Italian Bachelors: Ruthless Propositions: Taming Her Italian Boss / The Uncompromising Italian / Secrets of the Playboy's Bride

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 (#u44d6f22c-62d1-5fe1-a7f7-6e203a18167f)

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.’