At The Boss’s Beck And Call

CHAPTER THREE

FOR the second time that day, Alessandro opened his door and gestured her in. Lara passed through, careful not to brush him, although all the fine hairs on her body stood up as if she’d passed by the open door of a furnace.

She felt relieved to see that Donatuila was absent.

The office wasn’t very large, but for consultations with senior staff a space had been made over by the window for a cluster of armchairs.

After this morning’s episode, she waited to be invited to sit, but Alessandro stood still for a moment, studying her with a veiled gaze, his mouth stern. Despite her taut resolve, when his eyes flickered from her mouth to her breasts her flesh responded with a willingness that was shamefully sexual, considering he was now off-limits.

This time she restrained her instinctive need to touch him, understanding at last that the old feeling of intimacy was a fraud. Gone now, just a ghost, though his once beloved face was still so familiar, confusing her emotions and whizzing excitement around her veins in the old chaotic way.

The silence lengthened, and with it her suspense. Forced somehow to break it, she started in proudly, ‘Alessandro-’

He said quietly, ‘You’ve grown your hair. Otherwise you haven’t changed.’

Her hand made the involuntary flight to her nape. ‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

He smiled for the first time, and it warmed his deep, dark eyes with the old devastating charm. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. I’m still a little jet-lagged. Of course, we have both changed. Please…’ He indicated a chair.

She sat down, so relieved he seemed to remember her now, and was still the gentle, courteous man she knew. She resolved to respond in the same manner. Perhaps his coolness earlier had just been the result of surprise.

He took the chair opposite and opened a Manilla folder with her name on it. Her heart was thudding in a ridiculous rhythm, and to subdue the faint trembling of her hands she had to curl them in her lap. His lean, beautiful hands, though, were cool and steady, their supple strength reminiscent of the pleasure they’d once delivered. Such pleasures.

She dragged her eyes away. ‘I couldn’t believe it when they told us it would be you.’

‘Couldn’t you? Were you disappointed?’

‘Disappointed? Well, of course not. I was just…just…’

‘Nervous?’ He gave an easy shrug. ‘Don’t worry. No need to defend yourself. This will be strictly business.’

The words struck a jarring note. She felt a rush of need to say something warm, to cut through the strangeness, but though he seemed relaxed, his movements smooth, something in his manner was controlled, as if a steel barrier resided beneath the polished surface.

She moistened her lips and glanced at her watch. ‘I can’t stay long. I have someone waiting.’

‘Ah.’ Though his voice was richly smooth, his eyes met hers with a penetration that cut through to her spinal cord. ‘We mustn’t let you keep anyone waiting.’

The corner of his mouth made a sardonic quirk, and she felt a stir of unease. Had there been a note of sarcasm there?

Alessandro lowered his gaze to her file, a tightening in his gut. Naturally, she would have someone waiting. Some unsuspecting clown. When hadn’t she? He could hardly ask her who the lucky guy was this time.

He scanned the meagre notes, the arid lack of information. There was nothing of interest in her file, beyond a Newtown address and a phone number.

Her address was 37 Roseleigh Avenue. What could that tell a man? No clues as to what she’d been doing in the last six years. And with whom. Whoever had been in charge of Human Resources in this tinpot little company deserved to be sacked.

He stared at the page, willing himself not to look at her, though her image blazed through his eyelids. Her face had the same delicacy, that deceptively fragile beauty. There would be fools unable to help themselves from drowning in those deep-blue-sea eyes. Salivating for a taste of her ripe, deliciously resilient lips. She’d never be without a man. He should know how easy it was to be sucked into her fantasy world. To plunge into it.

Into her.

It was a risk, perhaps he felt as affected by her presence as he had earlier, but he allowed himself to skim a glance over her, feeling his blood-beat quicken despite his iron control. Whether he wanted it or not, that chemical connection was still dangerously potent, and he was as sure as he was of his name that she felt it too.

Though apparently relaxed, there was a tautness in her posture that suggested she was alert to the vibrations. Whenever she looked at him, her eyes were aware, the pupils just a little dilated, a sparkle in the irises. Surely they were bluer?

He forced himself back to the page. ‘I see you started your job here in February.’

No doubt formality was the wisest approach, Lara thought, straining to interpret the signals. How could she have expected to fall into the same old easy-going way with him, after all that happened? Pity her body still didn’t seem to get it.

‘Yes, yes. That’s right.’

She fielded the enquiries about her projects, increasingly conscious of the super-charged electric current connecting her to him at that visceral level. It had been too long for her. She must try not to stare, not to obsess on his gorgeous bones as if he were still hers, although she couldn’t help noticing that his fingers were free of rings. Why? What had become of his wife? Or did he remove his wedding ring when he travelled?

She winced at the thought, then glanced at his face. Though his expression was shuttered, the grim line from cheekbone to shadow-roughened jaw discouraging, every instinct in her rose up against that possibility. Surely her perceptions of him six years ago couldn’t have been so far off-target. Seeing him now in the flesh, so stern and hard and true, it was hard to believe he was anything but the decent and honourable man she’d believed in.

There had to be an explanation about the ring. Perhaps he and his wife hadn’t exchanged them, though how likely was that? Giulia Morello was a socialite from a wealthy family, according to the magazine she’d read. It would surely be unusual for an Italian wife not to expect her husband to wear a ring.

As he questioned her about her work she examined him, drinking in the planes and hollows of his face, his cheekbones and strong black brows. She knew what it was like to kiss that mouth. Still so stirring to her starved imagination, the straight upper lip and slightly fuller lower lip were severely cut, and sensuous in a way that reminded her too well of times they had reduced her to quivering ecstasy.

She wondered if he felt the same hungry sense of possession she felt, as if her lips, her body should still belong to him, then felt ashamed of her wanton thoughts. Neither of them had a right to feel that way now.

Now that he had a wife.

‘You have no former editorial positions listed. What other work have you done to qualify you for your present job?’

There was sensuality in the brilliant dark eyes devouring her face. At one time she’d have found that so invigorating. Maybe she still did, though-could she be imagining it, or was there an edge of underlying turbulence? But what was it? Violence? Anger? And whose anger? Hers, or his?

‘Well, part-time work mainly, as an editorial assistant. Bill thought I had some rather good references from the publishing house where I started off. And I have done quite a lot of studies in literature. As you…as you might remember.’

She appealed to him with a smile, but he evaded it, lowering his gaze to hold her at a distance, as though any further mention of their former relationship was now forbidden. She supposed she should respect that, although he didn’t have to be so cold.

Even-hostile.

She hastened to fill the silence. ‘Bill seemed to think I was worth a chance with the children’s book list. He…’

He looked up, irony in his intelligent dark eyes. ‘He liked you.’ That sexy mouth hardened. His gaze flickered to her throat.

‘Well, yes.’ She found herself sounding almost defiant, as if there had been an accusation wrapped in the words. ‘I suppose he did.’

‘Of course. He would.’

Though politely said, it didn’t sound like a compliment. There was an uncomfortable pause, while she struggled to understand the implications. Was he suggesting that in some way she had cheated her way into Bill’s good graces?

She felt as if the Alessandro she’d known was behind a barrier, as smooth and hard and slippery as glass. In an effort to reach him, she leaned forward a little, smiling and opening her hands in appeal. ‘Look, Alessandro…It feels so strange, talking to you like this when we know-knew each other so well. How-how have you been?’

He raised his glittering black gaze to her. ‘I think it would be best if you could forget our brief personal acquaintance. It’s ancient history now. My task is to reform your company into a viable asset for Scala Enterprises. I prefer to focus on that.’

She recoiled as if from a slap. She bit her lip, and the blood came rushing up to her cheeks. ‘Oh, right. Of course. Absolutely. If-that’s what you want.’

Ancient history. Was that all she was to him? Why was he being so cold? Had he heard something about her? Or…was it something from the past? The remote possibility she’d occasionally entertained sprang into her mind, though surely not. He wouldn’t have. Over and over she’d rationalised that likelihood out of contention.

He wouldn’t have flown back because he’d never been serious about her. Five minutes after saying goodbye he’d married someone else.

She tried to read his face. ‘Alessandro, is there something I’m not getting? I mean, I know it’s a bit awkward us working temporarily in the same place, but it doesn’t have to be a problem, does it? Surely we can…put aside…’

His black gaze flicked up to laser into hers for a long suspenseful second, then his mouth edged into an enigmatic smile. ‘Our old liaison? Sure we can.’ He made a lazy gesture with one lean, bronzed hand. ‘Consider it never happened.’ The dark eyes dwelling on her face were veiled, their lids heavy. ‘As far as I am concerned, there was no summer idyll between lovers. No long afternoons of passion.’ His glance drifted to her mouth. ‘No lingering kisses, seducing our senses until we were drunk with each other. Forget that your lips ever touched mine.’ He grimaced. ‘Frankly, it’s a relief to hear you take such a sensible attitude. Viewed in hindsight, these things often appear to have had a magic that is, in fact, deceiving. The most intelligent course for us now is to regard each other as strangers.’

‘Strangers!’ She flushed, warmed by the involuntary stirring of her body at his reference to those long afternoons, the kisses, at the same time hurt by the casual dismissal of the most passionate, the most heartfelt love she’d ever experienced with a man.

To be honest, the only love.

‘I’m not sure I’ll ever be that sophisticated. I don’t think I can regard you as a stranger.’ She added very sweetly, ‘Though, of course, I’m not the one who got married.’

His thick black lashes swept down. There was a small, smouldering silence, as if a volcano brooded in some subterranean vault. As she waited for him to respond she observed his sexy mouth harden.

When he looked at her his black eyes were hard as jet.

‘I think you are understating your ability to move on, Lara,’ he said, his accent all at once very evident in his quiet, icy voice. ‘However, much as I would love to dwell on the enchantments of undressing you in some long-ago hotel room, I have a mountain of work to get through.’ As though unaware of her sharp intake of breath, he gave the file a little shake. ‘So?’ He lifted an aristocratic eyebrow to chivvy her along. ‘Can we leave our personal issues aside? Shall we continue?’

His imperious tone set her hackles bristling. Was this the man she’d fallen in love with? She sat stiffly, her muscles clenched, and smouldered with resentment.

He cast her a veiled glance, then carried smoothly on.

‘There’s one thing that strikes me. I am curious. You have been with this company a short time, yet when last we met you were well on your way to an illustrious career in publishing. What have you been doing with your-impressive talents, apart from this part-time work as an assistant?’

That infinitesimal pause. The way he’d flicked down his eyelids on the word impressive. There had definitely been sarcasm there. She felt a surge of anger as an exquisite small face with big dark eyes, long luxuriant lashes and a halo of dusky curls rose before her.

Here it was. The moment of truth. The point to which all the tortuous pathways of her life had so far conspired to bring her.

Unfortunately, the moment hardly felt ripe.

She sat back and examined him. The Marquis of the Minor Venetian Isles was not the charming man she remembered. He was an icy, mocking, work-obsessed autocrat. Did he even deserve to hear what she could tell him, if she had a mind to?

She folded her arms under her breasts and smiled coldly. ‘I don’t want to bore you with the details of my little life, Alessandro. The truth is, I suspect that what I’ve been doing is probably too personal an issue to interest you. Suffice it to say I’ve done other things besides work in publishing.’

He narrowed his gaze to study her through his long lashes. ‘There’s no need to be defensive, Larissa.’

‘Isn’t there?’ She wiped her smile, leaned forward and said in a low, trembling voice, ‘You know, you aren’t the man I remember.’

His brows shot up. ‘No? Who do you remember?’

‘Someone else. Someone-kind.’

His eyes glinted, but his expression remained hard and implacable, though she noticed a tiny vein jump in his temple. ‘Whereas you, on the other hand, are exactly as I remember.’ He added softly, ‘To my regret.’

She gasped. ‘Fine.’ She gathered her bag, and, drawing her dignity around her, rose to her feet. ‘In that case, I won’t waste any more of your time.’

He sprang up as well, and to forestall him from opening the door for her and ruining her grand exit she turned quickly towards it. He must have lunged at the same time, for somehow his ankle hooked around hers, and their bodies entangled in an electrifying physical collision. It was like flint striking flint. At the points of contact at hip and thigh a high-voltage shock sped through her flesh, while the sudden blaze that flared in his dark eyes gave her a sensation of being showered in hot sparks.

Intensely aware of his arms whipping around to steady her, her deprived senses surged to the friction of his long, muscular thighs grazing hers, his evocative masculine scent and the strength of his big, iron-hard frame.

His hands slid to her upper arms, and he held her against him for a breathtaking moment that stretched into infinity.

‘Careful, now.’ His deep voice was a growl.

She was almost preternaturally conscious of the raw proximity of the hard body beneath the clothes brushing hers. Her mouth dried as her glance slid to his lips, and somehow those fire sparks in his eyes and voice must have crept under her skin, because she felt shaken all over.

Shaken and stirred.

Then abruptly, almost as if at some urgent signal, at the exact same instant they thrust each other away. She was left feeling giddy and disturbed, with a wild tingling in her breasts as though all her aroused blood cells were unwilling to lie down again.

‘So sorry,’ he said, a rasp in his voice. ‘I don’t know how that happened.’ For a second his eyes were agleam as though he was about to say something more, but the nuance quickly vanished.

She pulled herself together and made for the door, then hesitated with her hand on the handle. His attitude about their past relationship had been so-negative, so repressive. But did she have to allow him the last word?

She turned proudly to face him.

He was back at his desk, tidying files and placing them in his briefcase.

‘Alessandro?’ That brush with him had given her voice an unwelcome huskiness.

He paused to glance up at her, one querying brow raised.

‘There is something I need-to ask you. Something I need to get straight.’

‘Si?’ His eyes sharpened.

‘Do you remember the pact?’

He stilled. For a full second it was as though his big frame had been snap frozen, and she had the scary sensation of having blundered onto a live mine. For a second his lean, handsome face might have been carved from ice.

Her heart began to tremble as his eyes narrowed on her face with a hard intensity.

‘Pact?’

‘The pact we made.’

His expression didn’t change, but she was so sorry she’d mentioned it. How could she have offered it up for re-inspection in this hostile climate? But he was waiting now, and she felt condemned to plough on.

‘You know,’ she persevered in a breathless voice. ‘When you had to go back to finish your studies at Harvard. The deal-that if we still felt the same way…’ It was so embarrassing now, having to refer to their former feelings. ‘If we thought there was a chance of us still-wanting to-be together, we’d meet in six weeks at the top of the Centrepoint Tower.’

He glanced down at the floor, a sardonic quirk to his mouth as if there were something nasty on the rug, then he looked up, his glittering eyes narrowed. ‘Remind me. What was my part in this deal?’

‘You-you agreed to fly back from Harvard in your mid-semester break.’

He considered her in silence, his eyes veiled, then his lashes drifted down. ‘And your part was…?’

‘Oh, well…’ In truth, from a travel perspective she had always been shamefaced about the lightness of her end of the pact. From a certain angle, it could have looked to outsiders as though her sincerity was above reproach, whereas his…

Her lips dried with discomfort. ‘I-I was to meet you there. Travel down from Bindinong.’

He strolled around to the front of the desk and leaned his big frame on the edge, his arms folded across his powerful chest, brows lifted.

‘All the way from Bindinong?’ he drawled softly, with a mockery that made her insides squirm. ‘Sacramento, I think it’s clear who had the easier end of this deal.’ There was a flash of something she couldn’t interpret in the depths of those black eyes.

She wished she’d never brought it up. Certainly, Bindinong in the Blue Mountains wasn’t that far from Sydney. When she’d lived there with her parents it had only been a ninety-minute train trip. Not quite as far as Harvard. Viewed now from the vantage point of maturity, the whole thing made the younger Lara Meadows look like some dewy-eyed tyrant, willing to put a man through hell to prove himself.

She made a small gesture of appeal. ‘I know, I know it sounds unlikely from this distance, but at the time we both believed…We sincerely felt…Don’t you remember?’ As she tried to interpret his expression she felt herself growing hot. ‘There were good reasons to make sure. You wanted me to go away with you-well, that’s what you said-and I was young. I’d never travelled overseas, away from my parents. I was unsure, understandably, of risking everything for…’

‘For me, apparently,’ he said with a derisive lilt of his eyebrows.

It shook her, that he’d think of it, of her, in that hard way, then she started to see how the pact might have looked through his eyes, and felt all her doubts rise to the surface.

‘And tell me…whose idea was it?’ he continued the ruthless pressure. ‘This-pact?’

He nearly spat the word. His uncharacteristic cynicism gave her a shock. Anyone would think she’d behaved badly. She had a flash of herself as acting like some capricious princess in a mediaeval fairy tale, setting endurance tests for her suitors.

So all right, he had been reluctant at first to agree, but he’d come to appreciate her reservations, and he had agreed. Heavens, who could expect a woman to just toss everything up and plunge into life with a man on just three weeks’ acquaintance, without taking some time to think?

In the end, he’d seen the wisdom of her small delay, and his acceptance of the pact had been as wholehearted and sincere as her own. Well, it had seemed so at the time. She had to keep reminding herself that it had all been a sham on his part. To look at him now, though, you would hardly think so, his expression was so hard and unforgiving.

‘Well?’ he queried.

‘Oh, well…’ What was this, the Spanish Inquisition? She could see by his stern mouth and the set of his handsome jaw that he wasn’t about to admit to remembering it. ‘Look, forget it. Just forget it. This clearly isn’t the time.’

She made a move towards the door, but rocked to a halt when he said, ‘So tell me, Lara Meadows. Did you? Keep your end of the deal?’

There was mockery in his voice and it caught her on the raw. She swung round to face him. His dark eyes were shimmering with a sardonic, enigmatic light.

‘No. No, I didn’t,’ she said, anger welling in her at being mocked for what was, in fact, the tragedy of her life. ‘And neither did you, or you’d have known that. You never had any intention of keeping it, did you?’

Ridiculous, after six years, but it still hurt. Just as well she was over him. Lucky for her she’d long since grown used to the idea that he’d never intended to come back. She’d just been a little diversion, to while away his time in Sydney.

All at once she had the most overwhelming need to leave. Run. Run as fast as she could from the gorgeous ice-man, all the way home, if necessary. Home to Vivi. Home to hug her darling little girl to herself.

All to herself.

But pride, and the need to keep talking, helped her keep her brave front. She gave a breezy wave of her hand. ‘Just as well neither of us took it seriously. That was the deal, after all. No hard feelings on either side if anyone should pull out. Thank goodness we both did, or we’d really have something to regret, wouldn’t we?’

She walked out on a cold, hard laugh, snapping the door to a little too firmly, and stood outside breathing more furiously than an Olympic hurdler, while the implications began to gel. How amused he’d be if he knew of the lengths she’d gone to in preparation for going away with him. If he had even the faintest idea how she’d loved him.

How she’d cried.

That was when she thought of the other thing she should have asked. Having gone so far to open the old wounds, she supposed she might as well know everything. How much worse could it get?

She opened the door again and looked back in. He was standing very still staring down at his files, his face a grim mask.

‘Oh, incidentally, Alessandro,’ she said softly, ‘have you brought your wife with you?’

His head came up and he gazed at her for a long, steady moment, then a gleam shot into his eyes. ‘My wife? I don’t have a wife, carissa.’

It was her turn to stare. Then she realised what he’d said.

‘Larissa,’ she corrected, then with an exasperated gesture, ‘I mean Lara. That’s Lara.’