Chapter Ten
‘IS THAT REALLY what you think?’ Alessandro asked quietly as she dumped a cup of coffee in front of him and sat back down but on the opposite side of the table. ‘That what we had was just a bit of fun?’
He’d warned her about involvement at the start.
He’d warned her about a number of things.
That warning to make sure she didn’t start believing that their phoney relationship was real returned now to mock him because the one thing he hadn’t foreseen was his involvement.
She, on the other hand, open and funny and light-hearted, had not once done anything to make him think that she’d fallen in love with him.
She’d enjoyed him and then she’d walked away.
Coming here, for him, was the biggest risk he’d ever taken in his life because he was on the back foot and the way ahead was unclear, but love had left him with no choice.
‘What I think, Alessandro, is that I don’t want to get involved in this conversation. We had what we had and it’s over. I don’t want to have any post-mortems and I don’t want to hear what your plans are for a future with your ex-wife.’
‘That article, it’s not what you think.’
‘Isn’t it? Seemed pretty clear-cut to me. Sophia gazing up at you…you gazing down at her…arm in arm after a cosy dinner at a romantic restaurant.’
Georgie sighed and fiddled with the handle of her cup. Just saying those words out loud felt like a knife twisting in her heart. She was proud, however, that she had taken the bull by the horns and wasn’t hiding behind a show of not understanding why he had come.
‘I’m glad for you.’ It was a struggle to say that and a victory when she succeeded.
‘You’re glad for me?’
‘I know what happened and how it happened. You finally realised just how irreplaceable it is to have family time as a unit. My being there might have been an illusion, but it opened your eyes to what you hadn’t seen before.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know what I’m talking about, Alessandro,’ Georgie said impatiently. ‘Or you would know if you stopped to really think about it.’
He looked bewildered. Guarded but bemused and she didn’t want that expression to start making inroads into her common sense.
She didn’t want to start analysing it, didn’t want to think that there might be more to what she had seen and read, that when he said that it might not be what she thought, he might just be telling the truth.
She was sick of misinterpreting situations and reading men the wrong way.
She was sick of being na?ve.
Maybe he just hadn’t worked out why he and his ex-wife were suddenly getting back together. Or, at least, he hadn’t analysed the situation in depth.
Did it matter?
She wished he would just leave but, since it happened to be his house, that wasn’t really an option.
She could do the next best thing, though, so she began standing up, backing away from the table, eyes riveted to his darkly handsome face.
‘Please, Georgie.’
He stood and took a couple of steps towards her and Georgie froze in her tracks.
She was appalled when, somehow, he was towering over her and, somehow, he’d reached out and somehow her wrist had managed to find itself circled by his fingers.
She snatched her hand away and rubbed her wrist and looked at him with scathing hostility.
‘I realise that this is your house, Alessandro, but I’m going to leave now and, much as I like the money this job brings, I won’t be coming back to clean for you. I’ll let the agency know.’
Her heart was hammering inside her and she couldn’t tear her eyes away from his ashen face.
Why was his face ashen?
What did his face have to be ashen about?
She was the one whose heart had been broken in two! Her face had a lot to be ashen about!
‘I was going to come here to see you even before that ridiculous story broke.’
His voice was low and shaky and Georgie stared at him through narrowed eyes, not trusting herself to give an inch.
She folded her arms and eyed the kitchen door, desperate to flee through it and yet desperate as well to stay right where she was and hear what he had to say.
‘To do the decent thing? Fill me in before I found out sooner or later?’
‘I was going to come here to…’
The silence gathered around them until Georgie could feel herself breaking out in perspiration. Her fingers were digging into her arms and she loosened them.
‘To what?’ she finally asked.
‘To ask you to marry me.’
His words floated into her head and she stared at him, open-mouthed and in disbelief. She thought that she might have misheard what he’d said or maybe she’d missed a vital link in his sentence because her nerves were all over the place.
‘Sorry?’ she eventually stuttered.
‘I came here to ask you to marry me, Georgie.’ He reached into his pocket, pulled out a little black box and held it towards her.
Georgie stared at it, then quickly looked at him.
‘It’s a shock. I know that. I can see it all over your face. I know what I said…what I told you about making sure not to get feelings for me…and I know…’
He shoved the box back into his pocket, raked his fingers through his hair and flushed darkly.
‘We could have this conversation in the living room,’ he said roughly, ‘if you’ll let me. If you’ll hear me out.’
There was a nervousness in the way he hovered and maybe that was what propelled Georgie to nod and follow as he preceded her out into the vast hall and towards the sitting room where, not that long ago, she had bumped into him with his ex-wife and two lawyers in tow.
He’d come to ask her to marry him?
That made no sense. They’d parted company with a peck on the cheek. He hadn’t, not once, said anything about having feelings for her. The opposite if anything.
Was this about Flora?
‘Is this about Flora?’ was the first thing she asked when they were in the sitting room and she had sunk into one of the chairs while he remained by the window, perched against the sill, looking every inch the elegant billionaire.
‘What do you mean?’ He frowned and sighed. ‘Georgie, stop theorising and hear me out.’
Georgie barely heard him because she was busy wondering how on earth a marriage proposal could be about his daughter and also what were those pictures in the newspaper all about?
Her head wanted to explode.
She glanced up to find that he had strolled towards her and she watched as he dragged one of the chairs across so that he was sitting opposite her, his knees very nearly touching hers.
‘When we parted company, I… I thought that my life would return to where it had been before we met. Deep down, I knew that wasn’t going to happen but I refused to allow my mind to go off in that direction.
Didn’t matter. It was stupid to think anything was going to be the same without you around and I knew it, knew it the second I watched you walk away from me.
It was like having my heart cut out. Instinct made me want to rush behind you but years of self-control stopped me, made me retreat to think things through…
to come to terms with a love that was bigger than me, a love that was never going to go away.
’ He paused and lowered his head. When he looked up at her, he steepled his fingers under his chin and remained silent for a couple of seconds.
‘I spent my life making sure to protect myself against women who wanted too much from me because I accepted that I just couldn’t promise the sort of commitment they seemed to want.
Sophia and I…? Like I told you,’ he said heavily, ‘as I’ve told you so many things about myself in the time we spent together…
Sophia and I only married because she fell pregnant.
If that hadn’t happened, I would never have married her, but I married her and, for a very brief while, I’d hoped that I might find reservoirs of love I didn’t know I possessed. ’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘But I didn’t,’ Alessandro admitted on a sigh.
‘The opposite. I very quickly realised that I’d never loved Sophia and never would.
I accepted that I didn’t have it in me to love any woman because I’d grown up far too disillusioned with my own experiences of a childhood blighted by my father’s careless abandonment of me and my mother. ’
‘Yet you were loved, Alessandro. Your mother loved you, set you in the right direction, did everything within her power to make sure you didn’t end up destitute or worse. You told me so.’
‘I told you a lot of things, didn’t I?’ He smiled wryly.
‘That should have been a signpost to what was happening inside me, if I hadn’t been too damn stubborn to realise it.
Yes, my mother did a lot for me. Everything, truth be told.
But over the years I saw the damage caused by my father walking out on her.
She never recovered, never got involved with anyone else.
And more than that, I felt the hole my father’s vanishing act left in me.
Love, in all its complications, left pain in its wake and I decided from a very young age that I wasn’t prepared to put myself in the firing line.
Maybe if it had been a normal divorce, when I was old enough to understand that sometimes good people make bad life partners…
but I was very, very young and the hurt was crystallised in the notion of a man who’d walked out of my life, never looked back, never tried to get in touch, was never curious about the mess he’d left behind. ’
‘Alessandro, I still don’t understand what—’
‘When you left to head back to Vancouver, I got in touch with Sophia, told her that I wanted to meet her. I said that I’d explain everything when we met but there were things I wanted to tell her and I wanted to tell her face to face.’
‘You did…’
‘She suggested the restaurant and I complied. I felt it was going to be tough enough on her when she heard what I had to say.’
‘Alessandro…’
‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘I don’t know what to believe.’
‘Do you want to believe me? That’s the question I suppose I should be asking.’
‘What do you mean?’