Sandro Lambert’s infamous reputation.
‘You needn’t worry, love,’ teased Babs, rising to her feet and strolling over to one of the windows. ‘Rumour has it that Sandro’s off women with a vengeance at the moment—or, at least, that he was when filming finished a few weeks ago.’
Tessa rose and joined her, a sigh of awed disbelief escaping her as she looked out over the hotel grounds and down on to the turbulent majesty of the sea below.
‘It’s so incredibly wild and beautiful here,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve never been to Ireland before, but I’d love to—Babs, who’s that?’ she exclaimed as a tall, dark-haired woman appeared round the side of the building. ‘Wow, she certainly matches the scenery for beauty!’
‘Good heavens, it’s Angelica Bellini!’ gasped Babs, her neck craning as the woman disappeared from view.
‘Is she a film star?’
Babs shook her head dismissively. ‘Her brother, Umberto, often works with Sandro. He’s quite a famous cameraman—you might have heard of him. There was a terrible accident on the set of Sandro’s last film and Umberto was badly injured. Oh, look—here come the crew now.’
Tessa leaned forward, peering intently through the window as a group of men, laden with equipment, appeared from the shrubbed path leading up from the beach and walked across the lawn. ‘Which one is Sandro Lambert?’ she demanded, feeling a sudden twinge of excitement even though none of the men she could see seemed to bear any resemblance to the photographs she had seen of the fêted film director.
‘He doesn’t appear to be with them,’ muttered Babs. ‘Oh, yes—there he is now.’
Tessa watched the tall figure of a man stride from the path and across the lawn. He was dressed in what she took to be ski-wear—a sensible choice, she decided, given the piercing cold of the January wind now whipping its way through the curling blackness of his hair—his broad shoulders hunched against the elements and his hands rammed deep into his pockets. The photographs she had seen of him, she now realised, had given little indication of the true size of the man, or of the virile strength almost radiating from that purposefully striding figure. It was when he drew close enough for his features to become clearly visible that she heard her own gasp of disbelief.
‘He’s not exactly what you’d call photogenic, is he?’ she breathed. ‘Babs, he’s…he’s absolutely gorgeous!’
‘This is all I need!’ groaned Babs, hauling her away from the window and back to where they had been sitting. ‘It’s bad enough Angelica turning up here, but if you start drooling over him, my girl, he’ll make mincemeat out of you—I mean it, Tess.’
‘For heaven’s sake!’ exclaimed Tessa indignantly. ‘I wasn’t drooling! And why is it bad that Angelica’s turned up?’
‘I…oh, forget it,’ muttered Babs. ‘Look, they’ll be here any moment now and I forgot to warn you not to mention your connection with Conway Press. Sandro’s become a bit paranoid about the Press of late—and that’s putting it mildly.’
Tessa felt her entire body tense. ‘Conway Press is hardly the gutter press,’ she muttered, her tone verging on defensive. ‘But, if it makes you feel better, you can introduce me as Tessa Morgan.’ The instant she had made the suggestion she was sickened by her own duplicity and suddenly she was no longer sure that this fortuitous trip to Ireland would turn out to be the brilliant career move it had so recently seemed.
‘Actually, that’s not a bad idea!’ exclaimed Babs. ‘It can be your professional name,’ she teased.
Realising that she couldn’t bring herself to deceive her cousin like this, Tessa opened her mouth to protest, then closed it with a silent groan of frustration as a group of men burst into the room, all talking at the tops of their voices in a baffling assortment of languages.
‘Ciao, Babs!’ called out one of them, a thick-set, craggily attractive man who made his way over to them with a broad grin of delight. ‘This Ireland!’ he groaned through a heavy Italian accent. ‘So beautiful, but so wet and cold!’
‘Paolo, I’d like you to meet my cousin, Tessa—Tessa Morgan,’ said Babs, once she had extricated herself from his bear-hug of a greeting, her laughing emphasis of the surname leaving Tessa once again awash with feelings of guilt. ‘She’s standing in for my assistant who, like everyone else, has come down with the flu.’
‘More of this terrible flu,’ murmured Paolo with a doleful shake of his head as he and Tessa shook hands. ‘We’ll all die here,’ he added dramatically, kneeling down in front of the huge, open fire and spreading his arms as though about to hurl himself into its flames. ‘I tell Sandro the film is perfect, is finished—but he don’t listen. He brings us here to freeze to death while we film footage we don’t even need.’
‘Paolo’s the director of photography and just about the most brilliant cameraman around,’ Babs confided in a loud stage whisper, ‘but he’s also an unremitting pessimist’
As the rest of the group gradually joined them by the fire, Tessa felt a glow of exhilaration as she was drawn into their boisterous, multi-lingual banter, and decided that, even if her plan to break into journalism by means of a covert profile on Sandro Lambert came to nothing, at least she was going to enjoy these few days in this easygoing, cosmopolitan company.
‘What we are now about to have is an Irish tea.’
Tessa turned her head at the sound of those words, attracted by their fascinatingly husky tones and the faintest trace of an accent so elusive she wasn’t certain it actually existed. The first thing to catch her eye was a five-tier trolley being wheeled in by one of the hotel maids, its lower tiers laden with a lavish assortment of sandwiches, home-baked fruit breads and cream cakes, its upper ones with tea and coffee, silverware, cutlery and crockery. Her gaze then moved along to the man who had spoken and who was now conducting a conversation in Italian with Paolo and another of the men.
He had changed, she noted, completely oblivious of the intensity of her gaze as her eyes moved up from the long, perfectly shaped legs, now encased in denim so faded it was almost white, to the heavy navy fisherman’s sweater adorning an athletic, broad-shouldered torso. When her gaze finally alighted on Sandro Lambert’s face, the thought that again crossed her mind was that he really wasn’t in the least photogenic. True, any pictures she had seen of him had portrayed an extremely good-looking man, but not one of them had managed to capture anything of the extraordinary vitality he exuded—a powerful, almost animal magnetism that seemed to radiate from him.
Tessa’s eyes were still engrossed in their inspection when he broke off his conversation with the two men.
‘I’m sure we can manage to serve ourselves,’ she heard him tell the maid, a hint of laughter further warming the husky attractiveness of his voice.
So this was what was meant by charisma, thought Tessa, utterly fascinated and so lost in her leisurely inspection of this phenomenon possessing it that she hadn’t noticed the point at which he switched from Italian to French, her whole attention caught up in the husky softness of the sounds emanating with such fluid ease from a large, expressive and sensuously full-lipped mouth that parted every now and then to display teeth of stunningly white perfection.
She would no doubt have indulged herself in an equally leisurely inspection of the strong, classical lines of his nose had her gaze not been drawn, as though by command, to a pair of eyes trained implacably on her own. The eyes she encountered were a startling blend of velvety brown and topaz, but it wasn’t their unusual colour that startled her, nor was it the fact that he was still holding an animated conversation with one of the French members of his crew even while his eyes held hers in their mesmerising gaze. It was the unmitigated hostility with which she was being observed that startled her into a flustered awareness of how blatantly she had been staring.
The sensation of hot colour flaring to her cheeks only adding to her feelings of utter mortification, Tessa hastily transferred her gaze to the trolley the maid had wheeled