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‘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 computers, 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.
