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‘How so? Alessio narrowed his eyes.
She had her profile to him, and he wanted to tilt her head, make her look him in the eyes so that he could read what she was thinking.
The force of his wanting meshed with the force of his needing. Where did one begin and the other end?
It was disconcerting. It drove all his defences into gear. But still...
Around this woman, his defences didn’t do what they’d been trained to do.
Around her, he sometimes felt as though his outer armour had been stripped away, leaving him vulnerable to...
To what?
He didn’t know. It confused him, and confusion was an emotion that he had no intention of tolerating. Confusion equalled weakness, and Alessio knew what if felt like to be weak, to be helpless. He had been swept away on a tidal wave of grief after his mother’s death. Too young to navigate those choppy waters, and faced with a distant father who had withdrawn into himself, he had been carried along on currents over which he had had no control.
Of course he had come through those turbulent times, but he had a very long memory when it came to things like that.
‘Well?’ he pressed. ‘I’m guessing that you have some kind of plan in mind?’
‘We’re very different people...’
‘And?’
‘And under any other circumstances there’s no way we would have...would have...’
‘Say it, Sophie.’
‘There’s no way we would have ended up in bed together.’
She kept her voice low, although early into the journey Alessio had slid shut the partition separating them from his driver and Leonard still asleep in the passenger seat.
Neither could hear a word, but it still felt weird having this intimate conversation with two other people so close by.
She actually couldn’t say the wordlovers.
She knew that she was bright red, and she guessed that he was probably laughing at her circumspection.
How could you sleep with someone, touch them in the most intimate places imaginable, and then clam up when it came to calling a spade a spade?
Lack of experience.
She’d thought she was tough, having been through a lot growing up, but no amount of toughness had prepared her for a man like Alessio.
She breathed in deeply and held his dark gaze.
‘You know that for sure?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘So you think we only ended up being lovers because we happened to be in the same place at the same time?’
‘Sort of. More or less.’
‘That doesn’t say much for the powers of attraction, does it?’
‘What do you mean?’
Alessio ignored that question. ‘Furthermore, I find it pretty offensive.’
