scrambled ungainly to her feet, momentarily forgetting she was dressed in nothing but a slip of satin that was probably showing every contour of her body. It was only as she felt his dark blue gaze run over her that she wished she had asked Lucia for something a little less revealing to wear. ‘You found my pendant,’ she said unnecessarily.
‘Yes.’ He handed it to her. ‘It must have fallen from your neck when you dabbed at your spilt coffee on your top. It was on the floor. I found it as I was leaving to go upstairs.’
Rachel tried to put the pendant back on but her fingers wouldn’t cooperate. She gave it another try but it slipped out of her hands and she had to kneel down again to retrieve it off the floor.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Allow me.’
She leaned towards him but it brought her so close to his face her breath stalled in her throat. They were eye to eye.
His eyes were so very dark. His breath was minty and fresh as it caressed her face. She could see the pinpoints of stubble on his jaw, the fresh dark growth triggered by the rush of his potent male hormones. Her fingers ached to feel the rasp of his stubble under her fingertips, to trace the sensual contour of his mouth. Her lips tingled to feel the hard press of his on hers, her heart beat so hard and so fast in anticipation she was sure he could hear it. For that matter she could hear it. It was like the roar of the ocean in her ears: pounding, tumultuous, deafening.
Alessandro took the pendant from her fingers and looped it around her neck, one of his hands lifting the curtain of her hair to free it from the snare of the chain. Rachel’s skin shivered in reaction, not just her neck but her entire body, inside and out. His touch was like fire. Her skin felt as if it were going to erupt into flames; every nerve ending was fizzing like a child’s bonfire-night sparkler.
‘There,’ he said, leaning back once the catch was secure. ‘You should probably get a jeweller to look at it to make sure it doesn’t come loose again.’
Rachel fingered the pendant, her eyes still locked on his as if tethered there by some invisible energy source. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a scratchy-sounding voice. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if I had lost it.’
‘It is obviously very valuable to you.’
‘Yes, it was my mother’s,’ she said, sitting back on her heels. ‘It’s all I have of hers.’
‘Well, at least you have it back now,’ he said.
Rachel bit her lip and then dived right in. ‘How did it happen?’
He looked at her for a long pause without speaking. She waited with baited breath, wondering if he was weighing up the odds about revealing what had happened to him. Was this why she had been made to sign the confidentiality agreement? Did he think so poorly of her that he had to go to that extreme?
‘Have you heard of Guillain-Barré syndrome?’ he asked at last.
‘Yes, I think so,’ she said. ‘It’s caused by a virus, isn’t it?’
‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘About two months ago after a trip abroad I developed a slight chest infection. It was nothing out of the ordinary, or so I thought. A few days later I developed some weakness in my legs. Again, I thought I had just overdone it. I had been training for a marathon before I got sick. But it turned out to be Guillain-Barré. The illness results in the inflammation and destruction of myelin in the peripheral nerves. Sometimes the paralysis can be far more serious when it affects the breathing or the ability to swallow. I am told I am one of the lucky ones. It is only my legs that have been affected, hopefully not permanently.’
Rachel didn’t know what to say. She was still reeling from the shock of it all. She was still flaying herself for everything she had said to him. Why hadn’t he said something? Surely he hadn’t hoped to keep his condition a secret from her while she was here? Or had he deliberately left it as long as he could so she could hang herself with the rope he had so very cleverly fed out to her?
‘Don’t worry, Rachel,’ he said with an embittered look. ‘It’s not catching.’
She frowned as she realised how he had interpreted her silence. ‘I’m not in the least concerned about that.’
One brow rose cynically. ‘Are you not?’
‘Of course not,’ she said.
‘So, you’re not planning on leaving at first light?’ he asked.
‘I’m not leaving.’ As soon as she said the words she realised how deeply she meant them. He thought her a woman without honour and principles but she would show him just how honourable and principled she had become. She would stand by her agreement with him. She would stay as long as he needed her.
He pushed his chair back from where she was kneeling on the floor. ‘I don’t want your pity,’ he said, biting out each word as if they were something bitter and distasteful.
‘I’m not offering you pity,’ she said. ‘I think it’s terrible that you’ve been dealt this but that’s empathy, not pity.’
‘Get up off the floor, for God’s sake,’ he said irritably.
Rachel stood up and brushed the borrowed wrap back down over her thighs. ‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked. ‘Can I help you with anything?’
His dark eyes glittered as they held hers. ‘What exactly are you offering, Rachel? Your delectable body to awaken my half-dead nerves?’
Her face suffused with colour all over again. ‘That wasn’t part of the arrangement,’ she said.
‘We could make it part.’
Her eyes rounded. ‘You can’t mean that.’
‘I can do what I want, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I am the one holding the purse strings now, remember?’
‘Am I to be punished for every horrible word I ever said to you?’ she asked. ‘Is that what this is about? You want a whipping boy and I am it?’
His eyes were dark blue chips of ice. ‘Go to bed, Rachel. I will see you in the morning.’
‘Don’t dismiss me like a child,’ she said with a late show of her wilfulness. ‘You’re always doing that. It’s so annoying.’
His hands gripped the turning mechanism on his chair. ‘Are you determined to see me lose my temper?’
‘I’m not scared of you, Alessandro,’ Rachel said.
‘Then you should be,’ he said, fixing her with a searing look. ‘I can do more harm to you than ten of your worthless, spineless fiancés. One word from me and your fashion career will be over. No one in the whole of Europe will touch you with a bargepole. Am I making myself clear?’
Rachel swallowed a walnut-sized restriction in her throat. ‘If you do that you will not just be destroying me but my business partner too.’
A pulse ticked at the side of his mouth. ‘Then you had better behave yourself, hadn’t you, cara?’ he said and, without waiting for a response from her, he turned on his wheels and left.
Rachel
