The Uncompromising Italian

‘So...’

Lesley blinked herself back into the present to find herself staring directly into dark, dark eyes that were far too close to her for comfort.

‘So?’

‘Email one—a little too familiar, a little too chatty, but nothing that couldn’t be easily ignored.’

Lesley looked thoughtfully at the computer screen and read through the email. Her surroundings faded away as she began studying the series of emails posted to him, looking for clues, asking him questions, her fingers moving swiftly and confidently across the key board.

She could understand why he had decided to farm out this little problem to an outside source.

If he valued his privacy, then he would not want his IT division to have access to what appeared to be vaguely menacing threats, suggestions of something that could harm his business or ruin his reputation. It would be fodder for any over-imaginative employee, of which there were always a few in any office environment.

Alessio pushed himself away from the desk and strolled towards one of the comfortable, deep chairs facing her.

She was utterly absorbed in what she was doing. He took time out to study her and he was amused and a little surprised to discover that he enjoyed the view.

It wasn’t simply the arrangement of her features that he found curiously captivating.

There was a lively intelligence to her that made a refreshing change from the beautiful but intellectually challenged women he dated. He looked at the way her short chocolate-brown hair spiked up, as though too feisty and too wilful to be controlled. Her eyelashes were long and thick; her mouth, as he now saw, was full and, yes, sexy.

A sexy mouth, especially just at this very moment, when her lips were slightly parted.

She frowned and ran her tongue thoughtfully along her upper lip and, on cue, Alessio’s body jerked into startling life. His libido, which had been unusually quiet since he’d ended his relationship with a blonde with a penchant for diamonds two months ago, fired up.

It was so unexpected a reaction that he nearly groaned in shock.

Instead, he shifted on the chair and smiled politely as her eyes briefly skittered across to him before resuming their intent concentration on the computer screen.

‘Whoever’s sent this knows what they’re doing.’

‘Come again?’ Alessio crossed his legs, trying to maintain the illusion that he was in complete control of himself.

‘They’ve been careful to make themselves as untraceable as possible.’ Lesley stretched, then slumped back into the chair and swivelled it round so that she was facing him.

She stuck out her legs and gazed at her espadrilles. ‘That first email may have been chatty and friendly but he or she knew that they didn’t want to be traced. Why didn’t you delete them, at least the earlier ones?’

‘I had an instinct that they might be worth hanging onto.’ He stood up and strolled towards the French doors. He had intended this meeting to be brief and functional, a blip that needed sorting out in his hectic life. Now, he found that his mind was stubbornly refusing to return to the matter in hand. Instead, it was relentlessly pulled back to the image he had of her sitting in front of his computer concentrating ferociously. He wondered what she would look like out of the unappealing ensemble. He wondered whether she would be any different from all the other naked women who had lain across his bed in readiness for him.

He knew she would—instinct again. Somehow he couldn’t envisage her lying provocatively for him to take her, passive and willing to please.

No. That wasn’t what girls with black belts in karate and a sideline in computer hacking did.

He played with the suddenly tempting notion of prolonging her task. Who knew what might happen between them if she were to be around longer than originally envisaged?

‘What would you suggest my next step should be? Because I’m taking from the expression on your face that it’s not going to be as straightforward as you first thought.’

‘Usually it’s pretty easy to sort something like this out,’ Lesley confessed, linking her hands on her stomach and staring off at nothing in particular. The weird, edgy tension she had felt earlier on had dissipated. Work had that effect on her. It occupied her whole mind and left no room for anything else. ‘People are predictable when it comes to leaving tracks behind them, but obviously whoever is behind this hasn’t used his own computer. He’s gone to an Internet café. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes to a variety of Internet cafés, because we certainly would be able to trace the café he uses if he sticks there. And it wouldn’t be too much of a headache finding out which terminal is his and then it would be a short step to identifying the person... I keep saying he but it might very well be a she.’

‘How so? No, we’ll get to that over something to drink—and I insist you forfeit the tea in favour of something a little more exciting. My housekeeper makes a very good Pimm’s.’

‘I couldn’t,’ Lesley said awkwardly. ‘I’m not much of a drinker and I’m...err...driving anyway.’

‘Fresh lemonade, in that case.’ Alessio strolled towards her and held out his hand to tug her up from the chair to which she seemed to be glued.

For a few seconds, Lesley froze. When she grasped his hand—because frankly she couldn’t think of what else to do without appearing ridiculous and childish—she felt a spurt of red-hot electricity zap through her body until every inch of her was galvanised into shrieking, heightened awareness of the dangerously sexy man standing in front of her.

‘That would be nice,’ she said a little breathlessly. As soon as she could she retrieved her scorching hand and resisted the urge to rub it against her trousers.

Alessio didn’t miss a thing. She was a different person when she was concentrating on a computer. Looking at a screen, analysing what was in front of her, working out how to solve the problem he had presented, she oozed self-confidence. He idly wondered what her websites looked like.

But without a computer to absorb her attention she was prickly and defensive, a weird, intriguing mix of independent and vulnerable.

He smiled, turning her insides to liquid, and stood aside to allow her to pass by him out of the office.

‘So we have a he or a she who goes to a certain Internet café, or more likely a variety of Internet cafés, for the sole reason of emailing me to, well, purpose as yet slightly unclear, but if I’m any reader of human motivation I’m smelling a lead-up to asking for money for information he or she may or may not know. There seem to be a lot of imponderables in this case.’

They had arrived at the kitchen without her being aware of having padded through the house at all, and she found a glass of fresh lemonade in her hands while he helped himself to a bottle of mineral water.

He motioned to the kitchen table and they sat facing one another on opposite sides.

‘Generally,’ Lesley said, sipping the lemonade, ‘This should be a straightforward case of sourcing the computer in question, paying a visit to the Internet café—and usually these places have CCTV cameras. You would be able to find the culprit without too much bother.’

‘But if he’s clever enough to hop from café to café...’

‘Then it’ll take a bit longer but I’ll get there. Of course, if you have no skeletons in the cupboard, Mr Baldini, then you could just walk away from this situation.’

‘Is there such a thing as an adult without one or two skeletons in the cupboard?’

‘Well, then.’

‘Although,’ Alessio continued thoughtfully, ‘Skeletons imply something...wrong, in need of concealment. I can’t think of any dark secrets I have under lock or key but there are certain things I would rather not have revealed.’

‘Do you honestly care what the public thinks of you? Or maybe it’s to do with your company? Sorry, but I don’t really know how the big, bad world of business operates, but I’m just assuming that if something gets out that could affect your share prices then you mightn’t be too happy.’

‘I have a daughter.’

‘You have a daughter?’

‘Surely you got that from your search of me on the Internet?’ Alessio said drily.

‘I told you, I just skimmed through the stuff. There’s an awful lot written up about you and I honestly just wanted to cut to the chase—any articles that could have suggested that I needed to be careful about getting involved. Like I said, I’ve fine-tuned my search engine when it comes to picking out relevant stuff or else I’d be swamped underneath useless speculation.’ A daughter?

‘Yes. I forgot—the “bodies under the motorway” scenario.’ He raised his eyebrows and once again Lesley felt herself in danger of losing touch with common sense.

‘I never imagined anything so dramatic, at least not really,’ she returned truthfully, which had the effect of making that sexy smile on his face even broader. Flustered, she continued, ‘But you were telling me that you have a daughter.’

‘You still can’t erase the incredulity from your voice,’ he remarked, amused. ‘Surely you’ve bumped into people who have had kids?’