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‘You wouldn’t be doing it for me,’ he emphasised. ‘You’d be doing it for Mattio. What’s a few weeks out of your life? The poor kid hasn’t had much continuity in his so far.’
Even a compulsive liar had to speak the truth occasionally, Maya thought sardonically as her half-sister’s words floated through her head.You don’t know what Samuele is capable of.
Well, she now knew one thing he was capable of after this breathtakingly blatant attempt to play on her feelings for Mattio.
‘For future reference,’ she told him crisply, ‘I don’t respond well to moral blackmail. Not that there will be—a future, I mean,’ she tacked on, wincing, because the only thing she’d managed to do was make it sound as though they had a past.
They didn’t have a past, present or future. She had spent more time in the company of the woman at the checkout till at her local supermarket than this man, and she actually knew more about her!
It was just the entire off-the-scale hothouse weirdness of everything about the last few hours that had fed this strange feeling of intimacy between them, utterly misplaced intimacy, she told herself.
‘Sorry, that was below the belt.’
She suddenly caught an expression in his face and wondered if he felt guilty. If he did, it couldn’t bethatguilty. It wasn’t in his nature to give up, and when one tactic failed you tried an alternative one. He didn’t disappoint her.
‘I need your help and if you can put aside your dislike of me... I mean, you don’t have to like me or trust me, and any practical inconvenience I will sort out with your employer or whatever. Will you promise to think about it?’
She struggled not to feel disarmed by his sincerity, but knew she was losing the battle as she felt her antagonism melting away. ‘How long before you need to know?’
He glanced at the thin metal banded watch on his wrist. ‘Five...no, make that four minutes.’ He looked at her, one dark brow arched, and produced a white grin that would have given the devil a run for his money—a very attractive devil.
She gave a small laugh of disbelief.
‘And I would really appreciate your input into the recruitment of the nanny too,’ he said, dangling the suggestion like a carrot of temptation.
She breathed out heavily. ‘I just can’t...’ Her voice trailed away as the exhaustion she’d been holding at bay with sheer willpower suddenly hit her, like walking into a wall, and bone-deep weariness came flooding in.
‘Are you all right?’ He stood braced, looking as though he was fully prepared to catch her if she fell, which was a good thing because she really felt as if she might go down.
She pulled herself to her full height, but she still had to tip her head back a long way to look him in the face.
‘I’m fine,’ she grouched irritably, wishing she could throw something more than his concern back in his face, then sighed as she felt impelled to add, ‘Thank you.’
‘You need to sit down. You’re having a vasovagal attack.’
‘A what?’
‘You’re going to faint.’ Taking matters into his own hands, he took her by the shoulders and manoeuvred her onto the nearest sofa. One finger pressed into the middle of her chest sent her backwards while he lifted her legs onto the cushions.
‘I don’t faint.’ In her head it was a firm, calm statement, but sadly it emerged as a weak little whisper. Maybe she would just lie there until the world stopped spinning. Things were a bit vague and hazy, and she couldn’t even work up the enthusiasm to react when she felt cool fingers taking the pulse on her wrist. ‘Who made you the expert on fainting anyhow?’
Eyes closed, she missed the look that crossed his face.
‘I suppose you’ve been making girls swoon all your life,’ she observed waspishly as she experimentally opened her eyes to discover the world had stopped spinning.
‘Take it slowly,’ he cautioned as she lifted herself up onto an elbow.
A massive surprise when she ignored him and sat up, swinging her legs to the floor. ‘Did you get much sleep last night?’
It seemed like a century ago since she had opened her door to her half-sister, and the memories were already meshed into a kaleidoscope of intertwined images.
It had been one hit on top of another. The exhaustion she was feeling was not just about sleep deprivation; it was emotional.
‘Take this.’ She curled her fingers around the warm teacup. ‘You can sleep on the plane.’
She flung him a look and grimaced as, cradling the cup between her two hands, she lifted it to her lips and drank. ‘I don’t take sugar.’ She took another sip anyway. ‘I can’t just drop everything...my job...’ Her voice trailed away. She was expecting her redundancy notice to arrive any day now, not that that made any difference.
‘Where do you work?’
