Italian Bachelors: Ruthless Propositions
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He knew she was right. He just didn’t know if he knew how. Or even wanted to.
There was the tiniest noise in the back of his head, something snapping. But instead of releasing his anger he’d unleashed something else. It was also something he couldn’t keep buried any longer, and it had nothing at all to do with his mother and everything to do with the firecracker of a woman standing in front of him.
Slowly he leaned forward, and watched Ruby’s eyes widen. Darken. He slid his hand behind her neck, relishing the feel of her bare skin, the soft wisps of her hair, until he cupped her head and drew her to him. And then he unleashed the full force of all he was too weary to hold back any longer in one scorching kiss.
* * *
Ruby knew she should have frozen, knew she should have slipped out of his arms and retained some degree of decorum. Unfortunately, she wasn’t that sensible. Instead of reminding him of the barrier between them, the one that no proper nanny would cross, she let him sledgehammer through it as he ran hot kisses down the side of her neck.
She’d never been one for holding back and she certainly didn’t do so now. She ran her hands up his chest, grabbed his shirt collar and lifted herself closer, abandoning herself to the feel of his skin upon hers, his body pressed so tight against her own she felt breathless.
He slid his hands down the curve of her back to her waist, emphasising her femininity against his hard, straight masculinity. He kissed her again and she felt them both teeter on the edge of something, threatening to topple headlong into goodness knew what.
Oh, sweet heaven. She’d been right. When Max Martin let loose there was sizzle and passion and consuming fire, and all of that force was concentrated on her now, at the point where his lips were urgently seeking hers again. It was glorious.
It was also very stupid.
Max must have had an identical revelation at the same time, because he froze, his hands circling her waist, and then he stepped back, effectively dropping her back from her tiptoes onto her flat feet. She swayed, the sudden lack of solid, Max-shaped support and the cold air rushing between their bodies putting her off balance.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he almost stuttered, a look of complete horror on his face. ‘That was totally inappropriate.’
Ruby’s lips were still throbbing and her hormones still singing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’. She blinked and stared back at him. Inappropriate? That was not a word a girl wanted to hear after the hottest kiss of her life.
He shook his head and strode past her and back into the salon. She watched him go, a gnawing feeling growing in her stomach. She couldn’t let him leave like this. This wasn’t his fault. She had to let him know that she’d been just as much a part of it as he had been. She heaved in a much-needed lungful of night air and ran after him. ‘Max!’
He turned as he passed through the double doors into the corridor.
‘You don’t have to... I mean, it wasn’t just...’ She trailed off, unable to find the words. He looked so thoroughly wretched. Part of her sank, but another part wanted to reach out to him, to soothe that crumpled expression from his face.
She’d pushed him too far, when he’d been feeling too raw, and he’d lost control. She got that. But maybe it was a good thing. Maybe loosening up in one area of his life would have a knock-on effect?
But it wasn’t just that. The way he’d kissed her, hard and hungry, verging on desperate. He had to feel it, too, this weird attraction, crush...whatever. She wasn’t alone in this.
She opened her mouth to speak, hardly knowing how to form the question, but at that moment Fina appeared at the top of the stairs and spotted them farther down the corridor. The atmosphere had been thick around her and Max anyway, but now it became so dense it turned brittle.
Fina walked up to them and looked at her son. Any hint of the distress she’d shown earlier was gone, replaced by a brisk and prickly demeanour. ‘It’s your last night tomorrow, Massimo.’
With what looked like supreme effort, Max dragged his gaze from Ruby and turned it to Fina. ‘I know that,’ he replied.
Ruby looked between mother and son. In an earlier century, an atmosphere like this would have been dispersed by cocking pistols and marching twenty paces in opposite directions. She hoped that Fina would say something conciliatory, forgiving her son his outburst instead of nursing her own pain into hardness.
Tell him you love him, Ruby wanted to yell. Tell him he’s everything in the world to you. Max might not see it, but she did. It was evident in every breath Fina took.
But Fina stared back at her son. It seemed she’d learned a thing or two from her buttoned-up husband about staying granite-like in the face of pain. She nodded. ‘Good. Just don’t forget you promised to take Ruby out to see the city at sunset. It’s her last chance.’
And then she turned and walked down the corridor to her bedroom.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RUBY WAITED IN THE SALON in her carefully chosen outfit. She’d changed three times, veering between ‘boating casual’, which made her look as if she were going out for a country walk with her grandparents, and Roman Holiday, which made her look as if she was trying a little bit too hard. Maybe it had been the thick liquid liner and the red lipstick.
In the end she’d settled for a boat-necked navy cotton dress with a full enough skirt for clambering, her ballet pumps and a little black cardigan. The eyeliner stayed, but the lipstick was replaced by something in a more natural colour. Something that didn’t scream ‘Come and get me!’, because she had a feeling there was no way Max was going to, even if it did.
While he hadn’t answered the question she’d wanted to ask last night in words, his actions had done a pretty effective job for him. He wasn’t in the grip of the same fairy-tale crush she had been, that was for sure.
If he had been, he wouldn’t have avoided her all day. He certainly wouldn’t have taken Sofia out for ice cream on his own that morning, saying that even trainee travelling nannies needed some time off. She knew a brush-off when she heard one. She’d been getting them from her father all her life.
She checked the ornate gold clock on the marble mantelpiece. Ten to seven. Fina had decreed they should leave here on the hour to catch the whole glory of the sunset, which was supposed to be closer to eight.
She wandered over to the long windows and took in the golden light hitting the front of a pink and white palazzo on the other side of the canal. Max had been right. This city spun a spell, making you believe things that weren’t real, making you hope for things that could never be. She understood why so many people loved it now. And why he hated it.
She stayed there, watching the light play on the water, for what seemed like only a few minutes, and Fina startled her when she swept into the room and turned on the light. Ruby hadn’t realised it had got that dark yet.
‘Where’s Max?’ Fina asked, looking round, her brows drawn together.
Ruby shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We’re supposed to be leaving at—’
The clock on the mantelpiece caught her eye. It was five past seven. He’d be here soon, though, she didn’t doubt that. Whatever else Max was, he was a man of his word.
She almost wished he weren’t. It was going to be awkward. She’d back out if she could, but she sensed Fina would blame Max somehow if she did, and the last thing Ruby wanted was to cause more trouble between mother and son.
Fina tutted and swept from the room before Ruby could say anything else.
Ruby walked over to an armchair at the edge of the seating area and dropped into it. It was one of those old seats that accepted her weight with a ‘poof’ then slowly sank until her bottom rested fully against the cushion.
She stared into the empty fireplace and waited. A few moments later she heard Fina clip-clopping back up the corridor. She entered the room and sighed dramatically. ‘He has a very important phone call, apparently. The whole of London will fall down if he doesn’t speak to this man at this precise minute.’ She shook her head. ‘I shall go and read to Sofia, but he says he will be out in only a few minutes.’
Ruby nodded, and placed her hands in her lap. She rested back against the armchair instead of sitting up poker straight. No point in getting a stiff back waiting for him.
There was a squeal and the sound of two pairs of footsteps—one small and slippered, the other bigger and harder—and a moment later Sofia ran into the room in her pyjamas, her grandmother in hot pursuit. She launched herself at Ruby and landed on her lap.
Fina pressed a hand to her chest, and said breathlessly, ‘She’s full of beans tonight, and she wanted to come and see you.’
‘That’s okay.’ Then she turned to Sofia. ‘Perhaps doing something quiet together for a few minutes will help you get ready for bed. What do you say, young lady?’
‘Daw!’ said Sofia loudly and pointed to the crayons and scrap paper that had been left out after their earlier colouring session.
Ruby chuckled and let Sofia slip off her lap before she joined her kneeling by the coffee table. ‘And what would you like to draw this evening?’
Sofia thought for a moment. ‘Naughty fish!’
Of course.
Ruby couldn’t remember how many mischievous crabs she’d sketched since that first one: on the bottom of the lagoon, in a carnival mask, and Sofia’s favourite—clinging determinedly to her uncle’s big toe with a pair of razor-sharp pincers. She quickly did an outline in black pen, a gentler scene this time, something more in keeping with bedtime. She drew the cheeky crab in the back of a gondola with his equally cheeky crustacean girlfriend, being punted along by a singing gondolier in the moonlight.
When she realised what she’d done, how romantic she’d made the scene, she sighed and pushed it her charge’s way.
There Venice went again...messing with her head.
‘Here you go. And make sure you colour nicely. I don’t want it all scribbled over in two seconds flat.’
Sofia nodded seriously, then set to work giving the lady crab a shock of purple hair, which Ruby approved of most heartily.
The sun was down behind the buildings now. Ruby stood and walked to the window, drawn closer by a patchwork sky of yellows and pinks and tangerines, sparsely smeared with silvery blue clouds. Venice, which often had an oddly monochrome feel to its palette, was bathed in golden light.
She walked back over to where Sofia was colouring and complimented her on her hard work, even though the cartoonish drawing she’d provided her with was almost entirely obliterated with heavy strokes of multicoloured crayon. She pulled out a piece of paper for herself. Most of the sheets had writing on the back. They’d gone through Fina’s meagre stash of drawing paper and now were wading through documents Max had discarded, using them as scrap. Ruby flipped it over and looked at what was on the printed side.
It was a detail for an interior arch in one of the galleries of the National Institute of Fine Art. The shape was square with no adornment, and Ruby could see where the metal and studs of a supporting girder were left unhidden, giving it a textured, yet industrial air. She thought of the buildings Max had shown her up and down the canal, how he’d explained the Venetians had taken styles from the countries they visited with their own to make something unique, and, instead of turning the sheet back over again and drawing another princess, she picked up a pen and began to embellish.
She sighed, her heart heavy inside her chest. She might as well occupy herself while she waited.
* * *
‘You need to get back here right away,’ Alex, Max’s second-in-command at Martin & Martin insisted, more than a hint of urgency in his tone.
Max closed his eyes to block out the dancing cherubs above his head. He’d been pacing to and fro in his mother’s library and he was starting to get the uncanny feeling they were watching him. ‘I know.’
‘Vince McDermot wants the institute commission and he wants it bad.’
Max opened his eyes and stared at the screen on his laptop. ‘I know. But the institute board have committed to giving me this extra few weeks to tweak our designs. They won’t go back on that.’
Alex sighed. ‘True, but McDermot has been out and about wining and dining key members of the board behind our backs. Either you need to come back to London and start schmoozing this instant or we need to come up with a design that’ll blow that slimy little poser out of the water.’
Max knew this. He also knew he wasn’t good at schmoozing. ‘You’re better at buttering clients up than I am.’
Alex let out a low, gruff laugh. ‘Damn right, but it’s you they want, Max. It’s time to stop playing happy families and get your butt back here.’
Now it was Max’s turn to laugh. Happy families? Yeah, right.
‘I’ve been doing what needs to be done to focus on the work, Al. You know that.’
Alex grunted. ‘All I’m saying is that there’s no point in us burying our heads in the sand about this. Otherwise, the month will be up, we’ll submit new designs and, even if they do have the “wow factor”, the board will be more inclined to go with that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy.’
One of the reasons Max liked Alex, both as a colleague and a friend, was that he didn’t mince his words. Alex had a point, though. Vince McDermot was London’s new architectural wunderkind. Personally, Max thought his designs impractical and crowd-pleasing. They’d never stand the test of time.
‘I’m flying back to London tomorrow afternoon, so that’s that sorted,’ he told Alex. ‘The other stuff? Well, that’s another story, but if we can keep them sweet for the next fortnight, it’ll give us time to come up with what they’re looking for.’
It had to come at some point, didn’t it? He’d been hailed for his ‘ground-breaking minimalist and elegant style’, won awards for it. But that had been before. Now he couldn’t come up with anything fresh and exciting. It was as if his talent had been buried with his father.
Alex made a conciliatory noise. ‘Listen, I should have more of an idea of who exactly he’s been sliming up to in the next fifteen minutes. Do you want me to call back, or are you going to hold?’
Max looked at the clock. It was half past seven.
He hadn’t forgotten what that meant.
He was late. Really late.
‘I’ll hold,’ he said.
His conscience grumbled. He let the relief flooding through him drown it out.
It was better this way. It was getting harder and harder to remember Ruby was his employee. Harder and harder to stop himself relaxing so much in her presence that he kept letting his guard down. He couldn’t afford to do that. Not here. Not with his mother so close.
Better to put a stop to it now.
So Max made himself sit down. He made himself tinker with the designs for the institute’s atrium. He made himself ignore the clawing feeling deep inside that told him he was being a heel, that he was hurting her for no reason.
Unfortunately, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Probably because the lines and angles in front of him on the screen kept going out of focus, and he kept imagining what it would be like to be out in the boat with Ruby, the dark wrapping around them, enclosing them in their own little bubble while the lights of the city danced on the lagoon.
That only made him crosser.
Damn her. It was all her fault, waltzing into his neatly ordered life, turning it upside down.
You asked her. Hell, you practically commanded her to come with you.
Yeah? Well, everybody made mistakes. Even him. Occasionally.
It was only when he stood up to pace around the room again that he realised he’d put the phone down on Alex at some point in the last five minutes and hadn’t even noticed. He said a word that should have made the cherubs on the ceiling put their fingers in their ears.
And all that messing around he’d done on the atrium plans was a load of rubbish! In fact, all the work he’d done on them in the last couple of days had been tired and uninspiring. What had he been thinking?
He shook his head, perfectly aware of what had been filling it. That was why it would be so much better when he was back in London. He’d be able to get his brain round it then, removed from any distractions. Any strawberry-clad, purple-streaked distractions.
Now, where was the earlier atrium design? The one where he’d pared it all back to the basics? He might as well get rid of all these silly changes and start from scratch.
He rummaged through the papers on his mother’s antique desk. He’d had a printout of it. It had to be around here somewhere.
* * *
Ruby sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork. Not bad, even if she did say so herself. Maybe Max was right about her having some real artistic flair. Maybe she could do something with it, rather than just ‘messing around’, as her father called it.
There was such beauty and simplicity in Max’s designs, but this one had just needed a little something—a curve here, a twirl there. By the time she’d finished, the arch on Max’s discarded plan was a strange hybrid between twenty-first-century industrial and Venetian Gothic, with a little bit of Ruby thrown in for fun.
Perhaps she should be an architect?
The fact she didn’t burst out laughing then roll on the floor at that thought was all thanks to Max. He’d believed in her ability to draw, seen something no one else saw, and she was starting to think she could even see it herself. She wanted to tell him that when they went out later, to thank him, but she didn’t really know how to put it into words without betraying everything else she was starting to feel.
‘More fish!’ Sofia demanded, grinning at Ruby so appealingly that Ruby didn’t have the heart to make her say please.
‘I think maybe it’s time Grandma tucked you into bed,’ she told Sofia, smiling. Fina rose from where she’d been reading a magazine in an armchair, and held her hand out for her granddaughter. After running and giving Ruby a hug, Sofia allowed herself to be led away and Ruby was once again alone in the salon.
She tried not to look, but the gold clock on the mantelpiece drew her gaze like a magnet.
Eight o’clock.
A quick glance outside confirmed her suspicions. Compared to the brightly lit salon, the sky outside was bottomless and dark. Not helped by the heavy clouds that had started to gather over the city in the last half hour.
Max had stood her up.
She let her eyelids rest gently closed and inhaled. It didn’t matter.
The heaviness in her heart called her a liar.
But it shouldn’t be there. She was a paid employee. He owed her nothing more than her wages.
It was just...
She shook her head and opened her eyes again, then she got off up the floor and started piling the scattered bits of drawing up, putting the crayons back in their tub.
Just nothing.
She’d been fooling herself again, thinking this was something when it wasn’t. Max hadn’t seen inside her, he hadn’t spotted the potential that no one else had. He’d just paid her a compliment or two, that was all. And that kiss? Heat-of-the-moment stuff that produced nothing but regrets. She’d doled out a few of those herself in her time. Nothing to sweat about.
Then why did she feel like going to her room, shutting the door behind her and bawling her eyes out?
She gathered the sheets of paper in various sizes up in her arms and headed towards the door. She wasn’t quite sure where she was going to put these, but she suspected Fina wouldn’t want them scattered around her most formal living space. Maybe they could find a home for one or two of the best ones on the fridge door?
She couldn’t have been looking where she’d been going, because when the salon door burst open and Max came barrelling through she didn’t have time for evasive manoeuvres. She stumbled sideways, the stack of paper went flying into the air and then fluttered noisily down like oversized confetti.
Max just stood in the doorway, looking somewhat stunned.
He didn’t say anything, but he shook himself slightly then bent to help her pick up the scattered drawings.
Damn him for being such a gentleman. She wanted to hate him right now.
‘Here,’ he said, when they’d finished gathering up the last of them, and held a sheaf of papers in her direction.
‘Thanks,’ she mumbled, chickening out of looking him in the eye.
Max must have been doing the same, because suddenly he got very interested in the top sheet of paper.
‘What the hell?’ he started to say, and then his expression grew thunderous. ‘What’s this?’
Ruby rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said, feeling her cheeks heat. ‘I didn’t intend to make the cartoon of you being bitten by the crab at first, but Sofia thought it looked like you, because it was a man, probably, and then it just became a kind of joke and we—’
‘I’m not talking about a silly drawing!’ Max said, his voice getter louder.
His words were like a punch to Ruby’s gut. ‘But I—’
‘I’m talking about this!’ And he thrust a sheet of paper so close to her face that she had to step back to focus on it. It was the doodle she’d just finished: Max’s arch with her little bit of decorative nonsense superimposed.
Artist? Hah! Don’t kid yourself, Ruby.
‘It was just... I mean, I just...’ She let out a frustrated sigh and spiked her fingers through her neatly combed fringe. ‘It’s just a doodle, Max.’
‘A doodle?’
Ruby’s heart thudded and her stomach dived into her ballet pumps. If the heat of Max’s anger hadn’t been scalding her face, his expression would have been kind of funny. She nodded, feeling all the while that she was walking into an ambush that she didn’t know how to avoid.
‘These are my plans!’ Max bellowed. ‘What on earth makes you think you have the right to doodle on them? Are you out of your mind?’
Ruby’s mouth moved and she backed away. ‘But, it was there...’ her gaze flicked to the coffee table, where the pile of unmolested scrap paper still sat. ‘...with the stuff you tossed out the other day...on the top of the pile.’
‘This wasn’t scrap!’ he yelled. ‘These are my original plans. You had no right to use them for Sofia. No right at all.’
Ruby was so puzzled that she couldn’t even react to Max’s anger at that moment. How had Max’s plans got there? How? He’d given them the sheaf of papers himself yesterday and, okay, she hadn’t noticed that one sitting on top then, but neither she nor Sofia had been anywhere near the library. The plans couldn’t have walked here on their own.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, shaking her head.
Max began to laugh. But it wasn’t the warm, rich sound she remembered from the the day they’d gone crabbing. It was a dark, rasping sound that made the hair on her arms stand up on end.
‘Of course,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have hired you. Why I didn’t listen to my gut I’ll never know. What was I thinking? You have no qualifications, no experience—’
Now was the moment that the furnace of Ruby’s anger decided to whomph into life. She went from shivery and cold to raging inferno in the space of a heartbeat.
‘You’re right!’ she yelled back at him. ‘You want to know if I’m cut out to be a nanny? Well, I can answer that right now—I’m not! Not if it means I have to like working for closed-off, emotionally constipated jerks like you.’
Max went very still and his expression was completely neutral. If anything, that was more worrying than all the bluff and fluster had been. Ruby felt herself start to shake. She knew she’d gone too far, that she shouldn’t have said that. But, as the sensible side of her brain tried to tell her that, the impulsive, emotional side blocked its ears and sang la la la.
‘I should fire you for this,’ he said, and his voice was as cold as the marble floor beneath their feet.