met Vinn’s flinty gaze. ‘In spite of my refusal to play this game of charades with you, I hope you will still sponsor Isaac. He looks up to you and would be devastated if you—’
‘That’s not how I do business.’
She raised her chin a little higher. ‘And I don’t respond to blackmail.’
His gaze warred with hers for endless seconds, like so many of their battles in the past. It was strange, but this was one of the things she’d missed most about him. He was never one to shy away from an argument and nor was she. She had always secretly enjoyed their verbal skirmishes because most, if not all, of their arguments had ended in bed-wrecking make-up sex. She wondered if he was thinking about that now—how passionate and explosive their sex life had been. Did he miss it as much as she did? Did he ever reach for her in the middle of the night and feel a hollow ache deep inside to find the other side of the bed empty?
No, because his bed was probably never empty.
Ailsa was determined not to be the first to look away even though, as every heart-chugging second passed, she could feel her courage failing. His dark brown eyes had a hard glaze of bitterness and two taut lines of grimness bracketed his mouth, as if, these days, he only rarely smiled.
The sound of his phone ringing on the desk broke the deadlock and Vinn turned to pick it up. ‘Nonno?’ The conversation was brief and in Italian but Ailsa didn’t need to be fluent to pick up the gist of it. She could see the host of emotions flickering across Vinn’s face and the way the tanned column of his throat moved up and down. He put down the phone and looked at her blankly for a moment as if he’d forgotten she was even there.
‘Is everything all right?’ Ailsa took a step towards him before she checked herself. ‘Is your grandfather—?’
‘A donor has become available.’ His voice sounded strangely hollow, as if it was coming through a vacuum. ‘I thought there would be more time to prepare. A week or two or something but... The surgery will be carried out within a matter of hours.’ He reached for his car keys on the desk and scooped up his jacket where it was hanging over the back of his office chair, his manner uncharacteristically flustered, distracted. In his haste to find his keys several papers slipped off the desk to the floor and he didn’t even stop to retrieve them. ‘I’m sorry to cut this meeting short but I’m going to see him now before—’ another convulsive swallow ‘—it’s too late.’
Ailsa had never seen Vinn so out of sorts. Nothing ever seemed to faze him. Even when she’d told him she was leaving two years ago, he’d been as emotionless as a robot. It intrigued her to see him feeling something. Was there actually a heart beating inside that impossibly broad chest? She bent down to pick up the scattered papers and, tidying them into a neat pile, silently handed them to him. He took them from her and tossed them on the desk, where a couple of pages fluttered back to the floor.
‘I can’t let him down,’ he said in a low mumble, as if talking to himself. ‘Not now. Not like this.’
‘Would you like me to go with you?’ The offer was out before Ailsa could stop it. ‘My flight doesn’t leave for a few hours so...’
His expression snapped out of its distracted mode and got straight back to cold, hard business. ‘If you come with me, you come as my wife. Deal or no deal.’
Ailsa was torn between wanting to tell him where to put his deal and wanting to see more of this vulnerable side of him. She could agree to the charade verbally but he could hardly hold her to anything without having her sign something.
‘I’ll go with you to the hospital because I’ve always liked your grandfather. That’s if you think he’d like to see me?’
‘He would like to see you,’ Vinn said and searched through the papers on his desk for something, muttering a curse word in the process.
‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ Ailsa handed him the pages that had fallen the second time.
He took them from her and, reaching for a pen, slid them in front of her on the desk. ‘Sign here.’
She ignored the pen and met his steely gaze. ‘Do we have to do it now? Your grandfather is—’
‘Sign it.’
Ailsa could feel her will preparing for battle. Her spine stiffened to concrete, her jaw set to stone and her gaze sent a round of fire at his. ‘I’m not signing it unless you give me time to read it.’
‘Damn it, Ailsa, there isn’t time,’ Vinn said, slamming his hand down on the desk. ‘I need to see my grandfather. Trust me, okay? Just for once in your life trust me. I can’t let Nonno down. I can’t fail him. He’s depending on me to get him through this. Along with Isaac’s sponsorship, I’ll pay you a lump sum of ten million.’
Ailsa’s eyebrows shot up so high she thought they might hit the light fitting above her head. ‘Ten...million?’
The line of his mouth was white-tight. ‘If you don’t sign in the next five seconds the deal is off. Permanently.’
Ailsa took the pen from him, his fingers brushing hers in the exchange, sending a riot of fiery sensations from her fingertips to her feminine core. The pen was still warm from where he’d been holding it. She remembered all too well his warmth. The way it lit the wick of her desire like a match on dry tinder. She could feel the smouldering of his touch moving through her body, awakening sensual memories.
Memories she had tried so hard to suppress.
She took a shaky breath and ran her gaze over the document. It was reasonably straightforward: three years of sponsorship for Isaac and giving her a lump sum of ten million on signing. While it annoyed her he’d used money as a lure, she realised it was the primary language he spoke. Money was his mother tongue, not Italian. Well, she could learn to speak Money too. Ten million was a lot of money. She was successful in her business but with ten million in her bank account she could expand her studio to Europe.
But then she realised how trapped she would be once she signed that agreement. She would have to spend three months with Vinn. She needed time to think about this. She had rushed into marriage with him in the past. How foolish would it be to rush into this without proper and careful consideration? She left the document unsigned and pushed it and the pen back to him. ‘I need a couple of days to think about this. It’s a lot of money and... I need more time.’
He showed no emotion on his face, which surprised her given how insistent he had been moments earlier. But maybe behind that masked expression he was already planning another tactic to force her to comply with his will. ‘We will discuss this further after we’ve been to the hospital.’ He put the paper under a paperweight and, picking up her overnight bag, ushered her out of his office.
He spoke a few quick words to his receptionist Claudia, explaining what was happening, and Claudia expressed her concern and assured him she would take care of everything back here at the office. Ailsa felt a twinge of jealousy at the way the young woman seemed to be such an integral part of the business. She wondered what had happened to the receptionist who had worked for him during their marriage. Vinn liked surrounding himself with beautiful women and they didn’t come more beautiful than Claudia, who looked as if she’d just stepped out of a photo shoot.
Ailsa waited until they were in Vinn’s car and on their way to the hospital before she brought up the subject. ‘What happened to your other receptionist, Rosa?’
