Alessandro frowned because he had no idea how the conversation between them had meandered into the place it was now. There was work to do. He had a ton of emails to get through and various reports to look at.
He opened his mouth to rein it in but then looked at her and shifted.
She’d tugged her long plait over her shoulder and was idly playing with the end of it, twirling it between her fingers with a small frown on her face, as though her thoughts were a million miles away.
It was easy to feel insecure if you compared yourself to other people.
He had never suffered from that problem, even though he had grown up in lack.
From the minute he could understand the world around him, he’d set his eyes on the prize and gone for it with the energy of someone who fully believed in himself.
The goal at the end would be freedom, because that was the one and only thing money really bought.
Freedom from having anyone call the shots.
Everything else had been blocked out until Flora had come on the scene. Before her arrival, he had had no faith in relationships. Why would he? He had been abandoned by his father and had grown up in a world where things around him were transitory.
People came and went. In the case of his adolescent contemporaries, many in the direction of a jail.
His mother had been a constant, but he’d known from an early age that his father’s abandonment of them had broken her somewhere deep inside. She, too, had learnt the pain of loving and having that love rejected. With him, the pain of the child not comprehending the callousness of the parent and with his mother…the pain of the wife whose love had nowhere to go, abandoned by the man she’d set her heart on with a child by her side to take care of.
The one constant?
The acquisition of power and wealth that would protect him from the frailty of human nature all around him. Love was loss and loss was pain. His daughter was the only one who held the key to his heart.
Unaccustomed to introspection, Alessandro dragged his eyes away from Georgie even though some wilful part of him wanted to remain with the conversation for a bit longer.
‘Moving on,’ he said, and she blinked and focused on him.
He looked at her with lowered eyes. She really was very pretty in an ultra-feminine way. Big brown eyes…that unruly tumble of hair…her slightly parted lips as though always on the verge of saying something. Her dewy-eyed innocence was captivating.
Finding himself staring, he frowned and cleared his throat.
The headache was back and worse.
‘Flora will probably be up early so maybe we should aim to start the day by eight-thirty. Breakfast downstairs. I’ll get someone at Reception to improve on the schedule I emailed you and we follow it.’
‘I’m not sure six-year-old kids adhere to that kind of military approach when it comes to having fun.’
‘No option. I don’t want to spend my time wandering around aimlessly because I want to be back at the hotel by one so that I can catch up on work.’
‘Okay.’
‘You can do whatever you want between one and six.’
‘Sure.’
‘Flora will be happy to watch television and, at four, I’ll do something with her, let her lead the way.’
‘She’ll love that,’ Georgie said warmly.
‘At six, we can go to the restaurant and she can have her dinner. Once she’s asleep, you can do as you wish because I’ll grab something and catch up on work.’
‘Do you ever stop working?’
‘Here. I’ll barely be working while I’m here.’
‘But what about all thatcatching up on stuff?’
