Chapter Nine
ROOM SERVICE. Personalised Menus created just for them and delivered with the pomp and ceremony of a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Alessandro and Georgie quickly realised that they preferred it to going to any one of the amazing restaurants in the hotel and the park even though it would have been no trouble arranging a babysitter.
When money was no object, nothing was too much trouble, but the intimacy of having dinner with no one around was irresistible.
Alessandro had told her that he liked being with a woman who didn’t spend hours getting ready to go out and whose enjoyment didn’t come from basking in other people’s admiration, with whatever food that was on offer playing second fiddle.
Now, Alessandro was sitting on the sofa with the menu on the table in front of him, not that he needed a menu. Whatever he wanted was cooked for him. He watched her as she emerged in a fetching ensemble of grey silk culottes and a matching vest with tiny buttons down the front.
It was loose and fell to the waist and he could see that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her small breasts jutted against the thin silk, her nipples pushing out in two tiny cones.
‘You look good.’ He stood up to hand her a glass of wine and then continued standing until she was close enough to breathe her in.
‘So do you,’ Georgie quipped back.
‘There. Compliments out of the way. We both look good.’
‘Oh no! Are the compliments done already? I wanted them to keep coming.’
‘I figure you’re only half joking when you say that.
Thinking that you were second best to your sisters because you weren’t as academic has taken its toll.
I was shocked when you told me about your dyslexia.
Shouldn’t be but…no, shocked isn’t the right description.
I was…gutted for you. So what I’m saying is that I can rustle up a couple more compliments if you like.
’ Alessandro grinned and patted the space right next to him as he sat back down.
He wanted to feel her small body curving against his, so that he could dip his hand at will underneath the loose silk top and play with her breasts until he knew what effect he was having between her thighs.
Georgie blushed, sat next to him and rested her head against his shoulder before pulling back to sit and look at him.
‘I thought you didn’t like the psychobabble stuff.
Are you going to start analysing me?’ She wished he would.
He could spout the psychobabble stuff till the cows came home as far as she was concerned, because it would prove that he cared.
Telling him about her dyslexia had felt natural and she’d been thrilled when he’d responded with a look of sympathy and tenderness.
She’d stopped pretending that she didn’t have feelings for him and she was willing to see every small concession of affection from him as a declaration of an emotion he didn’t know he possessed.
From nowhere, hope had sprung like a weed, stubbornly pushing past common sense and reason and sending shoots down deep inside her.
For the past three days the sex had been mind-blowing…the holding hands had made her heart beat fast…and the stolen looks with Flora in between them had sent her nervous system into skittering free fall.
Just looking at him now, casually dressed in Prada and Ralph Lauren, all black polo shirt and black jeans, was enough to make her mouth go dry.
‘I’m beginning to get a kick out of this psychobabble stuff. Maybe I chose the wrong career.’
Georgie laughed. ‘I’m not seeing it,’ she told him wryly. ‘Anyway, women might get too distracted to spill their hearts out if they were lying on a couch looking at you. Not that I think the lying-on-a-couch thing still happens.’
Alessandro looked at her thoughtfully.
‘We should talk.’
The smile on Georgie’s face tightened but she kept it pinned there. Her eyes, though, were glassy and she lowered them. A conversation had to be had. Would it be too much to hope that he might want to see where this wonderful thing between them might lead?
‘Good idea,’ she managed in a normal voice. ‘You read my mind.’
‘Drink some of your wine and let me just feel you for a bit first.’
He slipped his hand underneath the vest and covered her breast with it, teasing her nipple until she was moaning softly and squirming. When he pushed up the top so that he could suckle the pink, throbbing tip, she slipped down the sofa and relaxed back to enjoy what he was doing.
Georgie’s mind went blank, the way it always did the second he started touching her.
She let one arm dangle off the side of the sofa and watched him as he laved her nipple with his mouth.
Her legs parted and she waited with mounting pleasure for him to touch her.
She knew how his hand felt as it trailed along her body, she knew where it would linger and how that touch would lighten or strengthen depending on where he touched.
Right now, he was touching her just where she wanted to be touched, circling her belly button, dipping into the small indent with feathery softness before continuing a downward spiral to the elasticated waistband of the culottes.
He slipped a finger inside her, rubbed her clitoris. She looked through half-opened eyes at the bulge of his hand under the culottes and that, in itself, was a turn-on.
She sighed, closed her eyes and moved to keep rhythm with his gently exploring fingers, angling her body to maximise her pleasure, and as his rubbing got stronger and firmer, she sucked in her breath and came in a long, convulsing shudder that drained everything out of her on a high of intense, shattering ecstasy.
She struggled back up into an upright position when she eventually returned to Planet Earth to find him smiling at her like the cat that got the cream.
The talk…a conversation that needed to be had…
She thought about the chasm between them, the chasm that they had both chosen to forget about temporarily but which was now rising up from the depths to confront them.
Why let him take the initiative? She was never going to open herself up to being vulnerable in front of a guy again, never look across to see him kissing another woman or else just walking away from her, smiling and waving and knowing he’d stuck the knife in because she’d given herself away.
Inside, she could be as vulnerable as she wanted and give as much airtime to hurt as she wanted but, no…she would be in charge of the narrative.
‘It’s our penultimate night here tomorrow.
I guess that’s what you want to talk about?
’ Her heart was racing, thumping so hard it felt as though it would smash right through her ribcage.
‘I might need to actually do some work. I have reports to write and I need to start planning next term’s curriculum.
Once the ski season starts coming to an end, I have to get into gear for a change of tempo when the outdoor activities change and I think that this is going to be my last season there, anyway.
’ Voice perfectly normal but, inside, everything in wild turmoil.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I need to start putting down roots. Proper roots. This has been fun and it’s served a purpose, as you know, but…’ Her voice tapered off.
Alessandro frowned.
In the pit of his stomach, he felt an unsettling flare of panic. Putting down roots? Quitting her job at Whistler? How had that been the last thing on his mind? And when she spoke about putting down roots, where exactly were those roots going to be planted?
The depth of his reaction set alarm bells ringing in his head.
Why was that? This was only ever going to be a brief fling.
In fact, it wasn’t going to be anything at all…
it was meant to be no more than an enforced situation that they would both endure before walking away back to the reality they’d left behind.
Shutters slammed down, an automatic self-defence mechanism to protect himself from hurt.
He barely acknowledged that it was there. He just knew to back away from questions to which the answers might not be what he wanted to hear and the question he wanted to ask her was why would you leave me?
He detested himself for the vulnerability in himself he was suddenly exposed to and he didn’t know where it had come from.
He’d always known how to keep the vault in which his heart lay under lock and key. Now it felt as though a crack had opened up in the layers of steel.
To acknowledge that crack was one thing, of course. However, to explore where that crack might lead was off the cards.
‘Of course,’ he said abruptly. He reached to tuck some of her unruly blonde hair behind her ear, keeping his voice controlled and light until his absolute self-control was back in place, although he knew that his hand was just a little bit unsteady.
‘What happened between us was never on the cards in the first place. When you talk about putting down roots, what roots are you talking about? Career roots?’
‘I suppose so.’ Georgie wasn’t looking look at him.
‘Find a place in London. Find a job that pays enough to afford somewhere not too crime-ridden. I can spend the next few months, until September at least, saving madly so I might be able to muster a deposit and, of course, the money I got for this stint will go a long way to realising my dream. So thank you for that.’
‘London…’
‘I was never planning on staying in Canada for ever.’
‘But while you’re here, Georgie, and this is what I wanted to talk to you about…
’ She would leave to return to England. Naturally.
That wasn’t gut-wrenching at all. In fact, it was terrific that she wasn’t being clingy!
That she was already making plans for moving on with a life in which she didn’t want him to play any part at all.
Wasn’t it?