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God, he was beautiful. Long, thick eyelashes…sexy eyes…the curve of his mouth…
She snapped out of it and remembered that this was what being friendly was all about. It was conversing without edginess, and without dredging up past hurts and recriminations.
She also reminded herself that he was engaged to be married.
‘She was probably just a little startled to see you there. Did you have a delicious Christmas lunch?’ she asked.
Alessandro shrugged. ‘One superb meal tastes much like another.’ Just like making the last million was much like making another. Only the first ever really counted. He looked at the heart-shaped face, the big, blue, almond-shaped eyes looking back at him, the full, kissable mouth.
‘Oh, to be able to say that!’ She felt a slight shift in the atmosphere and awkwardly edged her way off the stool. ‘I really should be going now.’
Caught up in the meanderings of his own thoughts, Alessandro frowned.
He didn’t want her to go.
What the hell did that mean?
Cutting through all the reasons he had given himself for his inexplicable urge to keep seeing her in the face of her obvious reluctance to see him—the guilt factor…the altruistic concern for her welfare…the practicality of having a civilised relationship because they would meet up occasionally as a matter of course—cutting through all that, like a dark undercurrent under the placid surface of a lake, lay the disturbing realisation that he still found her attractive, still found his eyes drifting along her body, remembering the exquisite sexual pleasure she had once afforded him.
Where did that leave Victoria?
He would have to talk to her. He owed it to both of them. But it was just as well that Megan was going.
When, as she approached the front door, she turned around and said politely that, at the risk of repeating herself, she probably wouldn’t be seeing him any time soon, and to take care and have a good life—whatever the hell that meant—he inclined his head in agreement.
That brief window of easy companionship was fading fast. She could see it in his eyes. She wasn’t sure what she had interrupted—work, probably—but he was eager to have her gone now, so that he could get back to whatever he had been doing.
She had wondered whether she had never been obedient enough. Now she suspected that she had just been tiresome. Suddenly she wanted to get away as fast as her legs could take her.
She gabbled something about his jacket needing dry cleaning.
‘No need. I will call a taxi for you.’
‘No! Thank you. Public transport…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! The bus and tube service today will be extremely limited.’
He picked up the jacket and there it was—that tiny weight nestling in the concealed pocket on the inside. He could feel it because it was where he often kept his own cellphone, and it was where he had stashed Victoria’s yesterday. He had completely forgotten about it—even when, over Christmas lunch, she had asked him, frowning, whether he knew where she had left it.
It just went to prove how much seeing Megan again had made him take his eye off the ball.
‘I have a phone here….’
He flipped the lid and stared at five messages, opened them, read them, and continued staring at the innocent little metal object in the palm of his hand.
‘What’s up?’
Reminded of her presence, Alessandro looked at her distractedly
‘The taxi…?’ Megan prodded nervously, because he was now staring at her in a really odd way and she figured that the egg timer that measured his patience levels was beginning to run perilously low. She would imprint this memory in her brain for ever, she told herself fiercely. It would do her well to remember, should she ever start going down the nostalgia road again, that she could outstay her welcome in a very short space of time.
She backed towards the door, but she doubted he even really noticed. He looked as though he were a million miles away.
‘Yes. The taxi.’ Alessandro snapped shut the phone and shoved it in the pocket of his sweats. ‘Might be quicker if I walk out with you and hail one.’
‘Are you sure you’re okay, Alessandro?’
‘What? Yes,’ he told her irritably. ‘Why? Are you planning on getting your Florence Nightingale hat on if I’m not?’
‘There’s no need to jump down my throat,’ Megan snapped back, pulling on her coat. ‘I only asked.’
‘Because underneath that thin veneer of hating my guts you still really care about my well-being, right?’ He clenched his fist round Victoria’s cellphone, burning a hole in his pocket, and willed his legendary self-control back into place. ‘I’m being rude. Apologies. You did me a favour bringing my jacket, and for that I thank you.’
