He’d played with her the way a cat played with a mouse—toying with her to prove a point.
He’d proved it.
For the first time ever she had a driving need to talk to her mother—to actually talk to her about her feelings.
Nothing had gone according to plan, and that was something Shirley Watson would understand. None of her life had gone according to plan. She had lurched from one guy to another in search of love. And she, Kate, had tried so hard to make sure she went in the opposite direction to her mother.
She had formulated her Plan A and had been determined to stick to it. Now look at her! Whatever plan she had ended up on, it certainly wasn’t Plan A. She wasn’t even sure it was Plan B.
She dialled her mother’s number and burst into tears at the sound of her mother’s voice.
‘Mum,’ she finally hiccupped, ‘I’ve made such a mess of things... I’ve just gone and done the stupidest thing... I’ve fallen in love with the wrong man...’
‘Oh, Katie. It’s not the end of the world... You’re crying, my darling. Please don’t cry. You’re such a strong young woman. What can I say? I’ve always known that you disapproved of my lifestyle, but it’s better to have fallen in love with the wrong man than to never know what it is to fall in love. Come down to Cornwall...spend a few days. Sea air is very good for clearing the head...’
* * *
There was no Red-Hot Rebecca spending the night for fun, games and a future of intellectual stimulation. She had been permanently dispatched.
Alessandro had spent the past hour wandering from room to room in his enormous house, unable to settle down. Work was no distraction from his thoughts, and right up there when it came to those thoughts was: Who the hell was her date and where the hell was she going to be spending the weekend?
And hard on the heels of that thought was another disturbing one... Why did he care? Why did it make him feel slightly sick whenever he thought of her with another man?
She still wanted him, but having proved that left him empty. She might burn for him but she had run away...hadn’t looked back.
And it wasn’t in him to chase a woman. He had never done that and never would. Chasing implied a lack of control, and he only had to look at his parents to see where that led. Their crazy love had resulted in an utter lack of control. They were so similar that they couldn’t help but egg each other on in their harebrained antics. For them, the rest of the world didn’t really exist—and that was a dangerous place for them to occupy.
That said, he spent the evening on his own, drinking too much and then suffering the after-effects with a sleepless night and a headache that kept him in bed until eight the following morning.
Where could she possibly be going for a weekend with a guy she’d only just met? Was the woman completely off her head? Had she flung herself into some kind of random affair with a man who could turn out to be anybody? Wasn’t she aware that that was a dangerous game to play?
And how could she get involved with someone else when she was still wrapped up in him?
He couldn’t. He’d tried, but he hadn’t been able to.
Kate might think that she was a tough, sassy career woman but she wasn’t. Dig a little and what you found was someone who was vulnerable—someone who was waiting to be taken advantage of, someone who wouldn’t be able to spot danger if it approached ringing bells and announcing itself through a megaphone.
She had been as safe as houses with him, but who knew what she would find with some man she had probably picked up in a bar somewhere? Because sure as hell she didn’t keep a little black book full of useful rainy-day numbers. Whoever this mystery guy was, she would have found him in just the sort of place where predators waited for gullible single girls to appear. A sexy-as-hell single girl would be like manna from heaven.
She might think that she was forging ahead on some new, independent path, but she was too naive to realize that any path that involved sex would be littered with potholes and pitfalls for someone who still believed in fairy tales.
He didn’t think twice. He knew where she lived.
What harm was there in just going over? Making sure that she hadn’t found herself in some sort of perilous situation she couldn’t cope with? Or even some sort of fairly harmless situation she couldn’t cope with?
What was the big deal in being a guy who could see the bigger picture? He was magnanimous enough not to be churlish just because she had decided to move on with her life. Even though she still fancied him.
Besides, he was pretty sure he needed to go out to buy something anyway. Coffee... Newspapers...
This would be a multipurpose trip.
CHAPTER TEN
KATE HAD NEVER in a million years thought that her mother could be a source of comfort when it came to the whole big love thing. But Shirley Watson had risen to the occasion and surprised her. She was, as she had said with an uninhibited laugh, the queen of broken hearts.
‘But, really, my heart was only broken once,’ she had said. ‘And that was when your father left. I just needed to find my way via a lot of frogs to realize that I could never replace him. I had to look in different places for a different sort of man. But guess what? Even if I could have turned back time and saved myself the heartache of falling for a guy who would leave me, I would have said no. Because falling for your dad was the best bit of falling I ever did.’
Kate double-checked that everything in the house was as it should be and glanced down at the holdall in which New Kate had been packed. New Kate being the Kate who wore clothes that suited a girl her age instead of the clothes of someone three times her age.
Unfortunately Old Kate was not managing to keep pace, and Old Kate was the one who had fallen in love with the wrong man, who didn’t fit the pretty, carefree outfits, who still wanted to hide behind her armour of suits and flat shoes and high-necked blouses and baggy jackets.
She sighed and thought that there was no point in killing time. It was going to be a long trip—although her mother had told her that she intended shopping in Exeter, that she would get the train and meet her there, and then they could continue the remainder of the journey together. At least she wouldn’t be on the road alone for longer than three and a half hours, all being kind with the traffic.
It was just as well, because she felt exhausted.
How could he have just replaced her with someone else in such a short space of time? And how could he have done what he had—turned her on, made her remember what she didn’t want to remember?
Speculation took root and had a field day in her head.
Had Alessandro been seeing the lawyer before he had decided to indulge in a fling with her? Maybe they had had an argument. Two high-powered people...that would be fertile ground for all sorts of arguments. Perhaps their timetables had clashed. Perhaps he had wanted more.
Or maybe he had come to his senses and done the comparisons... An employee who believed in love was a waste of energy next to a lawyer who was heading in the same direction he was. They could make appointments to meet up and book dates in bed to accommodate their frantic timetables. For a man who had no heart that would be the ideal arrangement, and perhaps he had worked that out for himself.
Or maybe...
Maybe it was even simpler than that.
Maybe he had realized that he was way too good for the daughter of a cocktail waitress. The sex had been good...great...but it paid to pay attention to the detail, and one big detail was the ease with which he had accepted her decision to end things. If he had wanted her enough he would surely have put up a bit more of a fight... He had just been soothing his ego by proving that she still wanted him. If only he knew...
So, all in all, good riddance!
She pressed on the accelerator of her hire car and a glance at the dashboard showed her that she had been driving for over an hour. She had been operating on autopilot, barely noticing the motorway whizzing past.
The grey summer skies had finally cleared
and it was a beautiful morning. She turned the radio on, adjusted the channels until she found one that had suitably peppy driving music, and then resigned herself to the remainder of the journey being spent in a state of pointless introspection.
There were only so many distressing scenarios she could play over and over in her head, but she thought that she might quite like to wallow in them.
In fact she was sure that she could add to the tally, and thereby get even more depressed than she already was.
It was a little after one by the time she made it to Exeter, which was thick with traffic on this Saturday afternoon.
She had suggested that her mother live in Exeter when she had planned on making her big move to the coast. She had thought that her mother would find it impossible to live in the middle of nowhere, but she had been wrong.
Not only had her mother loved Cornwall from the very second she’d gone there, but she had thrived.
And for the first time she was realizing that there were other things about her mother she had maybe not quite appreciated.
True, Shirley Watson had flung herself headlong into love after love after love, with the desperation of a starving man trying to grab at food that was always just out of reach, but she had not become embittered.
When it came to parenting Kate had summed her up as fragile, but she had been strong enough to do a pretty good job as it turned out.
She, on the other hand, with all her preparations and her precautions, her wariness and her insistence on being able to control her choices, had been the one to end up making the biggest mistake of all in falling in love with Alessandro.
Kate turned the volume up, crawled through the outskirts of the city and after a lot of hunting, managed to locate a car park.
She’d managed to complete the entire journey without really being aware of her surroundings except to marvel at how light the traffic had been.
Forging her way through the crowded streets, she decided that that was probably because everyone had already descended on the city. It was a tourist hotspot and packed.
When she finally made it to the Cathedral square, she couldn’t help but notice all the loved-up young couples lazing in the sunshine.
Some people made smart choices.
She was hot and flustered when she spotted her mother, sitting in front of a glass of wine with a pot of tea next to it, as though the healthy beverage atoned for the slightly less healthy one.
Kate smiled.
Thank goodness she was out of London. The long drive had helped her put a lot into perspective—such as how you could think you knew someone only to find that you didn’t...not really. She was looking forward to getting to know her mother a whole lot better.
Over tea or wine or whatever...
* * *
Now that he knew where she had gone Alessandro slowed his pace, for the first time really questioning why he had made this trip, why he had followed her like a police officer hot on the trail of a wanted felon. He had arrived to see her driving off, had spotted the pull-along case—the same one she had brought with her to Toronto—and he had seen red.
Part of him had thought that all her talk about having a date and being booked up for the weekend had been nothing but hot air. She just wasn’t the type who stepped out of one relationship only to immediately fling herself into another, especially when she still fancied him as much as he still fancied her.
He had been wrong.
God only knew where this sex-fest weekend was going to take place, but he’d intended to find out—and rather than overtake her, force her to pull to the kerb and then demand an answer which she was unlikely to give him, he had decided just to...follow her.
It hadn’t been hard.
She had no idea what car he’d be in. He had several cars, and the black Range Rover was a whole lot less conspicuous than the Ferrari. He had made sure to keep a safe distance behind her, but he probably could have been attached to her bumper and she wouldn’t have noticed. Who really ever paid attention to other cars on the road unless they were misbehaving?
He’d known from the route she was taking that she was heading for the West Country and he hadn’t been able to believe it.
She was going to spend the weekend with a perfect stranger, miles away from her home ground? Who the hell did that?
And now here he was, in a picturesque city square, with quaint Tudor-beamed buildings lining it, standing in front of a coffee shop, for the first time in his life hesitating.<3
A coffee shop was hardly the raunchy, seedy motel he had been expecting. A coffee shop smacked of a nerd—or some clever smart-ass pretending to be a nerd. Someone who didn’t make her lose control...someone who wasn’t...him.
But, having come this far, he had no intention of leaving without first confronting his rival.
Because that was what it felt like. Sitting somewhere in that coffee shop was his rival—some man he didn’t know from Adam, who was laying claim to his woman. It was a possessive feeling, it was unwelcome and it was...the way it was.
He strode forward.
* * *
‘Good heavens.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a gentleman by the door...quite arresting...’
Kate had had her fill of ‘arresting’ men. She had come to the conclusion that they all spelt bad news. She wasn’t interested—and besides, she was too busy getting rid of her misery via the plate of cakes that had been put between them. Her mother had nibbled one. She was on her fourth. Not only was she destined to be a spinster, she would end up being a fat spinster.
‘He’s coming over here...’
If she had never agreed to go to Toronto with him she wouldn’t be sitting here now, stacking on the pounds and fighting off a crying jag. If she hadn’t be so arrogant as to think that she could control the situation—could sleep with him and still hang on to her heart—she wouldn’t be here. There were so many steps along the way that could have saved her from being where she was now that she felt giddy when she thought about them.
She was lost in her thoughts, and when she heard that deep, sexy drawl she immediately put it down to the fact that she was probably hallucinating.
Except her mother was still staring, the voice had said something else and the young waitress who had been walking towards them had stopped and her jaw had dropped.
Heart beating fast, Kate slowly twisted round and there he was—larger than life and just as devastating.
Staring down at her, his dark eyes unfathomable.
‘You played fast and loose with the speed limit on the motorway,’ Alessandro murmured, instantly clocking the situation and feeling light-headed with relief because this was her weekend date.
There was little doubt that the older and still stunningly attractive woman staring at him, open-mouthed, was her mother.
‘I’m Alessandro, by the way...’ He turned to the blonde, hand outstretched. ‘I’m guessing you must be Kate’s mother...’
‘What are you doing here?’
Kate found her voice at last and anger surged up through her—anger that he had the barefaced cheek to have landed himself here when she was on the verge of congratulating herself on having put some temporary distance between them...anger that her whole body had lit up like tinder in receipt of a life-giving flame...anger that none of the bracing little homilies she had given herself on the drive down counted for anything when he was standing right here in front of her...anger at the power he had over her...
Had he come here for a repeat performance of proving just how much he could affect her?
‘Why are you here?’
‘Darling, I shall leave you two to get on with things. I have a bit more shopping to do, as a matter of fact.’
Shirley Watson was already standing and reaching for her handbag, ignoring the desperate yelp coming from her daughter.
‘Shoes...’ She addressed Alessandro. ‘A girl’s best friend... I’ve tried my entire life to instil that into
my beautiful daughter, but I see that it actually took you to succeed...’
Kate watched in horror as her mother—her treacherous and disloyal mother—disappeared with a cheery wave, leaving her seat vacant for Alessandro to sit on.
Which he did. Not once taking his eyes from her face.
‘How dare you follow me? What were you thinking? I can’t believe you followed me here!’
‘I was worried.’
‘You were worried? What’s that supposed to mean?’
She couldn’t peel her eyes from his face. God, he was handsome. A little drawn, perhaps, a bit haggard, but even drawn and haggard he was still drop-dead gorgeous.
‘You just took off.’ Alessandro loathed the defensive note that had crept into his voice. ‘On a so-called weekend away. I assumed—’
‘Oh, I get it,’ Kate said with blistering resentment. ‘You decided that I was going to meet some man, and also decided that I was too incompetent to look after myself. Or maybe you thought that I didn’t dare meet up with anyone because there’s a bit of you still in my system...?’
‘What was I supposed to think when you refused to tell me where you were going?’ So she had admitted it—and it thrilled him.
‘I didn’t refuse to tell you anything! I assumed that it was none of your business! And what would your lawyer girlfriend say if she knew you were here?’
It took him a couple of seconds to comprehend what she was talking about, and a few more seconds to bypass the instinctive clamp-down on explaining himself—which was something he never did. ‘There’s no connection there...’
‘Oh, right. You mean you slept with her and then decided that she didn’t fit the bill after all?’
She hated the weakness that was driving her to find out whether he and the lawyer had ended up in bed. It didn’t matter! What mattered was that he had rushed down here in her wake because he had some stupid, over-developed he-man instinct to make sure she wasn’t going to do anything crazy. Like actually get a life.
‘We never made it to the bedroom,’ Alessandro admitted in a driven voice.
At Her Boss's Pleasure Page 16