‘Where are all your things?’
He frowned, disquiet zigzagging through him. ‘What things?’
‘Photos, knick-knacks, trinkets, mementos. You know, the stuff and clutter a person generally accumulates as they go through life.’
‘I don’t have any.’
Her eyebrows lifted and she stared at him in astonishment. ‘None?’
‘I prefer to look forward, not back.’
‘So you hang on to nothing?’
‘I don’t see the point.’
‘I guess it saves on the dusting.’
It saved on the navel-gazing. It prevented the stirring up of memories of times he’d long since blocked out, and unwanted, unnecessary emotional ties. It facilitated a life free of burden and responsibility. But he’d been right in his initial assessment of her. She did see far too much. Which meant he had to be exceptionally careful about what else he allowed her access to.
‘What’s up there?’
‘My bedroom suite.’
For a moment, his words hung between them, charging the sudden silence with crackling static, while their gazes locked as if held by some invisible unbreakable thread, and then, with a swallow and a shaky laugh, she said, ‘I probably don’t need to see that.’
‘No,’ he agreed with an evenness that belied the fierce heat suddenly whipping around inside him, making him harden and ache. ‘You don’t.’
And there was no ‘probably’ about it. It was bad enough that she could roam around the communal areas of the house. Bad enough that he could envisage her walking up the stairs ahead of him, looking over her shoulder with heat and desire in her mesmerising green gaze and then gliding into his room, shedding her clothes and pulling him down with her onto his bed. Under no circumstances was she checking out his suite just in case she ‘got lost and wound up somewhere she shouldn’t’.
Instead, having hauled his body back under control, he took her up another set of stairs at the opposite side of the hall that led to the guest rooms, all four of them, one of which was temporarily hers, which again, did not need to be seen by either of them, and then back down, through a set of French windows and into the garden.
‘The gym is a recent addition,’ he said, stalking towards the studio and opening the door onto a vast room furnished with state-of-the-art equipment, where he’d spent much time slowly regaining his strength.
‘Installed after your accident?’
‘Yes.’
‘You said a BASE jump went wrong.’
‘That’s right.’
‘What led to the bad landing?’ she asked, weaving between the machines, inspecting them with interest as she went.
Annoyingly unable to take his eyes off her, Rico leaned against the wall and jammed his hands in his pockets. ‘The jump itself was fine,’ he said, remembering the thunder of nerves and anticipation as he’d stepped off the top of a snow-capped mountain that rose up two thousand metres above sea level and begun soaring through jagged cliffs, high on speed and adrenaline and invincibility. ‘But, coming in to land, a gust of wind caught my wingsuit and blew me off course. I over-adjusted and slammed into a tree, and from there I crashed to the ground.’
The disbelief had almost been as great as the pain, he recalled, still unable to fully credit what had happened. He’d been BASE jumping for years, thriving on the exhilaration, taking ever-increasing risks in this as with everything he did, because why not?
The few accidents he’d had had been expected and minor. Until this one, which had seen him airlifted to hospital in Courmayeur, where he’d endured hours of complex surgery, followed by a stint at a clinic back home in Venice and then a gruelling physiotherapy programme that technically he was still supposed to be in the middle of.
‘A rookie mistake?’
‘I have a thousand skydives and two hundred BASE jumps under my belt,’ he said. ‘It’s simply one of the most dangerous sports you can do and on this occasion I was unlucky.’
The look she threw him was disconcertingly shrewd. ‘Is the danger the attraction?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re a risk-taker.’