Gio smiled. ‘Sounds like a challenge.’
‘Have you seen how many nooks and crannies are hidden in those carvings?’ Leah asked very seriously. ‘It’s a nightmare.’
Walking along the deserted strand in jeans and a sweater, Gio recalled that conversation and laughed out loud. She would never have acted so normally with him had she known who he really was. ‘A wild mountain man’? Could it be that she had seen a photo of him on his return from his charitable trust’s trek in Borneo? Afterwards, he had cut his hair shorter and dispensed with the beard he had worn for years. And what was with the Gazillionaire tag? But,Madre di Cristo, she was outrageously pretty...andcurrently engaged in cleaning his stairs, he reminded himself wryly.
By the time he returned, she might be gone...although not without the little rat sneakily trailing him along the shore, Gio reckoned, casting a quick eye over his shoulder just in time to see the little dog duck behind a rock to hide. It wasn’t the brightest dog he had ever met. It was low to the ground and thought itself invisible behind the rock but, being so tall, Gio could see it clearly, cowering at the risk of being caught. He ignored it. Had it bitten him or tried to bite him earlier in the bedroom? There was no mark on his leg. He smiled, thinking it wasn’t much of an attack dog.
An hour later, Gio strode back into the house and found Leah still down on her knees on the stairs, wielding a brush and wiping the woodwork with a cloth. His breath hissed between his even white teeth as he took in the jut of her luscious behind shaped in skin-tight faded denim and he averted his attention, reminding himself that he did not perve over employees...ever! Although, strictly speaking, she wasn’t working for him, he reflected with a jab of satisfaction. It was stretching a point but when she glanced up at him, her vivid little face framed by that glorious mass of black curly hair and dominated by those huge dark sparkling eyes, whose employee she might be was the very last thing on Gio’s mind.
‘Stay and join me for dinner,’ Gio heard himself urge without any awareness that he had even considered that idea before he spoke. The immediacy of that random prompting sharply disconcerted him.
Leah flung a startled glance at him and then dropped her head to concentrate on her task. Of course, she would say no, because she had decided six months ago that she was done with men after having wasted a year on a male who had ditched her without a pang. Oliver had been an education and no mistake. He had taught her a lot, hard lessons that had hurt. But didn’t cutting herself off from the opposite sex merely hand Oliver yet another victory? A shot of defiance flared inside her at that suspicion.
‘OK,’ she said casually, as though agreement had not cost her a single moment of consideration. ‘I’ve nothing to rush home for... I assume you’re offering to cook?’
A wicked grin slanted Gio’s mobile lips as he read her dismay at the prospect that he could be expecting her to whip out the pans.‘Sì...’
‘Oh, you’re Italian like your boss...that’s where your name comes from.’ Leah stumbled over that awkward little speech as his pale eyes, the colour of glacier ice, glittered with unhidden amusement. ‘Sorry, not very travelled or cosmopolitan here.’
‘That has an appeal all of its own,’ Gio informed her truthfully, watching her blush, wondering when he had last seen a woman blush around him and quite entranced by it, any doubts he had had about his invitation draining away. He was in the mood for company, he told himself. It was harmless.
In something of a daze, Leah gazed back at him, hopelessly captivated by his looks and charm. She didn’t think she had ever come across a more handsome guy unless he had been on a movie screen and even then, in her humble opinion, Gianni could have knocked spots off all competition. He was drop-dead gorgeous and when he smiled, she got butterflies in her tummy as though she were a teenager again. For goodness’ sake, she castigated herself, start thinking like a grown-up for once...
CHAPTER TWO
‘DOYOUWANTa hand?’ Leah asked uncertainly from the kitchen doorway.
‘You could chop up some of the vegetables if you like,’ Gio suggested.
Leah didn’t like but Sally had raised her to have manners. Striving not to stare at the male efficiently working with the salmon she had bought at the island unit, she scrubbed her hands at the sink and returned gingerly to the centre of the kitchen. ‘Knives over there in the block,’ he advised, lifting out another cutting board and settling it on the other side of the unit. ‘Could you dice them?’
Leah was sure she could have done had she known what ‘dicing’ entailed.
Minutes later, Gio watched in silent wonderment as Leah wielded a knife much as though she were sawing up a log for the first time. ‘Watch your fingers,’ he heard himself say as he strove not to wince or be critical.
‘I’m not a child,’ she told him drily with an upward glance of her glorious dark eyes just as the knife sliced into a finger, causing her to drop it and yelp in startled pain.
For a split second, Gio said nothing because he was stunned by that level of cooking incompetence, and then he dropped his own knife and went to her rescue. He picked her up like a package and settled her down on one of the bar stools while blood dripped from her and she whimpered, white with shock. ‘Let me have a look...no, it won’t need stitches,’ he informed her soothingly, swiftly registering that she was one of those people terrified by the sight of blood.
White as a sheet, Leah sat shivering on the stool, fighting back the urge to throw up while Gio wrapped the bleeding finger in kitchen towelling to cover it from her gaze. He was incredibly competent in an emergency, she realised dimly as he broke out a first-aid kit and speedily cleaned her up and affixed a plaster to the offending digit.
‘There,’ Gio completed, pausing only to lift Leah and the stool back to the island unit. ‘Now you can watch me cook.’
‘I can’t possibly—’ she began, her throat tight with embarrassment at the show she had made of herself.
‘You can’t do anything with your hand out of commission,’ Gio countered gently, recognising the glassy sheen of tears in her eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I was such an idiot. I freaked out at the blood,’ she mumbled sickly.
‘It affects some people that way,’ Gio responded lightly, keen to lighten her mood.
Leah breathed in deep and swallowed so hard that she hurt her throat. ‘I was with my mother when she was in an accident and died,’ she told him jerkily. ‘It’s been a problem for me ever since.’
Disconcerted not only by that admission but also by an unfamiliar urge to demand further details about an event that had had such long-lasting consequences for her, Gio pulled a bottle of wine out of the wine cabinet and uncorked it. Such intense curiosity was unlike him, because he didn’t tend to get personal with other people lest it encourage them to assume that they could do the same with him. Yet Leah confided in him so easily and he definitely wasn’t accustomed to that trait. Was it because he was a stranger? Or was she like that with everybody? Or, even less likely, was she feeling the same weird relaxation in his company that he felt in hers?
‘That’s not surprising. Don’t worry about it,’ Gio urged softly, resisting a far too personal prompting to pat her slight shoulder in a comforting motion, utterly unsure whether he liked or disliked the first protective urge any woman since his mother had fired in him.
‘But a little cut and suddenly I’m behaving as though I cut my whole hand off...like a drama queen,’ Leah framed in severe mortification at that image, which offended her practical soul. ‘Sorry about that.’