Page 39 of Hired By The Forbidden Italian
‘You’re tense,’ Niccolo drawled, dropping into the chair next to her and staring out at the rapidly darkening horizon. ‘Why? Anything going on with your house that I should know about?’
‘My house?’
‘The sale.’ He slanted dark eyes across to her questioningly. ‘You said the valuators came to process what furniture was left that you wanted to auction. Did it all go okay?’
‘I’d forgotten about that,’ Sophie confessed. ‘But I haven’t heard from them so I’m guessing there were no problems. They’ll email me with the amount I can expect.’ She sighed. ‘It’ll all go towards paying off the people my dad owed money to.’
‘Tell me,’ Niccolo said casually, ‘how much money you have left to pay off those pesky people...’
Sophie laughed.
He was funny. It was something that hadn’t been apparent when they had first met, when she had written him off as another rich, arrogant guy who thought he could rule the world and everyone in it with a snap of his fingers.
He had a dry, witty sense of humour that never failed to make her smile.
She told him, and then, for the first time, really thanked him for the very generous salary he was paying her.
‘You have no idea what it feels like to have some of that financial burden lifted off my shoulders,’ she said quietly.
‘I know what it’s like to have very little. I can only imagine how much worse it has been for you because there was a time when you thought you had a great deal. And you still haven’t told me why you’re so tense.’ His voice dropped to a husky murmur. ‘Is that your way of letting me know that a back massage wouldn’t go amiss?’
Except, for once, the dark, exciting promise of desires fulfilled between the sheets failed to evoke that complete emptying of her head as it had done before.
‘I suppose,’ Sophie said, opting for a bit of a half-truth, ‘I can’t help but think about the fact that my family home is now empty of everything that made it a family home...and some other family will be living in it, filling it up with different memories, rubbing mine out along the way.’
‘I’m not sure that’s how it works, Sophie.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what they say about doors shutting and others opening.’
‘I’m not as good as you when it comes to moving on,’ she ventured a little tautly, then, just in case he got the idea that this was a statement that was leading to something else, something she quite frankly wanted to avoid, she hurried on without pausing for breath. ‘When you’ve talked about your family home, you’ve always implied that it was a relief when you left it and a relief when you’d made enough money to move your parents out...to make sure you could set them up in style back in Italy.’
‘I’ve said that to you?’ Niccolo frowned and shifted so that he was looking at her. ‘When?’
‘What do you meanwhen?’
‘I just don’t recall... Well, yes, I do remember telling you a bit about my family...but—’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ Sophie picked up the edge in her voice and wondered whether he did as well. Why, she wondered, did he have to act as though those little morsels of confidences were somehow a crime against humanity?
She knew why. Of course she did.
For most people, sharing was something that was a bonding experience. It was something they did when they actually gave a damn about what the other person thought.
Niccolo had shared stuff in soundbites, and she figured that it was because he’d wanted to give her just enough explanation for her to understand the man he was, a man who had nothing inside to give and was not interested in any sort of relationship that demanded more than what was on offer.
No wonder he was aghast at the thought that he might have told her anything that had been close to his heart.
It would be tough for anything to be close to a heart that wasn’t actually there!
‘I wasn’t,’ he said irritably, ‘worried about anything. Perhaps my experiences of the place I grew up in aren’t rooted in sentimentality.’
‘You can be so...cold, Niccolo.’
‘Show me a successful man who enjoys hugging trees and cries when he sees a pleasant sunset.’
Against her will, Sophie laughed and then told him off for making her laugh, but in a way she was pleased because the atmosphere had been veering into dangerous territory and she had wanted to find a way of pulling back, of reminding herself that she was in it for the moment, to enjoy what remained and not let despair at what would never be tarnish the present.
