Those words penetrated Niccolo’s consciousness and he felt a gut-level dismay, which he slammed a lid on fast.
‘Scout’s honour,’ he drawled, putting a full stop under any further heart-to-heart, touchy feely conversation. ‘And now...let’s park that topic because I can think of a hundred more things I’d rather do...’
‘A hundred?’
‘Okay, maybe just the one...’
‘And what might that be?’
‘Lunch, of course.’ He grinned and then chuckled. ‘What else were you thinking?’
CHAPTER NINE
TWENTY-FOURHOURSLATER, as she watched him play in the pool with Annalise, Sophie was thinking that time was running out.
The deal had all been concluded three days earlier. It had hit the headlines two days ago and Niccolo had spent time on various calls, some of which were with the financial press, who were asking for details of how he saw the company moving forward.
She knew that because, for once, he had not retired to his dedicated office aboard the yacht to do business but instead had sat at the low glass table on the middle deck where she and Annalise had been spending the day, watching them and joining in when time permitted, only breaking off to take calls, answer emails and communicate with all the people who seemed desperate to have air time with him.
Now there was no further reason for them to remain on the gently floating yacht. Reality was a heartbeat away and it was beckoning.
She didn’t want it to. When she thought about the cut and dried business of returning to London, where this moment in time would be forgotten, she felt physically sick.
She had embarked on this brief affair and if there had been a certain apprehension that the water she was stepping into might prove a little deeper than she wanted, she had not expected to find herself in water so deep that she was in danger of drowning.
Stepping back from the past year and a half, she felt she could disentangle all the threads that had wrapped themselves around her in a frightening stranglehold.
She could mourn the loss of her parents and see that although the loss would always be a part of her, the sun would still keep rising and setting and life would still be there, waiting to be lived, which was what her parents would have wanted for her.
And it helped that the fabulous sums of money she was being paid, plus the sale of the family home, actually meant that she no longer had to panic about her finances.
She also knew now that Scott, the guy who had loomed so large and caused her so much grief, had been merely a blip on her confused horizons.
Not because Niccolo had been a pleasant distraction, supplanting those depressing memories with more uplifting ones. Not because he had shown her that she was still capable of having fun, had taken her to a place where she had been able to glimpse sunshine through the dark clouds, but because he had filled her entire world with sunshine. She had been roused, like Sleeping Beauty, except she knew it wasn’t going to last.
And it scared her to imagine what life was going to be without him as a physical presence in it.
She was beginning to think that despite what she had told herself about lessons learnt, she was fundamentally a girl who had grown up with the love of parents who had set a shining example of what a happy life should look like. Her faith in love was too strong to be destroyed by one bad experience. Niccolo had shown her that. Unfortunately, he was the wrong guy for her.
As though sensing that her thoughts were on him, he turned to look at her, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun, and grinned.
‘Care to join the fun?’ he called and Sophie, also shading her eyes, smiled back at him.
In front of his daughter, he remained her boss and she was the responsible nanny.
Annalise was oblivious to any undercurrents.
‘The fun’s happening right here, thank you!’ She tapped the book which she had not been reading for the past twenty minutes because her mind had been going round and round in circles. ‘If I don’t finish this before we head back, then I’ll never finish it!’ she carolled, almost kicking herself for bringing to his attention the inevitability of their imminent departure.
Yet it was a subject that had to be raised and she was already prepping herself to be nonchalant when it was.
She couldn’t see his expression when he laughed a response and she actually did force herself to read and to try and relax for the next couple of hours. Annalise, who had endeared every member of staff to her, had her favourite dinner prepared for her by the chef, and then she insisted on going with Julia to the bit of the boat with a glass bottom which gave her a view under the water, even though Sophie laughingly told her that there wouldn’t be much to see at night.
Suddenly, the silence left by Annalise’s disappearance, the lack of comforting background childish chatter, felt awkward.
Was it because of all the thoughts that had been wreaking havoc in her head? The fact that she was getting to the point where sheneededhim to tell her when they would be leaving if only to give her the chance to work through her emotions as best she could?
The easy familiarity between them failed to reach the mark as he towelled himself dry and strolled towards her, a dark, silhouetted shape in a sky that was already turning from orange to midnight blue.
