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‘Roughly six months.’
Roughly six months! Less time than he’d been with her. It hurt to think that he must have been bowled over to have moved from dating to engagement in such a brief period of time.
‘Not long. A whirlwind romance?’ She forced a smile. ‘It must be the icing on the cake, Alessandro. I’m very happy for you.’
Alessandro hadn’t thought about it as a whirlwind romance. He had met Victoria when she had been working with her firm of lawyers on one of his deals. He’d liked her, admired her intelligence, and appreciated her ability to respect his ferocious working agenda. Was that romance? It had certainly been enough for him to take the next step forward, but he had to admit that it was at least partly fuelled by the fact that he wasn’t getting any younger.
Unlike a lot of his city colleagues—men in their thirties, climbing the ladder to success—Alessandro had no intention of remaining a bachelor because of a preference for playing the field. Nor was he going to hang around until he was too old to enjoy playing with his kids. Sure, he had had women, but some restless, dissatisfied urge had always held him back from commitment.
Victoria, he recognised, was undemanding. She had her own high-powered job, and therefore did not look to him for constant companionship. Nor did she nag for assurances about love or any such thing. She worked for him and he, he suspected, worked for her. It was a mutually gratifying situation.
‘Icing on the cake?’ he mused. ‘Yes, I suppose it is….’
CHAPTER TWO
IT HAD not been a satisfying meeting with Megan.
Alessandro stared out of his floor-to-ceiling office window at the busy, grey London streets five storeys below. Wet pavements were illuminated by lights, and everyone seemed to be laden down with shopping. The usual splurge of money-spending on presents—at least half of which would inevitably be returned to the shops on the first working day after Christmas because they didn’t fit the bill. He had already bought something for Victoria—a diamond necklace which had cost the earth and which he had dispatched his personal assistant to source with the guiding words that it should be classy and very expensive. His personal assistant was extremely efficient.
Thinking about Christmas presents made him think about the one and only Christmas present he had ever bought for Megan. A pair of tickets for a concert by a band she had been crazy about. A dark, intimate venue where the noise had made the walls vibrate. They hadn’t been able to stop grinning.
The memory surfaced seemingly from nowhere, and Alessandro frowned and thought back to his unsatisfactory meeting with Megan. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but the conversation had been awkward, forced, and the more awkward and forced it had become, the keener he had been to go beyond her polite responses and get the real flavour of the person sitting so stiffly opposite him.
He had left the house forty-five minutes after he had arrived, with the very clear impression that he had only been invited for a cup of coffee because she had found herself between a rock and a hard place, and that, having invited him in, she had been utterly uninterested in talking to him. Every word had been squeezed out of her, and each word had been less informative than the one before.
The woman hated him and couldn’t be bothered to hide the fact.
Having enemies was part and parcel of Alessandro’s life. Every successful man had his fair share. But his enemies would never have dared show their faces—and he had never known any woman to be less than madly in love with him! He knew that Megan had good reason. Just as he knew that breaking up with her at the time had been for her own good, whether she accepted that fact or not. There had been an innocence about her approach to life that would have been damaged had he dragged her along in his wake. He had made an attempt to tell her that, but she had listened to him politely, head cocked to one side, and then had said in a cool little voice, ‘Whatever.’
Nor had he been able to get her to talk about her private life. Was she seeing someone? He couldn’t imagine Megan making such a long-haul transfer, leaving behind her family, unless a man was involved. But when he had asked—out of genuine interest—all he had got was the same polite smile and, ‘That’s really none of your business, is it, Alessandro?’
Victoria’s call interrupted his frowning contemplation telling him that she and Dominic were in Reception.
Family outing number one—and Alessandro hadn’t objected because the outing in question was to the promised football game, which Dominic had followed up on with unexpected tenacity for a six-year-old kid. Football games didn’t usually feature high on Dominic’s agenda. His father lived in New York and only assumed a parental role once a year, for a fortnight when he came to London. And Alessandro certainly couldn’t see Victoria slashing her work commitments to take him to a football match, or even for that matter, arranging football lessons for him. She wouldn’t be able to commit to picking him up from them.
