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Surprisingly, Alessandro wasn’t sure that he had been worrying. More contemplating jumping into unknown waters….
‘Okay…’ he said, moving towards her very slowly and watching her the way he might watch a domestic pet that had suddenly become dangerously unpredictable. ‘So what is this all about, then?’
‘It’s about us, Alessandro.’
‘What about us?’
‘I’ve thought about this arrangement of ours and I’ve decided that the time has come to end it.’ She thought bitterly of that other self—the one who had existed less than two hours ago, the one who had become caught up in all sorts of silly, reckless dreams. She folded her arms and stood her ground while he looked at her in perfect bemusement.
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Alessandro told her amiably. ‘Did you take a knock to your head when you went to the restroom at the theatre? Maybe you need to lie down?’
‘I don’t need to lie down. I need to go upstairs and get my stuff, then I’m leaving this house and I won’t be coming back.’
The amiable smile dropped from Alessandro’s face, but before he could pick her up on what she was saying—which made absolutely no sense whatsoever—she had turned her back to him and was running up the stairs.
After a second’s hesitation he followed her, easily catching up with her and blocking the door to his bedroom.
‘Just like that?’ he ground out. ‘You’re leaving just like that? No explanation? Well, I refuse to allow it.’
‘You refuse to allow it?’ Megan gave a burst of mirthless laughter, but she was trembling.
‘Yes, dammit!’
‘You can do a lot of things, Alessandro, but you can’t stop me walking out on you.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing happened. I just wised up, that’s all.’
‘No, it damn well isn’t all! I can read people, and you weren’t planning on leaving me this morning, when we were out shopping! Nor were you planning to leave me when we were at the theatre—at least not until after the intermission. You disappeared for a while. What happened? Who did you talk to?’
Megan had not intended to go into details. When she had said goodbye to Victoria, she had been in a daze. The second half of the play, which she should have enjoyed but which in reality she would have been hard-pressed to remember, had given her time to try and collect her thoughts, and thought number one had been that she wasn’t going to go down the post-mortem route. She was going to be cool and dignified and leave him to stew with unanswered questions.
He probably wouldn’t stew for very long, but the thought of him stewing at all might well distract her from her misery at no longer being with him. She couldn’t get out of her mind the thought that she had dug herself a hole, jumped in, and proceeded to cover herself with earth. All her crazy hopes had been based on a piece of fiction.
Of course now that she was actually facing his barrage of questions, and staring into those black, intense eyes in which she had happily lost herself, she no longer felt quite so content with a dignified exit.
She had never been able to master the art of being cool.
‘Well?’ Alessandro demanded. ‘Are you just going to stand there, gaping like a goldfish?’
‘Let me pass! I want to get my stuff!’
‘Not until we’ve had some kind of conversation about this!’
‘You always have to get your own way, don’t you, Alessandro?’ she responded in a shrill voice, which sent his temper levels up by a couple of notches.
‘That’s pretty much it,’ he agreed. ‘And the sooner you start realising that, the better for all concerned.’
‘Okay. I’ll tell you what you want to know.’ She took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. ‘Guess who I bumped into when I was waiting in the queue for the toilet?’
‘No idea. Why don’t you enlighten me?’
‘Your ex! Victoria. Remember her?’
‘Of course I remember her,’ Alessandro said warily. ‘How is she?’
‘Oh, she’s doing just fine, now that you ask! Better than fine, in fact. Positively thriving.’
Alessandro waited.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what we chatted about?’
‘Why don’t we go downstairs to finish this conversation?’ he said in a grim voice. ‘You said that you didn’t want to talk in the taxi because it wasn’t the right place. Well, getting hysterical on the landing isn’t the right place for me.’
Megan wanted to tell him that it was the right place for her, because that way she might have asserted a little of her willpower, but in actual fact her legs felt wobbly, and while she knew that heading straight towards the question-and-answer session she had wanted to avoid was going to be undignified, collapsing outside his bedroom door because her legs were like jelly would have been even more undignified.
