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‘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 front 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.
‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do,’ she said on a sigh. ‘I’m just not used to people distrusting me. I’m one of the most reliable people I know when it comes to keeping a secret.’
‘Really?’ Mere inches separated them. He could feel the warmth radiating from her body out towards his and he wondered again whether his instincts had been right when they had told him that she was not as unaffected by him as she would have liked to pretend.
‘Yes!’ She relaxed with a laugh. ‘When I was a teenager, I was the one person all the lads turned to when it came to confidences. They knew I would never breathe a word when they told me that they fancied someone, or asked me what I thought it would take to impress someone else...’
And all the while, Alessio thought to himself, you were taking lessons in self-defence.
Never one to do much prying into female motivations, he was surprised to find that he quite wanted to know more about her. ‘You’ve won your argument,’ he said with a slow smile.
‘You mean, you won’t be asking me to sign something?’
‘No. So there will be no need for you to live in fear that you will be flung into prison and the key thrown away if the mood takes me.’ His eyes dipped down to the barely visible swell of her small breasts under the baggy tee-shirt.
‘I appreciate that,’ Lesley told him sincerely. ‘I don’t know how easy I would have found it, working for someone who didn’t trust me. So I shall start first thing in the morning.’ She suddenly realised just how close their bodies were to one another and she shuffled a couple of discreet inches back. ‘If it’s all the same to you, you can point me in the direction of your computer and I’ll spend the morning there, and the afternoon going through your daughter’s rooms just in case I find anything of interest. And you needn’t worry about asking your housekeeper to prepare any lunch for me. I usually just eat on the run. I can fill you in when you return from London or else I can call you if you decide to stay in London overnight.’
Alessio inclined his head in agreeable assent—except, maybe there would be no need for that.
Maybe he would stay here in the country—so much more restful than London and so much easier were he to be at hand.
CHAPTER FOUR
LESLEY WAS NOT finding life particularly restful. Having been under the impression that Alessio would be commuting to and from London, with a high possibility of remaining in London for at least part of the time, she’d been dismayed when, two days previously, he’d informed her that there had been a change of plan.
‘I’ll be staying here,’ he had said the morning after she had arrived. ‘Makes sense.’
Lesley had no idea how he had reached that conclusion. How did it make sense for him to be around: bothering her; getting under her skin; just being within her line of vision and therefore compelling her to look at him?
‘You’ll probably have a lot of questions and it’ll be easier if I’m here to answer them.’
‘I could always phone you,’ she had said, staring at him with rising panic, because she’d been able to see just how the week was going to play out.
‘And then,’ he had continued, steamrollering over her interruption, ‘I would feel guilty were I to leave you here on your own. The house is very big. My conscience wouldn’t be able to live with the thought that you might find it quite unsettling being here with no one around.’
He had directed her to where she would be working and she’d been appalled to find that she would be sharing office space with him.
‘Of course, if you find it uncomfortable working in such close proximity to me, then naturally I can set up camp somewhere else. The house has enough rooms to accommodate one of them being turned into a makeshift work place.’
She had closed her mouth and said nothing, because what had there been to say? That, yes, she would find it uncomfortable working in such close proximity to him, because she was just too aware of him for her own good; because he made her nervous and tense; because her skin tingled the second he got too close?
She had moved from acknowledging that the man was sexy to accepting that she was attracted to him. She had no idea how that could be the case, given that he just wasn’t the sort of person she had ever envisaged herself taking an interest in, but she had given up fighting it. There was just something too demanding about his physicality for her to ignore.
So she had spent her mornings in a state of rigid, hyper-sensitive awareness. She had been conscious of his every small move as he’d peered at his computer screen, reached across his desk to get something or swivelled his chair so that he could find a more comfortable position for his long legs.
She had not been able to block out the timbre of his deep voice whenever he was on the phone. She wouldn’t have been able to recall any of the conversations he had had, but she could recall exactly what that voice did to her.
The range of unwanted physical sensations he evoked in her was frankly exhausting.
So she had contrived to have a simple routine of disappearing outside to communicate with her office on the pretext that she didn’t want to disturb him.
