‘I didn’t force your hand,’ Alessio said comfortably.
‘You went into the office and talked to my boss.’
‘I just wanted to point out the world of opportunity lying at his feet if he could see his way to releasing you for one week to accompany me to Italy.’
‘I dread to think what the office grapevine is going to make of this situation.’
‘Do you care what anyone thinks?’ He leant against the window so that he could direct one hundred per cent of his undivided attention on her.
‘Of course I do!’ Lesley blushed because she knew that, whilst she might give the impression of being strong, sassy and outspoken, she still had a basic need to be liked and accepted. She just wasn’t always good at showing that side of herself. In fact, she was uncomfortably aware of the fact that, whilst Alessio might have shown her more of himself than he might have liked, she had likewise done the same.
He would not know it, but against all odds she had allowed herself to walk into unchartered territory, to have a completely new experience with a man knowing that he was not the right man for her.
‘Relax and enjoy the ride,’ he murmured.
‘I’m not going to enjoy confronting your daughter with all the information we’ve managed to uncover. She’s going to know that I went through her belongings.’
‘If Rachel had wanted to keep her private life private, then she should have destroyed all the incriminating evidence. The fact is that she’s still a child and she has no vote when it comes to us doing what was necessary to protect her.’
‘She may not see it quite like that.’
‘She will have to make a very big effort to, in that case.’
Lesley sighed and leaned back into the seat with her eyes shut. What Alessio did with his daughter was really none of her business. Yes, she’d been involved in bringing the situation to light, but its solutions and whatever repercussions followed would be a continuing saga she would leave behind. She would return to the blessed safety of what she knew and the family story of Alessio and his daughter would remain a mystery to her for ever.
So there was no need to feel any compunction about just switching off.
Yet she had to bite back the temptation to tell him what she thought, even though she knew that he would have every right to dismiss whatever advice she had to offer about the peculiarity of their relationship, if a ‘relationship’ was what it could be called. She was his lover, a woman who probably knew far too much about his life for his liking. She had been paid to investigate a personal problem, yet had no right to have any discussions about that problem, even though they were sleeping together.
In a normal relationship, she should have felt free to speak her mind, but this was not a normal relationship, was it? For either of them. She had sacrificed her feminist principles for sex and she still couldn’t understand herself, nor could she understand how it was that she felt no regrets.
In fact, when he looked at her the way he was looking at her right now, all she felt was a dizzying need to have him take her.
If only he could see into her mind and unravel all her doubts and uncertainties. Thank goodness he couldn’t. As far as he was concerned, she was a tough career woman with as little desire for a long-term relationship as him. They had both stepped out of the box, drawn to each other by a combination of proximity and the pull of novelty.
‘You’re thinking,’ Alessio said drily. ‘Why don’t you spit it out and then we can get it out of the way?’
‘Get what out of the way?’
‘Whatever disagreements you have about the way I intend to handle this situation.’
‘You hate it when I tell you what I think,’ Lesley said with asperity. Alessio shrugged and continued looking at her in the way that made her toes curl and her mouth run dry.
‘And I don’t like it when I can see you thinking but you’re saying nothing. “Between a rock and a hard place” comes to mind.’ He was amazed at how easily he had adapted to her outspoken approach. His immediate instinct now was not to shove her back behind his boundary lines and remind her about overstepping the mark.
‘I just don’t think you should confront Rachel and demand to know what the hell is going on.’ She shifted in the big seat and turned so that she was completely facing him.
The plane was beginning to taxi in preparation for taking off, and she fell silent for a short while as the usual canned talk was given about safety exits, but as soon as they were airborne she looked at him worriedly once again.
‘It’s hard to know how to get answers if you don’t ask for them,’ he pointed out.
‘We know the situation.’
‘And I want to know how it got to where it finally got. It’s one thing knowing the outcome but I don’t intend to let history repeat itself.’
‘You might want to try a little sympathy.’
Alessio snorted.
‘You said yourself that she’s just a kid,’ Lesley reminded him gently.
‘You could always spare me the horror of making a mess of things by talking to Rachel yourself,’ he said.
‘She’s not my daughter.’
‘Then allow me to work this one out myself.’ But he knew that she was right. There was no tactful way of asking the questions he would have to ask, and if his daughter disliked him now then she was about to dislike him a whole lot more when he was finished talking to her.
Of course, there were those photos, cuttings of him—some indication, as Lesley had said, that she wasn’t completely indifferent to the fact that he was her father.
But would that be enough to take them past this little crisis? Unlikely. Especially when she discovered that the photos and cuttings had been salvaged in an undercover operation.
‘Okay.’
Alessio had looked away, out through the window to the dense bank of cloud over which they were flying. Now, he turned to Lesley with a frown.
‘Okay. I’ll talk to Rachel if you like,’ she said on a reluctant sigh.
‘Why would you do that?’
Why would she? Because she couldn’t bear to see him looking the way he was looking now, with the hopeless expression of someone staring defeat in the face.
And why did she care? she asked herself. But she shied away from trying to find an answer to that.
‘Because I’m on the outside of this mess. If she directs all her teenage anger at me, then by the time she gets to you some of it may have diffused.’
‘And the likelihood of that is...?’ But he was touched at her generosity of spirit.
‘Not good odds,’ Lesley conceded. ‘But worth a try, don’t you think?’ He was staring at her with an expression of intense curiosity and she continued quickly, before he could interrupt with the most obvious question: why? A question to which she had no answer. ‘Besides, I’m good at mediating. I got a lot of practice at doing that when I was growing up. When there are six kids in a family, a dad worked off his feet, and five of those six are boys, there’s always lots of opportunity to practise mediation skills.’
But just no opportunity to practise being a girl. And that was why she was the way she was now: hesitant in relationships; self-conscious about whether she had what it took to make any relationship last; willing not to get into the water at all rather than diving in and finding herself out of her depth and unable to cope.
Only since Alessio had appeared on the scene had she really seen the pattern in her behaviour, the way she kept guys, smiling, at arm’s length.
He was so dramatically different from any man she had ever been remotely drawn to that it had been easy to pinpoint her own lack of self-confidence. She was a clever career woman with a bright life ahead of her and yet that sinfully beautiful face had reduced all those achievements to rubble.
She had looked at him and returned to her teenage years when she had simply not known how to approach a boy because she had had no idea what they were looking for.
For her, Alessio Baldini was no
t the obvious choice when it came to picking a guy to sleep with, yet sleep with him she had, and she was glad that she had done so. She had broken through the glass barrier that had stood between her and the opposite sex. It was strange, but he had given her confidence she hadn’t really even known she had needed.
‘And mediation skills are so important when one is growing up,’ Alessio murmured.
Basking in her new-found revelations, Lesley smiled. ‘No, they’re not,’ she admitted with more candour than she’d ever done to anyone in her life before. ‘In fact, I can’t think of any skill a teenage girl has less use for than mediation skills,’ she mused. ‘But I had plenty of that.’ She leaned back and half-closed her eyes. When she next spoke it was almost as though she was talking with no audience listening to what was being said.
‘My mum died when I was so young, I barely remember her. I mean, Dad always told us about her, what she was like and such, and there were pictures of her everywhere. But the truth is, I don’t have any memories of her—of doing anything with her, if you see what I mean.’
She glanced sideways at him and he nodded. He had always fancied himself as the sort of man who would be completely at sea when it came to listening to women pour their hearts out, hence it was a tendency that he had strenuously discouraged.
Now, though, he was drawn to what she was saying and by the faraway, pensive expression on her face.
‘I never thought that I missed having a mother. I never knew what it was like to have one and my dad was always good enough for me. But I can see now that growing up in a male-only family might have given me confidence with the opposite sex but only when it came to things like work and study. I was encouraged to be as good as they were, and I think I succeeded, but I wasn’t taught, well...’
‘How to wear make-up and shop for dresses?’
‘Sounds crazy but I do think girls need to be taught stuff like that.’ She looked at him gravely. ‘I can see that it’s easy to have bags of confidence in one area and not much in another,’ she said with a rueful shake of her head. ‘When it came to the whole game-playing, sexual attraction thing, I don’t think I’ve ever had loads of confidence.’
‘And now?’
‘I feel I have, so I guess I should say thank you.’
‘Thank you? What are you thanking me for?’
‘For encouraging me to step out of the box,’ Lesley told him with that blend of frankness and disingenuousness which he found so appealing.
Alessio was momentarily distracted from the headache awaiting him in Italy. He had no idea where she was going with this but it had all the feel of a conversation heading down a road he would rather not explore.
‘Always happy to oblige,’ he said vaguely. ‘I hope you’ve packed light clothes. The heat in Italy is quite different from the heat in England.’
‘If I hadn’t taken on this job, there’s not a chance in the world that I would ever have met you.’
‘That’s true enough.’
‘Not only do we not move in the same circles, we have no interests in common whatsoever.’
Alessio was vaguely indignant at what he thought might be an insult in disguise. Was she comparing him to the ‘soul mate’ guy she had yet to meet, the touchy-feely one with the artistic side and a love of all things natural?
‘And if we had ever met, at a social do or something like that, I would never have had the confidence to approach you.’
‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this.’
‘Here’s what I’m saying, Alessio. I feel as though I’ve taken huge strides in gaining self-confidence in certain areas and it’s thanks in some measure to you. I could say that I’m going to be a completely different person when I get back to the UK and start dating again.’
Alessio could not believe what he was hearing. He had no idea where this conversation had come from and he was enraged that she could sit there, his lover, and talk about going back on the dating scene!
‘The dating scene.’
‘Is this conversation becoming a little too deep for you?’ Lesley asked with a grin. ‘I know you don’t do deep when it comes to women and conversations.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘Well, you’ve already told me that you don’t like encouraging them to get behind a stove and start cooking a meal for you, just in case they think, I don’t know, they have somehow managed to get a foot through the door. So I’m guessing that meaningful conversations are probably on the banned list as well.’
They were. It was true. He had never enjoyed long, emotional conversations which, from experience, always ended up in the same place—invitations to meet the parents, questions about commitment and where the relationship was heading.
In fact, the second that type of conversation began rearing its head, he usually felt a pressing need to end the relationship. He had been coerced into one marriage and he had made a vow never to let himself be railroaded into another similar mistake, however tempting the woman in question might be.
He looked into her astute, brown eyes and scowled. ‘I may not be looking for someone to walk down the aisle with, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not prepared to have meaningful discussions with women. I’m also insulted,’ he was driven to continue, ‘That I’ve been used as some kind of trial run for the real thing.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lesley was feeling good. The vague unease that had been plaguing her ever since she had recognised how affected she was by Alessio had been boxed away with an explanation that made sense.
Sleeping with him had opened her eyes to fears and doubts she had been harbouring for years. She felt that she had buried a lack of self-confidence in her own sexuality under the guise of academic success and then, later on, success in her career. She had dressed in ways that didn’t enhance her own femininity because she had always feared that she lacked what it took.
But then she had slept with him, slept with a man who was way out of her league, had been wanted and desired by him, and made to feel proud of the way she looked.
Was it any wonder that he had such a dramatic effect on her? It was a case of lust mixed up with a hundred other things.
But the bottom line was that he was no more than a learning curve for her. When she thought about it like that, it made perfect sense. It also released her from the disturbing suspicion that she was way too deep in a non-relationship that was going nowhere, a relationship that meant far more to her than it did to him.
Learning curves provided lessons and, once those lessons had been learnt, it was always easy to move on.
Learning curves didn’t result in broken hearts.
She breathed in quickly and shakily. ‘Well?’ she flung at him, while her mind continued to chew over the notion that her involvement with him had been fast and hard. She had been catapulted into a world far removed from hers, thrown into the company of a man who was very, very different from the sort of men she was used to, and certainly worlds apart from the sort of man she would ever have expected herself to be attracted to.
But common sense had been no match for the power of his appeal and now here she was.
When she thought about never seeing him again, she felt faintly, sickeningly panicked.
What did that mean? Her thoughts became muddled when she tried to work her way through what suddenly seemed a dangerous, uncertain quagmire.
‘I mean that you used me,’ Alessio said bluntly. ‘I don’t like being used. And I don’t appreciate you talking about jumping back into the dating scene, not when we’re still lovers. I expect the women I sleep with to only have eyes for me.’
The unbridled arrogance of that statement, which was so fundamentally Alessio, brought a reluctant smile to her lips.
She had meant it when she had told him that under normal circumstances they would never have met. Their paths simply wouldn’t have crossed. He didn’t mix in the same circles as she did. And, even if by some freak chance they had met, they would have looked at
one another and quickly looked away.
She would have seen a cold, wealthy, arrogant cardboard cut-out and he would have seen, well, a woman who was nothing like the sort of women he went out with and therefore she’d have been invisible. But the circumstances that had brought them together had uniquely provided them with a different insight into one another.
She had seen beneath the veneer to the three-dimensional man and he had seen through the sassy, liberal-minded, outspoken woman in charge of her life to the uncertain, insecure girl.
She was smart enough to realise, however, that that changed nothing. He was and always would be uninterested in any relationship that demanded longevity. He was shaped by his past and his main focus now was his daughter and trying to resolve the difficult situation that had arisen there. He might have slept with her because she was so different from what he was used to and because she was there, ready and willing but, whereas he had fundamentally reached deep and changed her, she hadn’t done likewise with him.
‘You’re smiling.’ Alessio was reluctant to abandon the conversation. When, he thought, was this dive back into the dating scene going to begin? Had she put time limits on what they had? Wasn’t he usually the one to do that?
‘I don’t want to argue with you.’ Lesley kept that smile pinned to her face. ‘Who will you introduce me as when we get to Italy?’
‘I haven’t given it any thought. Where is all this hectic dating going to take place?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You can’t start conversations you don’t intend to finish. So, where will you be going to meet Mr Right? I’m taking it you intend to start hunting when we return to England, or will you be looking around Italy for any suitable candidates?’
‘Are you upset because I said what I said?’
‘Why would I be upset?’
‘I have no idea,’ Lesley said as flippantly as she could. ‘Because we both know that what we have isn’t going to last.’ She allowed just a fraction of a second in which he could have contradicted her, but of course he said nothing, and that hurt and reinforced for her the position she held in his life. ‘And of course I’m not going to be looking around Italy for suitable candidates. I haven’t forgotten why I’ll be there in the first place.’
THE UNCOMPROMISING ITALIAN Page 11
