THE UNCOMPROMISING ITALIAN

by Cathy Williams

  She watched him bring the food to the table and refill their glasses with more wine.

  Alessio gave her a long, considered look from under his lashes.

  ‘What I am about to tell you stays within the walls of this house, is that clear?’

  Lesley paused with her glass halfway to her mouth and looked at him over the rim with astonishment.

  ‘And you laugh at me for thinking that you might have links to the Mafia?’

  Alessio stared at her and then shook his head and slowly grinned. ‘Okay, maybe that sounded a little melodramatic.’

  Lesley was knocked sideways by that smile. It was so full of charm, so lacking in the controlled cool she had seen in him before. It felt as though, the more time she spent in his company, the more intriguing and complex he became. He was not simply a mega-rich guy employing her to do a job for him, but a man with so many facets to his personality that it made her head spin.

  Worse than that, she could feel herself being sucked in, and that scared her.

  ‘I don’t do melodrama,’ Alessio was saying with the remnants of his smile. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Never.’ Lesley licked her lips nervously. ‘What are you going to tell me that has to stay here?’

  His dark eyes lingered on her flushed face. ‘It’s unlikely that our guy would have got hold of this information but, just in case, it’s information I would want to protect my daughter from knowing. I certainly would not want it in the public arena.’ He swigged the remainder of his wine and did the honours by dishing food onto the plates which had already been put on the table, along with glasses and cutlery.

  Mesmerised by the economic elegance of his movements, and lulled by the wine and the creeping darkness outside, Lesley cupped her chin in her hand and stared at him.

  He wasn’t looking at her. He was concentrating on not spilling any food. He had the expression of someone unaccustomed to doing anything of a culinary nature for themselves—focused yet awkward at the same time.

  ‘You don’t look comfortable with a serving spoon,’ she remarked idly and Alessio glanced across to where she was sitting, staring at him. She wore a thin gold chain with a tiny pendant around her neck and she was playing with the pendant, rolling it between her fingers as she looked at him.

  Suddenly and for no reason, his breathing thickened and heat surged through his body with unexpected force. His libido, that had not seen the light of day for the past couple of months, reared up with such urgency that he felt his sharp intake of breath.

  She was not trying to be seductive but somehow he could feel her seducing him.

  ‘I bet you don’t do much cooking for yourself.’

  ‘Come again?’ Alessio did his best to get his thoughts back in order. An erection was jamming against the zipper of his trousers, rock-hard and painful, and it was a relief to sit down.

  ‘I said, you don’t look as though handling pots and pans comes as second nature to you.’ She tucked into the casserole, which was mouth-wateringly fragrant. They should be discussing work but the wine had made her feel relaxed and mellow and had allowed her curiosity about him to come out of hiding and to take centre stage.

  Sober, she would have chased that curiosity away, because she could feel its danger. But pleasantly tipsy, she wanted to know more about him.

  ‘I don’t do much cooking, no.’

  ‘I guess you can always get someone else to do it for you. Top chefs or housekeepers, or maybe just your girlfriends.’ She wondered what his girlfriends looked like. He might have had a rocky marriage that had ended in divorce, but he would have lots of girlfriends.

  ‘I don’t let women near my kitchen.’ Alessio was amused at her disingenuous curiosity. He swirled his wine around in the glass and swallowed a mouthful.

  With a bit of alcohol in her system, she looked more relaxed, softer, less defensive.

  His erection was still throbbing and his eyes dropped to her mouth, then lower to where the loose neckline of her tee-shirt allowed a glimpse of her shoulder blades and the soft hint of a cleavage. She wasn’t big breasted and the little she had was never on show.

  ‘Why? Don’t you ever go out with women who like to cook?’

  ‘I’ve never asked whether they like to cook or not,’ he said wryly, finishing his wine, pouring himself another glass and keeping his eyes safely away from her loose-limbed body. ‘I’ve found that, the minute a woman starts eulogising about the joys of home-cooked food, it usually marks the end of the relationship.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lesley looked at him, surprised.

  ‘It means that the last thing I need is someone trying to prove that they’re a domestic goddess in my kitchen. I prefer that the women I date don’t get too settled.’

  ‘In case they get ideas of permanence?’

  ‘Which brings me neatly back to what I wanted to say.’ That disturbing moment of intense sexual attraction began to ebb away and he wondered how it had arisen in the first place.

  She was nothing like the women he dated. Could it be that her intelligence, the strange role she occupied as receiver of information no other woman had ever had, the sheer difference of her body, had all those things conspired against him?

  There was a certain intimacy to their conversation. Had that entered the mix and worked some kind of passing, peculiar magic?

  More to the point, a little voice inside him asked, what did he intend to do about it?

  ‘I have a certain amount of correspondence locked away that could be very damaging.’

  ‘Correspondence?’

  ‘Of the non-silicon-chip variety,’ Alessio elaborated drily. ‘Correspondence of the old-fashioned sort—namely, letters.’

  ‘To do with business?’ She felt a sudden stab of intense disappointment that she had actually believed him when he had told her that he was an honest guy in all his business dealings.

  ‘No, not to do with business, so you can stop thinking that you’ve opened a can of worms and you need to clear off as fast as you can. I told you I’m perfectly straight when it comes to my financial dealings and I wasn’t lying.’

  Lesley released a long sigh of relief. Of course, it was because she would have been in a very awkward situation had he confessed to anything shady, especially considering she was alone with him in his house.

  It definitely wasn’t because she would have been disappointed in him as a man had he been party to anything crooked.

  ‘Then what? And what is the relevance to the case?’

  ‘This could hurt my daughter. It would certainly be annoying for me should it hit the press. If I fill you in, then you might be able to join some dots and discover if this is the subject of his emails.’

  ‘You have far too much confidence in my abilities, Mr Baldini.’ She smiled. ‘I may be good at what I do but I’m not a miracle worker.’

  ‘I think we’ve reached the point where you can call me Alessio. It occurred to me that there may have been stray references in the course of the emails that might point in a certain direction.’

  ‘And you feel that I need to know the direction they may point in so that I can pick them up if they’re there?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have seen them for yourself?’

  ‘I only began paying attention to those emails the day you were hired. Before that, I had kept them, but hadn’t examined them in any depth and I haven’t had the opportunity to do so since. It’s a slim chance but we can cover all bases.’

  ‘And what if I do find a link?’

  ‘Then I shall know what options to take when it comes to dealing with the perpetrator.’

  Lesley sighed and fluffed her short hair up with her fingers. ‘Do you know, I have never been in this sort of situation before.’

  ‘But you’ve had a couple of tricky occasions.’

  ‘Not as complicated as this. The tricky ones have usually involved friends of friends imagining that I can unearth marital affairs by bugging c
omputers, and then I have to let them down. If I can even be bothered to see what they want in the first place.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘This feels as though it’s got layers.’ And she wasn’t sure that she wanted to peel them back to see what was lying underneath. It bothered her that he had such an effect on her that he had been able to entice her into taking time off work to help him in the first place.

  And it bothered her even more that she couldn’t seem to stop wanting to stare at him. Of course he was good-looking, but she was sensible when it came to guys, and this one was definitely off-limits. The gulf between them was so great that they could be living on different planets.

  And yet her eyes still sought him out, and that was worrying.

  ‘I had more than one reason for divorcing my wife,’ he said heavily, after a while. He hesitated, at a loss as to where to go from there, because sharing confidences was not something he ever did. From the age of eighteen, he had learnt how to keep his opinions to himself—first through a sense of shame that he had been hoodwinked by a girl he had been seeing for a handful of months, a girl who had conned him into thinking she had been on the pill. Later, when his marriage had predictably collapsed, he had developed a forbidding ability to keep his emotions and his thoughts under tight rein. It was what he had always seen as protection against ever making another mistake when it came to the opposite sex.

  But now...

  Her intelligent eyes were fixed on his face. He reminded himself that this was a woman against whom he needed no protection because she had no ulterior agenda.

  ‘Not only did Bianca lie her way into a marriage but she also managed to lie her way into making me believe that she was in love with me.’

  ‘You were a kid,’ Lesley pointed out, when he failed to elaborate on that remark. ‘It happens.’

  ‘And you know because...?’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said abruptly. ‘I wasn’t one of those girls anyone lied to about being in love with. Carry on.’

  Alessio tilted his head and looked at her enquiringly, tempted to take her up on that enigmatic statement, even though he knew he wouldn’t get anywhere with it.

  ‘We married and, very shortly after Rachel was born, my wife began fooling around. Discreetly at first, but that didn’t last very long. We moved in certain circles and it became a bore to try and work out who she wanted to sleep with and when she would make a move.’

  ‘How awful for you.’

  Alessio opened his mouth to brush that show of sympathy to one side but instead stared at her for a few moments in silence. ‘It wasn’t great,’ he admitted heavily.

  ‘It can’t have been. Not at any age, but particularly not when you were practically a child yourself and not equipped to deal with that kind of disillusionment.’

  ‘No.’ His voice was rough but he gave a little shrug, dismissing that episode in his life.

  ‘I can understand why you would want to protect your daughter from knowing that her mother was...promiscuous.’

  ‘There’s rather more.’ His voice was steady and matter-of-fact. ‘When our marriage was at its lowest ebb, Bianca implied, during one of our rows, that I wasn’t Rachel’s father at all. Afterwards she retracted her words and said that she hadn’t been thinking straight. God knows, she probably realised that Rachel was her lifeline to money, and the last thing she should do was to jeopardise that lifeline, but the words were out and as far as I was concerned couldn’t be taken back.’

  ‘No, I can understand that.’ Whoever said that money could buy happiness? she thought, feeling her heart constrict for the young boy he must have been then—deceived, betrayed, cheated on; forced to become a man when he was still in his teens.

  ‘One day when she was out shopping, I returned early from work and decided, on impulse, to go through her drawers. By this time, we were sleeping in separate rooms. I found a stash of letters, all from the same guy, someone she had known when she was sixteen. Met him on holiday somewhere in Majorca. Young love. Touching, don’t you think? They kept in contact and she was seeing him when she was married to me. I gathered from reading between the lines that he was the son of a poor fisherman, someone her parents would certainly not have welcomed with open arms.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The lifestyles of the rich and famous,’ he mocked wryly. ‘I bet you’re glad you weren’t one of the privileged crowd.’

  ‘I never gave it much thought, but now that you mention it...’ She smiled and he grudgingly returned the smile.

  ‘I have no idea whether the affair ended when her behaviour became more out of control but it certainly made me wonder whether she was right about our daughter not being biologically mine. Not that it would have made a scrap of difference but...’

  ‘You’d have to find out that sort of thing.’

  ‘Tests proved conclusively that Rachel is my child but you can see why this information could be highly destructive if it came to light, especially considering the poor relationship I have with my daughter. It could be catastrophic. She would always doubt my love for her if she thought that I had taken a paternity test to prove she was mine in the first place. It would certainly destroy the happy memories she has of her mother and, much as Bianca appalled me, I wouldn’t want to deprive Rachel of her memories.’

  ‘But if this information was always private and historic, and only contained in letter form, then I don’t see how anyone else could have got hold of it.’ But there were always links to links to links; it just took one person to start delving and who knew what could come out in the wash? ‘I’ll see if I can spot any names or hints that this might be the basis of the threats.’

  And at the same time, she would have her work cut out going through his daughter’s things, a job which still didn’t sit well with her, even though a part of her know that it was probably essential.

  ‘I should be heading up to bed now,’ she said, rising to her feet.

  ‘It’s not yet nine-thirty.’

  ‘I’m an early-to-bed kind of person,’ she said awkwardly, not knowing whether to leave the kitchen or remain where she was, then realising that she was behaving like an employee waiting for her boss to dismiss her. But her feet remained nailed to the spot.

  ‘I have never talked so much about myself,’ Alessio murmured, which got her attention, and she looked at him quizzically. ‘It’s not in my nature. I’m a very private man, hence what I’ve told you goes no further than this room.’

  ‘Of course it won’t,’ Lesley assured him vigorously. ‘Who would I tell?’

  ‘If someone could consider blackmailing me over this information, then it might occur to you that you could do the same. You would certainly have unrivalled proof of whatever you wanted to glean about my private life in the palm of your hand.’

  It was a perfectly logical argument and he was, if nothing else, an extremely logical man. But Alessio still felt an uncustomary twinge of discomfort at having spelled it out so clearly.

  He noticed the patches of angry colour that flooded her cheeks and bit back the temptation to apologise for being more blunt than strictly necessary.

  She worked with computers; she would know the value of logic and reason.

  ‘You’re telling me that you don’t trust me.’

  ‘I’m telling you that you keep all of this to yourself. No girly gossip in the toilets at work, or over a glass of wine with your friends, and certainly no pillow talk with whoever you end up sharing your bed with.’

  ‘Thank you for spelling it out so clearly,’ Lesley said coldly. ‘But I know how to keep a confidence and I fully understand that it’s important that none of this gets out. If you have a piece of paper, you can draft something up right here and I’ll sign it!’

  ‘Draft something up?’ Under normal circumstances, he certainly would have had that in place before hiring her for the job, but for some reason it simply hadn’t occurred to him.

  Perhaps it had been the surprise of opening the fr
ont door to a girl instead of the man he had been expecting.

  Perhaps there was something about her that had worked its way past his normal defences so that he had failed to go down the predicted route.

  ‘I’m happy to sign whatever silence clause you want. One word of what we’ve spoken about here, and you will have my full permission to fling me into jail and throw away the key.’

  ‘I thought you said that you weren’t melodramatic.’

  ‘I’m insulted that you think I’d break the confidence you have in me to do my job and keep the details of it to myself.’

  ‘You may be insulted, but are you surprised?’ He rose to his feet, towering over her, and she fell back a couple of steps and held onto the back of the kitchen chair.

  Alessio, on his way to make them some coffee, sensed the change in the atmosphere the way a big cat can sense the presence of prey in the shift of the wind. Their eyes met and something inside him, something that operated on an instinctual level, understood that, however scathing and derisive her tone of voice had been, she was tuned in to him in ways that matched his.

  Tuned in to him in ways that were sexual.

  The realisation struck him from out of nowhere and yet, as he held her gaze a few seconds longer than was necessary, he actually doubted himself because her expression was so tight, straightforward and openly annoyed.

  ‘I am a man who is accustomed to taking precautions,’ he murmured huskily.

  ‘I get that.’ Especially after everything he had told her. Of course he would want to make sure that he didn’t leave himself open to exploitation of any kind. That was probably one of the rules by which he lived his life.

  So he was right; why should she be surprised that he had taken her to task?

  Except she had been lulled into a false sense of confidences shared, had warmed to the fact that he had opened up to her, and in the process had chosen to ignore the reality, which was that he had decided that he had no choice. He hadn’t opened up to her because she was special. He had opened up to her because it was necessary to make her task a little easier.