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He took her to a tiny restaurant by the side of the lake and they sat at a secluded table festively decorated with bunches of holly.
Alessandro picked up a menu and ordered and then looked at her with a wary expression on his handsome face. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Do you realise that you never let me order my own food?’ ‘All right.’ He leaned back in his chair and gave a shrug. ‘What would you have ordered?’ ‘Smoked salmon and duck.’
He gave an arrogant smile. ‘So—I ordered you smoked salmon and duck. That makes me a genius, no?’ ‘It makes you controlling, Alessandro.’ He frowned. ‘It means I know you well.’ ‘It means you don’t even give me the choice.’ He let out a long breath and reached for his wine. ‘OK.’ Suddenly his Spanish accent sounded very pronounced. ‘So from now on, you want to order your own food. No problem.’
She hesitated. ‘It’s not just my food, Alessandro, it’s everything. I want to know that you care about my opinion. About me as a person.’
‘Of course I care about you as a person.’
‘And yet you didn’t want me to work in A and E.’
‘I was wrong in that,’ he conceded. ‘You have proved that you are still an excellent A and E nurse. Obviously you should be working in that area, not wasting your talents as a practice nurse. We will sort out a contract that allows you to be home for the children and work in the department.’
‘You’re doing it again!’ She stared at him in exasperation. ‘You’re telling me what I should do. Try asking me, Alessandro. Try asking me what I want. Believe it or not, I have an opinion, too.’
He muttered something in Spanish and sat back as their first course arrived. ‘All right.’ He paused while the waiter placed the plates in front of him and then gave her a smile. ‘I am asking you what you want. Tell me.’
‘I want to make my own choices,’ she said softly. ‘I want to decide what’s right for me as well as for the family. Yes, I want to be there for the children, of course I do. If anything, it’s even more important now they’re getting older and they have homework to do and friends to play with, but I can easily combine that with work and the mountain rescue team.’
Alessandro picked up his fork. ‘I want to know why you find Jake easy to talk to and not me.’ A strange expression flickered in his dark eyes. ‘Am I that intimidating?’
‘Not to me,’ she said quietly, ‘but you’re very self-confident and sure of yourself. And sometimes your confidence drives everything else along in its path. You’re very strong and you make decisions for people.’
He studied her through narrowed eyes. ‘But I have always been the same, I think.’
She gave a soft smile. ‘Yes, you have.’
‘You remember the first time we met?’
Colour flooded into her cheeks. ‘I’m not likely to forget.’
‘You were talking to Jake in the students’ bar,’ Alessandro said softly, ‘and I took one look at you and knew then that you were going to be mine.’
‘You grabbed me by the hand and dragged me across the road to that little restaurant—’
‘And then you came back to my place,’ Alessandro said in a deep, sexy drawl. ‘And we didn’t get out of bed for three days.’
Her colour deepened. ‘I got pregnant that weekend.’
‘And I wa
s so pleased,’ Alessandro confessed with a complete lack of remorse. ‘It gave me a reason to marry you without having to suffer a long engagement.’
She stared down at the simple gold band on the finger of her left hand. At the time, getting engaged hadn’t seemed to matter. She’d been swept away by the force of his passion and the intensity of her love for him.
And that love had deepened over the years as she’d discovered what an amazing man he was.
But how had he felt about her? Had the novelty worn off? ‘All the women were after you.’
‘But I wanted only you.’
And how about now? she wanted to ask. How about now? Had he grown bored with the person she was? But she didn’t want to risk spoiling a nice evening by hearing something she didn’t want to hear and he was so obviously trying hard to listen to and understand her that she didn’t want to threaten the atmosphere.
‘It is true I am a strong person and that characteristic isn’t helped by the job I do,’ Alessandro confessed, disarmingly honest. ‘In A and E, I don’t operate by consensus. I am not going to stand there with an injured patient and ask everyone for an opinion on the correct treatment protocol. I am used to making snap decisions.’
And those snap decisions saved lives on a daily basis, Christy knew that. He was an incredibly skilled and talented doctor and his decisiveness and confidence was an important contributing factor in his success.
