I should not have thought about his mouth. His mouth had wreaked such havoc on my senses. He had used his mouth in ways I had not experienced before. No one had ever pleasured me that way. I hadn’t allowed them to. But with him it had felt natural. Damn it, it had felt like he was worshipping my body. It had added a level of sanctity to our lovemaking that was sadly lacking in my past experiences … especially the one I refuse to mention.
Alessandro gave me one of his half smiles—a twitch of his lips that was borderline mocking. ‘You think you can erase what we had?’
I rubbed at my wrist as if it had been stung, glaring at him so hard my eyes hurt. ‘I would appreciate it if you would refrain from referring to our … association whilst within the parameters of this school.’
I sounded so priggish I almost laughed out loud. Bertie would have been doubled over at me.
His eyes took on a glint that did serious damage to my equilibrium—if indeed I had any in the first place, which I suspect I didn’t.
‘I’ve told my niece we’re old friends,’ he said. ‘I thought it would help her to feel less threatened by coming here.’
I widened my eyes. I’m not talking cup-and-saucer wide. I’m talking satellite-dish wide, like those ones on the International Space Station.
‘What?’
‘You have a problem with making a small child feel a little more secure?’
I whooshed out a stormy breath. ‘I have a problem with you fabricating a relationship between us that doesn’t exist.’
‘It did once.’
I sent him another death-adder stare. ‘I beg to differ. How can you stand there and say we had something together when you failed to mention the fact that you’d recently broken up with your gold-digging fiancée? Not to mention your lies about not having a family. You lied to me from day one, Alessandro.’
I mentally kicked myself for using his Christian name. It was too personal. Too informal. Too intimate.
‘You have a sister and a niece and God knows who else. That’s not what people in a relationship do. They share stuff. Important stuff.’
I felt a teeny-weeny twinge of guilt at my statement. I hadn’t told him my important stuff, but I refused to see it as important. It was not worth thinking about. I hated thinking about it. It gave me nightmares to think about it. It was so long ago. I had packed away the sickening memories behind layers of I’m-a-tough-girl-don’t-mess-with-me bravado.
‘I would’ve told you in time.’
I rolled my eyes in disdain. ‘Like when?’ I said. ‘On our fiftieth wedding anniversary?’
Ack! There’s another word I loathe. Wedding.
‘But there wasn’t going to be a wedding, was there? Or even an engagement. Our quick-fire affair was all for show. After you’d achieved your aim of royally annoying your ex you would’ve neatly extricated yourself from our—’ I put my fingers up in air quotation marks ‘—”relationship” and moved on to your next conquest. You’re just annoyed I saw through you and got out first.’
His eyes held mine in a dark, unreadable lock. ‘I’m not here to talk about the past. I’m here to talk about my niece’s future.’
I gave him a narrow look. ‘Why this school?’
His eyes didn’t waver as they held mine. ‘I told you. It’s convenient for where I’ll be living.’
‘So you’re thinking of settling down at some point?’
Why are you asking that? I thought. You. Do. Not. Care.
‘At some point.’
I was like a dog with a bone. A terrier, that’s me. Now I had him here I wanted to know everything—even the stuff I didn’t want to know. Maybe it wasn’t a bone I was hanging on to. It was a smelly old carcass I was rolling in.
‘Are you in a relationship with someone at present?’ I said.
‘No.’
‘What about the blonde the other week?’
His eyes glinted as if in triumph. ‘Was that your sister with you?’
I glowered at him. Why had I allowed myself to fall into his trap so easily? But then, I thought, what was the point in denying I’d seen him? It was making me look foolish, and the last thing I wanted was to appear foolish and gauche in front of him.
‘Yes. Who was your date?’
‘The practice manager from my consulting rooms.’
I only just managed to stop myself from rolling my eyes. I could just imagine the ‘practice’ they’d get up to.
‘I’d love to see her job description.’
His jaw tensed as if he found my comment irritating. ‘It was her birthday. Now, let’s get on with the tour, shall we?’
It annoyed me that he’d made me look petty and unprofessional. ‘This way,’ I said, and turned smartly on my heels.
But I was all too acutely aware of his tall, commanding frame following close behind.
I COULD SMELL the lemon and spice of his aftershave as I led the way to the dormitories on the second floor. It was a subtle scent, redolent of warm summer afternoons in a lemon grove. I thought of that brief time in Paris—the way we’d met by accident when I’d run into him as I was coming out of a shop late on a Saturday afternoon. He steadied me with his hands and I looked up into his face and my heart all but stopped.
I’m the last person who would ever believe in love at first sight, but something happened at that moment I still can’t explain. I felt something shift inside me as his dark brown eyes met mine. He spoke to me in fluent French, so that might have explained it. It made me fall all the faster. And then he was so gallant, bending down to help me pick up the tote bag that had slipped off my shoulder, spilling its contents all over the cobblestones.
When he handed me my wand of lip gloss our fingers touched. I felt a fizzing sensation that travelled all the way up my arm and somehow ended in a molten pool between my legs.
He led me to a quiet table in the shade of a leafy tree outside a café on the Rue de Seine and ordered sparkling mineral water for me and an espresso for himself. We talked for two hours but it felt like two minutes.
He told me how he had grown up in Sicily but had studied and trained in London, and was spending that year working at Paris’s top cardiac centre to complete his PhD before heading back to London. Most surgeons found the specialty hard enough, but he’d taken on even more study.
He fascinated me. I was spellbound by his warm, intelligent brown eyes and his long-fingered hands that had so briefly touched mine. I thought of those hands, how they performed intricate surgery and saved countless lives. I sat there aching for him to touch me again. I must have communicated it silently, for he suddenly reached across the table and took my hand in his, stroking his thumb over the back of it as his eyes meshed with mine.
He didn’t have to say a word. I could see it in his gaze. I knew it was the same in mine. There was a connection between us that transcended the primal attraction of two healthy consenting adults. I had never felt a surge of lust so overpowering, and yet I could feel something else as well, which was less easily defined.
Looking back, I suspect I recognised some quality in him that spoke to the lonely outsider in me, which I prided myself on keeping well hidden. My mother would say it was fate, or kismet, or the planets aligning or something. My father would say it had something to do with our chakras