her in the pool, would have been tantamount to confessing just how awkward he made her feel. The last thing she wanted was for him to know the effect he had on her. He might have some idea that she wasn’t as impartial to his presence as she liked to pretend but her feelings were more confused than that and ran a lot deeper.

  That was something she was desperate to keep to herself. She could just about cope if he thought that she fancied him; half the female population in the country between the ages of eighteen and eighty would have fancied the man, so it would be no big deal were he to include her in that category.

  But it was more than that. Not only was she not the type to randomly fancy guys because of the way they looked, but her reactions to him pointed to something a lot more complex than a simple case of lust which could easily be cured by putting some distance between them.

  She had just reached the shallow end of the pool when Alessio emerged back out in the mellow evening sunshine.

  Lesley thought that she might faint. Only now did she fully comprehend how much time she had spent daydreaming about him, about what he might look like under those expensive, casual designer clothes he was fond of wearing.

  What would his body look like?

  Now she knew: lean, bronzed and utterly beautiful. His shoulders were broad and muscled and his torso tapered to a narrow waist and hips.

  He was at home with his body, that much was evident from the way he moved with an easy, casual grace.

  Lesley sat on one of the steps at the shallow end of the pool, so that she was levered into a half-sitting position on her elbows while her long legs and most of her body remained under the surface of the water. She felt safer that way.

  He dived into the water, as straight as an arrow, and swam steadily and powerfully towards her. It took every ounce of will power not to flinch back as he reared up out of the water and joined her on the step.

  ‘Nice,’ he said appreciatively, wiping his face with the palm of his hand, then leaning back just as she did.

  ‘You haven’t explained what you’re doing here.’ Lesley eyed the proximity of his body nervously.

  ‘And I shall do that as soon as we’re inside. For the moment, I just want to enjoy being out here. I don’t get much by way of time out. I don’t want to spoil it by launching into the unexpected little problem that’s cropped up.’ He glanced across to her. ‘You’re a good swimmer.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Been swimming a long time?’

  ‘Since I was four.’ She paused and then continued, because talking seemed a bit less stressful than remaining silent and concentrating all her energies on what he was doing to her. ‘My father had always been a good swimmer. All my brothers were as well. After my mother died, he got it into his head that he would channel all his energy into getting me into competitive swimming. The boys were all a bit older and had their own hobbies, but he’s fond of telling me that I was fertile ground for him to work on.’ Lesley laughed and relaxed a little. ‘So he made sure to take me down to the local swimming baths at least twice a week. I was out of arm bands and swimming by the time I was five.’

  ‘But you didn’t end up becoming a professional swimmer.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Lesley admitted. ‘Although I entered lots of competitions right up until I went to secondary school, then once I was in secondary school I began to play lots of different types of sport and the swimming was put on the back burner.’

  ‘What sport did you play?’ Alessio thought of his last girlfriend, whose only stab at anything energetic had involved the ski slope. He had once made the mistake of trying to get her to play a game of squash with him and had been irritated when she had shrieked with horror at the thought of getting too sweaty. Her hair, apparently, would not have been able to cope. He wondered whether she would have submerged herself in the pool the way Lesley had or whether she would have spent her time lying on a sun lounger and only dipping her feet in when the heat became unbearable.

  Any wonder he had broken up with her after a couple of months?

  ‘Squash, tennis, hockey, and of course in between I had my self-defence classes.’

  ‘Energetic.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘And in between all of that vigorous exercise you still had time for studying.’

  Hence no time at all for what every other teenage girl would have been doing. Lesley read behind that mild observation. ‘How else would I have ever been able to have a career?’ Lesley responded tartly. ‘Playing sport is all well and good but it doesn’t get you jobs at the end of the day.’ She stood up. ‘I’ve been out here for long enough. I should really get back inside, have a shower. Please don’t let me keep you from enjoying the pool. It’s a shame to have this and not make use of it, especially when you think that it’s so rare for the weather to be as good as it has been recently.’ She didn’t give him time to answer. Instead, she headed for her towel and breathed a sigh of relief when she had wrapped it around her.

  When she turned around, it was to find him standing so close to her that she gave a little stumble back, almost crashing into the sun lounger behind her.

  ‘Steady.’ Alessio reached out and gripped her arms, then left his hands on her arms. ‘I should really talk to you about what’s brought me back here. I’ve got quite a bit of work to catch up on and I’ll probably work through the night.’

  Lesley found that she couldn’t focus on anything while he was still holding her.

  ‘Of course,’ she eventually managed to croak. ‘I’ll go and have a shower, and then shall I meet you in the office?’ She could smell him—the clean, chlorinated scent of the swimming pool combined with the heady aroma of the sun drying him as he stood there, practically naked.

  ‘Meet me in the kitchen instead.’ Alessio released her abruptly. Just then every instinct inside him wanted to pull her towards him and kiss her, taste her, see whether she would be as delectable as his imagination told him she would be. The intensity of what had shot through him was disturbing.

  ‘I...I didn’t expect you to return; I told Violet that there was no need to prepare anything for me before she left. In fact, I let her go early. I do hope you don’t mind but I’m accustomed to cooking for myself. I was only going to do myself a plate
of pasta.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘Right, then,’ Lesley said faintly. She pushed her fingers through her hair, spiking it up.

  She left him watching her and dashed upstairs for a very quick shower.

  She should have found his unexpected arrival intensely annoying. It had thrown her whole evening out of sync. But there was a dark excitement swirling around inside her and she found that she was looking forward to having dinner with him, stupidly thrilled that he was back at the house.

  She told herself that it was simply because she would be able to fill him in on all sorts of discoveries she had made and, the faster she filled him in, the sooner she would be able to leave and the quicker her life would return to normal. Normality seemed like a lifetime away.

  He wasn’t in the kitchen when she got there half an hour later, with all her paperwork in a folder, so she poured herself a glass of wine and waited for him.

  She couldn’t think what might have brought him back to his country estate. Something to do with his daughter, she was sure, but what? Might he have discovered something independently? Something that would make it easier for her to tell him what she thought this whole situation was about?

  He strolled in when she was halfway through her glass of wine and proceeded to pour himself a whisky and soda.

  ‘I need this,’ Alessio said heavily, sinking onto the chair at the head of the table and angling it so that he could stretch his legs out whilst still facing her. ‘My mother-in-law called when I was in the middle of my meetings.’

  ‘Is that unusual?’

  ‘Extremely. We may well be on cordial terms but not so cordial that she telephones out of the blue. There’s still that ugly residue of their manipulation, although I will concede that Bianca’s mother was not the one behind it. And it has to be said that, for the duration of our divorce, it was only thanks to Claudia that I ever got to see Rachel at all. I can count the number of times that happened on the fingers of one hand, but then Claudia never was a match for her daughter.’ He caught himself in the act of wanting to talk more about the destructive marriage that had made him the cynical man he was today. How had that happened?

  ‘What did she want?’ Lesley eventually asked.

  ‘Rachel has been staying with her for the past four weeks. Pretty much as soon as her school ended, she decided that she wanted to go over there. She doesn’t know a great deal of people around here and only a handful in London. The down side of a boarding school out in the country, I suppose.’ He sighed heavily and tipped the remainder of his drink down before resting the empty glass on the table and staring at it in brooding silence.

  ‘Yes,’ Lesley contributed vaguely. ‘It must be difficult.’

  ‘At any rate, the upshot appears to be that my daughter is refusing to return to the UK.’

  Lesley’s mouth fell open and Alessio smiled crookedly at her. ‘She’s refusing to speak to me on the telephone. She’s dug her heels in and has decided to set up camp with Claudia and, Claudia being Claudia, she lacks the strength to stand up to my daughter.’

  ‘You must be a little put out.’

  ‘That’s the understatement of the hour.’ He stood up and signalled to her that they should start preparing something to eat. He needed to move around. For a small window, he had been so preoccupied with her, with arriving back and surprising her in the swimming pool, that he had actually put the gravity of the situation to the back of his mind, but now it had returned in full force.

  Strangely, he was thankful that Lesley was there.

  As if knowing that he would return to the topic in his own time, Lesley began preparing their meal. She had earlier piled all the ingredients she would need on the counter and now she began chopping mushrooms, tomatoes, onions and garlic.

  For once, his silence didn’t send her into instant meltdown. Rather, she began chatting easily and pleasantly. She told him about her lack of cooking experience. She joked that her brothers were all better cooks than she was and that two of them had even offered to show her the basics. She could sense him begin to unwind, even though she wasn’t looking at him at all and he wasn’t saying anything, just listening to her rabbit on aimlessly about nothing in particular.

  It was soothing, Alessio thought as he watched her prepare the vegetables slowly and with the painstaking care of someone who wasn’t comfortable in the arena of the kitchen.

  Nor was he feeling trapped at the thought of a woman busying herself in his kitchen. He cleared as she cooked. It was a picture-perfect snapshot of just the sort of domesticity he avoided at all costs.

  ‘So...’ They were sitting at the kitchen table with bowls of pasta in front of them. She had maintained a steady flow of non-threatening conversation, and it had been surprisingly easy, considering she was always a bundle of nervous tension whenever she was in his presence. ‘When you say that Rachel is digging her heels in and doesn’t want to return to the UK, are you saying for ever, or just for the remainder of the summer holidays?’

  ‘I’m saying that she’s decided that she hates it over here and doesn’t want to return at all.’

  ‘And your mother-in-law can’t talk her out of that?’

  ‘Claudia has always been the pushover in the family. Between her bullying husband and Bianca, she was the one who got dragged into their plot and now, in this situation, well, it’s probably a mixture of not wanting to hurt or offend her only grandchild and wanting to go down the path of least resistance.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about that?’

  ‘Well, there’s simply no question of Rachel staying out there and going to school.’ He pushed his empty plate to one side and sat back to look at her. ‘I could have waited until tomorrow to come back here and tell you this but...’

  ‘But...?’ Lesley rested her chin in the palm of her hand and looked at him. The kitchen lights hadn’t been switched on. It had still been bright when they had started preparing dinner, but the sun had suddenly faded, giving way to a violet twilight that cast shadows and angles across his face.

  ‘I have a favour to ask of you.’

  ‘What is it?’ Lesley asked cautiously. She began standing to clear the table and he circled her wrist with his hand.

  ‘Sit. Tidying can come later, or not at all. Violet will do it in the morning. I need to ask you something and I will need your undivided attention when I do so.’

  She subsided back into the chair, heart beating madly.

  ‘I want you to accompany me to Italy,’ Alessio said heavily. ‘It’s a big ask, I know, but my fear is that, short of dragging Rachel to the plane and forcibly strapping her to the seat, she will simply refuse to listen to a word I have to say.’

  ‘But I don’t even know your daughter, Alessio!’

  ‘If I cannot persuade my daughter to return to the UK, this will spell the end of any chance of a relationship I will ever have with her.’ He rubbed his eyes wearily and then leaned back and stared blankly up at the ceiling.

  Lesley’s heart went out to him. Was that how it would be? Most likely. And yet...

  ‘There’s something you should see.’ She stood up and went to the folder which she had brought down with her. This was the point at which she should now point out that she had gathered as much information as she could and it was up to him to do what needed to be done. In the end, it had been fiddly, but not impossible.

  ‘You’ve found something?’ Alessio was suddenly alert. He sat forward and pulled his chair towards her as she began smoothing out the various bits of paper she had found and the pages she had printed out over the past couple of days she had been at the house.

  She had only given him a rough, skeleton idea of her findings before, not wanting to build any pictures that might be incorrect.

  ‘I collated all of this and, well, okay, so I told you that I didn’t think that this had anything to do with your wife...’

  ‘Ex-wife.’

  ‘Ex-wife. Well, I was right. I managed to tra
ce our friend. He jumped around a bit, used a few different Internet cafés to cover his tracks, but the cafés, as I told you, were all in the vicinity of your daughter’s school. It took a bit of time, but I eventually identified the one he used most frequently. Most importantly, though, in one of the very early emails—one of the emails you never identified as coming from him—he used his own computer. It was a little bit tougher than I thought but I got through to the identity of the person.’

  Alessio was listening intently. ‘You know who he is?’

  ‘It would have been a bit more difficult to piece together conclusively if I hadn’t discovered those very early emails when he’d obviously just been testing the ground. They were very innocuous, which is why he probably thought that they would have been deleted. I guess he didn’t figure that they would still be uncovered and brought out of hiding.’ She shoved the stack of printed emails across to Alessio and watched as he read them one by one. She had highlighted important bits, phrases, certain ways of saying things that pointed to the same writer behind them.

  ‘You’re brilliant.’

  Lesley flushed with pleasure. ‘I was only doing what you paid me to do.’

  ‘So, build me the picture,’ he said softly.

  She did and, as she did so, she watched his expression darken and change.

  ‘So now you pretty much have the complete story,’ she finished. ‘I gathered all this so that I could actually present it to you tomorrow when you returned. I was going to tell you that there’s really nothing left for me to do now.’

  ‘I still want you to come with me to Italy.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Lesley said quickly, with a note of desperation in her voice.

  ‘You’ve sorted all of this out, but there is still the problem of my daughter. Bringing her back over here with this information, it’s going to be even more difficult.’

  That was something Lesley had not taken into account when she had worked out her plan to present him with her findings and leave while common sense and her instinct for self-preservation were still intact.