‘You win, Alessandro.’

Chase looked at him with green eyes that had once mesmerised him right out of the rigidly controlled box into which he had always been accustomed to piling his emotional entanglements with the opposite sex.

‘But maybe you could tell me whether you would have been as hard-line if I hadn’t been the person sitting here trying to talk you out of buying the shelter.’

‘Oh, the sale most certainly would have gone ahead …’ Alessandro drawled, without an ounce of sympathy. ‘But I probably wouldn’t have tacked on a ticking clock.’

Chase glared at him. ‘I never took you for a bully.’

‘I’ll admit that I have no intention of pulling out of this purchase, but you could recoup the lost thousands …’

‘Could I? How?’ She stared at him. She knew that the finances for the shelter were in serious disarray. They would need all the money they could get just to pay off the debts and wipe the slate clean.

‘We have an unfinished past …’ Alessandro murmured. ‘It’s time to finish it. I want to know who the hell you really are. Satisfy my curiosity and the full price is back on the table …’

CATHY WILLIAMS is originally from Trinidad, but has lived in England for a number of years. She currently has a house in Warwickshire, which she shares with her husband, Richard, her three daughters, Charlotte, Olivia and Emma, and their pet cat, Salem. She adores writing romantic fiction, and would love one of her girls to become a writer—although at the moment she is happy enough if they do their homework and agree not to bicker with one another!

Recent titles by the same author:

HIS TEMPORARY MISTRESS

A DEAL WITH DI CAPUA

THE SECRET CASELLA BABY

THE NOTORIOUS GABRIEL DIAZ

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

Enthralled by Moretti

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my three wonderful daughters.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EXCERPT

CHAPTER ONE

CHASE EVANS PUSHED aside the folder in front of her and glanced at her watch. For the fourth time. She had now been kept waiting in this conference room for twenty-five minutes. As a lawyer, she knew what this was about. Actually, even if she hadn’t been a lawyer she would have known what this was about. It was about intimidation. Intimidation by a juggernaut of a company that was determined to get its own way.

She stood up, flexed her muscles and strolled over to the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass that overlooked the teeming streets of the city.

At this time of year, London was swarming with tourists. From way up here, they appeared to be small little stick figures, but she knew if she went down she would join foreigners from every corner of the globe. You couldn’t escape them. You couldn’t escape the noise, the crowds and the bustle although here, in the opulent surroundings of AM Holdings, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were a million miles away from all that. It was deathly quiet.

Yet another intimidation tactic, she thought cynically. She had seen a lot in the past few years since she had been a practising lawyer, but the antics of this company took some beating.

She thought back to meeting number one, when they had imagined that buying up the women’s shelter would be a walk in the park. For meeting number one, they had sent their junior lawyer, Tom Barry, who had become embroiled in a tangle of logistics with which he had patently been unable to cope.

For meeting number two, they had dispatched a couple of more experienced guys. Alex Cole and Bruce Robins had come prepared, but so had she. Out of all the pro bono cases in which she specialised, the women’s shelter was dearest to her heart. If they had come prepared to wipe it out from under her feet, then she too had upped the stakes, pulling out obscure precursors and covenants that had sent them away scratching their heads and promising that they would be back.

Chase had had no doubt that they would. The shelter, or Beth’s House, as it was nicknamed, sat on prime land in West London, land that could earn any halfway canny speculator a great deal of money should it be developed. She knew, through contacts and back doors, that it had been targeted for development by the AM group. An ambitious transformation—from a women’s shelter to an exclusive, designer shopping mall for the rich and famous.

Well, over her dead body.

Staring down as the minutes of the clock ticked past and no one appeared, she knew that there was a very real possibility that she would have to let this one go, admit defeat. Yet for so many reasons she refused to let herself think that way.

After Alex and Bruce, her next meeting—this time with her boss by her side—had been with their top guy, Leslie Swift. He had cleverly countered every single magic act they had produced from their rapidly shrinking hat. He had produced by-laws, exemptions and clauses that she knew had been designed to have them running back to the drawing board. Now, alone in this sprawling conference room, Chase knew that she was in the last-chance saloon.

Once again she glanced at her watch before moving back to her seat at the thirty-seater table. Lord only knew who they would send this time to take her on. Maybe they would realise that she was mortally wounded and see fit to delegate her right back to the junior lawyer so that he could gloat at the woman who had sent him packing.

But she had one more trick up her sleeve. She wasn’t going to give up without a fight. The memory of giving up without fighting was too embedded in her consciousness for her ever to go down that road again. She had dragged herself away from a dark place where any kind of fighting had never been a good idea and she wasn’t about to relinquish any of the grit and determination that had got her where she was now.

Banishing all thoughts of a past that would cripple her if she gave it a chance, Chase Evans returned her attention to the file in front of her and the list of names and numbers she had jotted down as her final attempt to win her case.

* * *

‘Shall I tell Ms Evans how long she might be expected to wait?’

Alessandro Moretti glanced up at his secretary, who stared back at him with gimlet-eyed steeliness. She had announced Chase Evans’s arrival half an hour ago, longer, and had already reminded him once that the woman was waiting for him in the conference room. From anyone else, a second reminder would have been unthinkable. Alicia Brown, however, had been with him for five years and it had been clear from the start that tiptoeing around him wasn’t going to be on the cards. She was old enough to be his mother and, if she had never tiptoed around any of her five strapping boys, then she certainly wasn’t going to tiptoe around anyone. Alessandro Moretti included. He had hired her on the spot.

‘You can’t keep her waiting for ever. It’s rude.’

‘But then,’ Alessandro countered drily, ‘you’ve been with me long enough to know that I’m rude.’ But he stood up and grabbed his jacket from where he had earlier flung it on the long, low, black leather sofa that occupied one side of the office.

In the concrete jungle where fortunes were made and lost on the toss of a coin, and where the clever man knew how to watch his back because the knives were never far away, Alessandro Moretti, at the tender age of thirty-four, ranked as one of the elite pack leaders.

Well, you didn’t get to that exalted position by being soft and tender-hearted. Alessandro understood that. He was feared and respected by his employees. He treated them fairly; more than fairly. Indeed they were amongst the highest paid across the board in the city. In return, the line they trod was the line he marked. If he wanted something done, he expected it to be done yesterday. He snapped his fingers and they jumped to immediate attention.

So he was frankly a little put out that his team of lawyers had, so far, singularly failed in nailing the deal with the shelter. He couldn’t imagine that it was anything but routine. He had the money to buy them out and so he would. Why then, four months down the line, was he having to step in and do their job for them?

He had elaborate plans to redevelop the extensive land the place was sitting on. His price was more than fair. Any fool should have been able to go in, negotiate and come out with the papers signed, sealed and delivered.

Instead, in a day which was comprised of back-to-back meetings, he was having to waste time with a two-bit pro bono lawyer who had set up camp on the moral high ground somewhere and was refusing to budge. Did he really need to take valuable time out to demolish her? Because demolish her he most certainly would.

He issued a string of orders as he left his office and threw over his shoulder, as he was about to shut the door behind him, ‘And don’t forget how good I am at sacking people! So I’d better not find that you’ve forgotten any of what I’ve just told you! Because I don’t see your trusty notepad anywhere...’ He grinned and shut the door smartly behind him before his secretary could tell him what she thought of his parting shot.

He was carrying nothing, because as far as he was concerned he didn’t need to. He had been briefed on the woman’s arguments. He didn’t anticipate needing to strong-arm her at all into giving up. He had managed to unearth a couple of covenants barely visible to the naked eye that would subvert any argument she could put forward. Additionally, she had now been waiting for over forty minutes in a conference room that had been deliberately stripped bare of anything that could be seen as homely, comforting, soothing or in any way, shape or form, designed to put someone at ease.

He briefly contemplated summoning those losers who had not been able to do their job so that they could witness first hand how to do it, but decided against it.

One on one. Over and done with in fifteen minutes. Just in time for his next conference call from Hong Kong.

* * *

Having had plenty of time to mull over the intimidation tactics, Chase was standing by the window waiting for a team of lawyers. In bare feet, she was five-eleven. In heels, as she was now, she would tower over her opponents. The last one had barely reached her shoulders. Maybe, as a last resort, she could stare them down into submission.

She was gazing out of the window when she heard the door to the conference room opening behind her and she took her time turning round.

If they could keep her waiting in a room that had all the personality of a prison cell, then she could take her time jumping to attention.

But it wasn’t a team of lawyers. It wasn’t Tom Barry, Alex Cole, Bruce Robins or Leslie Swift.

She looked at the man standing by the door and she felt the colour drain from her face. She found that she couldn’t move from her position of dubious advantage standing by the window. Her legs had turned to lead. Her heart was beating so violently that she felt on the verge of a panic attack. Or, at the very least, an undignified fainting spell.

‘You!’ This wasn’t the strong, steady voice of the self-confident twenty-eight-year-old woman she had finally become.

‘Well, well, well...’ Alessandro was as shocked as she was but was much more adept at concealing his response and much faster at recovering.

And yet, as he moved slowly towards her, he was finding it almost impossible to believe his eyes.

At the speed of light, he travelled back in time, back to eight years ago, back to the leggy, gloriously beautiful girl who had occupied his every waking hour. She had changed, and yet she hadn’t. Gone was the waist-long hair, the jeans and sweater. In its place, the woman standing in front of him, looking as though she had seen a ghost—which he supposed she had—was impeccably groomed. Her shoulder-length bob was the same blend of rich caramel and chestnut, her slanting eyes were as green and feline as he remembered, her body as long and willowy.

‘Lyla Evans...’ He strolled towards her, one hand in his trouser pocket. ‘Should I have clocked the surname? Maybe I would have if it hadn’t been preceded by Chase...’ He was standing right in front of her now. She looked as though she was about to pass out. He hoped she wouldn’t expect him to catch her if she fell.

‘Alessandro... No one said... I wasn’t expecting...’

‘So I see.’ His smile was cold and devoid of humour. Of their own accord, his eyes travelled to her finger. No wedding ring. Not that that said very much, all things considered.

‘Will you be here on your own, or can I expect the rest of your team...?’ Chase tried desperately to regain some of her shattered composure but she couldn’t. She was driven to stare at the harsh, sinfully sexy contours of a face that had crept into her head far too many times to count. He was as beautiful as she remembered. More so, if that were possible. At twenty-six, he had been sexy as hell but still with the imprint of youth. Now he was a man, and there was nothing warm or open in his face. She was staring at a stranger, someone who hated her and who was making no attempt to mask his hatred.

‘Just me. Cosy, as it turns out. Don’t you think? So many years since last we saw one another, Lyla...or Chase, or whoever the hell you really are.’

‘Chase. My name is Chase. It always was.’

‘So the pseudonym was purely for my benefit. Of course, it makes sense, given the circumstances at the time...’

‘Lyla was my mother’s name. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll sit.’ She tottered over to the chair and collapsed on it. The stack of files in front of her, her briefcase, her laptop, they were all reminders of why she was in this conference room in the first place, but for the life of her she couldn’t focus on them. Her thoughts were all over the place.

‘So, shall we play a little catch-up, Lyla? Sorry...Chase? A little polite conversation about what we’ve been doing for the past eight years?’ Alessandro perched on the edge of the sprawling conference table and stared down at her: the one and only woman he had wasted time chasing, only to be left frustrated when she’d failed to fall into his bed. For that reason alone, she occupied a unique spot in his life. Add all the other reasons and she was in a league of her own.

‘I’d rather not.’

‘I bet. In your shoes, I’d plead the fifth as well.’

‘Alessandro, I know what you must think of me, but—’

‘I really don’t need to hear any sob stories, Lyla.’

‘Stop calling me that. My name is Chase.’

‘So you became a lawyer after all. I take my hat off to you—although, thinking about it, you did prove you were the sort of girl who would get what she wanted whatever the cost...’

Chase’s eyes flickered up to him. The expression on his face sent the chill of fear racing up and down her spine, yet how could she blame him? Their story had been brief and so full of things that had to be hidden that it was hardly surprising.

‘And I notice that there’s no telling wedding ring on your finger,’ he continued in the same mildly speculative voice that wouldn’t have fooled an idiot. ‘Did you dispose of the hapless husband in your ever-onwards and upwards climb?’

When he had met her—sitting there in the university canteen with a book in front of her, a little frown on her face, completely oblivious to everyone around her—she had knocked him sideways. It was more than the fact that she’d stood out, that she possessed head-turning looks; the world was full of girls who could turn heads. No, it had been her complete and utter indifference to the glances angled in her direction. He had watched as she had toyed with her sandwich before shoving it to one side and heading out. She had looked neither right nor left. The canteen could have been devoid of people.

Standing here now, looking at her, Alessandro could recreate that feeling of intense, incomprehensible attraction that had swept over him then as though it had been yesterday.

Significantly, she hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring then either.

‘I’m not here to talk about my past,’ Chase said, clearing her throat. ‘I’ve brought all the paperwork about the shelter.’

‘And I’m not ready to talk about that yet.’ He sat on one of the chairs alongside her and angled it away from the table so that he had a bird’s eye view of her as she stared down at the bundle of files and papers in front of her and pretended to concentrate. ‘So...’ he drawled. ‘You were about to tell me where the wedding ring’s gone...’

‘I don’t believe I was,’ Chase said coolly, gathering herself. Eyes the colour of bitter chocolate bored straight through her, bypassing the hard, glossy veneer she had taken so much time and trouble to build like a fortress around herself. ‘You might be curious about what I’ve been up to for the past few years, Alessandro, but I have no intention of satisfying your curiosity. I just want to do what I came here to do and leave.’

‘You came here to lose to me,’ Alessandro told her without preamble. ‘If you had any sense, you would recognise that and wave the white flag before I start lowering the price I’ve offered to pay for that place.’ He drew her attention to the clock on the wall. ‘With every passing minute, I drop my price by a grand, so make sure your argument’s a winning one, because if it’s not you’re going to find that you’re not working on behalf of your client.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘I can do whatever I like, Lyla...Chase...or shall I call you Mrs Evans? Or perhaps Ms...?’

‘This isn’t about us, Alessandro.’ She tried to claw the conversation back to the matter at hand, back to the shelter. ‘So please don’t think that you can use empty threats to—’

‘Look around you,’ Alessandro cut in lazily. ‘And tell me what you see.’

‘Where are you going with this?’

‘Just do as I ask.’

Chase looked around nervously. She could feel the jaws of a trap yawning around her, but when she tried to figure out what sort of trap she came up empty. ‘Big, bland conference room,’ she told him in a voice that hinted that she was already bored with the subject. When she looked around her, her eyes kept wanting to return to him, to look at his face and absorb all the small changes there. Seeing him now, she was beginning to realise that she had never entirely forgotten him. She had buried him but it had obviously been in a shallow grave.

‘I like it bland. It doesn’t pay to provide distractions when you want the people seated at this table to be focused.’

‘You like it bland...’

‘Correct. You see, I am AM Holdings. I own it all. Every single deal is passed by me. What I say goes and no one contradicts me. So, when I tell you that I intend to drop my price by a grand for every minute you argue with me, I mean it and it’s within my power to do it. Of course, you’re all business and you think you can win, in which case my threat will be immaterial. But if you don’t, well, after a couple of hours of futile arguing... Do the maths.’

Chase looked at him, lost for words. In view of what had happened between them, the deceit and the half-lies that had finally been her undoing, she was staring at a man who had been gifted his revenge. She should have done her homework on the company more thoroughly, but she had been handed the case after her boss had done the preliminaries himself, only to find that he couldn’t follow through for personal reasons. She had focused all her energies on trying to locate loopholes that would prevent the sale of the shelter to anyone rather than specifically to AM Holdings. Even so, would she have recognised Alessandro had his name cropped up? They hadn’t afforded much time for surnames.

‘Sounds ungentlemanly.’ Alessandro gave an elegant shrug and a smile that was as cold as the frozen wastelands. ‘But, when it comes to business, I’ve always found that being a gentleman doesn’t usually pay dividends.’

‘Why are you doing this? How could you think of punishing those helpless women who use the shelter because we...we...?’

‘Had an ill-fated relationship? Because you lied to me? Deceived me? Does your firm of lawyers know the kind of person you really are?’

Chase didn’t say anything but she could feel her nervous system go into overdrive. She had inadvertently stepped into the lion’s den; how far did revenge go? What paths would it travel down before it was finally satisfied? Alessandro Moretti owned this place. Not only was it within his power to do exactly as he said, to reduce the amount he was willing to pay for the shelter with each passing minute, but what if he decided actively to go after her?

‘Things weren’t what they seemed back then, Alessandro.’

‘The clock’s ticking.’ He relaxed and folded his hands behind his head. Against all odds, and knowing her for what she really was, he was irritated to discover that he could still appreciate her on a purely physical level. He had never laid a finger on her but, hell, he had fantasised about it until his head had spun, had wondered what she would look like underneath the student clothes, what she would feel like. By the time he had met her, he had already bedded his fair share of women, yet she had appealed to him on a level he had barely comprehended.

He hadn’t gone to the university intending to get involved with anyone. He had gone there as a favour to his old don, to give a series of business lectures, to get students inspired enough to know that they could attempt to achieve in record time what he had succeeded in achieving. Six lectures charting business trends, showing how you could buck them and still come out a winner, and he would be gone. He hadn’t anticipated meeting Lyla—or, as she now called herself, Chase—and staying on to give a further six lectures.

For the first time in his very privileged life, he had found himself in a situation with a woman over which he’d had little control and he had been prepared to kick back and enjoy it. For someone to whom things had always come easy, he had even enjoyed the hard-to-get game she had played. Of course, he had not expected that the hard-to-get game would, in fact, lead nowhere in the end, but then how was he to know the woman he had been dealing with? She had left him with the ugly taste of disillusionment in his mouth and now here she was...

Wasn’t fate a thing of beauty?

‘You’re not interested in reliving our...exciting past. So, sell me your arguments... And, by the way, that’s one minute gone...’

Feeling that she had stepped into a nightmare, Chase opened the top file with trembling fingers. Of course she could understand that he was bitter and angry with her. And yet in her mind, when she had projected into a future that involved her accidentally running into him somewhere, his bitterness and anger had never been so deep, nor had he been vengeful. He could really hurt her, really undo all the work she had done to get where she had.

She began going over some of the old ground covered in the past three meetings she’d had with his underlings, and he inclined his head to one side with every semblance of listening, before interrupting her with a single slash of his hand.

‘You know, of course, that none of those obstructions hold water. You’re prevaricating and it won’t work.’

Chase involuntarily glanced at the clock on the wall and was incensed that the meeting—all the important things that had to be discussed, things that involved the lives of other people—had been sidelined by this unfortunate, unexpected and worrying collision with her past.

And yet she lowered her eyes and took in the taut pull of expensive trousers over his long legs, the fine, dark hair that liberally sprinkled his forearms... Not even the unspoken atmosphere of threat in his cool, dark eyes could detract from the chiselled perfection of his face. He had the burnished colour of someone of exotic blood.

When she had first laid eyes on him, she had been knocked sideways. He hadn’t beaten about the bush. He had noticed her, he said, had seen her sitting in the university canteen. She had instinctively known that he had been waiting for a predictable response. The response of a woman in the presence of a man who could have whoever he wanted, and he wanted her. She had also known that there was no way she could go there. That she should smile politely and walk away, because doing anything else would have been playing with fire. But still she had hesitated, long enough for him to recognise a mutual interest. Of course, it had always been destined to end badly, but she hadn’t been able to help herself.

She tightened her lips as she realised just how badly things could go now, all these years later.

‘Okay, so you may have all the legalities in place, but what do you think the press would make of a big, bad company rolling in and bulldozing a women’s shelter? The public has had enough of powerful people and powerful companies thinking that they can do exactly as they like.’ This had been her trump card but there was no hint of triumph in her voice as she pulled it out of the bag.

‘I have names here,’ she continued in the gathering silence, not daring to risk a glance at him. ‘Contacts with journalists and reporters who would be sympathetic to my cause...’ She shoved the paper across to him and Alessandro ignored it.

‘Are you threatening me?’ he asked in a tone of mild curiosity.

‘I wouldn’t call it threatening...’

‘No? Then what exactly would you call it?’

‘I’m exercising leverage.’ It had seemed an excellent idea at the time, but then she hadn’t banked on finding herself floundering in a situation she couldn’t have envisaged in a million years. His dark eyes focused on her face made her want to squirm and she knew that her veneer of self-confidence and complete composure was badly undermined by the slow tide of pink colour rising to her face. ‘If you buy the shelter in a cloud of bad publicity, whatever you put up there will be destined to fail. It’s quite a small community in that particular part of London. People will take sides and none of them will be on yours.’

‘I bet you thought that you’d bring that out from up your sleeve and my lawyers would scatter, because there is such a thing as bad publicity being worse than no publicity. It’s a low trick, but then I’m not surprised that you would resort to low tricks.’ He leaned forward, rested both arms on the shiny conference table and stared directly at her. ‘However, let’s just turn that threat on its head for a minute...’

‘It’s not a threat.’

‘I have offered an extremely generous price for the purchase of the shelter and the land that goes with it. More than enough for another shelter to be built somewhere else.’

‘They don’t want to build another shelter somewhere else. These women are accustomed to Beth’s House. They feel safe there.’

‘You can wax lyrical to your buddies at the press that they’re being shoved out unceremoniously from their comfort zone. My people will counter-attack with a long, detailed and extremely enticing list of what they could buy for the money they’ll be getting from me. A shelter twice the size. All mod cons. An equal amount of land, albeit further out. Hell, they could even run to a swimming pool, a games room, a nursery...the list goes on.

‘So, who do you think will end up winning the argument? And, when it comes to light that I will be using the land for a mall that will provide much-needed jobs for the locals, well, you can see where I’m going with this...’ He stood up and strolled lazily towards the very same window through which she had been peering earlier.

Chase couldn’t tear her eyes away from him. Like an addict in the sudden presence of her drug of choice, she found that she was responding in ways that were dangerously off-limits. She shouldn’t be reacting like this. She couldn’t afford to let him into her life, nor could she afford to have any deep and meaningful conversations about their brief and ruined past relationship. Heck, it had only lasted a handful of months! And had never got off the starting block anyway.

‘So.’ Alessandro turned slowly to face her. With his back to the window, the light poured in from behind, throwing his face into shadows. ‘How are you feeling about your ability to win this one now?’

‘It’s Beth’s place; she’s comfortable there. Why do you think people fight to stay in their homes when a developer comes along promising to buy them out for double what their place is worth?’ But he would be able to sell it across the board. He had the money and the people to make sure that whatever message they wanted to get across would be successful. She knew Beth. Was she fighting to preserve something for reasons that were personal?

‘I can tell from your expression that you already know that you’re staring defeat in the face. By the way, it’s been nearly forty-five minutes of unconvincing arguing from you... So how much have you lost your client already? The games room? The nursery? The giant kitchen with the cosy wooden table where all those women can hold hands and break bread?’

‘I never thought that you were as arrogant as I now see you are.’

‘But then you could say that we barely knew anything about each other. Although, in fairness, I didn’t lie about my identity...’ He was unconsciously drawn to the way the sunlight streaming through the panes of glass caught the colours of her hair. Her suit was snappy and businesslike and he could tell that it had been chosen to downplay her figure. In his mind’s eye, he saw the tight jeans, the jumpers and trainers, and that tentative smile that had won him over.

Chase stared down at the folder in front of her. There was nothing left to pull out of the hat. Even if there was, this was personal. He was determined to win the final argument, to have the last word, to make her pay.

‘So I’m guessing from your prolonged silence that you’ll be breaking the happy news to... What’s her name? Beth?’

‘You know it is.’

‘And can you work out how much I’ll be deducting from my initial offer?’

‘Tell me you don’t really mean to go through with that?’

‘Lie, in other words?’ Alessandro walked towards her and perched on the edge of the table.

‘You can’t force them to sell.’

‘Have you had a look at their books? They’re in debt. Waiting to be picked off. It may be a caring, sharing place, but what it gains in the holding hands and chanting stakes it lacks in the accountancy arena. A quiet word in the right banker’s ear and they’ll be facing foreclosure by dusk. Furthermore, if it becomes widespread knowledge that they’re in financial trouble, the vulture developers will swoop in looking for a bargain. What started out as a generous offer from me would devolve into an untidy fire sale with the property and land going for a song.’

‘Okay.’ Chase recognised the truth behind what he was saying. How could this be the same man who had once teased her, entertained her with his wit, impressed her with the breadth of his intelligence...driven her crazy with a longing that had never had a chance to be sated?

‘Okay?’

‘You win, Alessandro.’ She looked at him with green eyes that had once mesmerised him right out of the rigidly controlled box into which he had always been accustomed to piling his emotional entanglements with the opposite sex. ‘But maybe you could tell me whether you would have been as hardline if I hadn’t been the person sitting here trying to talk you out of buying the shelter.’

‘Oh, the sale most certainly would have gone ahead,’ Alessandro drawled without an ounce of sympathy. ‘But I probably wouldn’t have tacked on the ticking clock.’

He strolled round to his chair and sat back down. His mobile phone buzzed, and when his secretary told him to get a move on because she could only defer his conference call for so long he informed her briefly that she would have to cancel it altogether. ‘And make sure the same goes for my meetings after lunch,’ he murmured, not once taking his eyes off Chase’s downbent head. He signed off just as Alicia began to launch into a curious demand to know why.

‘I don’t want to keep you.’ Chase began stacking all her files together and shoving them into her capacious brief case. She paused to look at him. Last look, she thought. Then I’ll never see you again. She found that she was drinking in his image and she knew, with resignation, that what she looked at now would haunt her in the weeks to come. It was just so unfair. ‘But I would like it if you could reconsider your...your...’

‘Lower offer? And save you the humiliation of having to tell your client that you single-handedly knocked the price down?’

Chase glared at him. ‘I never took you for a bully.’

‘Life, as we both know, is full of cruel shocks. I’ll admit that I have no intention of pulling out of this purchase, but you could recoup the lost thousands.’

‘Could I? How?’ She stared at him. At this point, the images of those wonderful additions to any other house Beth might buy vanishing in a puff of smoke, because of her, were proliferating in her head, making her giddy. She knew that the finances for the shelter were in serious disarray. They would need all the money they could get just to pay off the debts and wipe the slate clean.

‘We have an unfinished past,’ Alessandro murmured. ‘It’s time to finish it. I wouldn’t have sought out this opportunity but, now it’s here, I want to know who the hell you really are. Satisfy my curiosity and the full price is back on the table...’

CHAPTER TWO

SO WHERE WAS the jump for joy, the high five, the shriek of delight? For the sake of a little conversation, she stood to claw back a substantial amount of money. He might have expected some show of emotion, even if only in passing.

Alessandro didn’t take his eyes off her face, nor did he utter a word; the power of silence was a wonderful thing. Plus, he didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her. If she thought that she could somehow screw him for more than the agreed amount, then let her have all the silence in the world, during which she could rethink any such stupid notion.

‘I would need any assurances from you in writing,’ Chase finally said. He wanted to finish business between them? Didn’t he know that that was impossible? There were no questions she could ever answer and no explanations she could ever give.

‘You will be getting no such thing,’ Alessandro assured her calmly. ‘You take my word for it or you leave here with your wallet several shades lighter.’

‘There’s no point rehashing what happened between us, Alessandro.’

‘Your answer: yes or no. Simple choice.’

Chase stood up and smoothed down her grey skirt. She knew that she had a good figure, very tall and very slender. It was a bonus because it meant that she could pull off cheap clothing; she felt she needed simply to blend in with the other lawyers and paralegals in the company where she worked. Fitzsimmons was a top-ranking law firm and it employed top-ranking people; no riff-raff. Nearly everyone there came from a background where Mummy and Daddy owned second homes in the country. She kept her distance from all of them, but still she knew where they came from just by listening to their exploits at the weekends, the holidays they booked and the Chelsea apartments they lived in.

Thankfully, she was one of only two specialising in pro bono cases, so she could keep her head down, put in her hours and attend only the most essential of social functions.

She didn’t want her quiet life vandalised. She didn’t want Alessandro Moretti strolling back into it, asking questions and nursing a vendetta against her. She just couldn’t afford to have any cans of worms opened up.

Likewise, she didn’t want to feel this scary surge of emotion that made her go weak at the knees. Her life was her own now, under control, and she didn’t want to jeopardise that.

But where were the choices? Did she make Beth pay for what she didn’t want? Did she risk her boss’s disapproval when she turned up and recounted what had happened?

More than that, if she kept her lips tightly buttoned up, who was to say that Alessandro would conveniently disappear? The way those hard, black eyes were watching her now...

She sat back down. ‘Okay. What do you want to talk about? I mean, what do you want me to say?’

‘Now, you don’t really expect us to have a cosy little chat in a room like this, do you?’

He began prowling around the conference room: thick cream carpet aided and abetted the silence; cream walls; the imposing hard-edged table where the great and the good could sit in front of their opened laptops, conversing in computer-speak and making far-reaching decisions that could affect the livelihoods of numerous people lower down the food chain, often for the better, occasionally for the worst.

‘I mean, we have so much catching up to do, Lyla... Chase...’

‘Please stop calling me Lyla. I told you, I don’t use that name any more.’

‘It’s approaching lunchtime. Why don’t we continue this conversation somewhere a little more comfortable?’

‘I’m fine here.’

‘Actually, you don’t have a vote. I have five minutes’ worth of business to deal with. I trust you can find your way down to the foyer? And don’t...’ he positioned himself neatly in front of her ‘...even think of running out on me.’

‘I wouldn’t do that.’ Chase tilted her chin and stood up to look him squarely in the eyes. As a show of strength, it spectacularly backfired because, up close and personal like this, she could feel all her energy drain out of her, leaving behind a residue of tumultuous emotions and a dangerous, scary awareness. Her nostrils flared as she breathed in the clean, woody, aggressively masculine scent of his cologne. She took an unsteady step back and prayed that he hadn’t noticed her momentary weakness.

‘No?’ Alessandro drawled, narrowing his eyes. ‘Because right now you look like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Why? It’s not as though I don’t already know you for a liar, a cheat and a slut.’ He had never addressed a woman so harshly in his life before but, looking at her here, taking in the perfection of a face that could launch a thousand ships and a body that was slender but with curves in all the right places, the reality of their past had slammed into him and lent an ugly bitterness to every word that passed his lips.

‘I notice you’re not defending yourself,’ he murmured. He didn’t know whether her lack of fight was satisfying or not. Certainly, he wished that she would look at him when he spoke, and he was sorely tempted to angle her face to him.

‘What’s the point?’ Chase asked tightly. ‘I’ll meet you in the foyer but...’ she looked at him with a spurt of angry rebellion ‘...I won’t be hanging around for an hour while you take your time seeing to last-minute business with your secretary.’

Alessandro’s eyes drifted down to her full, perfectly shaped mouth. He used to tease her that she looked as though she was sulking when it was in repose, but when she smiled it was like watching a flower bloom. He had never been able to get his fill of it. She certainly wasn’t smiling now.

‘Actually, you’ll hang around for as long as I want you to.’

‘Just because you want to...to...pay me back for...’

‘Like I said, let’s save the cosy chit-chat for somewhere more comfortable.’

Only when he left the room did Chase realise how tense she had been. She sagged and closed her eyes, steadying herself against the table.

She felt like the victim of a runaway truck. In a heartbeat, her life seemed to have been derailed, and she had to tell herself that it wasn’t so; that because Alessandro was the man with whom she was now having to deal, because their paths had crossed in such a shadowy manner, it didn’t mean that he was out to destroy her. His pride had been injured all those years ago and what he wanted from her now was answers to the questions he must have asked himself in the aftermath of their break-up. Not that they had ever really had a relationship.

Of course, she would have to be careful with what she told him, but once he was satisfied they would both return to their lives and it would be as if they had never met again.

She left the conference room in a hurry. It was almost twelve-thirty and there were far more people walking around than when she had first entered the impressive building. Workers were going out to lunch. It was a perfect summer’s day. There would be sandwiches in the park and an hour’s worth of relaxing in the sun before everyone stuck back on their jackets and returned to their city desks. Chase had always made sure to steer clear of that.

In the foyer, she didn’t have long to wait before she spotted Alessandro stepping out of the lift. As he walked towards her, one finger holding the jacket that he had tossed over his shoulder, she relived those heady times when she had enjoyed kidding herself that her life could really change. Every single time she had seen him, she had felt a rush of pure, adrenaline-charged excitement, even though all they ever did was have lunch together or a cappuccino somewhere.

‘So you’re here.’

‘You didn’t really expect me to run away?’ Chase fell into step alongside him. It was a treat not to tower over a guy but she still had to walk quickly to match his pace as they went through the revolving glass doors and out into the busy street.

‘No, of course I didn’t. You’re a lawyer. You know when diplomacy is called for.’ He swung left and began walking away from the busier streets, down the little side roads that gave London such character. ‘And, on the subject of your career, why don’t we kick off our catch-up with that?’

‘What do you want to know?’

Alessandro leaned down towards her. ‘Let’s really get into the spirit of this, Chase. Let’s not do a question-and-answer session, with me having to drag conversation out of you.’

‘What do you expect, Alessandro? I don’t want to be here!’

‘I’m sure you don’t, but you’re here now, so humour me.’

‘I...I...got a first-class degree. In my final year I was head-hunted by a firm of lawyers—not the ones I work for now, but a good firm. I was fast-tracked.’

‘Clever Chase.’

Chase recognised that it hadn’t been said as a compliment, although she could only guess at what he was implying. He loathed her so, whatever it was, she had no doubt that it would be offensive.

Yet, she was clever. In another place and another time, she knew that she would have been one of those girls who would have been said to ‘have it all’: brains and looks. But then, life had a way of counter-balancing things. At any rate, she had relied far more on her brains than she ever had on her looks. She had worked like a demon to get her A-levels, fought against all odds to get to a top university, and once there had doggedly spared no effort in getting a degree that would set her up for life. And all that against a backdrop that she had trained herself never to think about.

‘Thank you.’ She chose to misinterpret the tone of his voice. ‘So, I got a good job, did my training, changed companies...and here I am now.’

‘Fitzsimmons. Classy firm.’

‘Yes, it is.’ She could feel fine prickles of nervousness beading her forehead.

‘And yet, no designer suit? Don’t they pay you enough?’

Chase cringed with embarrassment. He had never made any secret about the fact that he came from money. Was that how he could spot the fact that her clothes were off the peg and ready to wear from a chain store? ‘They pay me more than enough,’ she said coolly. ‘But I prefer to save my money instead of throwing it away to a high-end retailer.’

‘How noble. Not a trait I would tend to associate with you.’

‘Can’t you at least try and be civil towards me?’ Chase asked thinly. ‘At any rate, most of my work is pro bono. It’s sensible not to show up in designer suits that cost thousands.’ It was what she had laughingly told someone at the firm ages ago and her boss had applauded her good sense.

They were now in front of an old-fashioned pub nestled in one of the quieter back alleys. There were gems like this all over London. When they entered, it was dark, cool and quiet. He offered her a drink and shrugged when she told him that she would stick to fruit juice.

‘So...’ Alessandro sat down, hand curved round his pint, and looked at her. He honestly didn’t know what he hoped to gain from this forced meeting but seeing her again had reawakened the nasty questions she had left unanswered. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. Or maybe we should pick it up at the end—at the point when you told me that you were married. Yes, maybe that’s the place we should start. After we’d been meeting for four months... Four months of flirting and you gazing at me all convincingly doe-eyed and breathless, then informing me that you had a husband waiting in the wings.’

Chase nursed her fruit juice. She licked her lips nervously. Her green eyes tangled and clashed with cold eyes the colour of jet. ‘I don’t see what the point of this is, Alessandro.’

‘You know what the point of it is—you’re going to satisfy my curiosity in return for the full agreed price for your shelter. It’s a fair exchange. Tell me what happened to the husband.’

‘Shaun...was killed shortly after I got my first job. He...he was on his motorbike at the time. He was speeding, lost control, crashed into the central reservation on the motorway...’

‘So you didn’t ditch him in the impersonal confines of a divorce court.’ Nor would she have. Alessandro downed a mouthful of beer and watched her over the rim of the glass. Not, as she had told him on that last day in exhaustive detail, when he’d been her childhood sweetheart and the love of her life. ‘And I take it you never remarried.’

‘Nor will I ever.’ She could detect the bitterness that had crept into her voice, but when she looked at him his expression was still as cool and unrelenting as it had been.

‘Is that because there’s no room for a man in the life of an ambitious, high-flying lawyer? Or because you’re still wrapped up with the man who was...let me try and remember... Oh, yes, I’ve got it: the only guy you would ever contemplate sleeping with. Sorry if you got the wrong idea, Alessandro. A few cappuccinos does not a relationship make, but it’s been a laugh...’

‘We should never have seen each other. It was a terrible idea. I never meant to get involved with anyone.’

‘But you didn’t get involved with me, did you?’ Alessandro angled his beautiful head to one side as he picked up an unspoken message he wasn’t quite getting.

What was there to get or not get? he thought impatiently. The woman had strung him along, led him up the garden path and then had casually disappeared without a backward glance. Hell, she had made him feel things... No, he wasn’t going to go there.

‘No! No, I didn’t. I meant...’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘You don’t understand. I shouldn’t even have even to you. I was married.’

‘So why did you? Were you riding high on the knowledge that you’d managed to net the rich guy all the groupie students were after?’

‘That’s a very conceited thing to say.’

‘I value honesty. I lost track of the number of notes I got from girls asking for some “extra tuition”.’

If there hadn’t been notes, she thought, then he surely would have clocked the stares he’d garnered everywhere he went. The man was an alpha male with enough sex appeal to sink a ship. Throw in his wealth, and it was little wonder that girls were queuing up to see if they could attract his attention. She’d never, ever been at the university longer than was strictly necessary but, if she had been, she knew that she would have become a source of envy, curiosity and dislike.

‘So was that why you decided to keep your marital status under wraps? To take the wedding ring off? To string me along with the promise of sex?’

‘I never said we would end up in bed.’

‘Do me a favour!’ He slammed his empty glass on the table and Chase jumped. ‘You knew exactly what you were getting into!’

‘And I didn’t think... I never thought...’

‘So you lied about the fact that you weren’t single or available for a relationship.’

‘If I remember correctly, you once told me that you weren’t interested in commitment, that you liked your relationships fast and furious and temporary!’

Alessandro flushed darkly. ‘Weak reasoning,’ he gritted cuttingly. ‘Did you lie because you thought that you might try me out for size? See whether I wasn’t a better bet than the stay-at-home husband? Is that why you strung me along for four months? Were you hedging your bets?’ He shook his head, furious with himself for losing control of the conversation, for actually caring one way or another what had or hadn’t been done eight years previously.

‘No, of course not! And Shaun was never a stay-at-home husband.’ Again, that bitterness had crept into her voice.

‘No? So what was he, then?’ Alessandro leaned forward, the simple shift of body weight implying threat. ‘Banker? Entrepreneur? If I recall, you were a little light on detail. In fact, if my memory serves me right, you couldn’t wait to get out of my company fast enough the very last time we met.’

Alessandro was surprised to find that he could remember exactly what she had been wearing the very last time he’d laid eyes on her: a pair of faded skinny jeans tucked into some cheap imitation-suede boots and a jumper which now, thinking about it, had probably belonged to the ‘childhood sweetheart’ husband. On that thought, his jaw clenched and his eyes darkened.

It hadn’t taken her long to spill out the truth. Having spent months of innocent conversation, tentative advances and retreats and absolutely no physical contact—which had been hell for him—she had sat down opposite him at the wine bar which had become their favourite meeting place; at a good bus ride away, it was far from all things university. With very little preamble, and keeping her eyes glued to his face while around them little clusters of strangers had drunk, laughed and chatted, all very relaxed in the run-up to Christmas, she’d informed him that she would no longer be seeing him.

‘Sorry,’ he recalled her saying with a brittle smile. ‘It’s been a laugh, and thanks for all the help with the economics side of the course, but actually I’m married...’

She had wagged her ring finger in front of him, complete with never-before-seen wedding band.

Shaun McGregor, she had said airily. Love of her life. Had known him since they were both fifteen. She had even pulled out a picture of him from her beaten-up old wallet and waxed lyrical about his striking good looks.

Alessandro had stared long and hard at the photo of a young man with bright blue eyes and a shaved head. There was a tattoo at the side of his neck; he’d probably been riddled with them. It had been brought home to him sharply just what a fool he had been taken for. Not only had she strung him along for fun, but he had never actually been her type. Her husband had had all the fine qualities of a first-rate thug.

‘Shaun did lots of different things,’ Chase said vaguely. ‘But none of that matters now, anyway. The fact is, I’m sorry. I know it’s late in the day to apologise, but I’m apologising.’

‘Why did you use a different name?’

‘Huh?’

‘You used the name Lyla. Not just with me, with everyone. Why?’

‘I...’ How could she possibly explain that she had been a different person then? That she had had the chance to create a wonderful, shiny new persona, and that she had taken it, because what she could create had been so much better than the reality. She had still been clever, and she had never lied about her academic history but, she had thought, what was the harm in passing herself off as just someone normal? Someone with a solid middle-class background and parents who cared about her? It hadn’t been as though she would ever have been required to present these mysterious and fictitious parents to anyone.

And she had always made sure never to get too close to anyone—until Alessandro had come along. Even then, at the beginning, she had had no idea that she would fall so far, so fast and so deep, nor that the little white lies she had told at the beginning would develop into harmful untruths that she’d no longer be able to retract.

‘Well?’ Alessandro prompted harshly. ‘You lied about your single status and you lied about your name. So let’s take them one at a time.’ He signalled to a waitress and ordered himself another glass of beer. There went the afternoon, was the thought that passed through his mind. There was little chance he would be in the mood for a series of intense meetings and conference calls later. He was riveted by the hint of changing expressions on her face. He felt that he was in possession of a book, the meaning of which escaped him even though he had read the story from beginning to end. Then he cursed himself for being fanciful, which was so unlike him.

‘Lyla was my mother’s name. I like it. I didn’t think there was anything wrong in using it.’

‘And so you stopped liking it when you decided to join a law firm?’

‘You said we weren’t going to do a question-and-answer session!’ Her skin burned from the intensity of his eyes on her. Alessandro Moretti, even as a young man in his mid-twenties, had always had a powerful, predatory appeal. There was something dangerous about him that sent shivers up and down her spine and drew her to him, even when common sense told her it was mad. He certainly hadn’t lost that appeal.

‘It was easier to just use my real name when I joined Edge Ellison, that first law firm. I mean, my Christian name.’

‘Why am I getting the feeling that there are a thousand holes in whatever fairy story you’re spinning me?’

‘I’m not spinning you a fairy story!’ Chase snapped. Bright spots of colour stained her cheeks. ‘If you want, I can bring my birth certificate to show you!’ Except that would suggest a second meeting, which was not something that was going to be on the cards.

But what would he do if he found out where she really came from? What would he do if he discovered that the solid, middle-class background she had innocently hinted at had been about as real as a swimming pool in the middle of the Sahara?

He might be tempted to have a quiet chat with the head of her law firm, she thought with a sickening jolt. Of course, she hadn’t lied about any of her qualifications, and she knew that she was a damned good lawyer. There was no way she could be given the sack for just allowing people to assume a background that wasn’t entirely true, yet...

Wounded pride and dislike could make a person do anything in their power to get revenge. What if he shared all her little white lies with the people she worked with—the posh, private-school educated young men and women who weren’t half as good as she was but who would have a field day braying with laughter at her expense? She was strong, but she knew that she was not so strong that she could survive ridicule at the work place.

‘I should be getting back to work.’ She drained the remainder of her orange juice and made to stand up.

Without thinking, Alessandro reached out and circled his hand around her wrist.

Chase froze. Really, it was the most peculiar sensation...as if her entire body had locked into place so that she was incapable of movement. His fingers around her wrist were as dramatic as a branding iron and she felt her heart pick up speed until she thought it might explode inside her.

‘Not so fast.’

‘I’ve answered all your questions, Alessandro!’

‘What the hell was in it for you?’

‘Nothing! I...just made a mistake! It was a long time ago. I was just a kid.’

‘A kid of twenty and already hitched. I didn’t think that kind of thing happened any more.’

‘I told you...we were in love...’ Chase looked away and shook her hand free of his vice-like grip. ‘We didn’t see the point of waiting.’

‘And your families both joined in the celebrations?’

She shrugged. ‘He’s dead now, anyway, so it doesn’t matter whether they joined in the celebrations or not.’

‘Spoken like a true grieving widow.’ Why did he keep getting this feeling that something was out of kilter? Was his mind playing tricks on him? Had his ego been so badly bruised eight years ago that he would rather look for hidden meanings than take her very simple tale of treachery at face value?

‘It’s been years. I’ve moved on.’

‘And no one else has surfaced on the scene to replace the late lamented?’

‘Why is this all about me?’ Chase belatedly thought that she might turn the spotlight onto him. If there was one thing to be said for going into law whilst simultaneously detaching yourself from most of the human race, it was that it did dramatic things to your confidence levels. Or maybe it was just her ‘flight or fight’ reflex getting an airing. She stared him squarely in the face and tried not to let the steady, speculative directness of his gaze get to her.

‘What about you?’ she asked coolly. ‘We haven’t said anything about what you’ve been up to...’

‘What’s there to say?’ Alessandro relaxed back, angling his body so that he could cross his legs. She really did have a face that made for compulsive watching. It was exquisite, yet with a guarded expression that made you wonder what was going on behind the beautiful mask. Even as a much younger woman, she had possessed that sense of unique mystery that had fired his curiosity and kept it for the duration of their strange dalliance.

And now, yet again, he could feel his curiosity piqued.

‘I’m an open book.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘I don’t hide who I am and I don’t make a habit of leading anyone down the garden path.’

‘And is there a special someone in your life? Is there a Mrs Moretti dusting and cleaning in a house in the country somewhere and a few little Moretti children scampering around outside? Or are you still only into the fast and furious relationship without the happy ending?’

‘My, my. You’ve certainly become acid-tongued, Chase.’

Chase flushed. Yes she had. And there were times when she stood back and wondered if she really liked the person she had become. Not that she had ever been soft and fluffy, but now...

‘I don’t like being trampled.’

‘And is that why you think I brought you here? To trample over you? Is that what you think I’m doing?’

Chase shrugged. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘We’re exchanging information. How could that possibly be described as trampling all over you? And, in answer to your question, there is no Mrs Moretti in a country house—and if there were, she certainly wouldn’t be dusting or cleaning.’

‘Because you have enough money to pay for someone to dust and clean for you. Are you still working twenty-four-seven? Surely you must have made enough billions by now to kick back and enjoy life?’

She used to listen, enraptured, as he’d told her about his working life: non-stop; on the go all the time. The lectures, he had said, were like comic relief, little windows of relaxation. She had teased him that, if giving lectures was his form of relaxation, then he would keel over with high blood pressure by the time he was thirty-five. She was annoyed to find herself genuinely curious and interested to hear what he had been up to. Having anything to do with Alessandro Moretti was even more hazardous now than it had been eight years ago.

‘None of my business,’ she qualified in a clipped voice. ‘Am I free to go now?’

Alessandro’s lips thinned. He had found out precisely nothing. None of his questions had been answered. His brain was telling him to walk away but some other part of him wanted more.

‘Why did you decide to concentrate on pro bono cases?’ He asked softly. ‘Surely with a first-class degree, and law firms head-hunting you, there were far more profitable things to do?’

‘I’ve never been interested in making money.’ He had stopped attacking her and she realised that she had forgotten how seductive he could be when he was genuinely interested in hearing what she had to say. He would tilt his head to one side and would give the impression that every word she uttered was of life-changing importance.

‘I’d always planned on becoming a lawyer, although the two other options that tempted me were Social Services and the police force.’ She blushed, because she didn’t think that she had confided that in anyone before—not that she did a lot of confiding anyway.

‘Social Services? The police force?’

‘So please don’t accuse me of being materialistic.’

‘I can’t picture you as a social worker, even less a policewoman.’

‘I should be getting back to work. I have a lot to do, and I’ll have to visit the shelter later today and tell them what the outcome of my meeting with your company was. They’ll be disappointed because they honestly don’t want to move premises, not when they’ve been such a reliable fixture in the area for such a long time, and not when the majority of the women who use their services are fairly local to the area. A big place with a swimming pool and a games room in the middle of nowhere is no good for anyone.’

‘What made the decision for you?’

Hadn’t he been distracted from asking her personal questions? Having lowered her guard for three seconds, Chase now felt as though she was handing over state secrets to the enemy, and yet what was the big deal? Was she so defensive because Alessandro was on the receiving end of her confidences? And wasn’t it possible that, the more secretive she was, the more curious he would become? She forced herself to relax and smile at him.

‘The hours,’ she confessed in a halting voice. ‘I didn’t want to think that I might be called out at any time of the day or night. I might work long hours at Fitzsimmons but I can control the hours I work.’

‘Makes sense. More to the point, I suppose both other options would have involved an element of danger, and even more so for someone like you.’

‘Someone like me?’ Immediately, Chase bristled at the implied insult. ‘And I suppose you’re going to launch into another attack on me? More criticism of me that I’m a liar and a cheat? Although I have no idea how that would have anything to do with being in the police force or working for the council! I get it that you’re angry and bitter about what happened between us, but attacking me isn’t going to change any of that!’

‘Actually,’ Alessandro murmured, ‘I meant that those two professions are the ones that are possibly least suited to a woman with your looks. You’re sexy as hell; how would that have played out for you if you had found yourself in a dangerous situation...?’ The lips he had never kissed and the body he had never touched...

Suddenly, his body jackknifed into sudden, shocking arousal. The sheer force of it took him by surprise. It pushed its way past his bitterness and anger and made a mockery of the answers he had told himself he demanded to hear. As his erection throbbed painfully against the zip of his trousers, his mind took flight in a completely different direction. He imagined her hand down there, her mouth wrapped around him...

Who the hell cared about answers when he was consumed with lust? He had to shift in the chair just to release some of the urgency that was becoming painful.

He was suffused with anger at his physical response to her. She represented everything he found most repellent, yet how was it that she could still manage to turn him on? Was his libido so wayward that it could defy cool judgement and rise to the challenge of the unavailable, the unacceptable...the out of bounds? He had never lost control when it came to any woman and he had dated some of the most spectacularly beautiful women in the world. So what the hell was going on here?

‘I never gave that side of things any thought at all.’ Chase was determined not to let that description of her take their conversation in a direction she most certainly didn’t want.

Her voice was cool, Alessandro noted, yet her colour was up. And she couldn’t meet his eyes. Now, wasn’t that telling?

He knew that the last thing he should contemplate doing was to pay any credence to whatever her expression was saying or, more to the point, whatever his disobedient body was up to, and yet...

‘You know what? I think I might like to see this shelter. Evaluate just how the land will play out for what I have in mind. I’m taking it you’ll be my escort...?’

CHAPTER THREE

FOR THE FIRST time in years Chase felt helpless. Three days ago she had walked into the imposing glass building that housed AM Holdings with a simple mission: save the shelter. She had been in control—the career woman, successful in what she did, in command of the situation. She had hoped for a favourable outcome but, had there not been one, she would have left with a clear conscience—she would have done her best.

And now here she was, hanging around by the window in her house, peering out at regular intervals for Alessandro, who had made good on his request to be shown the shelter.

‘What for?’ she had demanded at the time. ‘I don’t see the point. You’re just going to demolish it anyway so that you can put up a mall catering for rich people.’

‘Be warned,’ he had said, eyebrows raised, those midnight eyes boring straight through her, making her feel as though her whole body had been plugged into a socket. ‘Do-gooders and preachers have a monotonous tendency to become self-righteous bores. Naturally, I have details of the land somewhere but I want to see for myself what the layout is. Since you’re the one handling the deal, I can’t imagine that would be a problem. Or is it? Does our past history make it a problem for you?’

Yes. Yes, it does, she had thought with rising desperation. ‘No. Of course not. Why should it?’ she had answered with an indifferent shrug.

So here she was now and she felt as though control was slipping out of her grasp. She knew that under normal circumstances a lapse in her self-control would be easily dealt with but with Alessandro...

Her frustration and anger was underlined by a darker, more insidious emotion, a swirl of excitement that scared her. It felt like a slumbering monster slowly reawakening. Even though she had taken care to dress as neutrally as possible, in a navy-blue suit that was the epitome of sexlessness—and an impractical colour, given the wall-to-wall blue summer skies and hot sunshine—she still felt horribly vulnerable as she hovered in the sitting room waiting for him to show up.

She had informed him that she would meet him at the premises, but he had insisted on collecting her.

‘You can fill me in on the history of the place on the way,’ he had said smoothly. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’

She had bitten her tongue and refrained from telling him that there was no point being forearmed when the net result would be a demolition derby. He was the guy with the purse strings and she had already seen first-hand how he could use that position to his own advantage. She had no desire to revive the ticking clock.

A long, sleek, black Jaguar pulled up outside the house just as she was about to turn away from the window and her attention was riveted at the sight of him emerging from the back seat, as incongruous in this neighbourhood as his car was.

He was dressed in pale-grey pinstriped trousers, which even from a distance screamed quality, and a white shirt, the sleeves of which he had rolled to the elbow.

For a few heart-stopping seconds, Chase found that she literally couldn’t breathe, that she was holding her breath. The mere sight of him was a full-on assault on all her senses. She watched as he looked around him, taking in his surroundings. She felt sure that this was the sort of neighbourhood he would be accustomed to telling his chauffeur to drive straight through and to make sure the car doors were locked. By no means was it in a dangerous part of London but neither was it upmarket. Well paid though she was, she wasn’t so well paid that she could afford to buy a house in one of the trendier areas and, unlike many of her associates, she didn’t have parents who could stick their hands in their pockets and treat her to one.

She dodged out of sight just as he turned to face the house and, when the doorbell rang, she took her time getting to it. Her heart was beating like a sledgehammer as she pulled open the door to find him lounging against the doorframe.

‘Right. Shall we go?’ she asked as her eyes slid away from his sinfully handsome face, returned to take a peek and slid away again. She gathered her handbag from where she had hung it on the banister and bent to retrieve her briefcase from the ground.

‘In due course.’ Alessandro stepped into the hallway and shut the front door behind him.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m coming in for a cup of coffee.’

‘We haven’t got time for that, Alessandro. The appointment has been made for ten-fifteen. With rush-hour traffic, heaven only knows how long it will take for us to get there.’

‘Relax. I got my secretary to put back the visit by an hour.’

‘You what?’

‘So this is where you live.’

Chase watched in horror as he made himself at home, strolling to peer into the sitting room, then onwards to the kitchen, into which he disappeared.

‘Alessandro...’ She galvanised herself into movement and hurried to the kitchen, to find him standing in the centre doing a full turn. It was a generous-sized kitchen which overlooked a small, private garden. It had been a persuading factor in her purchase of the house. She loved having a small amount of outdoor space.

‘Very nice.’

‘This is not appropriate!’

‘Why not? It’s hardly as though I’m a stranger. Are you going to make me a cup of coffee?’

Chase gritted her teeth as he sat down. The kitchen was large enough for a four-seater table and it had been one of the first things she had bought when she had moved in three years previously. She had fallen in love with the square, rough, wooden table with its perimeter of colourful, tiny mosaic tiles. She watched as he idly traced one long finger along some of the tiles and then she turned away to make them both some coffee.

‘Is this your first house?’ Alessandro queried when she had finally stopped busying herself doing nothing very much at the kitchen counter and sat down opposite him.

He hadn’t laid eyes on her in three days but he had managed to spend a great deal of time thinking about her and he had stopped beating himself up for being weak. So what if she had become an annoying recurring vision in his head? Wasn’t it totally understandable? He had been catapulted back to a past he had chosen to lock away. Naturally it would be playing on his mind, like an old, scratched record returned to a turntable. Naturally she would be playing on his mind, especially when she had remained just so damned easy on the eye.

‘What do you mean?’ Everything about Alessandro Moretti sitting at her kitchen table made her jumpy.

‘Is this the family home?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘The dearly departed... Is this the marital home?’

‘No, it’s not.’ She looked down. ‘Shaun and I... We, er, had somewhere else when we were together... When he died I rented for a couple more years until I had enough equity to put in as a deposit on this place.’

Alessandro thought of the pair of them, young love-birds renting together, while she had batted her eyelashes at him and played him for a fool. He swallowed a mouthful of instant coffee and stood up, watching as she scrambled to her feet.

‘Are you going to give me a tour of the place?’

‘There isn’t much to see. Two bedrooms upstairs; a bathroom. You’ve seen what’s down here. Shall we think about going?’

Alessandro didn’t answer. He strolled out of the kitchen, glancing upstairs before turning his attention to the sitting room. Why was she so jumpy? She had been as cool as a cucumber eight years ago when she had walked out on him, so why was she now behaving like a cat on a hot tin roof? Guilt? Hardly. A woman who could conduct an outside relationship while married would never be prone to guilt. Or remorse. Or regret.

Perversely, the jumpier she seemed to be, the more intrigued he became. He shoved one hand in his trouser pocket, feeling the coolness of his mobile phone.

‘For a cool-headed lawyer,’ he mused as he stared round the sitting room, ‘you like bright colours. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that the decor here suggests a completely different personality.’ He swung round to look at her as she hovered in the doorway, neither in the room nor out of it. ‘Someone fun...vibrant.’ He paused a fraction of a second. ‘Passionate...’

Chase flushed, and was annoyed with herself, because she knew that that was precisely the response he had been courting. He was back and he was intent on playing with her like a cat playing with a mouse, knowing that all the danger and all the power lay exclusively in his hands.

‘And yet,’ Alessandro drawled as he prowled through the room before gazing briefly out of the window which overlooked the little street outside, ‘there’s something missing.’

‘What?’ The question was obviously reluctantly spoken. As he began to walk towards her, she felt panic rise with sickening force to her throat. All at once she was overcome with a memory of how desperately she had wanted him all those years ago. Her eyes widened and her mouth parted on a softly indrawn breath.

Getting closer and closer to her, Alessandro thought he could touch the subtle change in the atmosphere between them. It had become highly charged and, for the first time in a very long time, he felt sizzlingly alive. Not one of the catwalk-model beauties he had slept with over the past few years had come close to rousing this level of forbidden excitement. The immediacy of his response shocked him, all the more so because he recognised that the last time he had felt like this was when he had been in the process of being duped by the very same woman standing in front of him now. Hatred and revulsion were clearly inadequate protection against whatever it was she had that was now pushing an erection to the fore.

The bloody woman had been elusive then, for reasons which he had later understood, and she was elusive now, this time for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand.

‘Are you afraid of me?’ he demanded harshly and Chase roused herself from the heated torpor that had engulfed her to stare up at him.

‘What makes you think that I’m afraid of you?’ She tried to insert some vigour into her voice but she could hear the sound of it—thin, weedy and defensive, all the things she didn’t want him to imagine she was for a second.

‘The way you’re standing in the doorway as though I might make a lunge for you at any minute!’

‘I can’t imagine you would do any such thing!’

Couldn’t she? It was precisely what he wanted to do: behave like a caveman and take her, because she was tempting the hell out of him!

‘I’m afraid of what you could do.’ She backtracked quickly as her mind threatened to veer down unexpected, unwelcome paths. ‘You’ve already shown that you’d be willing to punish Beth because you... Because of me.’

‘And yet here I am now. Do you think I’m the sort of man who reneges on what he’s said? I’ve told you that I intend to pay the full, agreed price. I’ll pay it.’ Not afraid of him? Like hell. She might not be afraid of him, but he was certainly making her feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to try and shimmy further away from him.

He extended one lean hand against the wall, effectively blocking any further scarpering towards the front door. He could smell her hair. If he lowered his head just a little, he would feel its softness against his face. Of their own accord, his eyes drifted to the prissy blouse and the even prissier navy-blue jacket. He was well aware that she was breathing quickly, her breasts rising and falling as she did her utmost to keep her eyes averted.

Just as quickly he pushed himself away, retreating from her space, and he watched narrowly as she relaxed and exhaled one long breath.

He wasn’t going to lose control. He had lost control once with her and he wasn’t about to become the sort of loser who made a habit of ignoring life’s lessons and learning curves.

‘I was going to say...’ He led the way to the front door and paused as she slung her handbag over her shoulder and reached for the case on the ground. ‘There’s something missing from your house.’ He opened the door for her and stood back, allowing her to brush past him. ‘Photos. Where are the pictures of the young, loving couple, from before your husband died? I thought I might have seen the happy pair holding hands and gazing adoringly up at one another...’

Chase walked towards the waiting car, head held high, but underneath the composed exterior she felt the ugly prickle of discomfort.

‘We didn’t do the whole church thing.’

‘Who said anything about a church?’

‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’ she burst out as soon as they were in the car. She had kept her voice low but she doubted the driver would have heard anything anyway. A smoked-glass partition separated the front of the car from the back. Presumably it was completely soundproof. The truly wealthy never took chances when it came to being overheard, not even in their own cars. Deals could be lost on the back of an overheard conversation.

Alessandro shifted his muscular body to face her. ‘Why are you getting so hot under the collar?’

‘I...I’m not. I...I don’t like to be surrounded by memories. I think it’s always important to move on. There are photos of me and Shaun, just not on show. Do you want to talk about the shelter? I...I’ve brought all the relevant information with me. We can go over it on the way.’ Sitting next to him in the back seat of this car induced the feeling of walls closing in. She fumbled with the clasp of her briefcase and felt his hand close over hers.

‘Leave it.’

Chase snatched her hand away. ‘I thought you wanted to pick me up so that we could talk about this deal.’

‘I’m more interested in the lack of photos. So, none of the husband. Presumably you have albums stashed away somewhere? But none of your family either. Why is that?’

Chase flushed. The adoring middle-class parents who lived in the country. She was mortified at how easily the lie had come to her all those years ago, but then she had been a kid and a little harmless pretence had not seemed like a sin.

Who wanted a rich, handsome guy to know that you have no family? That your mother had died from a drugs overdose when you were four and from that point on you’d been shoved from foster home to foster home like an unwanted parcel trying to find its rightful owner. How wonderful it had been to create a fictitious family, living in a fictitious cul-de-sac, who did normal things like taking an interest in the homework you were set and coming along to cheer at sports days, even if you trailed in last.

She had loved every minute of her storytelling until it had occurred to her that she had fallen in love with a man who didn’t really know a thing about her. The fact that she had been married was just one of the many facts she had kept hidden. By then, it had been too late to retract any of what she had said, and she hadn’t wanted to. She’d been enjoying their furtive meetings too much. Okay, so she knew that they would never come to anything, but she still hadn’t wanted them to end.

And now...

‘My parents...er...moved to Australia a few years ago.’ She hated doing this now but for the life of her she didn’t know what to do. At least, she thought, sending her non-existent parents on a one-way ticket to the other end of the world would prohibit him from trying to search them out.

Although, why on earth would he do that? The answer came as quickly as the question had: revenge. Find her weak spots and exploit them because he hated her for what he imagined she had done to him. She felt sick when she thought of the number of ways he could destroy her if he set his mind to it and if he had sufficient information in his possession.

‘Really?’

‘It was...um...always a dream of theirs.’

‘To leave their only child behind and disappear halfway across the world?’

‘People do what they do,’ she said vaguely. ‘I mean, don’t you ever want to disappear to the other end of the earth?’ Although she was making sure to stare straight ahead, she could feel his probing eyes on her, and she had to resist the temptation to lick her lips nervously.

‘I disappear there quite often, as it happens. But only on business.’

Chase could think of nothing worse than travelling the globe in the quest for more and more money and bigger and bigger deals. Stability, security and putting down roots had always been her number one priority. She had managed to begin the process, and she shuddered to think of him pulling up any of the roots she had meticulously put down over the past few years.

‘I’m surprised that after all these years you haven’t become tired of trying to make up for your parents’ excesses.’ It slipped out before she could think and Chase instantly regretted the momentary lapse. The last thing she wanted to do was establish any kind of shared familiarity. ‘My apologies,’ she said stiffly. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

The reminder of just how much she knew about him underscored his bitterness with a layer of ice. He had never understood how that had managed to happen, how he had found himself telling her things he had never told anyone in his life before.

But then, she had been different. He had never met anyone like her in his life before. Still and yet wryly funny; guarded and yet so open in the way she gazed at him; composed and brilliant at listening. Between the inane yakking of the students—who, at the end of the day, were only a few years younger than him, even though he had been light years removed from them in terms of experience—and the pseudo-bored sophistication of the people he mixed with in his working life, she had been an oasis of peace. And, yes, he had told her things. For a relationship that struggled even to call itself a ‘relationship’, he had confided and, hell, where exactly had it got him?

He clenched his jaw grimly. ‘I’m really not interested in psychobabble,’ he told her.

‘That’s fair,’ Chase returned. ‘But if I’m not allowed to talk about your history then I don’t see why you should talk about mine.’ For starters, the last thing she needed was detailed questions about her so-called parents and where exactly they lived in Australia. And how dared he imply that they somehow didn’t care about her simply because they had fulfilled their lifelong dream of emigrating? She almost felt sorry for them...

She half-grinned at that and Alessandro’s eyes narrowed. What was going through her head? He had a fierce desire to know.

‘So the shelter...’ He interrupted whatever pleasant thought had made her smile.

‘The shelter...’ Chase breathed an inward sigh of relief because this was a subject she was more than happy to talk about. He ceased being a threat as she began to describe life at Beth’s House. She smiled at some of the anecdotes about the women who came and went. She told him about the plans Beth had had for upgrading the premises, and then assured him that he could see for himself what she was talking about as soon as he got there. She told him that he had a heart of stone for wanting to knock it down to build, of all things, a stupid mall for people who had more money than sense, but found it was impossible to generate an argument because he hadn’t taken her to task for voicing her opinion.

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