CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

‘I CAN HANDLE O NIONS .’

‘There’s no need for you to earn your keep by helping, Alice. Sit, relax—recover from your ordeal.’

‘Honestly, I like to help out.’ Alice smiled when she thought about her parents. She had grown up with people coming and going; helping out wherever and whenever was ingrained in her, which was probably why she had become a teacher. She enjoyed kids, and enjoyed the business of having a job where she felt she might be making a real difference. ‘Now that we’ve established that you’re not an axe-murderer,’ she teased playfully, ‘can you tell me what you do?’

Out of the corner of her eye she could see his hands, strong and bronzed, as he expertly continued to prepare whatever meal he had been preparing before she had ruined his peace.

‘I... I’m self-employed, you could say.’

‘That’s tough, but you’re obviously good at what you do, if you can afford a chalet out here.’

‘Tough?’

‘I’d hate the insecurity—never knowing where your next meal is coming from. I teach. It’s the most secure job in the world.’ Her eyes were beginning to water and she blinked and stepped back a bit.

‘You’re a teacher? Shouldn’t you be at a school somewhere?’

‘Half-term; I’m here with three friends. I can’t tell you how relieved they were to hear from me! Anyway, we’ve been planning this trip for ages, and just going back to when you told me about being an idiot for skiing on this side of the mountain...’

She grimaced and looked sideways at him. ‘I’m actually a pretty experienced skier,’ she confessed, resuming her work on the onions, but half-heartedly, because she was so conscious of him next to her. She was buzzing with curiosity but knew better than to indulge it. Whoever he was and whatever he did, he didn’t seem to be the sort of open, talkative guy she was used to. She felt way out of her comfort zone just being around him and that was weirdly exciting. She wondered whether she was getting on his nerves with her chat but then what else was she supposed to do? She was talkative by nature and the thought of standing there in a state of repressed silence filled her with horror.

Actually, she just didn’t think she could do it.

‘I taught skiing on these very slopes for six months... Well, not these very ones—the easier runs on the other side—before I started my teacher training course.’

‘Right.’

‘So I’m accustomed to difficult runs but that blizzard just dropped out of the sky like a snow bomb. By the time it hit, there was no one else around on the slopes.’

‘Perhaps they’d wisely noticed the darkening skies, because I’m really struggling to believe that a blizzard can strike within seconds. Somehow that seems to defy the laws of nature.’

‘That’s a possibility,’ Alice conceded thoughtfully. She paused and then swivelled so that she was leaning against the counter, her hazel eyes pensive as she stared off into the distance. ‘I’m normally really clued up when it comes to changes out here but...my mind was a million miles away. What seemed sudden may not have been quite as sudden as I thought.’

Mateo took over the onions. He looked down at her, primed to discourage any unwelcome outpouring of personal back-stories, but hesitated at the expression on her face, which was a mixture of sadness and resignation.

Something in his gut made him think that she was too young and too inherently upbeat to be sad and resigned. Suddenly he felt a hundred years old. He was thirty-three. He couldn’t be more than a handful of years older than her but he felt jaded, cynical and ancient.

He knew how that had happened, and knew that there was nothing wrong with being cynical, because cynicism was a great self-defence mechanism. But for the first time he uneasily wondered what another road might have looked like. Disillusionment and the bitterness of divorce had taught him the value of being tough and keeping out the world, but what would that world have looked like if he had kept doors open to it? The openness of the woman looking at him seemed to encourage restless thoughts that had no place in his life.

Impatient with himself, he told her to go and sit.

‘There’s not much left to do,’ he said shortly. ‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour.’

‘Okay.’

‘And help yourself to more wine.’

He’d opened a bottle of red and poured them both a glass. She’d sipped her way through half of hers.

‘I’m annoying you, aren’t I?’

‘What sort of question is that?’ Mateo turned to look at her. She had subsided into one of the chairs at the table, a small thing bundled in clothing too big for her, nursing her glass and staring mournfully in his direction.

‘I don’t suppose you expected to end up having to cook food for someone you don’t want in your chalet.’

‘Life throws curve balls.’

‘You don’t strike me as the sort who does curve balls. A bit like you don’t do movies.’

‘Come again?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Alice shrugged. ‘I don’t blame you for being annoyed that you’re stuck with me. Hopefully this blizzard will die down tomorrow and I can be on my way.’ She rose to stroll towards the bank of windows and peered through the wooden shutters that concealed the vast space outside. ‘Doesn’t look like it,’ she said on a sigh. ‘When you’re in here, you don’t think it’s as wild outside as it is.’

‘Your friends...’ Mateo said awkwardly, sipping his wine and staring at her over the rim of his glass but remaining where he was, leaning against the counter, keeping a safe distance between them. He didn’t like the way he was distracted by her. ‘Is one of them your partner? If so, no need to be depressed about it. I’m sure this will blow over and I’ll make sure you’re safely delivered back to your lodge.’

‘Thank you. I’m an excellent skier; I certainly don’t need to be delivered anywhere safely by you! The days of damsels in distress needing to be rescued by knights in shining armour, who think they’re better skiers than they are, are long over.’ She grinned.

Mateo shot her a reluctant smile. He was tempted to tell her that he couldn’t think of any woman who would have rejected his offer and a lot who would have tried to engineer that exact situation. However, something told him that any comment along those lines wouldn’t go down well, which made the temptation to voice it even stronger.

‘But what about the anxious boyfriend wringing his hands and waiting for you to show up? Is he as experienced a skier as you?’

Food ready, Mateo began bringing dishes to the table, proud of the way he had risen to the occasion without resentment and only a little bit of initial hostility. The woman might have something about her he found a little unsettling, but it hadn’t put too much of a dent in his basic manners. He’d stepped up to the plate and not allowed his own personal annoyance at her invasion of his privacy get the better of him.

He wondered whether it helped that she was so straightforward and not interested in him as anything other than someone who had come to her aid. Maybe her sheer novelty value had lowered his defences, or maybe the unexpected situation had in turn generated unexpected reactions—unwelcome, uninvited but oddly energising, intoxicating reactions.

Alice’s stomach rumbled. She didn’t want to appear rude but she honestly couldn’t wait to dive into what he had produced from some onions, tomatoes and other bits and pieces that would probably have confounded her. Her culinary skills were basic to say the least. She watched as he helped her to the breaded chicken and pasta in a sauce that made her mouth water. She saw a shadow of a smile on his face.

‘That’s quite enough,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I couldn’t possibly eat any more.’

‘What about some cheese?’

Alice hesitated. He was here on his own and he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, not that that meant much. But was there a girlfriend in the background somewhere—even a wife? Whoever he was going out with, she was pretty sure that person wouldn’t have wanted to tuck into a plate piled high with food topped with a generous dollop of fresh parmesan on top.

‘Okay but just a bit. For the record, I’m here with three girlfriends. I... I don’t have an anxious boyfriend waiting for me anywhere.’

‘So what propelled you to make a headlong dash to this side of the mountain without your friends?’ He shot her an astute look that was discomforting, because it seemed to bore straight into her. ‘If I were the sort to indulge in guessing games, I’d have said you would have shot down here because of boyfriend troubles.’

‘I...’

‘Not that I’m asking you to expand,’ Mateo interjected smoothly. ‘Your business.’

Alice reddened, again in the grip of embarrassment at the thought that she was boring him.

He was making polite chit-chat because he had no choice. The last thing he wanted to hear was about her life or about her .

‘What about you?’ she asked, going slowly with the food, which took a lot of willpower, because she was ravenous. ‘I mean, why are you here on your own? Do you have anyone waiting up for you?’

‘I don’t believe my private life is any of your business,’ he returned gently.

‘It’s not. But if you can ask questions about me then isn’t it only fair that I ask questions about you?’

‘Not entirely, considering this is my lodge and you happen to be in it through misfortune as opposed to invitation.’

‘That’s not a very nice thing to say!’

‘I’ve sometimes been told that I’m not a very nice person,’ Mateo returned with a shrug.

‘Have you?’

‘You sound shocked.’ He grinned at her and Alice felt her skin prickle and a tide of pink wash her face.

‘Don’t you care?’

‘No.’ He raised his eyebrows, still smiling. ‘But, moving on from that, like I said when you got here, no wife and no girlfriend. Not here or waiting anywhere for me.’

Alice sighed. ‘You’re a fantastic cook.’ She changed the subject but was itching to return to him, to find out more about him, even though he was perfectly right to say that it was hardly her business to probe into his private life, as someone who had infuriatingly landed on his doorstep like a parcel delivered to the wrong address. She didn’t even know what he did: ‘self-employed’ could cover a multitude of sins!

‘What are you self-employed doing?’ she couldn’t resist asking. ‘And I know it’s none of my business, because I’m just here through sheer bad luck—at least, bad luck for you . Good luck for me.’

Mateo burst out laughing and pushed his plate to one side so that he could relax back in the chair and look at her, head tilted to one side.

‘You have a way when it comes to asking questions.’

‘Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher. We’re kind of trained to ask questions. So, what do you do? Are you a ski-instructor?’

He laughed again, this time with more amusement, and carried on looking at her, his amazing eyes as intimate as a caress as they rested on her.

‘From axe-murderer to ski-instructor with nothing in between.’

‘You told me you’re self-employed and you... Well, you have a chalet here out on one of the more dangerous runs, so you must be an experienced skier. I’m putting two and two together.’

‘You should avoid a career as a detective. No, I’m not a ski instructor, as it happens, even if I am proficient on the skis. I work in...tech.’

‘Oh.’

‘You look disappointed.’

‘I always thought that IT people were geeky.’

‘Not all.’

Mateo lowered his lashes.

Was this what it felt like to be anonymous, to blend in with the crowd and inhabit a place where no one around you knew who you were?

It was a long time since he’d been in that position. For most of his adult life, as he’d climbed the ladder at dizzying speed, he had become a recognisable commodity. He realised his world had shrunk to contain only people who moved in the same circles as he did. It was safe. Was it also limiting? It was something he hadn’t really considered before, because ‘safe’ equalled ‘controlled’ and control appealed.

Wealth and power attracted wealth and power and, while he had never courted any social scene, social scenes courted him. He got invitations to prominent events: hobnobbing with the great and the good; parties for openings stuffed with celebrities; and of course all those essential networking dos where the rich and influential mixed with the other rich and influential.

This getaway here was a taste of sanity. Being here with her meant she had no idea who he was and that was beginning to feel a little like a taste of sanity: stolen...temporary...pleasurable. She might not be his type. He definitely didn’t go for fluffy, small, voluptuous women who talked a lot, but he could write a book on the appeal of the unpredictable.

All taboo, when he thought about it. He shook himself free of the disturbing feeling of control slipping through his fingers.

‘So no argument with your boyfriend has brought you here,’ Mateo inserted briskly. ‘You were overcome with a need for some fresh air.’

‘Not as such.’

‘What does that mean?’

He opened his mouth to tell her again that he didn’t care whether she confided in him or not, that in fact he would rather she didn’t, but some base-level curiosity got the better of him and he shot her an encouraging look.

‘Well,’ Alice confided in a hitched voice. ‘My friend announced her engagement with lots of fanfare and champagne-cork-popping and I...well... I guess it just got to me. I was engaged eight months ago and... I broke it off. It’s not as though I’m sad that it ended, but all of a sudden I just felt empty inside and I had to get away. So, when I say the blizzard swept in from nowhere, it might have been a case of being so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t notice the sky getting darker and the snow getting thicker. At least, not until it was too late to do anything about it.’

Mateo shifted because, generally speaking, he disliked all this touchy-feely stuff. But then frowned as he saw tears begin to gather in the corner of her eyes. He hastily scouted round for something useful and settled on some paper towels on the kitchen counter, which he pushed over to her.

‘If you ditched the guy then why are you shedding tears over him? It obviously wasn’t much of a relationship.’

‘How can you say that?’ Alice rounded on him and vigorously dabbed her eyes.

‘You dumped him.’

‘Doesn’t mean—’

‘Doesn’t mean what?’

‘Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. Simon and I went back a long way. I’d known him since I was fifteen! He should have been the ideal guy for me.’

‘Mmm.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Mateo shrugged. ‘I’m the last person qualified to give advice on the makings of a good relationship, but if you’d known the guy since you were a kid, then maybe it was all just a little too cosy. Cosy,’ he said wryly, ‘is just a cousin once removed from boring, and who wants a boring partner?’

He looked at her with guarded appreciation and a little voice whispered to him, what would it be like, this woman who is so different from anyone else you’ve ever known...?

He shifted and cleared his head of the treacherous thought. It just didn’t pay to have thoughts like that. Bianca had been different once upon a time, until she’d ended up being just the same.

‘Simon was far from boring.’

‘So did the excitement get too much for you?’

‘I don’t know why I bothered to say anything to you about this,’ Alice muttered.

She met his gaze with fierce resistance but was thrown by the cool, amused, all-knowing, worldly look in the green eyes resting on her.

What must he think of her? She shouldn’t care but suddenly she saw herself through his eyes: small, could lose a few pounds, way too talkative and willing to confide, even in the face of all his signals that he was not that interested.

He might be an IT nerd but, with his looks, she reckoned he could have anyone he wanted, and from what she had seen of his chalet he was also not living in penury. He was one of those IT nerds with cash and those were in high demand. So was it any surprise that he found her amusing , after his initial horror that she had ruined his holiday for one? He didn’t see her as a woman . He saw her as a novelty toy: wind her up and watch her go. At least, that was her suspicion, and it was making her self-conscious.

‘I’m sorry,’ he surprised her by saying quietly. ‘I don’t mean to make fun of you or to somehow belittle what you’ve been through. It must have been tough, breaking off an engagement...’

‘It was,’ Alice said, drawn once again into his orbit and seduced into opening up, because there was something so compelling about him. ‘Everyone expected us to end up together, and I felt awful, because Simon is the nicest guy in the world.’

But just a tiny bit boring , she thought with a rare flash of acerbity. Way too cosy...way too much of a known quantity... ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘Do you? Enlighten me.’

‘You’re going to say that nice equals boring .’

‘Ah, was I? Thank you for filling me in. Saves me the bother of saying anything.’

‘You wouldn’t understand. I bet you’ve never experienced a broken engagement before—never known what it was like to pin your hopes on something, only for it to dissolve at the last minute.’

The silence that greeted this stretched and stretched until Alice began to fidget and wonder whether an apology might not be in order, although it wasn’t as though she’d asked him anything personal or been in any way offensive. He’d glanced down but now, as he raised his eyes to hers, they were cool and remote.

‘Can I ask something?’

‘What?’ Alice said cautiously.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘Don’t you think you’re very young to be thinking about embarking on love, marriage and the whole nine yards?’

Alice thought about her happily married parents, having met when they’d still been teenagers going to the same school. There had been a brief separation when they had gone to different universities but breaking up had never occurred to them.

She uneasily wondered whether she had thrown herself into Simon in a subconscious desire to emulate the example her parents had set. Or had she just been lazy in following a path that had been set for her without examining whether that was her path?

‘You’re never too young to fall in love,’ she said vaguely.

‘But you didn’t, did you? You made a mistake.’

‘Well...’

‘Not my problem. But, if you want to take some advice from someone a little further down the road than you, then I would say forget about the “true love” business at the moment. You have your life ahead of you; plenty of leg room to see what’s out there before you go looking for whatever it is you’re looking for.’

‘See what’s out there?’

‘Have fun and forget about the love,’ Mateo murmured in a low, silky voice that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

Have fun... I bet you’d be a lot of fun...

The thought leapt out at her with such surprising force that she was briefly struck dumb. She stared at him, her colour mounting, taking in the perfect symmetry of his face, his blatant sexuality and the lazy drift of his eyes that never left her face.

Surely he wasn’t flirting with her? That would be highly inappropriate, she decided.

At this point she felt that a jolt of alarm was in order. She should rise to her feet and say something about feeling tired and needing to get some rest. He wouldn’t stop her because, if there was one thing her gut instinct told her, it was that this guy was a gentleman, despite the arrogant, self-assured veneer and the annoying way he had of getting under her skin by telling her stuff she didn’t want to hear.

Instead, a buzz of forbidden excitement anchored her to the chair and she felt her pulse begin to pick up pace. Her body felt sensitive under the baggy clothes, his baggy clothes.

She fidgeted and then kept very still, just in case he noticed.

‘I’ll certainly have fun,’ she said politely.

‘Want some cheese? It’s the only dessert I eat.’

‘You have a lot of dos and don’ts in your life, don’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

Mateo was efficient when it came to tidying up behind himself. One more didn’t add much to the process. He brought three packs of exotic soft cheeses out of the fridge, along with crackers from the cupboard, and could tell that she was sorely tempted to join him but for some reason had decided that she would be ladylike and refuse.

How was she to know that he liked the way she enjoyed her food? He was also surprising himself with his tolerance when it came to her airing her views about this, that and everything under the sun, despite the fact that she surely must have read the room and noted that he was not the most encouraging person in the world when it came to people sharing their opinions of him with him. In fact, thinking about it, hadn’t he already made that perfectly clear on a couple of occasions?

‘I mean...’ Mateo watched with interest as she leant forward. Her arms were resting on the table and her breasts were nestled on her arms. They were abundant enough to push against the baggy clothes and it was making his imagination go into overdrive. ‘Mmm...?’ he encouraged absently as he felt the stirring of an erection. It was disobeying everything it was being told to do, namely to stop saluting and stand down.

She leant forward a little more. He wondered what she would look like under his clothes: rosy nipples, taut, tender and waiting to be kissed; the weight of heavy breasts in his big hands; the glorious perfection of wet womanhood opening up to him like a flower...

He drew in a sharp breath and sank a little lower in his chair.

‘You don’t do movies.’ She ticked off each point on her fingers in a very prim manner that was also something of a turn-on. ‘You don’t do dessert, which means you probably don’t do chocolate or ice-cream; you clearly don’t do sharing of confidences, and you probably don’t do love and marriage either, because you prefer to have fun, no strings attached...’

‘I admit that’s a fair summary of me.’ He grinned. ‘There are , however, quite a few things that I do do.’ He relaxed in the chair and realised that he was thoroughly enjoying himself. He took his time sampling some of the Brie and then pushed it over to Alice, gratified when she distractedly wedged some off with one of the crackers. He vaguely thought that it would be highly satisfying to take her to one of the terrific restaurants he went to in London and have her sample some of the finest food the capital had to offer. Not, he reminded himself, that that was on the cards.

‘I do ...’ he tabulated on his fingers ‘...work hard and I do ...’ he looked at her from under sooty, long lashes ‘...play hard.’

Thickening silence greeted this remark. Mateo noted the heightened colour that stole into her cheeks. She had a wonderfully transparent face, devoid of all artifice and guile. It wasn’t just the way she looked, though. It wasn’t just the satiny smoothness of her skin, the luminosity of her hazel eyes or the fact that her perfect hourglass figure did something crazy to his libido.

Her appeal lay in more than that. She dared to be one hundred percent genuine around him and that was a novelty. She didn’t play games—maybe because she didn’t know who he was, but he wanted to think that she just wasn’t a game player. He could spot those a mile off, whatever tactics they used and he could deal with them. In many ways, game players were a known quantity and when you were a billionaire, he figured they came with the territory. The woman who had just given him a stern critique of his failings was unique in all her differences.

He could tell from her expression that he had embarrassed her. Most women at this point would have fallen over themselves to explore his ambiguous rejoinder. She, however, was looking at him as though he had suddenly decided to do a striptease without warning her in advance.

‘Apologies.’ He held up his hands in a gesture of rueful surrender, belying the fact that his erection was still as hard as steel. ‘Just a thoughtless, light-hearted remark.’

‘No! No, no, no! Of course I understand that. When you’re freelance and having to work every day to get a pay packet, because if you have a day off you don’t get paid, then you need to let your hair down now and again.’

‘My life isn’t exactly that tortured.’ Mateo had the decency to flush at this sweeping misunderstanding of his position in life. He could frankly walk away from it all tomorrow and still have enough money to cruise through life in a way most people could only dream of doing.

‘And I can also understand,’ Alice said with bald sincerity, ‘why you were so annoyed when I banged on your door and you were forced to let me in, a complete stranger.’

‘You can...?’

‘You probably don’t get heaps of time off.’

‘I do work long hours, now that you mention it.’

‘So you get your one week here, or maybe two, and it’s interrupted by me. Can I ask...where is your permanent home?’

‘I...’ Mateo opened his mouth to say what came naturally to him, which was that he had several places. Although, he might be hard pushed to call any of them home , as such, which implied open fires and a dog somewhere, along with a partner waiting for him every evening with a hot meal and his slippers at the ready. ‘I live in London.’

Her face lit up.

‘So do I!’ She looked at him sympathetically. ‘I guess you probably don’t live in the sort of place I live in.’ She smiled without rancour. ‘If you can afford this as a holiday home then you’re not broke, which is good. Poverty can be a burden that pushes many off the cliff edge.’

‘I guess you could say that I’m not penniless.’ Mateo’s antennae vibrated because the last thing he wanted was to get involved in a discussion about what he could or couldn’t afford, even though he could see that she was utterly guileless in her questioning. A fundamental caring nature shone through everything she said. It was fascinating. The world he inhabited was dog-eat-dog and the women he dated enjoyed the challenge of dating a guy who lived in the fast lane. Right now he could be talking to someone from another planet.

‘Or maybe you rent this place out when you’re not using it? That would pay the overheads...’

‘Indeed.’

‘And then gives you enough to have somewhere modest, because honestly, getting onto the property ladder in London is a nightmare, isn’t it?’

‘Total nightmare.’ He thought of his six-bedroomed house in Holland Park with its manicured gardens in the front and rear and its own gym and swimming pool in the basement.

‘I have no idea whether I’ll ever be able to afford anything bigger than a box on my salary.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, I get you value your time here, and didn’t want it interrupted.’

‘Well,’ Mateo mused silkily, ‘now that it has been, I must tell you that I’m finding it far less onerous than I ever thought possible...’