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Isla’s observations mushroomed the more she watched them. The minute anyone tried to get into conversation with Alissandru, Grazia intervened, occasionally stepping between him and someone else or hailing someone else across the room and tugging him in that direction. The blonde was very pointedly possessive. She talked constantly, demanding his attention, stroking his sleeve, at one point stopping dead to straighten his bow tie in a statement of familiarity that made Isla’s teeth grit.
It was an uncomfortable show for Isla to be forced to watch when Alissandru had been in her bed with her the night before. Was she jealous? Overly possessive? she asked herself worriedly, disliking the shrewish tone of her thoughts. As for Alissandru, she could read him even better in the slight widening of his eyes when he saw her; he hadn’t expected her to be present and he moved with his companion in every direction but Isla’s, and by the time they all moved into dinner, Isla was angry at being ignored.
As they were passing through the big hall towards the dining room, Alissandru addressed her. ‘Isla...my mother didn’t tell me that you would be here.’
‘It was kind of her to ask me,’ Isla parried lightly, meeting Grazia’s assessing dark eyes as Alissandru performed an introduction.
‘So, you’re Tania’s little sister,’ Grazia remarked. ‘You don’t look much like her.’
‘No.’ Accustomed to such comments when anyone had met Tania first, Isla merely smiled and added, ‘Your dress is a wonderful colour...’
And that was all that was required to encourage Grazia to tell the tale of how she had found the material in a Moroccan silk market and imported it to make signature pieces for her most recent fashion show. They separated to find their seats and Isla was reasonably happy with the way the meeting had passed off. She hadn’t scratched Grazia’s eyes out. She hadn’t slapped Alissandru across the face even though she was naturally wondering if he was sleeping with the beautiful blonde, as well.
Of course, she was going to wonder that when the woman was all over him like a rash, touching him with a level of familiarity that went beyond the usual definition of friendship. So, decidedly not just a platonic bond on Grazia’s side, Isla decided, recognising that she was learning stuff about herself through Alissandru that she had never dreamt she would learn. She was the jealous, possessive type, she acknowledged with guilty unease. In fact, she found it very hard to look anywhere else in the room.
* * *
His mother should’ve warned him that Isla would be attending, Alissandru reflected impatiently, reading in Isla’s stiff smiles and set little face all that he didn’t want to see. Now she was furious with him, now she would be trying to throw him out of bed, her every suspicion aroused. The child they had lost had created a deeper bond between them but that extra layer both united and divided them, he conceded grimly. He cursed Isla’s desire for secrecy and questioned how the hell he had strayed into so potentially chaotic an affair. In truth, he didn’t know how he had ended up back in bed with Isla or why he had spent most of the day thinking about doing it again and revelling afresh in the hot, sweet welcome of her curvy body. Suddenly he was off-the-charts obsessed with sex for the first time since his adolescence and it had blinded him to every other consideration.
Isla was ridiculously unlike his previous lovers. She didn’t look like them, didn’t act like them, didn’t think like them and was highly unlikely to respect his boundaries. Even more pertinently, those boundaries were set in stone: he didn’t get attached, he didn’t like strings or drama or plans for a future that stretched more than a week ahead.
‘She’s very jealous, isn’t she?’ Grazia whispered in his ear. ‘She doesn’t look the type to make a public scene, though.’
‘What the hell have you been playing at?’ Alissandru demanded grimly.
‘I couldn’t resist testing her out once you said she was here,’ Grazia admitted. ‘A woman who tosses back diamonds could be worth her weight in gold to a man like you.’
‘What do you mean by a man like me?’ Alissandru practically snarled back, so irate was he that Grazia was pot-stirring merely to amuse herself.
Grazia gave him a huge affectionate smile. ‘Well, to be honest you’ve had it very easy with women. You click your fingers and they swamp you in attention, you ditch them and they still act like you’re their best friend in the hope that you’ll come back. And here you are having to try to impress a woman for the first time ever and she still won’t even walk down the street in daylight with you,’ she proffered. ‘I think it’s precious.’
‘I shouldn’t have told you about her.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t tell me everything, did you?’ Grazia said with a shrewd knowing look. ‘I sense more of a back story than you’re willing to share.’
‘Mind your own business,’ Alissandru advised her bluntly, thinking that that was one back story he would never share with anyone.
* * *
Isla stayed as long as was polite, cutting out after coffee and walking back out to her car with a sense of crashing relief that she had escaped the source of her discomfiture. Well, one lived and one learned, she reasoned with herself, and over the course of the evening Isla had learned that sex on its own wasn’t enough for her. Alissandru was a womaniser and she couldn’t say that she hadn’t been warned, not only by Tania’s gossip but also by his no-holds-barred rejection at the croft. Two people as different as she and Alissandru could only be a bad fit.
And that was that, she told herself as she removed her make-up and got ready for bed. She wasn’t about to punish herself with regrets because it had undoubtedly been time she acquired some experience with men. And she had run through the entire range of emotions with Alissandru, from the heartbreaking loss of their child to the sheer joy she had discovered in his arms. He had been useful for that, at least, she thought ruefully. Useful for that but not for much else, she extended censoriously. A very off-putting example too, she ruminated, terrific for sex, useless in every other sphere.
The doorbell went. Isla stiffened and ignored it. It went again, shrill and sharp as if it was being jabbed by an angry hand, the noise provoking Puggle into staccato barks. Isla climbed into bed and reached for her book while wondering if she should’ve gone downstairs to speak to Alissandru. She just knew it was him ringing the bell. What on earth would she have said, though? Another argument would not improve matters, particularly when she would have to deal with him to sell the house. No, it was more sensible to move on and ignore him and that meant no more thinking about him, no more wondering, no more dreaming. It occurred to her that life was suddenly looking very dull indeed.
Alissandru, unhappily, had no experience of being ignored and it inflamed him. Isla blew hot and cold. He never knew what she would do next. If she wasn’t shouting at him or blocking him on her phone, she was shutting him out, hugging the charmed circle of her privacy and all that made him want to do was invade it. A sensible man, however, would just go home again and leave her to stew, Alissandru reflected grimly. But Alissandru never turned his back on a challenge. He walked round to the side of the house and calculated his chances of climbing up onto the roof of the kitchen to make it into the bedroom where she had left the window open. Go home, logic advised, confront Isla, his volatile, stubborn nature urged. Yanking loose his bow tie to unbutton his collar, he cast his jacket over a shrub and tested a drainpipe for stability.
Isla heard a noise and looked up from her book. As she saw a hand come through the window to grasp at the sill she screamed so loud that she hurt her throat.
‘Per l’amor di Dio...it is only I,’ Alissandru drawled as he pushed the window wider and swung lithely through the gap, black hair tousled as he leant back on the ledge and stretched, long, lean black-trouser-clad legs extended.
