He walked over to the window of his office, which sat on the top four floors of an iconic skyscraper.
From here, you couldn’t even see people down below on the crowded lunchtime streets. All you could see was what was directly outside the panes of glass and that was the blue of a winter sky and the scudding of white clouds.
Would Georgie have seen that picture? Read the article, which was rife with ridiculous speculation? And if she had…
Alessandro groaned and raked his fingers through his hair.
He’d planned on seeing her. He knew that she would be cleaning his house on the following day, the Sunday, or, as she had laughingly put it, wafting a feather duster over a bunch of surfaces you could see your reflection in.
He’d resigned himself to a conversation that would very likely not go his way, but what happened now?
He grabbed his coat and exited his office at speed. There was no one around because it was nine-thirty on a Saturday evening and anyone with any kind of life to speak of wasn’t in an office building.
He would take his private jet to Vancouver and drive to his house. He wouldn’t wait for her in the house because he didn’t want to startle her. He would wait until she was there and he would ring the doorbell of his own house and wait for her to answer it.
Like someone paying a visit. Crazy, but desperation, he realised, made a person do crazy things.
Desperation and love.
Love.It still left him shaken when he thought about how deeply he had fallen into an emotion he’d thought he could never,would never, feel.
Years of building his defences, sealing himself away from anything that could promise hurt and yet… Georgie had walked away from him and he had felt tears in his eyes and a hollowness in his heart that made him want to sit on the pavement and bury his head in his hands.
He’d done nothing. He’d been paralysed by panic and terror at a place he’d never thought he’d be in. It had been as though the familiar contours of the world had shifted so while everything looked the same, nothing felt the same.
He would think things through. He would let the dust settle. He would come to terms with…the wild, uncontrolled feeling of being vulnerable.
And then he would see her because he had to. But now…with that article out there in the public domain…
It was going to be a very different visit from the one he had originally planned, before Sophia had pulled her last stunt at his expense.
Georgie was wafting the feather duster. Every time she went into a different room in Alessandro’s house, she was assaulted by vivid memories of meeting him for the first time, drowning in those dark eyes. She remembered the first feel of his hand on her and that feathery non-kiss that had made her shiver all over.
Then she thought about that headline, thought about him and Sophia getting back together, rebuilding their little family unit, and she wanted to dump the feather duster, grab the rolling pin from the kitchen drawer and run through the house breaking everything that could be broken, screaming out her agony and heartache.
She’dknownwhat the deal was when she’d got involved with him. She’dknownthat he was off-limits. She’dstupidly, nonchalantly, mistakenly assumedthat past hurt would protect her from making another mistake, especially when he’d made it clear that she wasn’t to start thinking that what they had was real.
Yet she’d fallen in love with him and now, not only was she dealing with her shattered heart, but she was also having to deal with the cold fact that somehow their brief liaison had propelled him into a change of heart with his ex-wife.
Was it because, for the first time, he had spent undiluted time with his daughter in the company of someone who joined in? Had her presence there, the way she’d bonded with Flora, led him to the belief that he might have ditched his marriage prematurely? That there remained things there that could be salvaged? That he and Sophia could find a way to being the family they should have been when Flora had been born?
Maybe he’d finally realised that he’d made his fortune and he could slow down and, in slowing down, could devote the time and energy needed to be a parent and a husband.
She wanted to take something positive from the experience, wanted to be the bigger person and feel happy that she had been instrumental in him finding the right path and, in so doing, opening up his relationship with Flora so that he could become the best dad she knew he had the potential to be.
Unfortunately, it was a work in progress. At the moment she was going down rabbit holes thinking about him.
She wondered whether she’d done the right thing walking away and then immediately told herself that she had, only to quickly start imagining what life would look like right now if she’d taken him up on his offer.
Rabbit hole.
She swept the feather duster round the sitting room with a flourishing touch by the door and stood back to look at her handiwork, not that much work had been involved. Between their leaving the house and returning to it, the agency had obviously been told to send someone in to do an interim job, and so Georgie had had very little to do on her first day back.
She was heading to the kitchen where she would finish things up when she heard the doorbell and it was such a shock that, for a few seconds, she froze.
She’d never been interrupted doing her cleaning duties before. Ever. Except that one time. But, of course, it couldn’t be Alessandro because he wouldn’t be ringing his own doorbell.
Which could only mean that it was someone from the agency who’d come to give her her walking papers.
