‘Hang on every word the way I used to?’ Daisy continued with unconcealed rancour.
‘Even then your mind wandered places I could never follow,’ Alessio acknowledged gruffly without turning his head. ‘We are very different people.’
For some peculiar reason that reminder distressed her, yet it was an undeniable truth. Alessio was an extrovert, but he didn’t show his emotions—not the private ones anyway—and he was always in control. Daisy was an introvert, but love had smashed her barriers and she had poured out on Alessio all the fierce emotion and affection that no one else had ever wanted from her. She had been dangerously out of control. Afterwards, she had promised herself that she would never bare herself to another human being like that again. And, with the single exception of her daughter, she had kept that promise.
‘Yes...’ she acknowledged unevenly, and just in case he might be thinking of that humiliating inequality she added, ‘You’re organised and practical and sensible. You don’t lose things or forget things or... or fall over or off things.’ Sucking in a shaky breath, Daisy pinned her lips shut with an effort, her eyes suddenly smarting with tears. At seventeen she had been dumb enough to think that those’ differences meant that they complemented each other.
‘Exasperatingly efficient but with not much in the way of imagination?’ Alessio queried silkily. ‘Possibly I am about to surprise you.’
‘Surprise me?’ Daisy questioned.
He swung back another door and stood back for her to precede him. Her fine brows knit as she walked through and glanced round a room obviously used as an office. She cleared her throat uncertainly. ‘Why have you brought me in here?’
His strong dark face hardened. ‘I didn’t want to have to do this, Daisy.’
Goose-flesh prickled at the sensitive nape of her neck. ‘Do what?’
‘It was not my intention to use undue pressure.’
‘Undue pressure?’ Daisy queried slightly shrilly, already calculating the distance she was from the door, her fertile imagination running riot.
‘I have employed every means of rational persuasion within my power.’
‘Tara...’ Daisy sighed limply.
Alessio lifted a thick document from the desk and held it out to her.
Daisy tensed even more. ‘What’s that?’
‘A deed of purchase for Elite Estates. I have bought the agency.’
The taut silence thrummed in her eardrums.
Her brow slowly furrowed. ‘That’s not possible. Old Mr Dickson would never sell. It was his first business, and he may not take much of a direct interest these days but—’
‘The agency is not very profitable given the current state of the property market,’ Alessio returned levelly. ‘Lewis Dickson couldn’t close with my offer fast enough.’
‘But what would you want with a London estate company?’ Daisy looked at him in perplexity. ‘You couldn’t have bought the agency!’ she argued with sudden conviction. ‘Giles would have known if there was anything like that in the wind.’
‘Carter is only an employee.’
‘But he manages Elite Estates—’
‘That does not grant him automatic access to his employer’s decisions, and discretion was part of the deal.’
Alessio had bought the agency? Daisy studied the document, intricate legal terms blurring beneath her searching gaze until she finally picked out sentences that had a frightening ring of reality. ‘I just don’t understand why...’ she muttered in a daze.
‘I could make a very tidy profit on the deal. The agency is sitting on a prime site with a great deal of expensive space wasted on that car park. It’s ripe for redevelopment.’
‘Redevelopment?’ Daisy repeated sickly. ‘Are you talking about closing the agency down?’
Glittering eyes rested intently on her. ‘That’s up to you.’
‘Me?’ Daisy gasped. ‘What’s it got to do with me?’
‘The fate of your former colleagues is in your hands,’ Alessio delivered softly. ‘If you marry me, the agency will continue to do business. If you don’t marry me, I will be consoled by a large profit but the agency will cease trading.’
A brittle laugh of disbelief was torn from Daisy. ‘You’re not serious!’
‘Never before has so much ridden on the back of one little deal,’ Alessio responded with complete cool.
‘But...but you wouldn’t do that sort of thing...make it personal like that,’ Daisy reasoned unsteadily. ‘That would be unethical.’
Alessio’s eyes met her expectant gaze in a head-on collision. ‘Blackmail is unethical.’
Daisy tried and failed to swallow at that unashamed acknowledgement. ‘You’re saying that if I don’t marry you you’ll put people out of work and it will be my fault. Why... why do you think that will influence me?’
Alessio’s gaze wandered over her, taking in her stark white face, the horror in her expressive eyes, and the hold she had on the desk to stay upright. His lush dark lashes lowered and his shapely mouth quirted. ‘I know you.’
‘You don’t know me. If you’re the new owner of Elite Estates, it’s got nothing to do with me!’ Casting aside the document, Daisy turned her back on him, her stomach twisting. She was reeling with shock but struggling desperately hard to hide it.
‘Daisy, you couldn’t sleep knowing that you were responsible for one person losing their job.’
Daisy flinched from that confident assurance, inwardly counting up the ten other people who formed the agency staff. In recent times, many estate agencies had cut back on employees. It would be very difficult, if not impossible for some of her colleagues to find work elsewhere. Four of the men had families to support. One woman was a single parent like herself, another had a husband who had recently lost his own job. The sudden loss of their pay cheques and their security would devastate all their lives.
‘Daisy...you feed stray animals. You weep over soppy movies. You worry that plants feel pain,’ Alessio enumerated softly. ‘That bleeding-heart sensitivity may not have extended to me thirteen years ago but you are definitely not one of the world’s most ruthless women.’
‘I hate you,’ Daisy mumbled strickenly, her slight shoulders rigid with strain.
‘You hate spiders...but have you ever stepped on one?’
‘Don’t be snide.’
‘I was being realistic on your behalf.’
‘I am a very realistic person but I never, ever thought that you would do anything like this,’ Daisy confessed chokily. ‘I always thought that aside from all the flaws you couldn’t help or were just born with...well, that you did at least try to be a basically decent human being...and even if you weren’t very good at it at least the trying had to count for something. To find out that you’re not even trying any more...Well, words just fail me...’
They appeared to fail Alessio as well because the silence stretched and thrummed for enervating and endless seconds. Then a strangled little hiss of air escaped him and all of a sudden he went off into a bout of coughing.
‘I hope you choke,’ Daisy said thinly while she toyed wildly with the idea of telling Tara about his threat. Her daughter would be appalled. Didn’t Alessio appreciate that? If Daisy talked, Tara’s trust in her father would be destroyed. But such an act would damage and hurt her daughter most of all, wouldn’t it? Tara had so many hopes and expectations already centred on Alessio. Acknowledging defeat, Daisy sagged like a beaten but bitterly resentful rag doll down into an armchair.
‘You’ve won...’
Alessio swung back to her.
‘I’ll marry you,’ she whispered jerkily. ‘But I want you to know that you are making a very big mistake.’
Alessio was very still, not a muscle moving in his darkly handsome face. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘We will be utterly miserable together,’ Daisy forecast.
‘That’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’
‘Tara will be miserable too,’ Daisy stressed.
‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’
‘She just won’t believe that we’re getting married again this fast.’
‘No?’ Alessio queried silkily. ‘I wonder who it was who first filled her head with all that stuff about Romeo and Juliet?’
Daisy flinched and looked hunted.
‘Because, oddly enough, she’s a very practical girl,’ Alessio continued smoothly. ‘I wouldn’t have said that she had a natural bent for throbbing melodrama. None of my family have. In fact the only person I have ever known who could turn a broken cup into a stirring six-act tragedy is—’
‘So we’re getting married on Saturday, are we?’ Daisy broke in feverishly fast.
‘But we’ll still be lagging a long way behind the example set by Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers.’ Alessio contrived to look simultaneously soulful and sardonic. ‘They got hitched within twenty-four hours.’
Two spots of scarlet now burned over Daisy’s cheekbones. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never read Romeo and Juliet,’ she said, crossing two sets of fingers the way she always did when she lied.