Maid for Montero - By Kim Lawrence Page 0,53

had never come to him before.

‘And I expect he knows you’re still angry with him.’

‘I’m not…’ He caught her eyes once more and sighed, dragging a hand through his sable hair until it stood up in tufts around his bronzed face.

‘All right, I am angry…How could he take the word of that woman and not his friends, people who he had known for years?’

‘You, you mean?’

He shrugged and issued his response through clenched teeth. ‘It is not important.’

Zoe felt her heart squeeze in her chest in sympathy. ‘It must have been hurtful.’

Isandro looked from the blue eyes brimming with sympathy to the hand that lay on his arm and thought, What the hell am I doing?

Regretting the outburst that had made him reveal so much of his feelings, and equating it with weakness, he slid his arm from under her hand. He was not a man who shared his problems. His cure for extreme frustration was mind-numbing laps of the pool, or a run that battered body and mind into numbness.

This time he had not sought the pool or donned his running shoes. He had…Why had instinct made him seek out Zoe?

‘What was hurtful, as you put it,’ he countered in a harsh voice, ‘was being forced to put my own life on hold and pull in every favour I had owing in order to stop the firm going under and my father ending up in jail. It wasn’t just his money the bitch got. He’d “borrowed” from clients’ accounts.’

Zoe watched the shutters go back up, hearing the lack of emotion in his hard voice. She could have screamed in sheer frustration, but instead she put her hand back in her lap, her feelings see-sawing violently between empathy and a strong desire to shake him.

Did he imagine allowing her even a glimpse of the man beneath the mask gave her some sort of special power?

‘Don’t worry, Isandro, I’d already guessed you’re actually human.’ Their glances connected and Zoe saw the shock he was not quick enough to hide flicker in the second before his hooded eyelids lowered, leaving her looking at the gleam of his eyes through the mesh of his eyelashes. ‘But I won’t tell anyone. Your secret is safe with me,’ she promised.

His lips tightened, but the faint flush along the angle of his cheekbones suggested she had made her point. ‘I am not in the mood for word games, Zoe.’

‘Fine, is this straightforward enough? Your dad made a mistake once…all right, a big mistake,’ she conceded in response to his snort. ‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t an outside possibility he actually loves this woman.’

His lip curled contemptuously. ‘My father believes in fairy tales.’ While he despised the childlike credulity, there had been moments when Isandro almost envied his father.

‘Isn’t that a good thing? That the awful woman didn’t win?’ she said softly.

The suggestion caused Isandro to turn his head sharply to look at her, the compassion glowing in her eyes as much as the statement causing him to frown. A nerve jumped spasmodically in his lean cheek. A man was allowed some privacy, yet she continually ignored the ‘keep off’ signs and crossed the boundaries.

Didn’t you invite her in when you offloaded your emotional garbage?

His frown deepened as he pushed away the question and barked, ‘How do you figure that one out?’

Watching as she stuck out her chin to a belligerent angle, he felt his anger slipping away to be replaced with an emotion he was less comfortable putting a name to. The woman had more guts than anyone he had ever met.

‘If your father had come out of the experience a cynic she would have won, but he hasn’t. He hasn’t become bitter, cynical and twisted.’

She saw the flicker of an emotion she could not name in his dark eyes before he turned his head away from her. The rain had begun to drum against the window.

‘Are you saying I have?’

Instead of responding to the question, she voiced one that had popped into her head during the conversation. ‘Is that why your marriage failed?’

He turned to face her and instead, as she half expected, of telling her to mind her own business, shook his head and repeated the question.

‘Is what why my marriage failed?’

Did he lay the blame for his failed marriage at his father’s door? It would certainly go a long way to explain why, all these years later, he could not forgive and forget. Common sense told her this was a subject she shouldn’t