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‘Come again?’
‘I had no idea you paid me.’
‘Pussycat?’
‘We get on like a house on fire—which is why I’m still with him, I guess. He does need some help...reminders with his diet and his medication, and making sure he does appropriate levels of exercise every day...but it’s also about companionship. He all but gave up work when he had his stroke...his confidence took a knocking and he delegated everything to his CEOs. He needs companionship, even though he would never say it in so many words. And aside from my expected list of duties on the medical side of things I’ve also started helping him collate material for his memoirs... I drive him to places as well. He enjoys his chess club on a Wednesday, and every so often he has friends over, and is very particular about what gets served for supper...’
Listening to her, seeing the way her features softened, Alessio felt as though he was being given a glimpse of a world he knew nothing about.
Since when had his irascible, overbearing, prickly and difficult father ever been described as apussycat?
And hadn’t he always scorned people who played chess? Played games of any description?
Alessio could remember trundling down to his father’s study, chess board under his arm, and knocking on the door behind which he had retreated following the death of his wife. Alessio had been ten at the time, and with his mother only gone a handful of weeks the loneliness of his bedroom had become too much.
But his father didn’t play games. That much Alessio remembered very clearly. He didn’t play games and he had no time for a child whose bedroom was too lonely or whose heart had suddenly been torn out.
Alessio had shrugged and left.
‘So my money,’ he drawled now, shutting the door on memories that had no place in the present, ‘is at least well spent. Which brings me back to why you can’t afford anywhere more salubrious to stay—especially when you could have charged it to my father’s account. Or were you afraid that he might spot your destination and have a hissy fit if he suspected you might be trundling down here to see me? No matter. You’ll be pleased to hear that your contract continues to be safe.’
He called for the bill with a barely-there nod of his head.
‘If I’m to intervene in my father’s affairs, then he’s going to have to find out that you’ve told me what’s going on.’
‘I know,’ Sophie said jaggedly. ‘You might want me to carry on there, but that won’t be up to you if your father decides he can’t trust me.’
‘And what would you do should that be the outcome?’ Alessio asked, his dark eyes watchful and his long, lush lashes shielding his expression.
Sophie shrugged her narrow shoulders, but she looked awkward, and a tinge of pink touched her cheeks. ‘I’ll do what I’ve always done. I’ll manage.’
‘You’ll do what you’ve always done...?’ he murmured.
‘Don’t we all?’ Sophie added quickly.
Alessio looked at her steadily. In the space of a couple of hours his life had been turned on its head. From a standpoint of historical non-involvement with his father, he was now looking at a completely different picture. He would naturally have to step in and find out what the hell had been going on with his father’s financial affairs, and the old man wasn’t going to like that. He would also have to protect this woman who looked as though the skies had fallen in.
She needed the money. Why? And what had she meant when she’d said that she would do what she’d always done and ‘manage’ if she lost her job? He had no idea, and in the wider scheme of things he didn’t care. It was just a miracle that someone existed who described his father as apussycat.
If his father was in trouble on both fronts, with his health and with his finances, and if she was right in reporting what the consultant had said about stress being the root of his stroke, then Alessio couldn’t afford to add to the stress levels.
Along with this analytical dissection of the situation Alessio felt a thread of ancient hurt trickle through him—the same hurt he had felt as a child, when his juvenile overtures after his mother’s death had been met with cold rejection. Hurt that he had not been told of momentous things happening in his father’s life.
He gritted his teeth and dismissed that passing weakness.
‘I’ll make sure to be discreet in my enquiries. I’ll get to the bottom of whatever’s been going on, but my theory is mismanagement. From the little I glimpsed of my father’s holdings ten years ago, it’s run along the lines of a gentlemen’s club—which might have worked back in the day, but doesn’t cut it in this day and age.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Would it deter you if I saidno?’ Alessio asked coolly, yet with a trace of amusement in his voice.
‘How is it that you never took an interest in your father’s company?’
The question lodged between them like a rock hurled into still waters. Her eyes were clear and curious, her head tilted to one side.
Alessio realised that he was in the presence of a woman who breached all boundaries. She had asked him an intensely personal question without any hint of an agenda behind the asking. She wasn’t trying to get close to him. She wasn’t trying to forge any kind of intimate connection by enticing confidences. She was curious and that was the end of it.
He wondered if that was why he said, surprising himself, ‘My father and I...we’ve had a difficult relationship. My mother died when I was very young. Just ten. Things were rocky. By the time I hit twenty-one and finished my university career at Oxford, I knew that I was going to make my own way in the world without the help of my father. Fortuitously, my mother brought her own personal fortune to my parents’ marriage, and much of it remained intact when she died. It was passed on to me. I suppose you could say that I had a head start when it came to getting my career going. A head start that completely bypassed my father, which suited me.’
