Page 43 of Hired By The Forbidden Italian
If you didn’t adapt to change, you got left behind. Life in the fast lane had taught him that. He had come from nothing and had had to work hard and think fast to make things happen the way he wanted them to.
‘We could always just let nature take its course,’ he drawled in a soft, lazy undertone.
Sophie stiffened. She knew exactly what he was saying and in some ways she wasn’t that surprised.
The fling he’d wanted, conducted away from the reality of daily life and with a time limit he could wrap around it so that he could parcel it neatly away when it was over, hadn’t reached a natural conclusion as far as he was concerned.
When Sophie thought about it she wondered whether they hadn’t already overstayed their time on the yacht, because why else was there any need to be here if the deal was done?
Had he subconsciously prolonged their time here because he’d known that, once they left and returned to London, they would have to walk away from what they’d started?
Maybe that and the fact that possibly for the first time he was moving from being a father to beinga dad, with all the subtle rewards that brought.
At any rate, those dark, assessing eyes left her in no doubt that he would be very happy for them to carry on sleeping together until such time as he got bored and decided to call it a day.
He would play with her and then discard her and his life would move on. Had Evalina really thought that she might be the one to change that? Ha!
She’d stuck her head in the sand like an ostrich while she’d been here. She’d held off thinking about the inevitable because enjoying the present had been too seductive.
Well, Fate was giving her a choice and she intended to make the right one.
‘I don’t think so, Niccolo.’ She smiled. ‘And you don’t have to worry about the fact that I won’t be in the job for the length of time I thought I would be. My finances, for the first time in ages, are actually looking pretty healthy and I finally feel I can get things together and see a way forward.’ Now her smile was warm and genuine. She would never tell him how she really felt about him, but shewouldtell himthis. ‘You’ve been more than generous, Niccolo. You’ll never know how much I appreciate being given the chance to look after Annalise even though you must have had some doubts about someone who came with practically zero experience of childminding. In a lot of ways, you’ve helped me so much more than you’ll ever know.’
She stood, began collecting her things—bits and pieces that she shoved into the canvas bag she had brought with her to the pool.
There was a chill in the air, and the sea, dark and flat, suddenly struck her as full of foreboding rather than deep with mystery and promise.
She shivered, and when their eyes met she knew that they were both thinking the same thing...
They had made love for the last time.
CHAPTER TEN
NICCOLOSWIVELLEDHISchair at such an angle that he could stare out of the floor-to-ceiling pane of glass that offered the sort of view of London that people usually had to pay to get.
Right now, there was little to see aside from grey skies and the sort of persistent, fine drizzle that would have plunged even the most optimistic person into a slough of despond.
It was a far cry from the wall-to-wall blue skies and sunshine he had enjoyed a fortnight ago when...
Niccolo gave up trying to shut the door on thoughts that had plagued him ever since he had returned to London to pick up where he had left off before his life had decided to do its own thing and take him on a magical mystery tour of places he had never gone before.
This shouldn’t be happening because he shouldn’t be thinking about a woman who had always been destined to be nothing more than a fleeting visitor in his well-oiled, well-run life. He had never expected to have any sort of fling with Sophie Baxter but, once he had abandoned his half-hearted attempts at resistance and brought her into his bed, guidelines had been laid down, had been agreed. No promises of anything more than a few days of fun.
It was what he did.
It was the man he was.
He had learned lessons from his childhood. Those lessons had been cemented into him, had roots so deep in his soul that not even his marriage could survive the tenacity of their hold on him.
Looking back on Caroline Ferri, so exotic, so refined, so impossibly glamorous, he could see the cracks that had been there, waiting to open up.
Mistakes were always so easy to spot with the benefit of hindsight. He should have known that exotic, refined and impossibly glamorous would eventually equal high-maintenance.
He should have known that any man who worked hard to earn the sort of money that could give him absolute personal freedom—a man like him—would have found the shrill demands of a high-maintenance woman impossible to deal with.
He had been foolish, but even so...that disastrous union had embedded in him the rock-solid conviction that he just wasn’t cut out for the sort of sacrifices that had to be made for a relationship to stay the course.
That was something he had happily accepted.
