KIM LAWRENCE - Surrendering To The Italian's Command

Danilo could feel the pressure in his head as the anger beating inside his skull reached critical level.

‘You should not have to live like this!’ He flicked one of the locks with a long finger and spun around to face her, conscious as he did so that he’d just missed his chance to walk away. ‘It is outrageous! Madre di Dio! How long has this been going on?’

‘Please, I’ve already had this conversation once tonight. Nothing as bad as this has happened before,’ she added, feeling the irrational need to defend herself.

‘But something has happened before?’ He seized on the comment. ‘Do you still have feelings for this man?’

The question astonished her. ‘I’ve never had feelings for him. I barely know him.’ Or you, she wanted to add, but she didn’t because she wanted more for this to be over and for him to go away. Didn’t he know that guardian angels appeared at the right moment and then slipped away, silently, without comment, without giving a person a headache—a worse headache?

‘What are you wearing?’

In the middle of sliding off the scuffed running shoes she had slipped on as she’d left the flat, Tess stopped, a deep flush travelling over her pale skin as her eyes moved from the onesie, chosen for its comfort value and not glamour, to his face.

‘Pyjamas!’

‘Yes, pyjamas,’ she said, beginning to get irritated now. ‘Maybe you don’t wear them but I do.’ She stopped, the colour in her cheeks deepening—you just suggested he slept naked.

If only her embarrassment had stopped there but, no, now she’d said it she was thinking it too. Tess was seeing a total stranger naked!

‘You deserve better!’

Danilo had no idea where the words came from as he stood there, his embarrassment concealed behind a stony mask—he could assume that his seeming inability to walk away, duty done, conscience salved, was down to that initial nebulous connection he had made between her and Nat. He couldn’t save his sister, he had failed Nat, but he could save this woman, who seemed to have serious self-destructive issues.

It was a statement that Tess couldn’t take issue with, though she was uncomfortably aware that people rarely got what they deserved.

‘He really isn’t my boyfriend, though, like you, he thinks he is, he even tells people that he is, but in reality he is just a guy who uses the same bus stop as me. There is nothing more between us than small talk.

‘At first,’ she admitted, ‘I just thought he was sweet...then, it was all a bit insidious, really. He’d turn up places I was, outside school, and then there were the emails and the texts. I thought if I ignored him he would get fed up and go away, then last month I had a break-in. There’s no proof it was him. He didn’t take anything but he left roses and champagne and...well, I took advice and precautions.’

Danilo heard her out in silence, his anger towards the other man growing as she told her story. ‘I should have throttled the guy!’

‘Well, with any luck I gave him my flu!’ The grimly vindictive wish was so out of sync with the wan, pathetic figure standing there that he laughed. The sound drew her attention back to him. ‘I hope you don’t catch it.’

‘You should inform the police.’

‘He didn’t actually hurt me, or even threaten to, it’s just that I panicked. If I hadn’t—if I’d just talked—’

‘You were not to blame for what happened.’

‘I know that, I’m just saying that I could have handled it better.’ Actually what was she saying? She pressed a hand to her aching head. ‘I suppose I will contact the police, but not tonight.’

‘Suppose?’

Tess squeezed her eyes closed. ‘If you yell I warn you I will cry and it is not a pretty sight.’ Bending forwards as she was convulsed by a loud sneeze, she raised her head and found a box of tissues extended to her. She took a bunch and blew her nose loudly then, looking at him through watery eyes, rasped, ‘Thank you.’

‘So what are you going to do now?’ he asked, tuning out the voice in his head that said, Not your business.

With a sigh she turned her back and moved towards the kitchen area that was sectioned off by a breakfast bar. ‘I never got my milk for my cup of tea so I’m going to improvise,’ she informed him, pushing her hand to the back of the cupboard where a bottle of sherry and the cooking brandy lived.

Standing on the other side the breakfast bar, circa the nineteen seventies, like the rest of the place, he watched as she took the brandy bottle and glugged some in the bottom of one of the mugs that sat on the draining board. ‘Sorry, where are my manners? Would you like some?’

He looked at the label, a flicker of amusement moving across his face. ‘Thanks, but I’ll pass. Are you sure you should?’

She had enough energy left to silence him with a red-nosed killer look but not enough to get herself to the comfy armchair. She collapsed instead onto the sofa, glass in hand. Then, head pushed back into the cushion, she closed her eyes and took a swallow, choking a little as the raw alcohol burned her sore throat.

‘For a woman who is being stalked you are pretty trusting.’

Tess forced her heavy eyelids apart... Trusting? The point was she wasn’t. In fact by some people’s more relaxed standards she was paranoid, thanks in no small part to the long-ago incident with her mum’s boyfriend. It didn’t take therapy to figure out that the episode had left her with some trust issues. Though now was definitely not the moment for a forensic analysis of her non-existent sex life.

But maybe, she mused, her eyes drawn almost against her will to the hard angles and planes of the dark lean face of a man who exuded raw sexuality like a force field, it was the moment to wonder why it had not crossed her mind at any point tonight to feel threatened by this total stranger. Down to the fever or plain stupidity?

‘Wait, you’re not about to tell me you’re also some sort of freak who’s fallen desperately in love with me?’

He laughed. ‘No.’

She lifted a hand to find her ear torn, the blood already caking. So it wasn’t just her ear-ring she’d lost but her sense of proportion too—his laugh hurt!

She let the amusement in his voice wash over her, not out of choice but because she had reached the point where stringing two words together was an effort. The dignified high ground was a place Tess aspired to occupy, but she’d never made it there.

On a good day—actually, any day but this one—she would now be informing him that she scrubbed up pretty well, as it happened, and that she had plenty of offers, which would have been childish, but true.

She had moved on a long way from the sixteen-year-old with the bad case of acne, braces and no discernible curves that had inspired the sleaze whom she had so conveniently thrown up over. He’d been less than happy about her obvious rejection of his unwanted advances, enough to issue a disgusted parting shot—‘You should be grateful I’d even look at you!’

The voluptuous curves had never materialised but two years later her skin had cleared, she had lost her braces and boys her own age had started noticing her. The trouble was their interest rarely lasted long, or, for that matter, was mutual.

Tess had discovered she seemed destined to attract the sort of man who equated her appearance and her small frame with a fragility she did not possess either physically or mentally.

No matter how good-looking a man was, Tess found it a massive turn-off when he treated her as if she were a china doll that might break, and when they discovered she wasn’t sweet and yielding, but actually quite tough, they tended to drift away disillusioned—all except Ben, of course.

The man who loved her for who she was turned out to be certifiably insane—maybe, she mused, that was what it took?

She fervently hoped not.

Tess didn’t really know who her perfect man was, but she knew he wouldn’t patronise her and he would treat her on equal terms. And if he could offer some mind-blowing sex that would definitely be a plus, but so far she had not come close to it!

Of course, while she was telling herself she was waiting for the right man and that she wasn’t going to be pressurised into settling, it occurred to her that she might be one of those women who were never going to meet the man who pressed all the right buttons. The women who blamed the men because they didn’t want to face the possibility it might be them? That they...she didn’t have it in her? A bubble of rebellion came to the surface of her drifting thoughts: no, I want passion!

‘I suppose you think that it was something I did?’

‘You can’t go through life worrying about what other people think. Are you awake?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

The dry comment made him smile. He could think of few people who could retain a sense of humour after the evening she had had. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘You don’t love me—I’m still recovering.’

‘Then that’s a no. I have a suggestion.’

‘Another lock? A remote cottage on the Outer Hebrides? Already thought of it.’

‘Your door won’t take another lock and it rains too much in the Hebrides.’

When did this Englishwoman become your problem?

Obviously she wasn’t his problem, except in the sense she had evoked such a strong protective response in him, which was as difficult to ignore as a kick in the chest.

Try harder!

He responded to the suggestion from his dark side with a thin smile, which morphed into a frown as his dark veiled glance lifted from the tiny defenceless figure on the sofa and slid to the door with its rows of locks. All he had to do was walk through it. He’d done what anyone could expect of him and more.

So why was he still here?

Because he knew about the price of selfish actions, he lived with guilt, it was a constant presence in his life and he didn’t want any more.

And it wasn’t about playing the hero. That would, he reflected, his lips forming a fleeting sardonic smile, have been a serious case of miscasting.

When he thought of heroes he thought of his little sister. She was the most heroic person he knew. Bleakness drifted to his eyes. Maybe, he speculated, that was why he felt such a strong compulsion now he couldn’t save Natalia, but he had the opportunity to save someone... His lips twisted in a cynical smile—it helped that it required little or no effort on his part and no sacrifice.

‘That stuff is actually quite good.’ She leaned back, feeling quite mellow as the glow from the cooking brandy in her stomach began to spread. The floating feeling was pleasant.

‘When are you back in college?’

‘School,’ she corrected sleepily, and yawned as she watched him through the mesh of her lowered eyelashes. At a purely aesthetic level he was well worth looking at. A few sleepy moments later she realised that he was looking at her, not lost in admiration, but because she hadn’t answered his question—now, what was the question?

‘I teach,’ she slurred tiredly. The virus and the events of the last hours were catching up with her big time.

Danilo blinked. ‘You’re a teacher?’

‘No, I’m an excellent teacher,’ she rebutted with a half-smile, then yawned.

Danilo, still making the mental adjustment, didn’t register her attempt at humour. ‘So what do you teach?’

‘After I graduated I did some supply teaching, then for a term I was a support classroom worker for a little boy with muscular dystrophy, now I teach reception class.’ She gave a self-conscious little grimace, aware that she had given away more information than the casual question required.