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

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.

‘Don’t bother,’ she shot back, making enough heat and anger for both of them. ‘I quit. I’m not cut out for this and I don’t want to be.’ And she dumped the pile of paper she’d been holding onto Max’s pile and stomped off towards the door. Thank goodness she only had that one rucksack to pack. She could be out of here within the hour.

‘That’s right,’ Max said, his voice low and infuriatingly even as she reached the door. ‘Run out on another job.’

She spun round to face him. ‘You know nothing about me. So don’t you dare judge me.’

He stared her down. The fire from a few moments earlier was gone, doused by a healthy dollop of concrete, if his expression was anything to go by.

‘I know that you bail when the going gets tough, that you’ve never seen a single job through to the end.’

‘So? That’s my business, not yours. You’ve made that abundantly clear.’

He stepped forward. ‘I’m afraid it is my business when you’re leaving before the end of your contract.’

That was when Ruby smiled. She really shouldn’t, but it started somewhere deep down inside and bubbled up until it reached her lips. ‘And there’s your problem, Mr Hot Shot. I don’t have a contract, remember?’

And, leaving him to chew on that, she stalked down the corridor. Pity she was wearing ballet slippers, because it would have been so much more effective in heels.

‘We had a verbal agreement!’ he yelled after her.

Ruby’s response was to keep walking but use some non-verbal communication she was pretty sure was offensive in just about any language you cared to mention.

An angry shudder ripped through her as she headed for her room, already mentally packing her rucksack. And she’d thought she was attracted to this man? She really was insane. The sooner she got out of Venice, the better.

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

MAX WAS SO FURIOUS he couldn’t speak, could hardly even breathe. How dare she act as if he were in the wrong? And how dare she bail on him after only one week? What was he going to do now? Knowing his mother, she’d make an impulsive decision and say she couldn’t possibly keep Sofia here on her own, and then he’d be stuck here, right when it was more urgent than ever that he leave this tangled family mess behind and concentrate even harder on his work.

He wanted to march after Ruby, to give her a piece of his mind, but he suspected she was in no mood to listen. She was stubborn as hell, that woman, and bound to dig her heels in if he went in with all guns blazing.

He’d give her half an hour. Then he’d go and find her, make her see sense.

He looked down at the stack of papers in his hands. His scribbled-on plans were on top. Just the sight of them made his temperature rise a couple of notches. He turned and headed for the library. At least he’d be able to distract himself for a short while trying to see if anything was salvageable. Once he was there, he dropped the stack of papers on the desk and sank into the chair.

It had to have been her fault. She must have come and got more paper from his makeshift office at some point, despite what she’d said, because how else could his pristine plans have ended up on Sofia’s drawing-paper pile? They hadn’t been outside the library all week.

A cold feeling washed through him from head to toe.

Except...

Last night, when he’d taken some papers into the salon as a cure for insomnia, and the plans had been amongst them. It had worked, too. After an hour and a half of poring over them, going over every detail, he’d woken himself up, his head lolling against his chest, and then he’d stumbled back to bed.

Oh, hell.

And he had no idea if he’d stumbled back into the library first and replaced the plans.

He stared at the clean, narrow printed-out lines of his plans, with Ruby’s thicker doodlings over the top. It was his fault, wasn’t it? Not hers. While he hadn’t exactly put them on Sofia’s paper stack by leaving them lying around in the salon he’d opened up the way for them to get muddled into it during the course of the day.

Max exhaled heavily and let his forehead drop so it rested on the pile of papers.