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‘The speculation online is intense, but only in the less reputable media...for now. The photographs of you in the car will break soon enough. Who knows what they’ll say? My staff won’t talk, if that’s your concern.’
‘They never have before. I havenoconcerns there.’
‘I have a team considering the problem.’ Stefano looked at her again and in the deep pit of her stomach she knewshewas the problem here. Something to be dealt with. Not a person with fears of her own. ‘I’ll see them now, on how we manage things going forward.’
He left the room and Alessio walked to the window, looked out over Lasserno. His country. The only thing he desired or needed, she was coming to realise.
‘Never complain, never explain,’ she said.
He wheeled round, all of him so hard and tense it was as if one more push and he might snap. She wanted to do something. Reach out. Comfort. Say it would all be okay. But she knew some things would never be okay again, for either of them.
‘What?’
‘The British Royal family. That’s what they do.’
‘Trust me.’ He began to pace the room in that familiar way of his, as if he needed to expend energy. ‘I won’t be giving statements.’
‘How did the press find out?’
He raised one coal-dark eyebrow at her, the burnt umber gaze of his so heated only hours ago, now cold and forbidding like some bottomless, muddy pool. ‘How, indeed?’
‘You think...me?’
He looked so out of place in this moment, in his disarray. Wearing casual clothes and not the suit he donned as his usual armour. Surrounded by his ancestors glaring down from their lofty height on the walls, as if the weekend of humanity he’d stolen was some kind of disgrace.
‘I trust everyone else around me. But this story is a familiar one.’
It dawned on her then, what he wouldn’t say out loud. He didn’t trusther.‘It might be an annoyance for your private life, but have you ever thought how this debacle could affect me?’
He stopped his pacing. Dead.
‘You?’
Said as if he’d only just realised she was a person who might have thoughts and feelings about this too. She threw up her hands and began pacing then. As if Alessio’s will to constantly be on the move had infected her.
‘No, clearly you haven’t thought about me at all. Other than to accuse me.’
‘I’ve accused you of nothing.’
Theyethung unsaid.
‘I sign non-disclosure agreements with all of my clients. My word about what I discover is absolute. Would any of them trust me if they thought I would spill my secrets to the press? No. Sure, I could paint people, but it would never be the same. It would destroy my process. Ruineverything.’
The corner of his mouth rose in something like a sneer. Not quite contempt, but close enough.
‘You’re financially distressed. Your uncle mismanaged your inheritance. A tell-all about me would fill your bank account,’ Alessio hissed, cold, cruel and furious.
She stopped then, as if those words had stripped the will to move right out of her. There was such accusation in his gaze. It was as though he was a brittle shell filled with nothing but disdain.
‘You honestly believe I would talk about this, us...’ she waved between them as he had done, only this had meant something to her ‘...to the press? What kind of world do you live in?’
‘Look around you.’ He spread his arms wide, like some sacrifice. ‘I live in the real world! Where people want what they can’t have and take what they can.’
His words cracked her, cleaving her in two. She grabbed on to the back of an armchair and gripped the silken fabric tight in case the halves of her fell to the floor. ‘If this is the real world then I don’t want any part of it.’
‘Luckily for you, you shall have none.’
A reminder once again she was being firmly put in her place. A place she’d never sought to leave, until the weekend just past. ‘I know.’
