‘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.