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‘You didn’t seem that interested in her when you were downgrading the price of the place by a thousand pounds per minute.’
‘That was before I met her.’
Every argument she engineered seemed to crash into a brick wall. He wasn’t interested in arguing with her. She, on the other hand, felt driven to keep arguing because something inside her was telling her that, if she didn’t, she might find herself in dangerously unchartered territory. She might start remembering how funny he could be, how thoughtful, how engaging.
‘She obviously comes from a fairly wealthy background,’ Alessandro murmured encouragingly. ‘And yet the road she decided to travel down wasn’t exactly the predictable one.’
When he had first laid eyes on Chase after eight years, he had been shocked. And hard on the heels of that shock had come rage and bitterness. It seemed that he had badly underestimated the effect she had had on him. He hadn’t put her behind him after all. Had he succeeded in doing that, he would have felt nothing but indifference and contempt. So, yes, revenge had been an option but why make a third party suffer? Weren’t there other ways of handling a situation that had landed in his lap?
Rage and bitterness were corrosive emotions and there was one very good way of permanently eliminating them. He smiled with slow, deliberate intent.
Chase took note of that smile and wondered what the heck was going on.
‘She hasn’t had a...normal upbringing,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I know this because I knew her before this whole business with the shelter cropped up. Actually, she came to me when she was approached with your company’s interference because we were already friends.’
‘Interference? I’ll overlook your take on my generous offer to buy her out. How did you become friends? Oh no, don’t tell me—you were drawn to her because of your “care in the community” approach to life.’
‘I’m glad you think it’s funny to want to help other people!’
‘I don’t. I think it’s admirable. Like I said, I just find the sentiments hard to swallow when they’re coming from you.’
‘If I’m such an awful person, why are you taking me out to lunch? Why didn’t you let me find my own way back? The sale’s agreed. Your legal team could take it from here on in.’
‘But then I would miss out on the pleasure of watching you.’
Chase flushed and wondered whether he was being serious or not. She told herself that she didn’t care and squashed the unwanted sliver of satisfaction it gave her when she thought of him watching her and enjoying it. Suddenly, it felt safer to talk about Beth than to sit in silence, as he looked at her, and speculate on all sorts of things that threw her into confusion.
‘Her parents were both really well off,’ she blurted out, licking her lips nervously and wishing he would just stop looking at her in that pensive, brooding way that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. ‘They were missionaries. Beth says that as though it’s the most normal thing in the world.’
She began to relax and half-smiled as she remembered the conversation they had had years ago when she had first met her. ‘I mean, they didn’t want to convert anyone, but they wanted to help people in the third world. They rented out their house, which is now the shelter, and took themselves off to Africa where they spent their own money on various irrigation and building projects. In fact, there’s a plaque dedicated to them in one of the little villages over there.’
‘Good people.’ Alessandro thought of his own feckless parents and marvelled at the different ways money could be spent.
‘They returned to London to live when Beth was a child. I think they wanted her educated over here. Maybe they thought that they had done what they had set out to do. At any rate, they found that they couldn’t just do nothing once they’d come back, so they did lots of volunteer work at various places. They were both in their fifties by then. They’d had Beth when they were quite old. Beth went to university and studied to become an engineer, but found herself drawn to helping others, and when her parents died and she inherited the house and land, the stocks and shares and stuff, she turned the house into a shelter and hasn’t looked back.’
‘So effectively it’s really the only house she’s ever lived in and the only work she’s ever done.’
‘Yes. So there you have it. I don’t suppose you can really understand what makes someone like Beth tick.’
‘Do me a favour and stop trying to pigeon-hole me because I happen to have a bit of money.’
