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‘I don’t want anything to stress your father. It won’t be good for him.’
‘Then allow me to handle things my way.’
‘You’re so...cold!’
‘I think you’ve mentioned that before. You should be careful of taking sides in a battle that’s not yours.’
‘I just want what’s best for Leonard, and it doesn’t help his health issues for him to think that you hate him...’
CHAPTER FOUR
ALESSIOSTILLED.
Had he just heard what he thought he’d heard? Had anyoneeveroverstepped the boundaries as much as the woman sitting opposite him just had? For a few seconds he was quite simply so incredulous that words failed him.
‘I’m sorry.’ Sophie rushed hurriedly into the lengthening silence. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I just...got so frustrated. I’m sorry.’
‘I appreciate that you want what’s best for my father...’ Alessio cleared his throat and tried to wrest back some self-control. But he had taken a direct hit, and for a man who never lost his self-control, far less ever took any direct hits from anyone, he was finding himself on shaky ground.
‘I do.’ Sophie leant forward, every fibre of her being stretched taut, as if with a sense of urgency for him to understand her outburst.
Their eyes tangled. Alessio wondered how he could ever have described the firebrand leaning towards him as ‘background’. She was about as background as a rocket taking off for Mars.
‘You do?’ he heard himself parrot, still dazed by what she had said. His father thought that hehatedhim? How on earth had things got to where they had?
For ten years he had had a good childhood. Of course his father had, by nature, been the more distant parent. His mother had been the laughter and the exuberance...the one who had flung things into a basket and dragged her husband from his office and dug her heels in until he laughed and agreed to take them to the beach. She had been the one who hugged and kissed and sang in the kitchen and played music, pulling her husband to his feet and twirling him round, teasing him that she would make a dancer out of him if it was the last thing she ever did.
Alessio had adored her. But he had also loved his father and looked up to him. How had that disappeared so completely over the years?
He knew how. The open water between them had grown and swelled with disagreements and nagging differences and harsh judgement calls until an ocean separated them. He had been too young to understand what had been going on with his father after his wife had died, and his lack of forgiveness for his remarrying so soon after her death had solidified into a wall of bitterness that had been cemented into place.
For the first time Alessio felt uncomfortable with the choices he had made and the road he had opted to follow.
He fidgeted and frowned, his dark gaze resting on Sophie’s expressive face. Her eyes were blazing with a mixture of determination, sincerity, and regret for what she had said in the heat of the moment. Her short blonde hair was tangled every which way, as natural as it was possible to get. Her mouth was parted.
And as his eyes drifted further down he felt a quickening inside him and a sudden heavy ache in his groin. Because out of nowhere he was imagining more than just a concerned carer. He found himself mentally undressing her, getting to the hot, passionate woman underneath.
It occurred to him that he knew nothing about her personal life. It also occurred to him, hard on the heels of that, that her personal life was none of his business.
‘It’s very reassuring,’ he murmured now, ‘to know that the person who is looking after my father is so heavily invested in his well-being.’
‘Invested enough to stick up for him against her better judgement?’ she asked.
‘It’s what brought you down to see me in London, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is. I’m very fond of Leonard.’
‘Why do you qualify your sticking up for him as going against your better judgement?’
‘Because...’ Sophie sighed. ‘It’s not up to me to air anything your father should be saying to you face to face.’
‘Do I intimidate you?’ Alessio asked softly, his head tilted to one side.
‘Of course not! Like I said... I... It’s not my place... It just sort of came out... You don’t intimidate me...not at all. Why would you?’
‘It’s been known to happen.’ Alessio shrugged. ‘I have no idea why, because I am the least forbidding person I know.’
Sophie’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You can’t know very many people, that being the case.’
