by Lynne Graham
Alessio was as sharp as a knife. He was also a Leopardi, born to go from cradle to grave in the belief that he had a hotline to heaven and knew the wisest, smartest move in every situation. Had Tara let Alessio see exactly what she wanted from him? Had Alessio’s blood run cold too? Had he then appreciated that Tara could be a real, manipulative handful? Was that why he had said they should remarry? If he was that impressionable, Tara would run rings round him.
Tara got off the bed and sent Daisy a cheeky grin. ‘I know you’re gasping to hear what he said. Dad thinks you’re still gorgeous… and I think he’d be doing really well for himself getting a second chance with you—’
‘It’s not going to happen, Tara,’ Daisy said as gently and firmly as she could.
‘I don’t see why not.’ Her daughter looked distinctly smug and gave her mother a warm and approving appraisal. ‘Lots of men go for you. Why shouldn’t he?’
* * *
That revealing and explosive dialogue haunted Daisy throughout the next morning. She couldn’t keep her mind on her work and found herself drifting off into thoughts of what life might have been like if she hadn’t divorced Alessio. Would he have changed after she had had the baby? Would he have wanted her again then? Would he have dumped Sophia and become a faithful husband? Daisy looked out of the window in cynical search of a flying pig or a blue moon.
‘You know, there’s something different about you this week,’ Barry commented, watching her doodle interlocking triangles on her pad. ‘You’re much more approachable.’
‘Barry—’
‘Have dinner with me tonight,’ he urged, dropping down athletically into a crouch in front of her swivel chair so that they could meet eye to eye. ‘I won’t lay a finger on you…I promise!’
‘Give over, Barry,’ Daisy groaned.
‘So I used to show off a little when I first started here but that was three years ago,’ Barry stressed with a winning smile as he reached for her hands. ‘I’ve grown up since then. I don’t boast about my one-night stands any more. I know you’re not impressed by how fast I drive my Porsche. I think I could even be faithful for you.’
Daisy studied him and experienced a very, very faint stab of remorse. Deep down inside, she had always known why she had loathed Barry on sight. In build, colouring and brash confidence, he reminded her just a little of Alessio as a teenager. Poor Barry. He had been chasing her for so long that it was a running office joke. ‘Sorry—’ she began.
‘Daisy…’
Releasing her fingers, Barry vaulted upright. Daisy might have got whiplash if Alessio hadn’t spun her chair round so fast that she saw whirling lights instead.
‘Lunch,’ Alessio drawled with definite aggression.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Daisy muttered out of the corner of her mouth as she turned her chair back to her desk. ‘Go away…’
‘Mr Leopardi?’ Barry cleared his throat after a lengthy pause. ‘We spoke on the phone last week—’
‘You may inform your superior that Miss Thornton won’t be returning to work here,’ Alessio interposed, smooth as glass. ‘She’ll be far too busy roasting in the fires of eternity as my wife.’
‘Your… your wife?’ Barry spluttered incredulously.
Ignoring him, Alessio lifted Daisy’s slim handbag from the desk and studied it with scepticism. ‘Where’s all the rest of the junk?’
‘Junk?’ Daisy’s voice fractured as she rose jerkily upright, unable to believe that he had made such an announcement in front of the entire office.
‘Daisy, you couldn’t get through one day with a purse this tiny. This is for show. Somewhere else there has to be a holding tank for the hundred and one things you have to keep within reach. Ah…’ With unhidden satisfaction, Alessio reached below the desk and lifted the large, battered leather holdall he had espied. ‘Yours? How often do you feed the purse? Hourly? Half-hourly?’
‘I’ll be back after lunch, Barry,’ Daisy said frigidly, striving to regain control of the situation but quite shattered by the manner in which Alessio was behaving. Barry simply gaped at her.
‘You won’t be,’ Alessio drawled, running at speed through the drawers of her desk, extracting a small teddy bear, a single shoe, three fat romantic novels, two hairbrushes and several packets of tights. He stuffed the lot into the leather holdall. ‘Have you a coat? One? Two?’
‘I’ll see to that.’ Joyce giggled into the resounding silence and crossed the room to a cupboard, to emerge with two umbrellas, a coat, a jacket and a pair of red stiletto-heeled ankle-boots which had sent Barry into such paroxysms of lust that Daisy had stopped wearing them out of pity.
‘I’ll be back,’ Daisy said defiantly.
‘You’re not the Terminator,’ Alessio dropped in with gentle satire as he curved a hand round her elbow and marched her out into the fresh air, Joyce following in their wake. ‘Didn’t the toy boy ever figure out how to derail you? Take you by surprise and you’re as helpless as a tortoise turned on its back, cara.’
‘Was it love at first sight?’ Joyce prompted with dreamily intent eyes as she passed Daisy’s possessions over to the chauffeur.
‘Is that when you feel like you’ve been run over by a tank?’ Alessio enquired with a deeply reflective air. ‘That magical but gut-wrenching moment when you realise that nothing is ever going to be the same again? It was more like having a very large rock dropped on me from a height. The earth may have moved but I wasn’t fast enough on my feet.’
Daisy studied him in disbelief.
‘I suppose men feel they have to fight it,’ Joyce sighed philosophically. ‘But you didn’t fight for long, did you?’
‘I don’t think you want the answer to that one,’ Alessio murmured, pressing Daisy into the limousine and tossing her bag in after her.
‘How could you embarrass me like that?’ Daisy demanded as the car drew away from the kerb. ‘How am I supposed to explain all that nonsense you talked?’
‘You won’t have to. When I said you weren’t setting foot in there again I was not joking. I have already acquired a special licence. We can get married on Saturday morning before Tara goes off on her school trip to France,’ Alessio explained with immovable calm.
Her lashes fluttered over incredulous violet eyes. ‘A special licence? S-Saturday?’ she stammered. ‘Are you crazy? We’re divorced and staying that way!’
‘Are you prepared to lose Tara?’ Astute golden eyes rested on her enquiringly.
Daisy stiffened. ‘Are you threatening me?’
‘It was a warning. I’m telling you what may well happen if we don’t get married and present a united front,’ Alessio pronounced with deflating cool. ‘You chose to bring Tara up outside the society in which she belongs and her life is now about to change out of all recognition. She is not in any way prepared for that transformation and my family will try to spoil her as much as they spoiled me.’
Daisy dropped her head in surprise at that admission.
‘Everything Tara wants, she will receive. You couldn’t possibly compete from a distance, any more than you can continue to deny who she is. She’s a Leopardi and one day she will be an extremely wealthy young woman. She will have to make major adjustments.’
‘I could help her—’
‘How could you help if you weren’t there? And how quick would you be to blame me if anything went wrong? Tara will need more backup than I can give her. She will need her mother’s full support. When she realises how much she has missed out on, you won’t find it easy to stay in control when she’s abroad and you’re still here in London,’ Alessio pointed out drily.
He had spelt out realities about Tara’s future that Daisy did not want to hear. Her daughter would indeed find the Leopardi lifestyle shockingly seductive. Her grandparents would undoubtedly greet her with open arms. Tara was, after all, one of them. All that money and attention might turn the head of even the most stable adult, so what effect might they have on an impressionable teenager? She remembered the F
errari, Alessio’s eighteenth-birthday present, and her stomach turned over sickly.
‘You’re talking as if Tara’s likely to be spending a lot of time in Italy.’
‘You won’t have much choice about that, Daisy. My father is moving into semi-retirement. While he will retain a consultative position within the bank, I’m taking over our main office in Rome next month,’ Alessio imparted. ‘I’ll only be back in London on business trips after that—’
‘But you were looking for a house here,’ Daisy said involuntarily, struggling to conceal her growing dismay at what he was telling her.
‘I was viewing the house on my parents’ behalf, not my own. They’re looking for a base in London.’
A base, Daisy reflected dizzily. Only a Leopardi could refer to a house that big and expensive as a base. She surveyed Alessio with dazed eyes. It was a welcome escape from the daunting facts he was hammering her with. He looked gorgeous—undeniably and infuriatingly gorgeous. No sleepless shadows beneath his eyes and, remarkably, not even a hint of yesterday’s strain. His superbly tailored charcoal-grey suit was a spectacular showcase for his lean, vibrantly male physique, but even so Daisy found that she was experiencing a deep craving to see him in a pair of faded, tight jeans again…
Daisy stopped herself dead, guiltily squashing that train of thought. Why should she get all worked up about the fact that Alessio still attracted her? Wasn’t that immature and narrow-minded? It was only her hormones which were at fault—natural female promptings accentuated by silly, sentimental memories. Alessio was incredibly sexy… that was all. Her body was tempted but her intelligence was safely in control.
‘So you must see that if I am to establish a relationship of any depth with my daughter she will be travelling to Rome on a very regular basis.’
‘Hmmm…’ Daisy sighed absently, wondering if he remembered the time she had tried to take his jeans off with her teeth… seriously hoping that he didn’t.
‘I think that you owe both Tara and me the chance to make something out of this mess.’
Daisy nodded and wished she had sat beside him instead of opposite.
‘I also want to give Tara what she wants, and I would have to be extraordinarily stupid not to know what she wants after yesterday.’
With enormous effort, Daisy fought to reinstate rational concentration and lifted exasperated eyes to his. ‘That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You let Tara tie you up in knots, didn’t you?’
Disorientatingly, Alessio’s gleaming dark gaze flared with spontaneous amusement. ‘Not at all. When she asked me very loudly in the middle of a crowded restaurant whether I thought I could still fancy her mum, I took it beautifully.’
The challenging slant of Daisy’s chin wavered as she slowly turned a beetroot shade, horror striking into her bones.
‘It was only half past twelve but I was already waiting for the question,’ Alessio confessed lazily. ‘Tara has no subtlety. She can’t wait for anything either. She just jumps right in and splashes everyone around her. Thirty-two years’ experience of Bianca stood me in good stead.’
Daisy was mortified. ‘So you guessed what she was trying to do.’
‘She was like a suicide bomber forcing herself out on a diplomatic mission. She told me how she had always thought that you and I had a lot in common with Romeo and Juliet.’
Daisy went from mortification to sheer agony. ‘Oh, no—’
‘How divorce destroys children’s lives: that was phase two. She backed that up with several hair-raising horror stories about schoolfriends. I lunched to the accompaniment of tales about spiteful stepmothers and abusive stepfathers. By the time the dessert cart came my appetite was Bagging but Tara was putting away enough fuel to stoke a steam engine,’ Alessio recalled wryly. ‘I was allowed a break until mid-afternoon before she embarked on the problems suffered by children from broken homes.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ Daisy said feelingly.
‘She took me step by painful step through subjects such as low self-esteem and abysmal academic achievement—’
‘She’s top of her class!’ Daisy gasped.
‘I suspected that. Nobody that determined to make me feel guilty could possibly be lacking in intelligence. And by the end of my indoctrination session the picture was crystal-clear. Tara worships the ground you walk on. You have also attained martyr status while still alive,’ Alessio murmured with sardonic eyes. ‘The divorce was fifty per cent my fault and fifty per cent the fault of the in-laws from hell. My evil, scheming parents, who sounded remarkably like a twentieth-century resurrection of the Boigias, may not have succeeded in driving you to suicide but then that is only a tribute to the strength of your character.’
Daisy gulped. ‘Teenagers can be very melodramatic.’
‘There were moments yesterday when I could have shaken you until your teeth rattled in your head,’ Alessio confided. ‘But the bottom line is that Tara is consumed by a desire to see us reconciled.’
‘It’s an understandable dream for her to have,’ Daisy conceded grudgingly.
‘But I want to give my daughter that dream,’ Alessio returned with dangerous softness. The limousine had stopped and the chauffeur walked round the car to open Daisy’s door for her. Tight-mouthed, Daisy slid out. ‘Where on earth are we going?’
‘My apartment.’
Inside the lift, she breathed in deep. ‘Alessio… I love Tara very much and I understand that, the way you’re feeling right now, you’d try to give her the moon if she asked for it, but I don’t want—’
‘What you want doesn’t come into this.’
Daisy’s generous mouth fell wide open.
‘Haven’t you had everything your way for long enough?’
Daisy froze in shock.
‘When the going go too rough, you walked out on our marriage without hesitation,’ Alessio delivered with aggressive bite. ‘I got no choice then and I got even less choice when it came to my rights as a parent. You didn’t compromise your wants and wishes until Tara gave you a guilty conscience. If she had had no interest in her absent father, I would probably never have learnt that I had a daughter. Dio… I feel I’ve earned the right to make some demands of my own!’
Daisy was devastated by that condemnation. Clearly, Alessio saw her as an utterly selfish individual who had caused unlimited damage. But she was being unfairly judged by adult standards. In marrying her at nineteen, Alessio had acknowledged that their child’s needs should come first. It had been a fine and noble ideal but he had not carried through with the reality that their marriage would have to work to make that possible.
* * *
His penthouse apartment was breathtaking. Inquisitively she glanced through open doorways, taking in glimpses of richly polished wooden floors, magnificent rugs and gleaming antiques. In an elegant dining-room, the first course of their meal already awaited them. A silent manservant pushed her chair in, shook out her linen napkin and poured the wine before leaving them. Daisy emptied her glass fast. Over the rim, she collided with Alessio’s broodingly intense dark gaze and the silence pulsed and pounded like the quiet before the storm.
Alessio expelled his breath in an impatient hiss. ‘When we met again, I admit that I was very hostile.’ His strong jawline squared. ‘But that was self-defence. All the memories came back and I only allowed myself to recognise two reactions—lust and anger.’
In the past, Daisy had had a large personal acquaintance with both emotions, although, admittedly, Alessio had never before acknowledged the existence of either. She surveyed her empty glass with a sinking heart. She wondered what it would take to satisfy the Leopardi need for blood and retribution. When would Alessio take account of his own sins of omission?
‘But there was a lot of pain and bitterness in there too.’
Daisy experienced enough of a surge of interest and surprise to look up and pay closer attention.
Alessio’s gaze was screened to a mere glimmer of gold. ‘I was amazed that
I could still remember those feelings,’ he admitted tautly. ‘But then my ego was very fragile at the time and you do hold the distinction of being the only woman who ever ditched me for a large injection of cash.’
Daisy’s breath caught in her throat as she belatedly recalled that she had not yet explained about that money. ‘I—’
Alessio shifted a lean, autocratic hand to silence her. ‘But that sordid reality does not release me from what is patently my duty of care and responsibility towards my daughter. Nor do your personal feelings release you from that same obligation.’
Sordid reality? In the midst of reflecting that it might well have done Alessio a great deal of good to believe that he had been ditched in return for a large injection of cash, Daisy was sidetracked by his horrific use of that word ‘duty’. Her daughter had used it last night and it had given her mother a distinctly nasty turn. Leopardis were heavily into buzz words of the ‘duty’ and ‘honour’ variety. Employing such terms, they braced themselves to do masochistic things and then took revenge by punishing the unfortunate being who had forced them into those sacrifices.
That was the story of their first marriage in a nutshell, Daisy conceded with an involuntary shudder. Alessio had been punishing her for his sacrifice. She was not crazy enough to give him a second bite at the same apple. Tara would thank neither one of them for involving her in the misery of an unhappy marriage. If Alessio wanted a sacrifice, he was not going to find one in Daisy. Whatever he might think, Daisy knew she was not good martyr material.
‘Daisy..’ Alessio breathed in a charged undertone. ‘Are you listening to me?’
Like a mouse slowly raising its gaze to risk the hypnotic and deadly enchantment of a snake, Daisy lifted her head. ‘Sorry?’ she said very tautly.
Anger glittered in his incisive scrutiny. ‘No doubt it will surprise you, but I am accustomed to attention when I am speaking.’