He had his daughter. She would be the recipient of every single luxury extreme wealth could buy.
She would never be patronised by people who thought they were superior to her because they happened to have more in their bank accounts.
She would never feel angry on his behalf because he had not made the most of what he had been born with, because he had found himself in a position where other people called the shots over the direction of his life.
Oh, no.
Work had come first. It had been the engine that had fired up his life for as long as he could remember.
Women were fun and he was very happy to shower them with gifts, but none of them were there to stay the course, and within those boundary lines he had never known anything but pure contentment with the life choices he had made.
Until Sophie Baxter had arrived on the scene.
When had he started questioning the things that had been the cornerstones of his life?
When had he started looking at his relationship with his daughter and seeing that it wasn’t enough to ensure that there was nothing she lacked that money could buy?
He was very glad he had, but even so, how was it that he had not noticed the way those firmly held convictions about how he ran his life had begun to unravel, as if a thread had been gently pulled until every weave in the fabric became unstable?
He and Sophie had become lovers and she had made him feel like a horny teenager. She had lain in his arms and he had been loath for her to leave the warmth of his bed. She had smiled at him and he had felt as if there was nothing in the world that wasn’t possible.
Nothing.
Not even the chance to love.
Staring out of his office window now, Niccolo closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, steadying his runaway thoughts.
She’d left. She hadn’t tried to find any reasons to stay. She’d turned down his offer to hang on to what they had. She had been polite and gentle and firm, and he only now recognised his reaction to her departure for what it had been.
Love.
She’d carved a path through the walls he had built around himself and managed to get right down to the very foundations where, brick by brick, she had somehow dismantled all his defences and he hadn’t seen it coming.
He’d been so intent on making sure she got the message that there could be nothing between them but a brief, flickering flame to be snuffed out the second they returned to reality that he had missed all the signs of his own heart disobeying the rules his head had always laid down.
And now here he was. Wondering where she was and what she was doing.
Instead of leaving at the same time, he had remained on his yacht for a further two days, discreetly allowing her time to pack her things and leave. The perfect, thoughtful gentleman.
Was that why he had done that? Or had he subconsciously realised that it would have hurt too much to spend those final hours in her company knowing that she wouldn’t be around for much longer?
He cursed under his breath and vaulted out of his chair, moving to the sheet of glass that separated him, cocooned in his magnificent, expensive ivory tower, from the rest of humanity far down below.
How could he have ever accepted that it was normal to remove himself from the things in life that really mattered? Or believed that happiness lay in isolation? That the challenges of meaningful interaction could or should be sidelined?
And where did this onslaught of introspection leave him now?
At a little after seven in the evening, there was a miserable air of dreariness to the wet, grey vista below.
Most of his employees had already left to begin their weekend.
He had absently mulled over the possibility of digging into his metaphorical little black book and finding himself some amusing company but had ditched that idea as fast as it had appeared in his head.
As he had been doing since returning to London, he would stay at home, spend time with Annalise and dodge his aunt’s sneaky attempts to find out what he had thought of Sophie.
And what else?
Think of Sophie?
