scorching hot again and she wondered why on earth she’d agreed to this.
Another one of her stupid ideas.
She’d thought her feelings for him had been no more than a childish crush. She’d thought the pain he’d caused would have inoculated her against his lethal charm. She’d thought she was immune. If you’d been infected with something once, you shouldn’t catch it again, should you?
So why the explosion of chemistry?
Tasha gave a groan of frustration and turned off the shower.
Her brother was right. She needed to get out more.
Wrapping herself in a huge towel, she opened the bathroom door and risked a glance towards his bedroom. It was in darkness. The feeling of superiority drained out of her. If he’d been watching her, he wasn’t now. He wasn’t lying there tortured with unfulfilled desire after seeing her in her underwear.
He was asleep.
Which said it all. You couldn’t torment a man who didn’t even bother looking.
Feeling cross and hot and all sorts of things she didn’t want to feel, Tasha flopped onto the bed and rolled onto her stomach, burying her face in the pillow. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She was supposed to have taken one look at him and wondered what she’d seen in him. She wasn’t supposed to be having the thoughts she was having now. Why couldn’t he be a total wimp like all the other men she met on a daily basis? Her last relationship had floundered after less than a week when the doctor in question had taken to his bed with a dose of man-flu. Tasha, who had endless patience with sick children, had been exasperated by his dying-duck impression but she’d dutifully made hot drinks, dished out tablets and made sympathetic noises until finally calling a halt, reasoning that there was no future in a relationship where one of the partners wanted to strangle the other.
Why couldn’t Alessandro provoke the same feelings of irritation?
Why didn’t she want to strangle him?
‘Ugh.’ Blocking out images of his broad shoulders, she burrowed under the pillow. The man had to be in agony. The bruises on his chest were the worst she’d ever seen. But had he uttered a murmur of complaint? No. In fact, he’d been so stoical about the whole thing it had been a struggle to persuade him to take painkillers. She wanted him to be a wimp, but he was anything but. And as for the chilli...
Clearly he liked his food hot.
Tasha thumped the pillow angrily and rolled onto her back. So he was tough. So what? That just proved the man had no nerve-endings and she already knew that. A man with the slightest sensitivity wouldn’t have treated her the way Alessandro had treated her.
Had she seen a flicker of remorse?
Had he apologised?
No. And she hadn’t exactly progressed in her plan to make him suffer. In fact, so far her plan had totally failed to get off the ground.
Wishing she hadn’t wasted her limited finances on sexy underwear, Tasha rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.
So far she’d failed spectacularly to make him feel remotely guilty for the way he’d treated her, but she couldn’t very well back out now without exposing herself to relentless questioning and teasing by her insensitive brother. Which meant she was stuck here.
She lay in the dark, unable to sleep, wondering how someone with a chest that bruised had somehow managed to get himself to and from the bathroom without help. It hadn’t just been the physical strength that had impressed her, it was the mental strength. Somehow he’d pushed through the pain.
He didn’t just look like a warrior, he had warrior mentality.
There was a hardness to him that hadn’t been there ten years before. He wasn’t the same person.
And neither was she.
Tasha was pondering on that when a loud crash echoed around the house.
She was out of bed in a flash, her mind already working through various scenarios. If he’d fallen out of bed, it could have seriously aggravated his injuries. They’d need an ambulance. Paramedics... ‘Alessandro?’ Sprinting into his bedroom, she saw a lamp lying on the floor where he’d knocked it off the bedside table. On the wall in front of him a football match was being played out on the wide-screen TV and he was watching avidly, his hand locked around the remote control.
‘Tash, you’re standing in front of the screen!’
‘You’re watching sport?’ Her heart was hammering and she felt weak at the knees. ‘You frighten the life out of me and then all you can say is “You’re standing in front of the screen”?’ Incredulous, she rescued the lamp and waited for her heartbeat to reach a normal level. ‘I thought you’d fallen out of bed. I thought you’d broken the rest of your ribs and your skull to go with it.’
‘I knocked the lamp off when I was reaching for the remote control.’
‘It’s two in the morning. What is it with men and the remote control?’
‘I wanted to watch sport. I couldn’t sleep.’
Him too?
Only she’d been lying there thinking about him while he’d been thinking about football. The knowledge scraped at her nerves and strengthened her resolve. ‘Is it the pain?’ Tasha straightened the lamp. ‘I thought you’d fallen.’ And she’d been terrified of what a fall could do to his broken ribs. Not that she cared, she told herself quickly, but she didn’t want to be stuck here nursing him any longer than she had to be.
‘It isn’t pain. Go back to bed, Tasha. I’m sorry I disturbed you.’ He didn’t shift his gaze from the screen, watching unblinking as the crowd roared its approval. He was a typical man, obsessed with sport, just like her three brothers. She could walk across the room naked and he wouldn’t look up because some feat of sporting prowess was being enacted on the giant plasma screen.
Why had she bothered buying expensive lingerie to drive him wild? she thought crossly. She may as well have worn her ancient Mickey Mouse T-shirt.
The glass doors were still open onto the terrace and a cool breeze wafted into the room. ‘Shall I close these now?’ She walked across the room. ‘You must be freezing.’
‘I like the cold air.’ Something in his tone made her look at him closely and it was only because she was trained to notice subtle clues that she realised he wasn’t actually watching the game. True, his eyes were fixed on the screen, but they were blank. Empty.
And suddenly she knew that the football was an excuse.
Tasha switched on the other lamp and for a fleeting second saw the expression on his face. The humour was gone and in its place was exhaustion and pain. She hesitated and then sat down on the chair, hating herself for not just being able to walk away. It wasn’t that she cared, she told herself quickly. It was because he was in pain. She’d never been any good at watching someone in pain. ‘You look rough.’
‘Go to bed, Tasha.’ It was a dismissal she chose to ignore.
She wondered whether he was thinking about his injury or the loss
