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‘Me too.’ Alessio stepped back, his fabulous dark eyes shuttered. ‘This never happened.’ One more step back. ‘A moment in time. Nothing more. Tomorrow my work begins in earnest, and you will see next to nothing of me.’
‘Good,’ Sophie said curtly.
She looked away, down to her trembling fingers, which she curled into a steady fist.
His ‘moment in time’ had been a shattering awakening for her. He was more than dangerous, so seeing nothing of him while he was here was what she needed. And wanted.
She turned her back on him, waited, and when she eventually turned around the kitchen was empty.
CHAPTER FIVE
SOPHIEAPPROACHEDTHEdining room with apprehension. It had been two days since she had laid eyes on Alessio, and during that time there had not been a single minute when he hadn’t been in her head.
That kiss...that moment in time...to be forgotten...
It was seared into her consciousness with the red-hot intensity of a branding iron. Yes, of course it would never happen again, but neither, for her, would it ever be forgotten.
For him...yes, itwouldbe forgotten—had probably been forgotten already. Because he was a man of the world to whom a kiss was just a kiss, and it hadn’t even been a kiss with a woman he was really attracted to. It had been a kiss born of sudden shared confidences and a moment during which the walls between them had been temporarily dislodged.
A matter of seconds...
Fundamentally, nothing had changed. He was still the sort of man of whom she disapproved, from the way he treated his own father to his casual approach to relationships with women. For all his sharp intelligence and complex light and shade personality, he was still not the sort of upfront, honest, straightforward kind of man she had always imagined herself eventually going for.
She had no plans ever to be knocked for six, made vulnerable. Because she couldn’t cope with the love of her life being taken from her, either through death or divorce. She would never be helpless. The kind of man who could give her what she wanted in life would be someone who appealed intellectually, who was kind, and allowed her space, who was thoughtful and undemanding...someone calming, with whom she would feel comfortable. No highs or lows.
Alessio was a raging volcano, and she had no time for those. However powerful the pull to gaze into the seething red-hot lava.
And for him?
Well, how many times had he mocked her for being ‘background’? What did that imply? It implied that he found her dull and unexciting...the sort of girl who was always be the wallflower, standing at the back of the room, watching everyone else have fun, waiting for her turn to arrive.
Not that far from the truth, as it happened.
She knew the sort of women Alessio liked and dated. Outgoing, sexy little blondes who paraded their assets and were as ‘background’ as a firework display on New Year’s Eve.
And yet for all her common-sense reasoning he still remained embedded in her head like a burr.
And now, as she hesitated in front of the dining room door, she could feel her heart accelerate.
So much had been accomplished in the space of a couple of days.
A housekeeper had been hired. Leonard had announced that only the morning before.
‘Just when I had become perfectly accustomed to the two of us in the house, what does the boy go and do? Another housekeeper! She’ll have to work around me, my girl, that’s for sure!’
Sophie had been quietly relieved, and she knew that Leonard had been as well. He was fastidious, and over the months had insisted on many of the rooms being closed so that they wouldn’t become cluttered, wouldn’t need cleaning. He’d used to entertain his friends in the grand sitting room, with dinner served by Edith in the dining room, but things had become a lot more informal. Gatherings had been smaller, and held in the kitchen, where Sophie had been only too happy to tease his elderly friends and join them as they ate at the kitchen table.
The company overhaul had also begun. This too she’d learnt from Leonard, who had grudgingly admitted that Alessio was not playing the tough taskmaster and flinging all his CEOs out of their offices by the seat of their trousers.
‘He was never going to do that,’ Sophie had soothed, smiling. ‘You should know that, of all people. You’ve got all those cuttings and clippings stashed in folders. You admire him. You would never admire someone cruel enough to get rid of your friends and colleagues at the company.’
‘The boy’s ruthless.’
But Sophie had detected a thread of admiration in Leonard’s voice. Yes, Alessio was ruthless, because she guessed that was what you had to be to climb the greasy pole to success, but ruthless didn’t necessarily mean cruel or unfair, and Alessio was neither.
She’d shrugged and then reddened when Leonard had looked at her with narrowed, thoughtful eyes. ‘Plays the field as well,’ he had said slyly, and Sophie had gone a deeper shade of beetroot.
‘So it would seem,’ she’d murmured.
