Free The Truth Behind his Touch by Cathy Williams Page A

Giancarlo’s beautiful face. If only Alberto knew!
    She spun back around to look at her employer. ‘I’m going to fetch Tessa and tomorrow you won’t have your routine disrupted. Your son is going to be here for a few days. There will be time enough to take a trip down memory lane.’
    ‘
A
few days?’
They both said the same thing at the same time. Giancarlo was appalled and enraged while Alberto was hesitantly hopeful. Caroline decided to favour Giancarlo with a confirming nod.
    ‘Maybe even as long as a week,’ she threw at him, because wasn’t it better to be hanged for a sheep than a lamb? ‘I believe that’s what you said to me?’ She wondered where on earth this fierce determination was coming from. She always shied away from confrontation!
    ‘So tomorrow,’ she continued to both men, ‘there will be no need for you to worry about entertaining your son, Alberto. He will be sailing on the lake.’
    ‘I’ll be
sailing on the lake
?’
    ‘Correct. With me.’ This in case he decided to argue the rules she was confidently laying down, with a silent prayer in her head that he wasn’t going to launch into an outraged argument which would devastate Alberto, especially after the gruesome evening they had just spent together.
    ‘I thought you couldn’t sail, Caroline,’ Alberto murmured and she drew herself up to her unimpressive height of a little over five-three.
    ‘But I’ve been counting down the days I could start learning.’
    ‘You told me that you had a morbid fear of open water.’
    ‘It’s something I’ve been told I can only overcome by facing it … on open water. It’s a well-known fact that, er, that you have to confront your fears to overcome them …’
    She backed out of the room before Alberto could pin her down and flew to Tessa’s room. She could picture the awkward conversation taking place between Giancarlo and Alberto in her absence, and that was a best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario involved them both taking that trip down memory lane, the one she had temporarily managed to divert. It was a trip that could only lead to the sort of heated argument that would do no good to Alberto’s fragile recovery. With that in mind, she ran back to the sitting-room like a bat out of hell and was breathless by the time she reappeared ten minutes later.
    It was to discover that Giancarlo had disappeared.
    ‘The boy has work to do,’ Alberto told her.
    ‘At this hour?’
    ‘I remember when I was a young man, I used to work all the hours God made. Boy’s built like me, which might not be such a good thing. Hard work is fine but the important thing is to know when to stop. He’s a fine-looking lad, don’t you think?’
    ‘I suppose there might be some who like that sort of look,’ Caroline said dismissively. With relief, she heard Tessa approaching. Alberto drew no limits when it came to asking whatever difficult questions he had in his head. It was, he had proclaimed, one of the benefits of being anold bore. The last thing she wanted was to have an in-depth question-and-answer session on what she thought of his son.
    ‘Bright, too.’
    Caroline wondered how he could be so clearly generous in his praise for someone who had made scant effort to meet him halfway. She made an inarticulate noise under her breath and tried not to scowl.
    ‘Said he’d meet you by his car at nine tomorrow morning,’ Alberto told her, while simultaneously trying to convince Tessa, who had entered the room at a brisk pace, that he didn’t need to be treated like a child all the time. ‘Think he’ll enjoy a spot of sailing. It’ll relax him. He seems tense. Of course, I totally understand that, given the circumstances. So don’t you mind me, my dear. Think I’ll rise and shine, but not with the larks, and the old bat here can take me for my constitutional walk.’
    Tessa winked at Caroline and grinned behind Alberto’s back as she helped him up.
    ‘Anyone would think he wasn’t a complete