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The trickle of customers was fast becoming a flood and Sunny went into autodrive. She had been working at TWC Eaterie for eight months and she knew the ropes. Take orders, smile a lot, race between kitchen and tables, deliver the orders and as soon as one set of diners had finished eating, get the bill to them as fast as she could so that the table could be cleared, making way for another lot to sit down. Sometimes, if the customers seemed to be dawdling a little too much over their coffees, Claire would turn up the volume on the music, just a notch, and that always seemed to remind them that it was time to go.
Sunny had her patch and she could work the tables blindfold. She chatted without really noticing who she was chatting to and she always added a smiley face to the bill when she brought it because she had read somewhere that it encouraged diners to leave bigger tips than they normally would.
This evening, she was particularly oblivious to the crowd. She’d thought of nothing but Stefano on the Tube ride back and he was still in her head as she dashed around the restaurant, distracting her, which got on her nerves.
The man had got under her skin.
Was it because he was just so good-looking? And why should that have made a difference anyway? Sunny had never been susceptible to good-looking men. She’d been chased by enough of them and heard enough of their corny lines to know that they were usually full of themselves and arrogantly all too aware of the effect they had on the opposite sex.
So why had Stefano Gunn proved the exception? Especially when she had given up on men? If she hadn’t been able to feel any sort of physical attraction to a guy who had been perfect, then there was no hope for her. She had reconciled herself to that fact. She had assumed that she was frigid, a consequence of her turbulent background and a mother who had set a poor example when it came to self-restraint and decorum.
She touched the locket she wore around her neck. In it was one of only a handful of pictures she had of her damaged parent. Annie Porter might have been a terrible mother but there was still a big place in Sunny’s heart for her. She felt that that must be what unconditional love was all about. Her mother would be the only recipient of that sort of love as far as Sunny was concerned. If she ever loved anyone again, and she wasn’t even sure that she had loved John nearly as much as he had loved her, then there would be so many conditions that the weight of them would probably kill off any relationship before it could get going. Suited her.
But she hadn’t had a relationship with anyone since John and she wondered whether the effect Stefano had had on her had been a timely reminder that she was still young.
It made no difference anyway. She wasn’t going to see him again. She had politely turned down his offer for dinner and had shown no interest in whatever proposition he had for her that she might find irresistible.
Dinner and a proposition could only add up to one thing as far as Sunny was concerned.
Bed.
Perhaps he saw her as a possible easy conquest. He was staggeringly rich and staggeringly good-looking and maybe he thought that if he made a pass at her, she wouldn’t be able to resist. Maybe he thought that, as a relative junior in the company, she would be awestruck and open-mouthed and breathless with girlish excitement if he so much as glanced in her direction.
Maybe...no, almost certainly, that was where the irresistible aspect of his so-called offer came in.
She was so wrapped up in thoughts that she wanted to box away that she was convinced her mind was playing tricks on her when, with the crowd finally and thankfully beginning to thin out, she heard the sound of his dark, velvety voice behind her.
She spun round, only just managing to hang on to the tray she was balancing and stared.
It was a little after ten and he looked as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as when she had last seen him at five-thirty, although he was no longer wearing his suit.
The suit had been replaced by a pair of black jeans and a fitted black jumper that did remarkable things for his lean, muscular build.
She couldn’t find a thing to say. She actually blinked several times to make sure that she wasn’t seeing things, that her mind hadn’t conjured up his image because she had been thinking so much about him.
‘So this is where you work...’
Sunny was galvanised into movement. ‘What are you doing here, Mr Gunn?’ She wasn’t in the office now and she didn’t see why she should try and modulate her voice to accommodate him. She stared at his face but she was aware of every part of him with every pore in her body. ‘Look, I can’t stop to chat to you.’ She turned round abruptly and began heading towards the kitchen, heart beating like a sledgehammer inside her.
Fi, one of the girls who worked the tables with her, the only full-time waitress among them and a bubbly brunette who specialised in having boyfriend problems, was taking a little time out to catch her breath because her stint was almost over. Sunny was very tempted to ask her whether Stefano was still outside and, if he was, whether she could take his order but then she knew that that would lead to endless curiosity and, as always, the part of her that clammed up at the thought of confiding slammed into gear.
Maybe he would get the message and leave. Maybe he’d already left. Her hands were clammy and she wiped them on her trousers as she headed back out to the restaurant, which was now practically empty.
There was no avoiding or ignoring him. His presence was so powerful that it would have been impossible to overlook him even though he was sitting right at the back. He had pushed his chair at an angle so that he could stretch out his long legs and he looked utterly composed and relaxed.
Stifling a sigh of frustration, Sunny walked towards him, taking her time.
‘I’m afraid we’ve already taken last orders,’ she said ungraciously, ‘so if you’ve come here expecting a meal, then you’re going to be disappointed.’
‘Oh, dear. And the menu looked so interesting. Perhaps another day. However, that being the case, I’m assuming you’ll be leaving shortly?’
‘How did you even find out where I worked?’ She looked at him with great reluctance and was assailed by the same unwelcome heady discomfiture she had felt before. His eyes were as dark as night and as captivating as an open flame to a moth. There was nothing safe or comforting about him but he had the sort of face she felt driven to stare at and the sort of compelling personality that wanted to suck her in and she had no intention of being sucked in.
Her memories of her mother were scattered but she remembered enough. She remembered how pretty her mother had been and how helpless she had been at the hands of men who had taken advantage of her. The roller-coaster ride that had been her childhood had built in her a capacity for self-control she never relinquished and a determination never to find herself in any situation with anyone that made her feel helpless. John had never made her feel helpless.
But something about Stefano Gunn made her feel helpless.
‘Sit.’
Sunny folded her arms and stared at him. ‘We’re not in an office now, Mr Gunn...’
‘Stefano, please.’
She chose to ignore that interruption. ‘So I feel it’s okay for me to be direct with you.’
‘I’ve always encouraged directness in other people,’ Stefano murmured. She was even more eye-catching than he remembered, even though the hair, he noted, was still tucked away and she wore no make-up.
She’d turned down his offer for dinner and rejected what he had to say without bothering to give him a hearing. She’d been pointedly polite about it but she hadn’t been able to get away from him fast enough.
He was accustomed to women bending over backwards to attract his attention. He’d never been in the position of being with a woman who so clearly couldn’t wait to escape his presence and he hadn’t known whether to be irritated or amused by that.
‘I don’t know how you managed to find out where I work...’
‘Not that difficult. I got your address from Katherine, went to your house, spoke to the girl who shares your flat with you, who told me where you worked and here I am.’
‘You spoke to Katherine?’ Sunny was outraged. She glanced round to see Claire looking at her curiously. ‘I have to finish clearing the tables,’ she muttered.
‘I’ll wait until you’re finished and walk you home.’
‘I don’t need an escort, Mr Gunn.’
‘I told you, the name is Stefano.’ An edge of impatience had crept into his voice. Her simmering hostility and mutinous stubbornness, rather than putting him off, was goading him into digging his heels in. He’d come here to talk to her and talk to her he would. Maybe if it hadn’t been for Flora, he would have shrugged off her cool refusal to listen to him although a little voice in his head was telling him that she posed a challenge and a challenge was something he had not experienced in a very long time.
Sunny didn’t bother to answer. She knew she was attracting interested looks from her friends in the restaurant and that in itself made her bristle with annoyance at him.
How dared he track her down like this?
How dared he think that he could stampede over her very clear refusal to listen to his proposition?
How dared he think he could try and sweet-talk her into bed because he was filthy rich and she was just an ordinary junior in a law firm and therefore open to persuasion?
And how dared he compromise her position in the company by talking to her boss about her?
Rage bubbled up inside her as she raced through the remainder of her chores, wiping the tables and then, finally, changing back into her jeans and T-shirt and the denim jacket she had brought along because it was now quite cool outside.
‘He’s still there, you know,’ Claire said, lounging by the kitchen door with a tea towel slung over her shoulder. She and Tom would stay on for at least another hour and in the morning they would count the takings. It had been a very good night. ‘I know you’ve made a point of pretending not to notice, but he hasn’t gone.’
Sunny flushed and scowled.
‘My darling, none of us can miss the way the guys who come in here stare at you. I don’t mean to intrude... I know you’re a very private person, but haven’t you ever been tempted to...to...?’
‘Never,’ Sunny said fiercely. ‘I don’t go for guys who are drawn to me because of the way I look.’ She remembered her foster father’s lecherous eyes following her through the house, while his invalid wife remained cheerfully oblivious, and shuddered.
‘Who’s your latest admirer?’
Sunny sighed and looked at Claire. ‘He’s not an admirer,’ she admitted. Although why else would he be here? If not to try and get her into bed? She wasn’t vain but she was realistic and being realistic protected her against having her head turned by meaningless, pretty words. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of him and I’ll make sure he doesn’t come here again.’
Claire laughed. ‘He looks rich. He can come whenever he wants, just as long as he puts his hand in his pocket and actually shows up in time to order food and drink!’
‘I’ll pass that on.’ Sunny smiled weakly. She had no intention of doing any such thing. What she intended to do was find out just what he had said to Katherine and whether he had compromised her position in the company.
And she would have to do that without letting her temper explode. She would have to be cool, calm and collected whilst leaving him in no doubt that she wasn’t interested in whatever he had to say to her.
She emerged and Stefano was almost surprised because he had half expected her to have disappeared through a back door. But there she was, in jeans and a T-shirt and, without the cap, her hair was long. Very long. Every shade of blonde feathering in curls down her back, although that didn’t last very long because, even as she walked towards him, she was stuffing it into a ponytail.
She had the long, slender body of a ballet dancer and her movements were graceful. She was scowling, but not even the scowl could hide that startling, unusual prettiness. When she had been created, some small added ingredient had been thrown into the mix, elevating her from good-looking to unbelievably striking. Her green eyes were narrowed suspiciously on him as she finally came to a stop directly in front of him.
‘I want to know what you said to Katherine.’
‘You’re not, are you?’ Stefano stood up, towering over her, and she automatically fell back a step or two.
‘Not what?’
‘Sunny.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets as they headed to the door. ‘Your mother must rue the day she named you that. Unless, of course...’ he pushed open the restaurant door, allowing her to brush past him ‘...you’re sunny with everyone else but reserve all your bulldog belligerence for me...is that it? And, if so, why?’
‘My mother died when I was a child,’ Sunny said coldly. ‘What did you tell Katherine?’ She didn’t want him walking next to her...didn’t want him escorting her the short distance to her flat, but she felt as if she had no choice.
‘I told her that I wanted to discuss something with you of a personal nature and she was kind enough to provide me with your address.’
‘How dare you?’ She rounded on him, hands on her hips, so furious that she felt she might explode. ‘Do you have any idea how important that job is to me?’ A series of scenarios ran through her head, each worse than the one before. He had put poor Katherine in a position...he was so important that she had had no choice but to do as he had asked...but in the morning, she, Sunny, would be called in for a little chat...she would be told that fraternising with clients was frowned upon...she would be warned...she might even be sacked... She hadn’t been there very long and the last thing the company would want would be a lawyer who couldn’t be trusted around clients...she would lose her job, her career and everything that made sense of her life...
And it would all be this man’s fault.
‘I don’t want anything to do with you and how dare you tell my boss that you want my address? So that you can try and come on to me? How dare you?’ Tears of anger and frustration were pricking the back of her eyes.
With just the street lights for illumination, his face was all angles and shadows. He towered over her and she couldn’t read the expression on his face.
Just in case he hadn’t got the drift, though, she thought that she should make herself perfectly clear.
‘I’m not going to sleep with you, Mr Gunn, and I don’t want you pestering me. I don’t care how rich or powerful you are or how much business you’re going to bring to the firm... I don’t come as part of what’s on offer to you!’
Stefano was genuinely outraged that she had pigeonholed him as desperate and downright stupid enough to think about making a pass at her.
‘Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?’ he asked coolly.
That threw her and for a few seconds she stared at him in sudden confusion.
‘Anyway, I hope I’ve made myself clear,’ she muttered, dragging her eyes away from him and walking briskly towards the flat. He kept pace with her.
The flat she shared with Amy was cheap and thus located in a fairly dodgy part of town. A hop and a skip away, smart restaurants and trendy cafés lined the high street but here all of that gave way to rundown houses that were mostly let to people who couldn’t afford anything better, and a couple of off licences and corner shops that stayed open beyond the call of duty.
‘So—’ she stopped in front of the door that led up to the flat she shared at the top of the converted Victorian house ‘—I’d appreciate it if you just left me alone, and please don’t discuss me with my boss. It could jeopardise my position in the company.’
‘Like I said...you’re getting ahead of yourself here. I think you’re confusing me with the sort of sad loser who’s into pursuing reluctant women and can’t take no for an answer.’
Sunny stared at him in silence, slowly realising that she had misunderstood the situation.
Mortification swept over her in a hot, burning tide. ‘You said you had a proposition for me...’ she stammered, so taken aback that she was barely aware of him removing the key from her hand, opening the door and urging her inside.
He shouldn’t be coming in. He definitely should not be coming in. Amy wasn’t going to be there. She was on nights and wouldn’t be back until the following morning and Sunny couldn’t imagine him being in the flat with her, just the two of them.
Although he wasn’t interested in her, was he? When you thought about it, why the heck would he be? He could have any woman he wanted. He would just have to snap his fingers! She was so embarrassed at jumping to erroneous conclusions that she would happily have stepped into the hole if the ground had opened up beneath her feet.
While this jumble of thoughts was chaotically running through her head, they took the stairs and he let them into the flat with the key, which she had failed to take from him.
It was a very small two-bedroom flat with barely room to swing a cat. The décor was shabby and the furniture looked as though it had mostly been reclaimed from a skip somewhere. Not even the cheerful prints Blu-tacked to the walls could lift the place into something more cheerful. But it worked for both of them. They got along very well and, because Amy worked nights most of the month, they tended to see one another only in passing.
Looking around him, Stefano realised that he had never been anywhere like this before in his life. He knew that by anyone’s standards his life had been one of unsurpassed privilege. The only child of a wealthy Scottish landowner and an Italian mother who, herself, had inherited a tidy sum of money when her parents had passed away, he had never had any occasion to find himself slumming it. Alicia, of course, had not had money but he had rarely ventured into the quarters she shared with her friends.
Here, amidst this drab, unappealing ordinariness, Sunny was the equivalent of an orchid in a patch of weeds. He could almost understand why she had misinterpreted his intentions, although that did nothing to detract from the umbrage he felt.
Although, a little voice whispered in his head, hadn’t he looked at her with sexual interest? It wasn’t going to happen.
Stefano swept that unwanted thought aside as fast as it had come.
‘My daughter liked you,’ he said without preamble.
‘Did she? I have no idea why. I gave her work to do and I don’t suppose many eight-year-olds would have appreciated that.’ But she felt a rare bloom of pleasure at his words.
Released from the discomfort of thinking that he was just someone else attracted to her because of the way she looked, Sunny knew that she should be able to relax, but she was still as tense as a piece of elastic stretched to breaking point. He had sprawled out on one of the chairs in the tiny sitting room and he was just so wildly exotic that she could scarcely look at him without her breath catching in her throat and a weird tension invading her body.
‘I had to bring Flora in with me because she managed to successfully see off the last nanny and my mother had to go unexpectedly to Scotland...’
‘Oh.’ Where was this going? Sunny was bewildered. ‘When you say see off the last nanny...’ This for no other reason than to fill the silence.
‘Flora enjoys making life as difficult for her nannies as she humanly can.’ Stefano sighed and raked his fingers through his hair.
‘I don’t see what this has to do with me.’ His wife wasn’t around. He was an eligible bachelor. The office gossip mill had made that perfectly clear from day one, when speculation had been rife that he was only handing them business because of Katherine. She perched on the edge of a chair and looked at him steadily.
‘My mother will be up in Scotland for the next month. I have a nanny to cover for Flora during the day, as she’s on holidays, but not even the most long-suffering of nannies, and Edith is about as long-suffering as they come, is willing to do day and night cover. I’m wrapped up in some pretty important deals over the next fortnight and my proposal was for you to work for me between five and ten every evening, Monday to Friday.’
‘I’m sorry but that’s out of the question.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t have to give long explanations,’ Sunny told him stiffly. Something about the prospect of being inside his house sent shivers through her. No matter that she now knew that he had no interest in her aside from babysitter for his daughter. ‘But, in case it’s missed you, I actually already have a job after work and it’s a job I enjoy and wouldn’t want to lose. Also...’
Stefano tilted his head to one side. Flora had been animated on the drive back to the house. In fact, she had been the most animated he’d seen her since she had arrived in London. She had actually spoken to him, as opposed to sitting in surly silence and answering his questions in monosyllables.
