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‘At least.’
‘Don’t you have other things to do? What about your company in New York? Shouldn’t you be rushing back there?’
‘Unlike this organisation, I can easily maintain links with my business concerns in America. I have people in place who are geared to assume responsibility in my absence. And there are such things as airplanes that can deliver me to America within hours if I need to be there.’
‘How very efficient.’
Rocco’s dark brows met in a frown. ‘Efficiency is the basis of a successful operation. Which brings me neatly to you.’ He relaxed back in his chair and proceeded to look at her very carefully.
‘I am extremely efficient at what I do.’
‘That’s as may be, but your level of efficiency isn’t really the crux of the matter here, is it? You’re supremely efficient at what you do. It’s simply that what you do brings no money into the company.’
‘There’s more to life than just making money.’ Two bright patches of angry colour had appeared on her cheeks and she found that she was leaning forward, her hands balled into fists. ‘I personally find it very sad when someone’s only focus in life is creating wealth. What do you do with all your money, Mr Losi? Stick it into bank accounts and then spend jolly evenings poring over your statements and patting yourself on the back at what a clever boy you’ve been?’
Rocco looked at the earnest face glaring stubbornly at him and felt it again. That sudden rush of invigoration. It was like tasting something powerfully addictive that he hadn’t tasted in a long time, not since he’d been building up his career, when the doubts had been balanced equally with the self-assurance. Success had become an assumption for him and successful men, he had discovered, invariably became surrounded by like-minded individuals, people whose sights were firmly set in the same direction. No one contradicted him because his vast power and influence rendered him virtually untouchable.
‘Oh, I can think of infinitely more interesting ways of spending an evening,’ he drawled, perversely enjoying the delicate flush that invaded her face as she cottoned on to the exact meaning of what he had said.
The sexual innuendo, leaping out of nowhere, crashed into Amy like a runaway freight train. For a few seconds her imagination took dangerous flight and painted pictures that she had to force herself to push away. He really was a stunningly attractive male, she conceded shakily. That black hair and those thick, luxuriant dark lashes that could droop to conceal his fabulous eyes, that wide, sexy mouth. She blinked and sat up a little straighter.
‘What do you intend to do, Mr Losi?’ She firmly brought the conversation back to business. ‘I have a staff of five very dedicated people, all of whom are one hundred per cent committed to what we do. Two of them are married and need the salary they earn. Well, we all do, come to that. I’m also in mid-project at the moment. It’s not just a question of me.’
‘Therefore…what?’
‘This is hopeless. I can’t see the point of being here.’ Amy stood up but then found that she was hovering.
‘Rule one in business is to never let your emotions control your responses. Sit back down.’ Rocco stood up and began prowling through the office, hands firmly stuck in his trouser pockets, forcing Amy to twist around to follow his progress. He paused in front of the generous, old-fashioned bookshelf and perched on the protruding ledge that housed two orchids and a selection of exquisite artefacts that Antonio had collected over his years of travel. Amy swivelled her chair around so that she was facing him. The neat little navy-blue skirt she was wearing felt peculiar and she was vaguely aware that it rode up her thighs just a little too much for her liking.
‘I have studied the figures and have reached the obvious conclusion that your reckless indulging in altruistic projects will have to come to an end.’
‘There’s nothing reckless about—’
Rocco held up one imperious hand. ‘Which is not to say that I am a monster who does not appreciate the necessity to have a social conscience. However, I think you will agree that there is a far simpler way of helping.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I am prepared to agree to a set sum that will be given to charities of your choice.’
Amy looked at him with her mouth half open in stunned surprise, then she drew in a deep, steadying breath and said slowly, ‘It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? Need to prove you have a social conscience? Why, then, just fling a bit of money at a charity and you can sleep peacefully at nights. After all, where’s the point in actually taking any kind of interest in the community around you? That’s just tiresome, unproductive hard work, isn’t it? No precious money to be made there, so why waste time investing human resources in it? It doesn’t occur to you that there might be some kind of emotional fulfilment to be had from physically helping other people!’
Rocco clicked his tongue with impatience and irritation and pushed himself away from the ledge, moving towards her until he was towering over her. Then he leant over with his hands on either side of her chair, caging her in.
‘If you’re looking for emotional fulfilment, Miss Hogan, then might I suggest that you are in the wrong job. The figures you have been spending lavishly over the years simply do not add up.’ He stood up abruptly but continued to look down at her, his intimidating blue eyes narrowed. ‘Now let me see exactly what you are working on at the moment. Obviously I will extend some leeway to projects that are currently in the pipeline.’ He strode swiftly back to his desk and Amy reluctantly stood up to follow in his wake, clutching her batch of papers.
She had never met a man quite like him. He was as unfeeling and unmoveable as a rock. It came as no great surprise, when she thought about it. After all, what kind of man could mercilessly cut off all ties with his one surviving parent, whatever the reasons?
She edged round the desk and extracted the complex layout for what she was working on.
‘This is one of the more run-down council estates in the city centre,’ she explained tersely, shoving up the sleeves of her cotton top and propping herself up on both hands. ‘There’s a high level of single-parent families living here and consequently a lot of disaffected teenagers with nothing to do. It’s been a hard slog but we’ve managed to obtain planning permission to build a youth centre right here…’ She pointed to a highlighted dot on the map with one finger and felt all the enthusiasm and energy flowing into her as she contemplated her newest venture.
The residents were all in favour of this project. The tired, despairing mothers saw it as a way of cutting down on the petty crime continually being committed by bored adolescents, and even the kids she had talked to were keen in their own noncommittal, semi-sneering way.
She pulled out more plans of what they had in mind to build. Dee was a qualified architect and had done detailed drawings of what they could achieve given the restrictions of space. She lost sight of the fact that Rocco was an arch enemy to every word she was saying until she had finally finished talking a long while later, at which point cold reality washed back over her and she straightened up.
‘This is nothing like flinging money at a charity and leaving them to get on with it,’ she said heatedly.
‘No. Flinging money at a charity takes an hour or so while this takes several valuable months of time and effort.’
Rocco pushed back his chair and turned to look at her, clasping his hands behind his head.
‘But I have to admit you are very…passionate about what you do…’
‘We all are.’ Had it been necessary to use that particular description for her? she wondered.
‘And when it comes to work, passion, in the right place, can be a very good thing. Where do the rest of those people working with you fit in?’
’ Those people?’
Rocco recalled the long-haired men and the cropped-haired women and raised his eyebrows to suggest what he thought of them.
Amy read the message and bristled. ‘Freddy’s a chartered surveyor, Tim and Andy handle all the dealings with the people who need organising to work on turning our projects into reality, Dee’s the architect and Marcy’s our administrator.’
‘And where do you fit in?’
‘I oversee everything,’ Amy said coldly, sensing implied criticism. ‘Make sure deadlines are kept, liaise with various councillors, meet with the residents to make sure that their suggestions are being taken on board.’ She edged back, watching as he silently tapped his fingers on the desk.
‘And this is the only thing you’re working on at the moment? Where are the costings?’ Amy stepped forward to rifle through the papers, glanced at her watch and caught her breath.
‘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!’
