The Italian Tycoon's Mistress

‘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!’