The Italian Tycoon's Mistress

‘In there.’ She pointed vaguely at the bundle of papers. ‘They’re mostly estimates, but I’m quite familiar with all the suppliers we now use and we get pretty good deals from them.’

‘Run it by me.’

‘I can’t.’ Amy flushed and looked away, before circling round the desk to fetch her bag from the chair. Where had the time gone? She couldn’t have been talking for over two hours? It was now after five-thirty and of all the days to lose track of time, this had to be right up there as one of the worst.

‘You have already shown your lack of professionalism in failing to come and see me on the pretext that you were too busy and now it appears that you are happy to cut short what could be a very pivotal meeting for you and your staff because…what?’

‘I just have to go. I’m sorry.’ Amy slung her bag over her shoulder. ‘I didn’t realise how long I’d been here.’

‘Go where?’

‘I’m prepared to discuss whatever you want to discuss as far as work goes, Mr Losi, but I’m certainly not prepared to discuss my personal life with you. That’s none of your business.’ Those cool blue eyes were unnerving though, and Amy knew how things must look from his point of view. Here she was, ready to defend her position with all the ammunition at her disposal just so long as it didn’t clash with her personal life. She sighed and dropped her bag onto the chair.

‘I…I have a date, actually, and I can’t possibly cancel it because I’ve already cancelled the last three. Sam’s got tickets for us to go to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the theatre and I just don’t want to let him down. Again.’

Rocco looked at the flushed, embarrassed face and felt a spurt of intense, unfamiliar interest kick-start inside him.

‘Also,’ she mumbled uncomfortably into the engulfing silence, which she read as yet more mounting, unspoken criticism, ‘my car’s in for service and Edward can’t take me to the theatre. I’m going to have to get a cab and it’s always difficult getting one to come this far out of the town centre in summer. Too many tourists around competing for too few taxi drivers.’ She contemplated the convoluted journey, which would not really leave her sufficient time to go back to her house and change, and gloomily tried to imagine Sam’s expression as he paced the foyer waiting for her. He wouldn’t be overjoyed. He had already told her that her workaholic tendencies were beginning to try his patience.

‘Okay.’ Rocco shrugged and stood up. ‘We’ll continue this on Monday.’

Amy breathed a sigh of relief and stole a surreptitious look at him. For a big man, he moved with surprising grace and she wondered whether he played a lot of sport. Didn’t they all do that in New York? Join gyms so that they could frantically work out? If he played any sport, she imagined that it would be of the confrontational kind, something like squash that was fast and vigorous and would allow him to thrash his opponent to a pulp.

As far as Amy was concerned, the gym was something that she had spent the past five years meaning to get around to but never quite managing.

She hardly noticed that he was standing beside her, opening the door for her to leave, and she said, in some surprise, ‘You’re not leaving work already, are you? Don’t you burn the midnight oil?’

‘What makes you think that I’m not leaving here so that I can carry on burning it somewhere else?’ he asked with a crooked smile. The first smile she had seen and her heartbeat quickened treacherously. Bastard the man might be, but a very sexy one.

‘In which case, have fun.’ She shrugged, heading for the stairs, and was taken aback to find that he was keeping step with her, tailoring his long strides to match her smaller ones.

There were still a number of people in the old building, but most of the secretarial staff had already left. Unofficially, they were allowed to head home earlier than usual on a Friday, and most of the junior members of staff took advantage of the fact. Busy doing the things she had never really seemed to do, she supposed. Partying, flitting from boyfriend to boyfriend, drinking until the early hours of the morning and then waking up with hangovers.

Her father’s deteriorating and agonising illness had taken a huge dent out of her youth and she had emerged with all the carefree joys of being young seemingly lost to her for ever. Not that she had once regretted the reasons she had grown into adulthood before her time. She didn’t. But she knew that things might have been different if she had not had to cope with the strains of looking after her father when she had barely been able to look after herself. She had thrown herself into her work, knowing that she had had a lot to prove with her age being against her.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked casually as they walked down the staircase, for the sake of saying something. ‘Anywhere interesting?’

‘To the theatre,’ he said, as casually. ‘To drop you off for your hot date.’

Amy stopped dead in her tracks and looked at him with nervous dismay. ‘Thank you. Very much, but I’d really rather you didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

A thousand and one reasons fluttered inside her head but she was hard pressed to name one and, in the ensuing silence, he said reasonably, ‘We spent longer than we thought going over the files. That was my fault. Hence I intend to help you make up for lost time by driving you to wherever you are going. Unless you have time to go back to your place and dress first, in which case I’ll take the necessary detour, but I should think you probably wouldn’t.’

‘There’s no need to put yourself out…’

‘Why don’t you accept the offer of a lift in the spirit in which it was intended?’

Amy accepted faintly, faced with zero choice, but the thought of being in a small, enclosed space with this man, her enemy, she reminded herself, made her feel unaccountably uneasy.

‘I rarely pay attention to the time,’ Rocco said, zapping open the doors of his rented Jaguar with his remote. He opened the passenger door for her and she shot inside like a bolt.

He picked up the easy conversation once he was inside, turning to her with an unreadable expression. ‘I usually expect everyone else to abide by the same rules.’

‘I don’t normally clock-watch, Mr Losi…’ Amy’s voice trailed off and she was held reluctant captive to his dark, averted profile as he manoeuvred the car out of the courtyard and through the stone columns that fronted the building.

‘Hence the three cancelled dates…? And by the way, I think we can do away with the formality of surnames. I always try and encourage a certain amount of informality in my staff. That way, they can feel more relaxed about approaching me.’

Amy tried to equate relaxation with Rocco Losi. The two didn’t go together at all. He was just too forbidding. Even now, when he had taken off his intimidating hat, she still couldn’t begin to relax in his company. Did he really expect her to? she wondered. After he had told her in no uncertain terms what he intended to do with her precious subsidiary? Trample it into the ground like a cockroach under his foot?

‘What changes do you have in mind for the company? Will there be redundancies?’

‘What time do you have to be at the theatre?’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘Nor should I.’ He glanced swiftly across at her. ‘It would be highly unprofessional to discuss something like that with one person. Tell me about your boyfriend. I didn’t expect you to have one.’

Amy was distracted enough by the bald rudeness of that to forget all about work, possible redundancies including her own and the collapse of the career she had spent the past decade building up.

‘I don’t believe you just said that.’

‘Why?’ Rocco shrugged.

‘Because…because it’s rude!’ Rude and insulting and hurtful. ‘But why should I be surprised?’ she lashed out, still stinging from the bare-faced effrontery. ‘You’re the most obnoxious, arrogant, rude individual I’ve ever come across!’

‘Funny. That’s not an accusation any woman has ever levelled at me in the past…’ The air between them throbbed with a violent, hidden charge. He could almost taste her breathless anger raging beneath the prim little outfit that she was obviously uncomfortable wearing.

‘Which says a lot about the kind of women you surround yourself with!’ The conversation had become disastrously unfocused, but Amy found that it was almost impossible to gather herself together and revert to talking about work. She wanted to wipe that calm, smug, amused expression off his face. ‘I’m twenty-six! Believe it or not, most twenty-six-year-old women do not live in a physical vacuum!’ For a second, she wondered who she was trying to convince, him or herself. She had had boyfriends, well, three of them, but none had ever come close to distracting her from her work. She had certainly never been the sort of girl who had led a wild, abandoned sexual life, but to be casually dismissed by this man as a nonentity who had surprised him by having a boyfriend was hateful and wounding.

‘No,’ he agreed, in an aggravatingly reasonable voice. ‘I just assumed that you were one of these women who puts her career first.’

‘I don’t just think about work!’ But she did, she acknowledged silently. She had been forced to become too self-sufficient from too young an age, and she had transferred all the needs that most normal people expended on relationships into her work. In some weird way, she was as emotionally detached as Rocco Losi.

‘So what’s he like, this man?’

‘Do you know how to get to the theatre? You’re so busy nosing into my private life that you might just end up missing the turnings.’

‘I’m not nosing into your private life, Amy. I’m conversing with you on a subject that has nothing to do with work.’

The way he said her name sent a little shiver racing down her spine, but when she looked at him it was with resentment and apprehension.

‘You want to take my job away from me. You want to make me and my team unemployed. How can you calmly sit there and pretend to be interested in having a normal conversation?’

‘I want to do what benefits the company in the long run,’ Rocco said tersely.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

Still smarting from the unpleasant way he had of thoroughly unsettling her, Amy forgot about the little fact that he was her boss and she was simply an inconvenient employee on her way out. Her normal reasonable, pragmatic character that made her so good at what she did seemed to have given way to a driving need to say something or do something that would get under his skin the way he managed to get under hers.

‘Why do you care one way or another what happens to Losi Construction?’ she blurted out. ‘It’s not as though you’ve ever taken the slightest bit of interest in it!’

The silence stretched like taut wire and Amy wrestled with the desire to apologise for overstepping the boundaries and a feeling that she could say just as she damn well pleased. He, obviously, felt that he could make whatever remarks he wanted to about things that didn’t concern him and, anyway, it was hardly as though she had very much to lose.

She still felt horribly nervous in the wake of her outburst, though, and even more nervous when he pulled the car over to the side and killed the engine.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, biting her lower lip and watching him warily, the way one might watch a tiger that had been recently fed but might still fancy a bit more.

‘Developing this conversation,’ Rocco told her, angling his big body so that he was facing her.

Supplies of oxygen suddenly seemed to plummet. ‘Sorry if I spoke out of place,’ Amy said grudgingly, ‘but you did say that you liked your employees to be on a first-name basis with you so that they could feel free to air any grievances…’

‘And your grievance is…?’

‘That you’ve got your own life in New York. That you’ve never troubled yourself with your father or with his company and yet you think that you can just storm in now, take control, change people’s lives for ever and then sweep back out leaving everyone to pick up the pieces and carry on!’

‘You’re over-dramatising.’

‘Am I?’ Amy snorted in disbelief and was more rattled by his lack of fight than if he had picked up the heated gauntlet she had thrown down and engaged in his usual warfare.

‘I have no intention of chucking every member of staff out on their ears,’ he objected mildly. ‘Just tidying things up a bit and the reason why is because that’s just the way I’m built. We do have a bit in common, come to think of it. We both had to climb the ladder step by painful step, without help from anyone.’

‘I had to,’ Amy said, tilting her chin. ‘You chose to. And besides, you had the help of a university education! I had GCSE qualifications and desperation!’

Desperate was exactly how she was feeling now, skewered to the car door by those hooded blue eyes. Every breath she took was laborious.

‘You’ve invested everything into your job, haven’t you?’ he asked softly and Amy stubbornly refused to answer. She was trying hard to bring herself back down to earth and establish the dislike and animosity that had fuelled her emotions towards the silver-tongued devil staring at her with those amazing eyes, but it was a bit like trying to remain upright on a bed of quicksand.

‘That’s why, at twenty-six, you’re not in any solid relationship—’

‘I told you—’

‘That you have a boyfriend. One you’re seeing tonight out of guilt because you’ve broken the last three engagements on the pretext of work.’

‘I’m not seeing Sam out of guilt!’ Her cheeks reddened as she uncomfortably wondered whether his random stab had hit closer to the target than she would have expected. ‘And anyway, are you going to drop me at the theatre? Because if not, then please tell me and I’ll just get out and walk the rest of the way.’

‘You’ll walk for three miles in uncomfortable shoes out of pride?’

‘Got it in one.’

She looked away and heard him laugh, a rich, full sound that made the nerves in her body come alive, but then he started the engine and pulled away while she dealt with her hammering heart with a stern dose of frozen silence.

‘I think you might just do it as well…’ Rocco murmured lazily. ‘Men don’t like that, you know…’

‘Don’t like what? Women who are prepared to walk now and again if it’s necessary? Or women who actually have one or two principles that they’re prepared to stand up for?’

‘Oh, hard-nosed women who like to be in control. Women who are so busy shouting and venting their spleen about what they believe in that they never take time out to listen to what other people have to say…’

‘Thanks. Thank you very much for that piece of advice. Coming from a man who doesn’t seem to have time to listen to what other people have to say, I’ll make sure that I take what you say on board.’

‘Of course,’ Rocco drawled, noticing with a twinge of regret that they were approaching the theatre, ‘those types of women tend to attract the same kind of man…’

‘Any point in me telling you that I’m not really the slightest bit interested in what you have to say on the subject?’

‘Weak men. Men who enjoy being bullied about and bossed around. Men who don’t mind being stood up continually.’

Amy waited until he had pulled over to the pavement and then turned to him. ‘I’ll roughly translate that into men who listen to what people try to say to them. Unlike you. You’ve written off what I do and my contribution to the company without even bothering to go into too many details. You took one look at the balance sheet and then decided that we just weren’t profitable and so had to be eliminated. If that’s the mark of a strong man, then, frankly, I think I prefer the weak ones.’ Amy was quite proud of this heartfelt speech. Her voice had been calm and composed and he would have to have been a mind-reading genius to guess at how angry she was at his uninvited generalisations made at her expense. If this was his idea of polite, non-work-oriented conversation, then she was surprised that he had a social life at all.

‘What details did you have in mind? There’s just so much one can do with a list of figures, most of them in the outgoing column.’

‘Well, you could come and see for yourself what we do!’ Amy opened the car door, stepped out of the car, then said, leaning into it, ‘Or are you one of these strong men who refuse to budge once they’ve made their minds up?’

Rocco had to hand it to her—she wasn’t going to take her medicine lying down. Naturally, she wouldn’t win. There were too many hard facts stacked up against her, whether she liked to believe it or not, but he was nothing if not fair. He would go and have a look at her little pet project and then no one would be able to accuse him of being bull-headed when he was regrettably forced to shut the enterprise down.

CHAPTER THREE

THE play was good. Dinner, afterwards with Sam, somewhat less so. Amy made the mistake of confiding in him about the newest addition to the company and what it meant in terms of her work being summarily terminated, and was regaled with his self-righteous outrage for most of the pizza meal.

The altruistic fervour that had drawn her to him three months previously left her feeling flat and confused.

‘I don’t think he’s too bothered by the concept of helping the community,’ Amy explained, pushing away her plate. Now stone-cold, her pizza resembled something that had been fashioned out of Play-Doh.

‘Typical mogul,’ Sam snorted. ‘Met a lot of those myself. Only interested in making money. Would drop a bomb over a council estate if they thought they could rebuild it into five-bedroom executive homes that they could sell at inflated prices to a gullible public.’

‘Well, maybe not quite as dramatic as that…’ Amy smiled and tried to defuse some of the unpleasant feeling.

She had met Sam quite accidentally while working on her previous project. He worked in an organisation specialising in care in the community and they had clicked immediately, finding that they had quite a bit in common when it came to their natural empathy towards good causes. Almost without realising it, their friendship had developed into something more, though what, precisely, she wasn’t altogether sure. But she was happy enough to go along for the ride. He might not be the most striking person she had ever encountered in the looks department, with his thinning sandy hair and pale blue eyes, but he was comfortable and thoughtful and genuinely interested in all the things she was genuinely interested in.

She looked at his kind, earnest face and a darker, far more dangerous one superimposed itself on her retina.

Sam was now expounding on the many different businessmen he had met over the years and the superhuman efforts it took to get them interested in the community that was as important to them as they were to it. Money, he was fervently saying, while making sure to finish his pizza that looked every bit as off-putting as her own half-finished one, was the root of all evil.

‘I’m too tired to think about this,’ Amy said, stifling a yawn. ‘Anyway, he’s agreed to come along with me to have a look at what we’re working on at the moment. Maybe I can change his mind.’

‘And if you can’t?’

‘Then I shall be out of a job, along with my staff.’

‘What would you do?’

‘Find another.’

‘They’re pretty thin on the ground, Amy, jobs like that. In fact, yours is unique. You can do what you enjoy doing and you’re funded for it. What could be better?’ He ordered two coffees without asking her whether she wanted one and sat back as they were brought to the table.

The weight of her pressurised day was getting to her. She could easily have rested her head in her hands and nodded off to sleep.

Sam was busily expounding on the huge benefits of doing what she did while Amy half listened and found herself thinking of how Rocco would react when he found himself traipsing around sites with her. Would he be bored? Indifferent? Would he feign interest? He was an immensely successful businessman. He would have feigning interest down to an art form. Then she thought that he certainly hadn’t feigned any interest in her plight. No need to. So she was back to imagining him with a bored, irritable expression and only half caught the tail-end of Sam’s remark.

‘I mean,’ he obligingly repeated for her benefit, ‘there would be no need then for you to get something as demanding as what you’re doing now. You could work part-time, perhaps. Maybe even in the capacity of a volunteer…’

‘Sam. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sorry. I’m just so tired. My thoughts were a million miles away.’

He looked annoyed and it flashed through her mind that that was one of his less endearing traits. He never actually blew his top but he could be sulky and petulant when things didn’t go his way, as he would have been if she had cancelled on him again.

‘I was saying,’ he stressed, ‘that we could take things a step further.’

‘A step further?’ The coffee that had been ordered on her behalf, which she hadn’t wanted, now seemed a brilliant focus for her distraction.

‘I think we should get engaged.’

‘You think we should get engaged? After three months?’

‘Knowing someone for years doesn’t necessarily mean a good marriage,’ Sam said testily. ‘I’m thirty-eight. I want to settle down, Amy, and I think I’ve found the right girl to settle down with. Someone who shares my interests, enjoys the simple pleasures in life.’ He reached over and enfolded her hand in his. ‘We do get along, don’t we?’

‘Yes, we do,’ Amy agreed, struggling to give his suggestion houseroom and feeling hunted in the process. ‘But I don’t want to rush into anything.’ She squeezed his hand and then tactfully withdrew hers.

‘Promise me you’ll think about it.’

‘Of course.’ She tried to picture being Sam’s wife. He would be a good husband, steady, reliable and would, one day, be a very good father. And they had a lot in common. ‘But I’m only twenty-six…’

‘Time waits for no man.’ He fell back on a cliché, and then was happy to change the conversation, to chat about the play and compare it to the other Shakespeare production they had seen two months previously.

Amy didn’t think, however, that his proposal would go away, that she could put it to the back of a cupboard and carry on with their undemanding, soothing relationship, even when two days later she told him that she really couldn’t commit to an answer, not just yet, not when there was so much stress in her life at the moment.

Rocco, unsurprisingly, hadn’t beaten a path to her door to be shown around her project in progress. She wondered whether he figured she and her project would just conveniently vanish into thin air. Or, more likely, his silence was a pointed way of informing her that, whatever she did, she would not be able to face him down, so what was the point in him bothering to look around anything with her?

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