Even so, he felt no resurgence of desire. And Alexio didn’t like to acknowledge the fact that the sex had been wholly underwhelming. On the surface it had been fine; but on some deeper level it had left him cold. He switched on the charm he was famed for, though, and smiled.
‘Sorry, bellissima, I have to fly to Paris this morning for work.’
The woman, whose name he all of a sudden wasn’t entirely sure of—Carmela?—leant back and stretched seductively, displaying her perfectly cosmetically enhanced naked breasts to their best advantage, and pouted even more. ‘You have to leave right now?’
Alexio kept his smile in place and when he’d finished dressing bent down and pressed a light kiss to her mouth, escaping before she could twine her arms around his neck. Claustrophobia was rising within him.
‘We had fun, cara...I’ll call you.’
Now the seductive pout was gone, and the woman’s real nature shone through as her eyes turned hard. She knew when she was being blown off and clearly did not like it when the man in question was as sought-after as Alexio Christakos.
She stood up from the bed naked and flounced off to the bathroom, issuing a stream of Italian petulance. Alexio winced slightly but let out a sigh of relief as soon as she’d disappeared behind a slamming door.
He shook his head as he made his way out of the suite and towards the lobby of the plush hotel in the private lift reserved for VIP guests. Women. He loved them, but he loved them at a distance. In his bed when it suited him and then out of it for as long as he cared to indulge them—which invariably wasn’t for long.
After years of witnessing his mother’s cold behaviour towards his father, who had remained in slavish thrall to her beauty and eternal elusiveness, Alexio had developed a very keen sense of self-protection around women. He could handle cold and aloof because he was used to that, and he preferred it.
His father, thwarted by his emotionally unavailable wife, had turned to his son, making him the centre of his world. It had been too much. From an early age Alexio had chafed against the claustrophobia of his father’s over-attention. And now when anyone—especially a woman—became even remotely over-emotional, or expected too much, he shut down inside.
Brief encounters were his forté. Witnessing his half-brother’s wedding the day before had inevitably brought up questions of his own destiny, but Alexio, at the age of thirty, felt no compelling need to settle down yet.
He did envisage a wife and family at some stage...far in the future. When the time came his wife would be perfect. Beautiful, accommodating. Undemanding of Alexio’s emotions. Above all, Alexio would not fall into the same trap as his father: tortured for life because he’d coveted a woman who didn’t covet him. He’d been disabused at an early age of the notion that love might be involved.
He thought of his older brother turning up at his mother’s funeral and all the accompanying unwelcome emotions he’d felt that day: shock, anger, hurt, betrayal.
Used to blocking out emotions, Alexio had relegated the incident to the back of his mind. He hadn’t sought Cesar da Silva out, hadn’t mentioned it again to Rafaele—even though he knew Rafaele had invited their half-brother to his wedding. Predictably enough, after that first and last terse meeting, he hadn’t turned up.
Emotions were messy, unpredictable. They tripped you up. Look at Rafaele! His life had just been turned upside down by a woman who had kept his son from him for four years. And yet two months after meeting her again he was getting married, looking foolishly in love and blithely forgetting the lessons his own father had taught him about the fickle nature of women.
As far as Alexio was concerned—even if Rafaele appeared to be happily embarking on wedded bliss, and no matter how cute his three-and-a-half-year-old nephew was—his brother had been played for a fool by his new wife. Why wouldn’t she now want to marry Rafaele Falcone, wunderkind of the worldwide automobile industry, with an estimated wealth running into the billions? Especially if she had a son to support?
No, Alexio was steering well clear of similar scenarios and he would never allow himself to be caught as his brother had been. He would never forgive a woman who kept a child from him. Still, a sliver of unease went down his spine. His brother, whom he’d considered to share a similar philosophy, had managed to get caught...
Alexio’s mouth firmed and he pushed such rogue notions down deep. He put on a pair of shades as his driver brought the car around to the front entrance and was oblivious to the double-take stares of a group of women as they walked into the hotel.
As soon as the car pulled away Alexio was already focusing on the next thing on his agenda, the introspection his brother’s wedding had precipitated along with his recent unsatisfactory bed partner already relegated to the back of his mind.
* * *
Sidonie Fitzgerald buckled her seatbelt on the plane and took a deep breath. But she was unable to shift the ball of tension sitting in her belly. For once her habitual fear of flying was being eclipsed by something else, and Sidonie couldn’t even really enjoy that fact.
All she could see in her mind’s eye was her beloved Tante Josephine’s round, eternally childish and worried face and hear her quavering voice: ‘Sidonie, what does it mean? Will they take my home from me? All these bills...where did they come from?’
Sidonie’s aunt was fifty-four and had spent a lifetime locked in a world of innocence. She’d been deprived of oxygen as a baby and as a result had been mildly brain-damaged. She’d always functioned at a slightly lesser and slower level than everyone around her, but had managed to get through school and find a job. She still worked in the grocer’s shop around the corner from where she’d lived for years, giving her precious independence.
Sidonie pursed her lips. She had loved her self-absorbed and endlessly vain mother, who had passed away only a couple of months before, but how could her mother have done this to her sweet and innocent younger sister?
The never forgotten sting of shame reminded Sidonie all too uncomfortably of exactly how her mother could have done such a thing—as if she could ever really forget. Ruthlessly she quashed it.
When Sidonie’s father had died a few years before, their comfortable lives had crashed around their ears, leaving them with nothing. Sidonie had been forced to leave her university degree before the start of her final year in order to find work and save money to go back.
Moving to Paris to live with Tante Josephine had been her mother Cecile’s only option to avoid becoming homeless or—even worse—having to find work. Cecile had not been happy. She’d been used to a life of comfort, relative luxury and security, courtesy of her hard-working husband who had wanted nothing more than to make his wife happy.
It would appear now, though, as if Sidonie’s mother’s selfish ways had risen to the fore again. She’d encouraged her sister to take out a mortgage on the apartment that had been bought and paid for by her husband because he’d cared for his vulnerable sister-in-law’s welfare. Cecile had used this fact as leverage to persuade Tante Josephine to agree to the remortgage. She’d then used that money, and credit cards in both their names, to spend a small fortune. Tante Josephine now found herself liable for the astronomical bills as the remaining living account-holder.
Sidonie had to figure out the best way forward to help her aunt—she had no intention of leaving her to fend for herself. The start of the process had been taking on the burden of the debts into her own name.
