‘I realise that. What was he like?’ He was curious. He found that he wanted to know. This wasn’t polite conversation, although the casual tone of his voice gave nothing away.
The last thing Chase wanted to do was to talk about Shaun but she had a sneaking suspicion that, if she backed away from the subject, it would arouse his interest even further. ‘We met when we were young. I was only fifteen. Just. We met at the local disco.’
‘Cosy. And was it love at first sight?’
‘We found that we had a lot in common.’
‘Always a good start to a healthy relationship. Even at the ripe old age of fifteen. Just.’ He found that he didn’t care for the idea of them having a lot in common at whatever the hell age they had happened to meet. Nor had he intended to get wrapped up in pointless conversations about the thug who had been lurking behind the scenes when she had taken him for a ride and played him for a fool.
‘So they say,’ Chase murmured tonelessly.
‘I take it he wasn’t sharp enough to make it to university?’
‘Shaun was plenty sharp.’ She couldn’t help the bitterness that had crept into her voice but she kept it at bay. Talking about Shaun would inevitably lead to all sorts of questions about the sort of world she had really come from. Chase found that she had moved on from the fear of him discovering the truth about her and eking out some kind of belated revenge by spilling the beans to her work colleagues. She honestly couldn’t see him doing that.
No, what she feared—and she hated herself for this—was to have him walk away in disgust at the lies she had told, at the person she really was and the life she had really led. His pedigree was impeccable and although she knew that they would be the archetypal doomed lovers—in it for the wrong reasons but driven to fulfil their destiny—she still found that she wanted him to believe her to be the sassy, smart lawyer with the perfectly ordinary background when they parted company.
Wasn’t that to be expected? What if she bumped into him at a later date? What if he met some of the partners in her law firm and started talking about her? If he knew the truth about her, then wasn’t it likely that it would slip out in conversation? And, even if nothing did slip out, surely he would never be able to disguise the contempt in his voice at the mention of her name?
‘Sharp as in...?’
She snapped out of her daydreaming to find his eyes narrowed on her. ‘Streetwise; sharp as in streetwise.’
‘And did your streetwise late husband have a job?’ He thought back to the picture she had shown him all those years ago.
‘He...worked in transport but he...he lost his job shortly before the accident. I’d bought him that motorbike. I’d been putting aside some money and I wanted to celebrate getting my first promotion...’
‘So you celebrated by buying him a motorbike. Shouldn’t he have been the one doing the buying to congratulate you? Or am I just thinking like a dinosaur again?’
‘Alessandro, please, let’s move on from this. I honestly don’t want to talk about Shaun. Tell me more about here. It’s amazing to think that there can be snow on mountaintops that are just a short distance from the Med...’
Alessandro heard the soft plea in her voice. ‘Why did you give me a second look if you were so clearly head over heels in love with your husband?’
‘I...I’m sorry. I made a mistake.’
‘Which doesn’t answer my question.’ He raked his hand impatiently though his hair and sat back with his eyes closed for a few seconds. ‘Scrap that. Not sure I could stomach whatever fairy stories you decide to come out with.’
‘Alessandro...’
He inclined his head towards her and linked his fingers loosely in his lap. She had the face of an angel, the body of a siren and he was furious with himself for wanting to probe deeper. He pointed to a spot behind her as the car turned left. ‘My house.’
Chase turned just in time to glimpse a sand-coloured mansion rising up from the cliffs, overlooking the placid turquoise sea with a backdrop of woods of chestnut trees. She forgot everything and her mouth dropped open.
‘I have two housekeepers who live in, make sure everything is ticking over. Occasionally, it’s used by some of my employees, a little bonus if they do well. The promise of an all-expenses-paid long weekend here generates a lot of healthy competition, and it does no harm for the place to get an airing now and again.’
‘It’s huge. What about family members?’
‘Oh, completely off-limits to them. My parents ensured their place in the pecking order as the black sheep of the family and I’ve inherited their generous legacy. I have little contact with my extended family.
‘My parents were both only children, so there are strangely few people who bear a belated grudge towards me. I see a couple of slightly less distant relatives now and again when I’m in Milan; a few more work in some of my associated companies, my way of making amends for my parents’ appallingly hedonistic behaviour which was, if all accounts are to be believed, ruinous to both family names.’
He edged towards her and pointed. ‘You can’t see it, but there’s a winding path that leads down to a private cove at the bottom of the cliff face. Excellent bathing. Once upon a time, fishing used to be big here. Not so much any more. Tourism pays better, it would seem. The wealthy find the sight of yachts far more uplifting than the reality of fishing boats.’
‘What a shame you don’t get here often,’ Chase said. When he was like this—charming, informative, his voice as deep and as dark as the most pure, rich, velvety chocolate—she could forget everything. She could lapse back to the past where dangerous, taboo emotions still held a certain innocence, a time when he didn’t hate her. ‘Don’t you sometimes long to have someone to share this with?’
‘Oh, but isn’t that what I’m doing now?’ Alessandro drawled. ‘Admittedly, only for a few days, and with a woman who is destined never to return, but it’ll do for the moment.’
He reached across, pulling her towards him. ‘I’ve given my loyal housekeepers time off,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘It’s hot here. I thought it might be nice for us to live as naturists for a few days. Why bother with clothes? I want to be able to touch you anywhere...at any time... And you’ll discover that my house is perfect for ensuring one hundred per cent privacy. I’ll make you thaw, my sweet; on that count, you can trust me...’
Chase was still smarting from the insistent stab of hurt his words had generated. Destined never to return.
They approached the sprawling villa through wrought-iron gates which had been flung open, revealing perfectly groomed lawns stretching out on either side of the gravel drive.
‘How many people does it take to look after these gardens?’ She shouldn’t have been, but she was still shocked by the splendour.
‘A small army,’ Alessandro admitted drily. ‘I’m single-handedly trying to do my bit to keep the economy going. There’s a very private pool to the side of the house. I have vague memories of my parents throwing some extremely wild parties there.’
‘I had no idea the house belonged to them.’ Chase turned to look at him and their eyes tangled. Instantly, she could feel her breasts begin to ache in expectation of his caresses. With Shaun, she had become conditioned to viewing sex as something that had to be done. But when she had lain next to Alessandro her body had been fired up in a way that was new and, whilst they hadn’t made love, it now thrummed at the prospect of being touched by him. It was a heady, exciting feeling and she was sure that it was all wrapped up in the culmination of what had begun all that time ago, what had never come to fruition.
‘It was their pride and joy. The one thing they both hung on to.’
‘And you kept it for sentimental reasons?’
‘I never do anything for sentimental reasons. It’s a good, appreciating asset.’
It was dreamy.
If she had been able to conceive of a place like this, she might have been more elaborate in her teenage fantasies about perfect lifestyles instead of just settling for average. Then she decided that it was just as well, because how much more awkward would life have been now had her naïve, happily married parents in their two-up two-down been turned into minor landed gentry living in a small castle?
They were greeted by an elderly housekeeper and her husband who had stayed on to welcome Alessandro, tugging him into the kitchen so that they could show him the freezer full of food that had been prepared and the well-stocked larder. He managed to shoo them away after an hour and they departed wreathed in smiles.
‘They’ve been with me for longer than I care to think. As you know, my parents were firm believers in handing over care of their offspring to hired help,’ he told her as he played tour guide, taking her from room to room. He absently thought how many of those little details of his past she had been privy to, courtesy of that small window in his life during which his self-control had gone on holiday.
‘I’m treating them to a well-deserved rest in a destination of their choosing, which as it turns out happens to be France, where their eldest is a dentist. I tried to persuade them into somewhere a little further afield but they weren’t having it. Mauritius, apparently, is no competition for two hyper grandchildren.’
Chase’s heart fluttered. This was how he had managed to get under her skin. This was why she never wanted to have him learn the truth about her. This was why the thought of what he could do to balance the scales of justice should he want to avenge past wrongs was no longer the only consideration. Underneath his ruthlessly cold exterior were these flashes of genuine thoughtfulness that kept reminding her of why she had risked so much just talking to him eight years ago; that ambushed all her good intentions to keep her distance. Whenever he made her laugh, her defences slipped just a little bit more.
This was a dangerous game because she would end up being hurt. She would end up losing her hard-won self-control. She would end up with someone else having power over her, someone who didn’t care about her, who wanted her for all the wrong reasons. Maybe she had already ended up there.
She had walked into this with her eyes wide open but now she felt as though she had walked straight into a trap, having stupidly failed to take account of its power for destruction.
The whole sex thing... Yes, she had wanted it, had craved it, but she had been scared because of past experience and he had respected her when she had turned into a block of ice in his arms. That consideration he had shown her, as it turned out, was just something else that had nibbled away at the edges of her defences so that what had once been a fortress, protecting her from the slings and arrows of emotional involvement with the human race, was beginning to resemble a broken down old castle open to all the elements.
She felt exposed in a way she never had in her life before. She felt as she had eight years ago: like a woman falling in love.
‘You’ve stopped using rapturous superlatives to describe my house.’
Chase blinked and realised that he was several metres ahead of her because she had stopped dead in her tracks. Her brain had been so wrapped up contemplating the horror of falling for this guy again that it hadn’t had any room left to give messages to her legs to keep moving.
‘I think I may have run out of them.’ She blinked and took in the raw sexuality of the man lounging in front of her with that killer half-smile on his lips.
‘Where is this famous pool you’ve been bragging about?’ Her voice was normal but her brain was malfunctioning.
‘I never brag.’ Again that smile that hurled her back in time. He took her hand to lead her through the house, out to the kitchen and towards the sea-facing side of the house, which took her breath away. ‘Except in this one instance.’
He gestured to the open view as though he owned it and then relaxed back to look at her response. He had never given a damn what women thought of his opulent lifestyle and was indifferent to their gasps of awe whenever they stepped foot into his house in London. Yet he rather enjoyed the way her mouth fell open as she stepped out to stand next to him.
The house looked down to the sea that was turquoise and as still as a lake. The garden on this side was just a strip of green, broken by distinctive Italian palm trees and bordered by thick shrubbery. To one side a gate announced the winding stone steps, which Chase imagined led to the cove he had told her about.
This was her dream come true. She had somehow been catapulted into the prints she had hung on her walls. The romance which had not been part of the plan clung to her in a miasma, giving her all sorts of stupid illusions that somehow what they had might be the beginning of something real. It was time to start unravelling that piece of fiction.
‘Are you sure it’s completely deserted here?’ She squinted against the sun to look up at him, shielding her eyes with one hand.
Alessandro looked down at her. She was in a flimsy sleeveless dress which was far too baggy for his liking but which, on the upside, provided terrific fodder for his imagination. ‘As a ghost town. Why?’
‘Because I think we should explore that pool area you were bragging to me about... Oh yes, I forgot: you never brag...’ Her hand fluttered provocatively to the small top button of the dress. ‘It’s so warm. I think I might need to strip off, have a dip in that pool of yours, the one—’
‘I keep bragging to you about even though I never brag?’ He laughed under his breath and felt the bulge in his pants as that part of his body which had been in charge of his brain ever since she had reappeared to smash into his ordered existence rose to immediate attention.
He linked his fingers through hers and began leading her across the lawn, swerving to the side of the house where exuberant flora, lemon trees, shrubs sprouting with brightly coloured flowers and hydrangea enclosed an exquisite infinity pool. The air was aromatic.
‘I feel as though I’ve stepped into a travel brochure.’
Alessandro frowned. A nagging thought occurred to him. Had he seen those prints on the walls and brought her here so that he could deliver her those dreams of sun, sea and sand that had clearly never been realised? Had that been some weird, unconscious motivation behind his invitation to bring her to his house? He irritably swept aside a suspicion with which he was not comfortable.
‘You said you were hot...?’
‘So I did.’ She would have liked to enjoy the scenery a bit more. Well, a lot more. But business was business, wasn’t it? The longer this game between them carried on, the deeper her scars would be when they parted company, when he had got what he wanted. She undid the small buttons of the dress and it fell to the ground, pooling at her feet.
Alessandro remained where he was, looking at her with lazy, predatory satisfaction. ‘Will this be a full striptease?’
‘I want you, Alessandro...’ And I love you. I loved you once and I think it would be very easy to love you again. She schooled her features to conceal the chaos of her thoughts. ‘And I think we’ve both waited long enough...’ She walked towards him, reaching behind her as she did so to unhook her bra, which she tossed onto one of the low, wooden sun loungers, never taking her eyes off his face.
Alessandro found that he could barely control his breathing. The moment was electric. His jaw clenched when she was finally standing in front of him and he had to steel himself against an unruly, premature overreaction as she slipped out of her panties so that she was now completely naked.
‘The sun’s pretty fierce...’ He curved his hand around her waist, idly caressing it and pulling her against him at the same time. ‘And you’re fair. Any doctor would tell you that you need to lather yourself in sunblock...’ He kissed her slowly, tugging her bottom lip with his teeth, gently tasting her mouth, taking his time as their tongues melded, even though it was agony trying to keep his libido in check.
‘So what do you want to do about it?’ She wrapped her arms around his neck and flung her head back with a sigh as his lips traced a path along the slender column of her neck. She was wet and ready for him. She reached to fumble with the button of his trousers and he stayed her hand.
‘One good striptease deserves another,’ he murmured in a sexy, shaky undertone that sent her blood pressure skyrocketing. ‘But first...’
He sauntered towards what she now saw was a vine-covered pool house and emerged a couple of minutes later with towels and various creams. He dumped them on one of the vacant loungers and she watched, heart beating wildly, as he did what she had done only moments before.
His shirt was tossed to join hers and he kept his eyes on her as he walked slowly towards her. Every inch that brought him closer did crazier things to her nervous system. Her breath caught in her throat as he removed his trousers, then, when she felt that swooning was a real possibility, the final item of clothing joined the rest and he was as naked as she was, his proud, impressive erection proclaiming that he was as turned on as her.
When he was inches away from her, she reached down and firmly circled it with her hand.
‘Three days ago you were as tense as a violin string...’ He led her towards one of the loungers which was shaded by an overhanging tree and he neatly spread one of the towels on it.
Three days ago, she thought, I had no idea that my body could feel like this; three days ago it started to come alive. I may have been apprehensive then at what I was feeling but I’m not apprehensive now...
‘I’m not now,’ she said huskily.
‘Then lie down. I’m going to put sun cream on you and it’ll be the best foreplay you’ve ever experienced...’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘IT MIGHT BE a little cold,’ Alessandro murmured. He had to make sure to keep his eyes away from her breasts, away from her flat stomach, away from the soft, downy hair that lightly covered the triangular apex between her thighs. He would save himself. ‘I keep the pool house air-conditioned. Lie on your stomach...’
Enthralled by Moretti Page 11