Alessandro, Megan noticed miserably, kept his hand clamped round her arm as they said their goodbyes. Did he think that she might do a runner if he didn’t?
She found herself in the back seat of a taxi while Alessandro gave orders for them to be taken back to his house.
‘I want to go back to my own place.’ Megan turned to him and edged away ever so slightly.
‘You do realise how rude you’ve been?’ He ignored her request and looked at her grimly.
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You don’t look particularly sorry.’ He raked his fingers through his hair. In the darkness, there was a dangerous glitter in his eyes that would have sent a shiver down her spine if she weren’t feeling so angry. ‘Let’s just cut through the crap, Megan. If you’ve got female problems, then I’m the King of England. You were fine today when we were out, and you were perfectly well up until the second half. What the hell’s going on?’
‘I need to talk to you,’ Megan said stiffly, ‘and the back seat of a taxi isn’t the place.’ Nor was his house, for that matter, but there was no way he was going to drop her home, and anyway she had some of her possessions at his place, which she would have to collect.
Alessandro looked first at the distance she had put between them, at her hands which were balled into fists on her lap, and then at her profile as she stared out of the window.
Need to talk? Female problems?
His justified annoyance at her abrupt end to the evening did a rapid U-turn. She had said that she needed to talk to him—correction, that she needed to talk privately—and she had said it in a voice that had made him vaguely uneasy. Add to that the fact that she was sitting like an iceberg next to him, and he came up with the one explanation which made sense.
He didn’t know how, but it was suddenly clear to him that she had managed to get pregnant. She had disappeared to the restrooms at the theatre, had remained there for an inordinately long time, and then had returned with a personality transplant. Had she taken some kind of testing kit to the loo? Maybe being in the company of Melissa had got her thinking about her menstrual cycle? Made her wonder if it had been as regular as it should have? Who knew? Alessandro wasn’t a doctor, but he was pretty sure that he had hit jackpot.
He lapsed into a reflective silence of his own as he began to consider the possibilities of this unexpected event.
He had not considered his relationship with Megan to be a permanent one. She was an itch that he needed to scratch—a fever that roared through his system and needed curing once and for all. A pregnancy would change all that. He thought about becoming a father. Megan wasn’t like Victoria. She would see parenthood as a full-time occupation. Broken nights, changing nappies, sterilising bottles—all of that would be, for her, a shared venture. His life would be turned on its head.
Alessandro looked at her. For someone who must be churning up inside, she appeared remarkably calm. In fact, for someone who was perfectly happy to be swept along on an emotional tide, she seemed to be handling the situation with a lot of sang froid.
The taxi pulled up outside his house.
‘Okay,’ he said, opening his front door and standing back to let her walk past him. ‘You’ve had time to try and work out whatever speech you’ve got prepared…’ Alessandro slammed the door behind him and stayed where he was, leaning against it and watching her. ‘So what’s this talk about? Anything to do with those female problems you mentioned, by any chance?’
On her way to the sitting room, Megan stopped in her tracks and turned to face him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. I wasn’t born yesterday, Megan. You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
After the ensuing silence, during which Megan tried to gather her scattered wits and not burst into laughter at his wild, inaccurate deduction, Alessandro continued calmly.
‘I don’t know how it’s happened, but it has, and now you’re trying to work out how to break the news.’
‘Oh, right. Is that what I’m doing? And how would you suggest I go about it?’ Megan’s voice was cool and level. He imagined she was pregnant? That, she thought, would have been one complication too far, and she was mightily relieved that she didn’t have to deal with it.
Alessandro was a little unsettled by that response. Not a flicker of emotion had crossed her face. ‘Just come right out and confess,’ he advised. ‘You can’t skirt round a pregnancy.’
‘And how will you react?’ Megan tried to tear herself away from a pointless conversation about a non-existent situation. But it was tempting to buy time, and even more tempting to try and find out what he might have felt had he been confronted with a pregnant lover.
Part of her knew that she was just shoring up that little twig of hope, building herself a little fantasy that maybe, in a situation like that, he might suddenly be overwhelmed by need and love and race to her side in a supportive way. He wouldn’t.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she told him in an icy voice. ‘I’m not pregnant, so you can stop worrying.’
Surprisingly, Alessandro wasn’t sure that he had been worrying. More contemplating jumping into unknown waters….
‘Okay…’ he said, moving towards her very slowly and watching her the way he might watch a domestic pet that had suddenly become dangerously unpredictable. ‘So what is this all about, then?’
‘It’s about us, Alessandro.’
‘What about us?’
‘I’ve thought about this arrangement of ours and I’ve decided that the time has come to end it.’ She thought bitterly of that other self—the one who had existed less than two hours ago, the one who had become caught up in all sorts of silly, reckless dreams. She folded her arms and stood her ground while he looked at her in perfect bemusement.
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Alessandro told her amiably. ‘Did you take a knock to your head when you went to the restroom at the theatre? Maybe you need to lie down?’
‘I don’t need to lie down. I need to go upstairs and get my stuff, then I’m leaving this house and I won’t be coming back.’
The amiable smile dropped from Alessandro’s face, but before he could pick her up on what she was saying—which made absolutely no sense whatsoever—she had turned her back to him and was running up the stairs.
After a second’s hesitation he followed her, easily catching up with her and blocking the door to his bedroom.
‘Just like that?’ he ground out. ‘You’re leaving just like that? No explanation? Well, I refuse to allow it.’
‘You refuse to allow it?’ Megan gave a burst of mirthless laughter, but she was trembling.
‘Yes, dammit!’
‘You can do a lot of things, Alessandro, but you can’t stop me walking out on you.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing happened. I just wised up, that’s all.’
‘No, it damn well isn’t all! I can read people, and you weren’t planning on leaving me this morning, when we were out shopping! Nor were you planning to leave me when we were at the theatre—at least not until after the intermission. You disappeared for a while. What happened? Who did you talk to?’
Megan had not intended to go into details. When she had said goodbye to Victoria, she had been in a daze. The second half of the play, which she should have enjoyed but which in reality she would have been hard-pressed to remember, had given her time to try and collect her thoughts, and thought number one had been that she wasn’t going to go down the post-mortem route. She was going to be cool and dignified and leave him to stew with unanswered questions.
He probably wouldn’t stew for very long, but the thought of him stewing at all might well distract her from her misery at no longer being with him. She couldn’t get out of her mind the thought that she had dug herself a hole, jumped in, and proceeded to cover herself with earth. All her crazy hopes had been based on a piece of fiction.
Of course now that she was actually facing his bar
rage of questions, and staring into those black, intense eyes in which she had happily lost herself, she no longer felt quite so content with a dignified exit.
She had never been able to master the art of being cool.
‘Well?’ Alessandro demanded. ‘Are you just going to stand there, gaping like a goldfish?’
‘Let me pass! I want to get my stuff!’
‘Not until we’ve had some kind of conversation about this!’
‘You always have to get your own way, don’t you, Alessandro?’ she responded in a shrill voice, which sent his temper levels up by a couple of notches.
‘That’s pretty much it,’ he agreed. ‘And the sooner you start realising that, the better for all concerned.’
‘Okay. I’ll tell you what you want to know.’ She took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. ‘Guess who I bumped into when I was waiting in the queue for the toilet?’
‘No idea. Why don’t you enlighten me?’
‘Your ex! Victoria. Remember her?’
‘Of course I remember her,’ Alessandro said warily. ‘How is she?’
‘Oh, she’s doing just fine, now that you ask! Better than fine, in fact. Positively thriving.’
Alessandro waited.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what we chatted about?’
‘Why don’t we go downstairs to finish this conversation?’ he said in a grim voice. ‘You said that you didn’t want to talk in the taxi because it wasn’t the right place. Well, getting hysterical on the landing isn’t the right place for me.’
Megan wanted to tell him that it was the right place for her, because that way she might have asserted a little of her willpower, but in actual fact her legs felt wobbly, and while she knew that heading straight towards the question-and-answer session she had wanted to avoid was going to be undignified, collapsing outside his bedroom door because her legs were like jelly would have been even more undignified.
‘Fine,’ she said in the calmest voice she could muster. ‘But once I’m done talking I collect my things and I leave this house for ever.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALESSANDRO watched Megan from across the unbridgeable width of the sitting room. She had adopted a defiant pose, perched on the ledge of the bay window. She hadn’t removed her coat and she was huddled into it, even though the central heating was still on and the room was warm.
Too warm, in fact. He rid himself of his jacket and rolled the sleeves of his shirt to the elbows.
‘Drink?’ he asked, and when she shook her head, he shrugged and said, ‘Well, I could do with one.’
Megan looked at him with mounting anger as he went across to one of the cupboards which slid noiselessly back to reveal a well-stocked bar.
The man was as cool as a cucumber! She had just threatened to leave him, to walk out of his house for good, and how was he reacting? As though nothing had been said! As though this was just another normal day at the ranch!
‘You were saying…?’ Alessandro turned back to her and sipped his whisky.
‘I was saying that I bumped into Victoria, and she told me what happened between the two of you.’ Megan drew in a deep breath and, taking her cue from him, banked down the emotion that was threatening to spiral out of control. Her voice was flat and calm. ‘I was under the impression that you were responsible for the break-up, Alessandro.’
‘Does it matter where the finger points? When it comes to the breakdown of a relationship there is nothing to be gained from apportioning blame.’
‘Don’t try and twist words,’ Megan said bitterly. ‘I was led to believe that you broke off your engagement because you wanted a relationship with me…’
‘You believed what you wanted to believe,’ Alessandro told her, his fury mounting at being called to account. He braced himself for the inevitable direction of the conversation.
‘So you’re not going to deny that Victoria was the one who decided to break off your engagement?’
The last pathetic shred of hope that he might at least try to disabuse her of Victoria’s version of what had taken place shrivelled and died in the face of his continued silence.
‘She told me about her mobile phone,’ Megan continued in a hollow voice. Now that her decision to be cool and to walk away without explanation because he didn’t deserve one had been abandoned, she felt driven to expose every little detail of her own foolishness. It was like picking away at a scab. It wouldn’t remedy anything but it was still an unstoppable temptation.
And still there was nothing from him. He just stood there, taking small sips of his drink, seemingly at ease with the situation.
‘You found out that Robbie had been in touch with her, and I guess before you could—I don’t know—try and make her go down the sensible route, she decided that she wanted to throw caution to the winds and get involved with someone else. Someone who didn’t make sense. She and Robbie are an item now. Did you know that?’
If Megan had intended to rile him with that dig then she failed, because Alessandro simply shrugged and remarked evenly, ‘I wish them well.’
A wave of hopelessness swept over her, leaving her small and defeated.
‘What do you want me to say, Megan?’ Alessandro had been enjoying life, enjoying whatever the hell she wanted to call it—their relationship, situation, involvement—but he wasn’t enjoying being boxed into a corner. ‘That I am prepared to make you promises which I know won’t be fulfilled? Do you want to hear the whole love thing?’ Every part of him that desired and saw the necessity for absolute control, rejected her directness.
‘I never said that!’
‘What, then?’
‘You used me.’
Alessandro was outraged at that—outraged at her portrayal of herself as a passive victim when she had been as crazy for sex as he had.
However, he wasn’t going to succumb to the weakness of raising his voice or getting emotional. ‘If that’s what you wish to believe, Megan, then there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But just think about this: I came to you and you had every opportunity to tell me that you didn’t want involvement. If I recall, you didn’t do that. In fact, at no point did I get the impression that you wanted out. I might be mistaken…’
This time it was Megan’s turn to fall silent as she considered the accuracy of that flatly intoned statement. Yes, he had given her the option of backing out.
‘I was under the impression—’
‘I never once told you that I had broken off my engagement with Victoria,’ he reminded her, mercilessly driving home his point that she had not been coerced into any situation she hadn’t wanted. ‘You just went ahead and made assumptions.’
What he failed to tell her was that he would have broken it off with Victoria, anyway. Would have broken it off even if he hadn’t found those mildly incriminating text messages on her mobile phone. Had been secretly relieved that the onus of ending their relationship hadn’t fallen on his shoulders.
‘And you never corrected those assumptions because they suited you. You wanted to get me into bed, and the fastest way of doing it was to lead me to believe that you had broken your engagement to Victoria.’
‘I didn’t need a fast way of doing that. We would have fallen into bed together anyway.’ But he flushed, because there was a modicum of truth in what she was saying. He had known that, however much she was attracted to him, she would not have leapt into his arms had she thought for a passing minute that she was a plaything. He resented the fact that she was throwing all of this in his face when she could so easily have accepted the situation for what it was. Two people who had temporarily reconnected.
‘Why?’ Megan looked at him unblinkingly. ‘Why did you bother? Why didn’t you just leave me alone?’
‘I realised that I still wanted you. I also realised that you still wanted me.’
‘And so you thought…why not? Is that it?’ Yet again, she was good enough to have a romp with, but not good enough for a committed relationship.
It seemed that neither of them had grown up after all. She was still looking for the impossible, and he was still convinced that she didn’t fit the bill. The bitter truth, she thought, was that she fitted the bill even less now. In the space of seven years he had become so powerful that the concept of hitching his wagon to a woman who defiantly refused to obey him would be unthinkable.
‘You think that you have somehow been insulted? What you fail to understand is that what’s happened between us needed to happen!’
Lost in a daze of her own agonising thoughts, Megan barely surfaced to hear his latest piece of wisdom.
Her brain caught up with what he was saying after a ten-second delay, and she looked at him blankly.
‘What?’
‘I am saying,’ Alessandro repeated slowly, ‘that we needed to get each other out of our systems. I am saying that the only way of doing that was to have a relationship, allow this overpowering mutual lust to burn itself out…’
Need? Lust? The words which she knew would have thrilled most women to death when applied to Alessandro dropped like poison into her consciousness.
While she had been blissfully toying with more romantic notions, he had summed everything up in an emotion that blew strong and then faded away. He had allowed her the illusion of pretending that there was more to what they had because he wanted to tire of her, and the only way he could do that was to have her until he no longer wanted her.
‘You’ve said enough.’ She forced her wooden body to move. ‘I don’t want to hear any more. I’m going to go upstairs and get my stuff now.’ She reached for the ludicrously expensive jewellery adorning her and carefully removed it. ‘You can have this back.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A dark flush highlighted his sharp, arrogant cheekbones. ‘What the hell am I going to do with women’s jewellery?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’ Since he was making no effort to take what she was offering him back, she casually dropped it on one of the side tables in the room. ‘You can always give it to your next conquest. Most women adore this sort of thing.’
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