Enthralled by Moretti

And yet she lowered her eyes and took in the taut pull of expensive trousers over his long legs, the fine, dark hair that liberally sprinkled his forearms... Not even the unspoken atmosphere of threat in his cool, dark eyes could detract from the chiselled perfection of his face. He had the burnished colour of someone of exotic blood.

When she had first laid eyes on him, she had been knocked sideways. He hadn’t beaten about the bush. He had noticed her, he said, had seen her sitting in the university canteen. She had instinctively known that he had been waiting for a predictable response. The response of a woman in the presence of a man who could have whoever he wanted, and he wanted her. She had also known that there was no way she could go there. That she should smile politely and walk away, because doing anything else would have been playing with fire. But still she had hesitated, long enough for him to recognise a mutual interest. Of course, it had always been destined to end badly, but she hadn’t been able to help herself.

She tightened her lips as she realised just how badly things could go now, all these years later.

‘Okay, so you may have all the legalities in place, but what do you think the press would make of a big, bad company rolling in and bulldozing a women’s shelter? The public has had enough of powerful people and powerful companies thinking that they can do exactly as they like.’ This had been her trump card but there was no hint of triumph in her voice as she pulled it out of the bag.

‘I have names here,’ she continued in the gathering silence, not daring to risk a glance at him. ‘Contacts with journalists and reporters who would be sympathetic to my cause...’ She shoved the paper across to him and Alessandro ignored it.

‘Are you threatening me?’ he asked in a tone of mild curiosity.

‘I wouldn’t call it threatening...’

‘No? Then what exactly would you call it?’

‘I’m exercising leverage.’ It had seemed an excellent idea at the time, but then she hadn’t banked on finding herself floundering in a situation she couldn’t have envisaged in a million years. His dark eyes focused on her face made her want to squirm and she knew that her veneer of self-confidence and complete composure was badly undermined by the slow tide of pink colour rising to her face. ‘If you buy the shelter in a cloud of bad publicity, whatever you put up there will be destined to fail. It’s quite a small community in that particular part of London. People will take sides and none of them will be on yours.’

‘I bet you thought that you’d bring that out from up your sleeve and my lawyers would scatter, because there is such a thing as bad publicity being worse than no publicity. It’s a low trick, but then I’m not surprised that you would resort to low tricks.’ He leaned forward, rested both arms on the shiny conference table and stared directly at her. ‘However, let’s just turn that threat on its head for a minute...’

‘It’s not a threat.’

‘I have offered an extremely generous price for the purchase of the shelter and the land that goes with it. More than enough for another shelter to be built somewhere else.’

‘They don’t want to build another shelter somewhere else. These women are accustomed to Beth’s House. They feel safe there.’

‘You can wax lyrical to your buddies at the press that they’re being shoved out unceremoniously from their comfort zone. My people will counter-attack with a long, detailed and extremely enticing list of what they could buy for the money they’ll be getting from me. A shelter twice the size. All mod cons. An equal amount of land, albeit further out. Hell, they could even run to a swimming pool, a games room, a nursery...the list goes on.

‘So, who do you think will end up winning the argument? And, when it comes to light that I will be using the land for a mall that will provide much-needed jobs for the locals, well, you can see where I’m going with this...’ He stood up and strolled lazily towards the very same window through which she had been peering earlier.

Chase couldn’t tear her eyes away from him. Like an addict in the sudden presence of her drug of choice, she found that she was responding in ways that were dangerously off-limits. She shouldn’t be reacting like this. She couldn’t afford to let him into her life, nor could she afford to have any deep and meaningful conversations about their brief and ruined past relationship. Heck, it had only lasted a handful of months! And had never got off the starting block anyway.

‘So.’ Alessandro turned slowly to face her. With his back to the window, the light poured in from behind, throwing his face into shadows. ‘How are you feeling about your ability to win this one now?’

‘It’s Beth’s place; she’s comfortable there. Why do you think people fight to stay in their homes when a developer comes along promising to buy them out for double what their place is worth?’ But he would be able to sell it across the board. He had the money and the people to make sure that whatever message they wanted to get across would be successful. She knew Beth. Was she fighting to preserve something for reasons that were personal?

‘I can tell from your expression that you already know that you’re staring defeat in the face. By the way, it’s been nearly forty-five minutes of unconvincing arguing from you... So how much have you lost your client already? The games room? The nursery? The giant kitchen with the cosy wooden table where all those women can hold hands and break bread?’

‘I never thought that you were as arrogant as I now see you are.’

‘But then you could say that we barely knew anything about each other. Although, in fairness, I didn’t lie about my identity...’ He was unconsciously drawn to the way the sunlight streaming through the panes of glass caught the colours of her hair. Her suit was snappy and businesslike and he could tell that it had been chosen to downplay her figure. In his mind’s eye, he saw the tight jeans, the jumpers and trainers, and that tentative smile that had won him over.

Chase stared down at the folder in front of her. There was nothing left to pull out of the hat. Even if there was, this was personal. He was determined to win the final argument, to have the last word, to make her pay.

‘So I’m guessing from your prolonged silence that you’ll be breaking the happy news to... What’s her name? Beth?’

‘You know it is.’

‘And can you work out how much I’ll be deducting from my initial offer?’

‘Tell me you don’t really mean to go through with that?’

‘Lie, in other words?’ Alessandro walked towards her and perched on the edge of the table.

‘You can’t force them to sell.’

‘Have you had a look at their books? They’re in debt. Waiting to be picked off. It may be a caring, sharing place, but what it gains in the holding hands and chanting stakes it lacks in the accountancy arena. A quiet word in the right banker’s ear and they’ll be facing foreclosure by dusk. Furthermore, if it becomes widespread knowledge that they’re in financial trouble, the vulture developers will swoop in looking for a bargain. What started out as a generous offer from me would devolve into an untidy fire sale with the property and land going for a song.’

‘Okay.’ Chase recognised the truth behind what he was saying. How could this be the same man who had once teased her, entertained her with his wit, impressed her with the breadth of his intelligence...driven her crazy with a longing that had never had a chance to be sated?

‘Okay?’

‘You win, Alessandro.’ She looked at him with green eyes that had once mesmerised him right out of the rigidly controlled box into which he had always been accustomed to piling his emotional entanglements with the opposite sex. ‘But maybe you could tell me whether you would have been as hardline if I hadn’t been the person sitting here trying to talk you out of buying the shelter.’

‘Oh, the sale most certainly would have gone ahead,’ Alessandro drawled without an ounce of sympathy. ‘But I probably wouldn’t have tacked on the ticking clock.’

He strolled round to his chair and sat back down. His mobile phone buzzed, and when his secretary told him to get a move on because she could only defer his conference call for so long he informed her briefly that she would have to cancel it altogether. ‘And make sure the same goes for my meetings after lunch,’ he murmured, not once taking his eyes off Chase’s downbent head. He signed off just as Alicia began to launch into a curious demand to know why.

‘I don’t want to keep you.’ Chase began stacking all her files together and shoving them into her capacious brief case. She paused to look at him. Last look, she thought. Then I’ll never see you again. She found that she was drinking in his image and she knew, with resignation, that what she looked at now would haunt her in the weeks to come. It was just so unfair. ‘But I would like it if you could reconsider your...your...’

‘Lower offer? And save you the humiliation of having to tell your client that you single-handedly knocked the price down?’

Chase glared at him. ‘I never took you for a bully.’

‘Life, as we both know, is full of cruel shocks. I’ll admit that I have no intention of pulling out of this purchase, but you could recoup the lost thousands.’

‘Could I? How?’ She stared at him. At this point, the images of those wonderful additions to any other house Beth might buy vanishing in a puff of smoke, because of her, were proliferating in her head, making her giddy. She knew that the finances for the shelter were in serious disarray. They would need all the money they could get just to pay off the debts and wipe the slate clean.

‘We have an unfinished past,’ Alessandro murmured. ‘It’s time to finish it. I wouldn’t have sought out this opportunity but, now it’s here, I want to know who the hell you really are. Satisfy my curiosity and the full price is back on the table...’

CHAPTER TWO

SO WHERE WAS the jump for joy, the high five, the shriek of delight? For the sake of a little conversation, she stood to claw back a substantial amount of money. He might have expected some show of emotion, even if only in passing.

Alessandro didn’t take his eyes off her face, nor did he utter a word; the power of silence was a wonderful thing. Plus, he didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her. If she thought that she could somehow screw him for more than the agreed amount, then let her have all the silence in the world, during which she could rethink any such stupid notion.

‘I would need any assurances from you in writing,’ Chase finally said. He wanted to finish business between them? Didn’t he know that that was impossible? There were no questions she could ever answer and no explanations she could ever give.

‘You will be getting no such thing,’ Alessandro assured her calmly. ‘You take my word for it or you leave here with your wallet several shades lighter.’

‘There’s no point rehashing what happened between us, Alessandro.’

‘Your answer: yes or no. Simple choice.’

Chase stood up and smoothed down her grey skirt. She knew that she had a good figure, very tall and very slender. It was a bonus because it meant that she could pull off cheap clothing; she felt she needed simply to blend in with the other lawyers and paralegals in the company where she worked. Fitzsimmons was a top-ranking law firm and it employed top-ranking people; no riff-raff. Nearly everyone there came from a background where Mummy and Daddy owned second homes in the country. She kept her distance from all of them, but still she knew where they came from just by listening to their exploits at the weekends, the holidays they booked and the Chelsea apartments they lived in.

Thankfully, she was one of only two specialising in pro bono cases, so she could keep her head down, put in her hours and attend only the most essential of social functions.

She didn’t want her quiet life vandalised. She didn’t want Alessandro Moretti strolling back into it, asking questions and nursing a vendetta against her. She just couldn’t afford to have any cans of worms opened up.

Likewise, she didn’t want to feel this scary surge of emotion that made her go weak at the knees. Her life was her own now, under control, and she didn’t want to jeopardise that.

But where were the choices? Did she make Beth pay for what she didn’t want? Did she risk her boss’s disapproval when she turned up and recounted what had happened?

More than that, if she kept her lips tightly buttoned up, who was to say that Alessandro would conveniently disappear? The way those hard, black eyes were watching her now...

She sat back down. ‘Okay. What do you want to talk about? I mean, what do you want me to say?’

‘Now, you don’t really expect us to have a cosy little chat in a room like this, do you?’

He began prowling around the conference room: thick cream carpet aided and abetted the silence; cream walls; the imposing hard-edged table where the great and the good could sit in front of their opened laptops, conversing in computer-speak and making far-reaching decisions that could affect the livelihoods of numerous people lower down the food chain, often for the better, occasionally for the worst.

‘I mean, we have so much catching up to do, Lyla... Chase...’

‘Please stop calling me Lyla. I told you, I don’t use that name any more.’

‘It’s approaching lunchtime. Why don’t we continue this conversation somewhere a little more comfortable?’

‘I’m fine here.’

‘Actually, you don’t have a vote. I have five minutes’ worth of business to deal with. I trust you can find your way down to the foyer? And don’t...’ he positioned himself neatly in front of her ‘...even think of running out on me.’

‘I wouldn’t do that.’ Chase tilted her chin and stood up to look him squarely in the eyes. As a show of strength, it spectacularly backfired because, up close and personal like this, she could feel all her energy drain out of her, leaving behind a residue of tumultuous emotions and a dangerous, scary awareness. Her nostrils flared as she breathed in the clean, woody, aggressively masculine scent of his cologne. She took an unsteady step back and prayed that he hadn’t noticed her momentary weakness.

‘No?’ Alessandro drawled, narrowing his eyes. ‘Because right now you look like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Why? It’s not as though I don’t already know you for a liar, a cheat and a slut.’ He had never addressed a woman so harshly in his life before but, looking at her here, taking in the perfection of a face that could launch a thousand ships and a body that was slender but with curves in all the right places, the reality of their past had slammed into him and lent an ugly bitterness to every word that passed his lips.

‘I notice you’re not defending yourself,’ he murmured. He didn’t know whether her lack of fight was satisfying or not. Certainly, he wished that she would look at him when he spoke, and he was sorely tempted to angle her face to him.

‘What’s the point?’ Chase asked tightly. ‘I’ll meet you in the foyer but...’ she looked at him with a spurt of angry rebellion ‘...I won’t be hanging around for an hour while you take your time seeing to last-minute business with your secretary.’

Alessandro’s eyes drifted down to her full, perfectly shaped mouth. He used to tease her that she looked as though she was sulking when it was in repose, but when she smiled it was like watching a flower bloom. He had never been able to get his fill of it. She certainly wasn’t smiling now.

‘Actually, you’ll hang around for as long as I want you to.’

‘Just because you want to...to...pay me back for...’

‘Like I said, let’s save the cosy chit-chat for somewhere more comfortable.’

Only when he left the room did Chase realise how tense she had been. She sagged and closed her eyes, steadying herself against the table.

She felt like the victim of a runaway truck. In a heartbeat, her life seemed to have been derailed, and she had to tell herself that it wasn’t so; that because Alessandro was the man with whom she was now having to deal, because their paths had crossed in such a shadowy manner, it didn’t mean that he was out to destroy her. His pride had been injured all those years ago and what he wanted from her now was answers to the questions he must have asked himself in the aftermath of their break-up. Not that they had ever really had a relationship.

Of course, she would have to be careful with what she told him, but once he was satisfied they would both return to their lives and it would be as if they had never met again.

She left the conference room in a hurry. It was almost twelve-thirty and there were far more people walking around than when she had first entered the impressive building. Workers were going out to lunch. It was a perfect summer’s day. There would be sandwiches in the park and an hour’s worth of relaxing in the sun before everyone stuck back on their jackets and returned to their city desks. Chase had always made sure to steer clear of that.

In the foyer, she didn’t have long to wait before she spotted Alessandro stepping out of the lift. As he walked towards her, one finger holding the jacket that he had tossed over his shoulder, she relived those heady times when she had enjoyed kidding herself that her life could really change. Every single time she had seen him, she had felt a rush of pure, adrenaline-charged excitement, even though all they ever did was have lunch together or a cappuccino somewhere.

‘So you’re here.’

‘You didn’t really expect me to run away?’ Chase fell into step alongside him. It was a treat not to tower over a guy but she still had to walk quickly to match his pace as they went through the revolving glass doors and out into the busy street.

‘No, of course I didn’t. You’re a lawyer. You know when diplomacy is called for.’ He swung left and began walking away from the busier streets, down the little side roads that gave London such character. ‘And, on the subject of your career, why don’t we kick off our catch-up with that?’

‘What do you want to know?’

Alessandro leaned down towards her. ‘Let’s really get into the spirit of this, Chase. Let’s not do a question-and-answer session, with me having to drag conversation out of you.’

‘What do you expect, Alessandro? I don’t want to be here!’

‘I’m sure you don’t, but you’re here now, so humour me.’

‘I...I...got a first-class degree. In my final year I was head-hunted by a firm of lawyers—not the ones I work for now, but a good firm. I was fast-tracked.’

‘Clever Chase.’

Chase recognised that it hadn’t been said as a compliment, although she could only guess at what he was implying. He loathed her so, whatever it was, she had no doubt that it would be offensive.

Yet, she was clever. In another place and another time, she knew that she would have been one of those girls who would have been said to ‘have it all’: brains and looks. But then, life had a way of counter-balancing things. At any rate, she had relied far more on her brains than she ever had on her looks. She had worked like a demon to get her A-levels, fought against all odds to get to a top university, and once there had doggedly spared no effort in getting a degree that would set her up for life. And all that against a backdrop that she had trained herself never to think about.

‘Thank you.’ She chose to misinterpret the tone of his voice. ‘So, I got a good job, did my training, changed companies...and here I am now.’

‘Fitzsimmons. Classy firm.’

‘Yes, it is.’ She could feel fine prickles of nervousness beading her forehead.

‘And yet, no designer suit? Don’t they pay you enough?’

Chase cringed with embarrassment. He had never made any secret about the fact that he came from money. Was that how he could spot the fact that her clothes were off the peg and ready to wear from a chain store? ‘They pay me more than enough,’ she said coolly. ‘But I prefer to save my money instead of throwing it away to a high-end retailer.’

‘How noble. Not a trait I would tend to associate with you.’

‘Can’t you at least try and be civil towards me?’ Chase asked thinly. ‘At any rate, most of my work is pro bono. It’s sensible not to show up in designer suits that cost thousands.’ It was what she had laughingly told someone at the firm ages ago and her boss had applauded her good sense.

They were now in front of an old-fashioned pub nestled in one of the quieter back alleys. There were gems like this all over London. When they entered, it was dark, cool and quiet. He offered her a drink and shrugged when she told him that she would stick to fruit juice.

‘So...’ Alessandro sat down, hand curved round his pint, and looked at her. He honestly didn’t know what he hoped to gain from this forced meeting but seeing her again had reawakened the nasty questions she had left unanswered. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. Or maybe we should pick it up at the end—at the point when you told me that you were married. Yes, maybe that’s the place we should start. After we’d been meeting for four months... Four months of flirting and you gazing at me all convincingly doe-eyed and breathless, then informing me that you had a husband waiting in the wings.’

Chase nursed her fruit juice. She licked her lips nervously. Her green eyes tangled and clashed with cold eyes the colour of jet. ‘I don’t see what the point of this is, Alessandro.’

‘You know what the point of it is—you’re going to satisfy my curiosity in return for the full agreed price for your shelter. It’s a fair exchange. Tell me what happened to the husband.’

‘Shaun...was killed shortly after I got my first job. He...he was on his motorbike at the time. He was speeding, lost control, crashed into the central reservation on the motorway...’

‘So you didn’t ditch him in the impersonal confines of a divorce court.’ Nor would she have. Alessandro downed a mouthful of beer and watched her over the rim of the glass. Not, as she had told him on that last day in exhaustive detail, when he’d been her childhood sweetheart and the love of her life. ‘And I take it you never remarried.’

‘Nor will I ever.’ She could detect the bitterness that had crept into her voice, but when she looked at him his expression was still as cool and unrelenting as it had been.

‘Is that because there’s no room for a man in the life of an ambitious, high-flying lawyer? Or because you’re still wrapped up with the man who was...let me try and remember... Oh, yes, I’ve got it: the only guy you would ever contemplate sleeping with. Sorry if you got the wrong idea, Alessandro. A few cappuccinos does not a relationship make, but it’s been a laugh...’

‘We should never have seen each other. It was a terrible idea. I never meant to get involved with anyone.’

‘But you didn’t get involved with me, did you?’ Alessandro angled his beautiful head to one side as he picked up an unspoken message he wasn’t quite getting.

What was there to get or not get? he thought impatiently. The woman had strung him along, led him up the garden path and then had casually disappeared without a backward glance. Hell, she had made him feel things... No, he wasn’t going to go there.

‘No! No, I didn’t. I meant...’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘You don’t understand. I shouldn’t even have even to you. I was married.’

‘So why did you? Were you riding high on the knowledge that you’d managed to net the rich guy all the groupie students were after?’

‘That’s a very conceited thing to say.’

‘I value honesty. I lost track of the number of notes I got from girls asking for some “extra tuition”.’

If there hadn’t been notes, she thought, then he surely would have clocked the stares he’d garnered everywhere he went. The man was an alpha male with enough sex appeal to sink a ship. Throw in his wealth, and it was little wonder that girls were queuing up to see if they could attract his attention. She’d never, ever been at the university longer than was strictly necessary but, if she had been, she knew that she would have become a source of envy, curiosity and dislike.