her feel as though her whole body had been plugged into a socket. ‘Do-gooders and preachers have a monotonous tendency to become self-righteous bores. Naturally, I have details of the land somewhere but I want to see for myself what the layout is. Since you’re the one handling the deal, I can’t imagine that would be a problem. Or is it? Does our past history make it a problem for you?’
Yes. Yes, it does, she had thought with rising desperation. ‘No. Of course not. Why should it?’ she had answered with an indifferent shrug.
So here she was now and she felt as though control was slipping out of her grasp. She knew that under normal circumstances a lapse in her self-control would be easily dealt with but with Alessandro...
Her frustration and anger was underlined by a darker, more insidious emotion, a swirl of excitement that scared her. It felt like a slumbering monster slowly reawakening. Even though she had taken care to dress as neutrally as possible, in a navy-blue suit that was the epitome of sexlessness—and an impractical colour, given the wall-to-wall blue summer skies and hot sunshine—she still felt horribly vulnerable as she hovered in the sitting room waiting for him to show up.
She had informed him that she would meet him at the premises, but he had insisted on collecting her.
‘You can fill me in on the history of the place on the way,’ he had said smoothly. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’
She had bitten her tongue and refrained from telling him that there was no point being forearmed when the net result would be a demolition derby. He was the guy with the purse strings and she had already seen first-hand how he could use that position to his own advantage. She had no desire to revive the ticking clock.
A long, sleek, black Jaguar pulled up outside the house just as she was about to turn away from the window and her attention was riveted at the sight of him emerging from the back seat, as incongruous in this neighbourhood as his car was.
He was dressed in pale-grey pinstriped trousers, which even from a distance screamed quality, and a white shirt, the sleeves of which he had rolled to the elbow.
For a few heart-stopping seconds, Chase found that she literally couldn’t breathe, that she was holding her breath. The mere sight of him was a full-on assault on all her senses. She watched as he looked around him, taking in his surroundings. She felt sure that this was the sort of neighbourhood he would be accustomed to telling his chauffeur to drive straight through and to make sure the car doors were locked. By no means was it in a dangerous part of London but neither was it upmarket. Well paid though she was, she wasn’t so well paid that she could afford to buy a house in one of the trendier areas and, unlike many of her associates, she didn’t have parents who could stick their hands in their pockets and treat her to one.
She dodged out of sight just as he turned to face the house and, when the doorbell rang, she took her time getting to it. Her heart was beating like a sledgehammer as she pulled open the door to find him lounging against the doorframe.
‘Right. Shall we go?’ she asked as her eyes slid away from his sinfully handsome face, returned to take a peek and slid away again. She gathered her handbag from where she had hung it on the banister and bent to retrieve her briefcase from the ground.
‘In due course.’ Alessandro stepped into the hallway and shut the front door behind him.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m coming in for a cup of coffee.’
‘We haven’t got time for that, Alessandro. The appointment has been made for ten-fifteen. With rush-hour traffic, heaven only knows how long it will take for us to get there.’
‘Relax. I got my secretary to put back the visit by an hour.’
‘You what?’
‘So this is where you live.’
Chase watched in horror as he made himself at home, strolling to peer into the sitting room, then onwards to the kitchen, into which he disappeared.
‘Alessandro...’ She galvanised herself into movement and hurried to the kitchen, to find him standing in the centre doing a full turn. It was a generous-sized kitchen which overlooked a small, private garden. It had been a persuading factor in her purchase of the house. She loved having a small amount of outdoor space.
‘Very nice.’
‘This is not appropriate!’
‘Why not? It’s hardly as though I’m a stranger. Are you going to make me a cup of coffee?’
Chase gritted her teeth as he sat down. The kitchen was large enough for a four-seater table and it had been one of the first things she had bought when she had moved in three years previously. She had fallen in love with the square, rough, wooden table with its perimeter of colourful, tiny mosaic tiles. She watched as he idly traced one long finger along some of the tiles and then she turned away to make them both some coffee.
‘Is this your first house?’ Alessandro queried when she had finally stopped busying herself doing nothing very much at the kitchen counter and sat down opposite him.
He hadn’t laid eyes on her in three days but he had managed to spend a great deal of time thinking about her and he had stopped beating himself up for being weak. So what if she had become an annoying recurring vision in his head? Wasn’t it totally understandable? He had been catapulted back to a past he had chosen to lock away. Naturally it would be playing on his mind, like an old, scratched record returned to a turntable. Naturally she would be playing on his mind, especially when she had remained just so damned easy on the eye.
‘What do you mean?’ Everything about Alessandro Moretti sitting at her kitchen table made her jumpy.
‘Is this the family home?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘The dearly departed... Is this the marital home?’
‘No, it’s not.’ She looked down. ‘Shaun and I... We, er, had somewhere else when we were together... When he died I rented for a couple more years until I had enough equity to put in as a deposit on this place.’
Alessandro thought of the pair of them, young love-birds renting together, while she had batted her eyelashes at him and played him for a fool. He swallowed a mouthful of instant coffee and stood up, watching as she scrambled to her feet.
‘Are you going to give me a tour of the place?’
‘There isn’t much to see. Two bedrooms upstairs; a bathroom. You’ve seen what’s down here. Shall we think about going?’
Alessandro didn’t answer. He strolled out of the kitchen, glancing upstairs before turning his attention to the sitting room. Why was she so jumpy? She had been as cool as a cucumber eight years ago when she had walked out on him, so why was she now behaving like a cat on a hot tin roof? Guilt? Hardly. A woman who could conduct an outside relationship while married would never be prone to guilt. Or remorse. Or regret.
Perversely, the jumpier she seemed to be, the more intrigued he became. He shoved one hand in his trouser pocket, feeling the coolness of his mobile phone.
‘For a cool-headed lawyer,’ he mused as he stared round the sitting room, ‘you like bright colours. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking
