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If this was about sex, maybe she ought to get it over with...
She shook her head. Sleep with Cesare? The flaws in that plan hit her immediately, the main being that he wouldn’t be interested unless he’d just had a row with his girlfriend. She was under no illusions that a man like Cesare, with his well-known penchant for leggy blondes, would, under normal circumstances, give her a second glance. A lovers’ tiff was the only thing that explained the woman’s absence from his room.
* * *
Cesare was still swearing in two languages when the door opened before he reached it.
He clamped his lips closed. During his short but meteoric driving career he had been renowned for his ability to maintain his cool under any and all circumstances. Labelled enigmatic by the press and a machine by his envious rivals, at that moment he found himself struggling to contain his feelings, and if his housekeeper’s expression was any indication he was not doing a very good job.
He tilted his head in stiff acknowledgement of Mrs Mack, and, not trusting himself to speak without yelling, raised a sable eyebrow in enquiry.
‘Mr Dane is in the library.’
Cesare struggled not to read too much into her air of tight-lipped disapproval. His housekeeper disapproved of many things, not just discovering a married guest in a passionate clinch with an employee. Even so the image that tortured him remained in his head, making him break into a jog before he reached the library door, where he stopped and took a deep breath.
Paul turned out to be alone. The only thing he had been getting close and friendly with, if the levels in the bottle were any indication, was his whisky. Cesare had no problem sharing booze, but when it came to his... A frown tugged his brow into furrows. What was she other than not his?
Not his, but a total nightmare and she was not getting paid to sleep with his married friend, so his attitude was totally justified.
‘This is a surprise, Paul.’ Despite an effort to inject some warmth Cesare didn’t even manage tepid.
The other man didn’t appear to notice the lack of tepid.
Cesare took a deep breath and decided against small talk. Better to know straight off how bad this could get.
On the plus side, if there was a plus side, the sight of the family unit in the flesh might bring home to Anna that her actions had an impact on others.
Or it might drive her back into her married lover’s arms.
‘Is Clare with you? The children?’ If so he would have to be especially nice to Mrs Mack, who had threatened—not seriously—early retirement after the twin boys’ last stay.
Paul, in the act of topping his glass, raised it to Cesare and shook his head. ‘Clare has left me... Acshully,’ he slurred, ‘she has thrown me out.’
Cesare froze as the alarm bells in his head became deafening.
‘She found out about Rosanna?’
Had Paul confessed?
Cesare discarded this possibility. Paul was not the confessing kind. He was the kind to dump his problem on his friends and expect them to sort them for him. How many times over the past five years had they played this scene? Cesare experienced a flash of guilt at the thought and his irritation. He owed Paul.
And Paul knew it.
His friend was going to carry on dumping his problems. What did the psychologists call it—learnt behaviour?
Paul gave a hazy frown and blinked. ‘Are you all right ? You look...’ He gave a sudden light-bulb grin. ‘Rosanna. You mean Rosie, the delicious Rosie. So, so sweet...so...so hot. Just the best.’
Cesare’s lips thinned into a grimace of distaste. At his sides his hands clenched into fists as he ground his teeth audibly and fought his way through a red-mist moment.
‘No, she never found out about Rosie, but Rosie, she was different, the real thing. I wish...’ He gave an emotional sigh. ‘No, this was nothing. A one-night stand, that’s all.’ He dismissed it with a snap of his fingers before he took another gulp of thirty-year-old malt. ‘But Clare won’t see that. She won’t listen to reason at all,’ he whined.
He paused as if expecting a sympathetic murmur in response to the petulant complaint, but when it didn’t come he took another gulp of whisky.
‘I hoped you might make her see reason, Cesare. She likes you. You’ve got a way with women.’
‘That’s not “a way”, it’s called not cheating.’
Before Paul could respond the door opened, letting in the distant sounds of Jas’s laugher, dogs’ excited barking and Anna, who walked into the room in a mood for a fight. It didn’t take any intuitive skills to know this; every delicious inch of her screamed it.
