The Italian Tycoon's Mistress

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‘You’re over-dramatising.’

‘Am I?’ Amy snorted in disbelief and was more rattled by his lack of fight than if he had picked up the heated gauntlet she had thrown down and engaged in his usual warfare.

‘I have no intention of chucking every member of staff out on their ears,’ he objected mildly. ‘Just tidying things up a bit and the reason why is because that’s just the way I’m built. We do have a bit in common, come to think of it. We both had to climb the ladder step by painful step, without help from anyone.’

‘I had to,’ Amy said, tilting her chin. ‘You chose to. And besides, you had the help of a university education! I had GCSE qualifications and desperation!’

Desperate was exactly how she was feeling now, skewered to the car door by those hooded blue eyes. Every breath she took was laborious.

‘You’ve invested everything into your job, haven’t you?’ he asked softly and Amy stubbornly refused to answer. She was trying hard to bring herself back down to earth and establish the dislike and animosity that had fuelled her emotions towards the silver-tongued devil staring at her with those amazing eyes, but it was a bit like trying to remain upright on a bed of quicksand.

‘That’s why, at twenty-six, you’re not in any solid relationship—’

‘I told you—’

‘That you have a boyfriend. One you’re seeing tonight out of guilt because you’ve broken the last three engagements on the pretext of work.’

‘I’m not seeing Sam out of guilt!’ Her cheeks reddened as she uncomfortably wondered whether his random stab had hit closer to the target than she would have expected. ‘And anyway, are you going to drop me at the theatre? Because if not, then please tell me and I’ll just get out and walk the rest of the way.’

‘You’ll walk for three miles in uncomfortable shoes out of pride?’

‘Got it in one.’

She looked away and heard him laugh, a rich, full sound that made the nerves in her body come alive, but then he started the engine and pulled away while she dealt with her hammering heart with a stern dose of frozen silence.

‘I think you might just do it as well…’ Rocco murmured lazily. ‘Men don’t like that, you know…’

‘Don’t like what? Women who are prepared to walk now and again if it’s necessary? Or women who actually have one or two principles that they’re prepared to stand up for?’

‘Oh, hard-nosed women who like to be in control. Women who are so busy shouting and venting their spleen about what they believe in that they never take time out to listen to what other people have to say…’

‘Thanks. Thank you very much for that piece of advice. Coming from a man who doesn’t seem to have time to listen to what other people have to say, I’ll make sure that I take what you say on board.’

‘Of course,’ Rocco drawled, noticing with a twinge of regret that they were approaching the theatre, ‘those types of women tend to attract the same kind of man…’

‘Any point in me telling you that I’m not really the slightest bit interested in what you have to say on the subject?’

‘Weak men. Men who enjoy being bullied about and bossed around. Men who don’t mind being stood up continually.’

Amy waited until he had pulled over to the pavement and then turned to him. ‘I’ll roughly translate that into men who listen to what people try to say to them. Unlike you. You’ve written off what I do and my contribution to the company without even bothering to go into too many details. You took one look at the balance sheet and then decided that we just weren’t profitable and so had to be eliminated. If that’s the mark of a strong man, then, frankly, I think I prefer the weak ones.’ Amy was quite proud of this heartfelt speech. Her voice had been calm and composed and he would have to have been a mind-reading genius to guess at how angry she was at his uninvited generalisations made at her expense. If this was his idea of polite, non-work-oriented conversation, then she was surprised that he had a social life at all.

‘What details did you have in mind? There’s just so much one can do with a list of figures, most of them in the outgoing column.’

‘Well, you could come and see for yourself what we do!’ Amy opened the car door, stepped out of the car, then said, leaning into it, ‘Or are you one of these strong men who refuse to budge once they’ve made their minds up?’

Rocco had to hand it to her—she wasn’t going to take her medicine lying down. Naturally, she wouldn’t win. There were too many hard facts stacked up against her, whether she liked to believe it or not, but he was nothing if not fair. He would go and have a look at her little pet project and then no one would be able to accuse him of being bull-headed when he was regrettably forced to shut the enterprise down.

CHAPTER THREE

THE play was good. Dinner, afterwards with Sam, somewhat less so. Amy made the mistake of confiding in him about the newest addition to the company and what it meant in terms of her work being summarily terminated, and was regaled with his self-righteous outrage for most of the pizza meal.

The altruistic fervour that had drawn her to him three months previously left her feeling flat and confused.

‘I don’t think he’s too bothered by the concept of helping the community,’ Amy explained, pushing away her plate. Now stone-cold, her pizza resembled something that had been fashioned out of Play-Doh.

‘Typical mogul,’ Sam snorted. ‘Met a lot of those myself. Only interested in making money. Would drop a bomb over a council estate if they thought they could rebuild it into five-bedroom executive homes that they could sell at inflated prices to a gullible public.’

‘Well, maybe not quite as dramatic as that…’ Amy smiled and tried to defuse some of the unpleasant feeling.

She had met Sam quite accidentally while working on her previous project. He worked in an organisation specialising in care in the community and they had clicked immediately, finding that they had quite a bit in common when it came to their natural empathy towards good causes. Almost without realising it, their friendship had developed into something more, though what, precisely, she wasn’t altogether sure. But she was happy enough to go along for the ride. He might not be the most striking person she had ever encountered in the looks department, with his thinning sandy hair and pale blue eyes, but he was comfortable and thoughtful and genuinely interested in all the things she was genuinely interested in.

She looked at his kind, earnest face and a darker, far more dangerous one superimposed itself on her retina.

Sam was now expounding on the many different businessmen he had met over the years and the superhuman efforts it took to get them interested in the community that was as important to them as they were to it. Money, he was fervently saying, while making sure to finish his pizza that looked every bit as off-putting as her own half-finished one, was the root of all evil.

‘I’m too tired to think about this,’ Amy said, stifling a yawn. ‘Anyway, he’s agreed to come along with me to have a look at what we’re working on at the moment. Maybe I can change his mind.’

‘And if you can’t?’

‘Then I shall be out of a job, along with my staff.’

‘What would you do?’

‘Find another.’

‘They’re pretty thin on the ground, Amy, jobs like that. In fact, yours is unique. You can do what you enjoy doing and you’re funded for it. What could be better?’ He ordered two coffees without asking her whether she wanted one and sat back as they were brought to the table.

The weight of her pressurised day was getting to her. She could easily have rested her head in her hands and nodded off to sleep.

Sam was busily expounding on the huge benefits of doing what she did while Amy half listened and found herself thinking of how Rocco would react when he found himself traipsing around sites with her. Would he be bored? Indifferent? Would he feign interest? He was an immensely successful businessman. He would have feigning interest down to an art form. Then she thought that he certainly hadn’t feigned any interest in her plight. No need to. So she was back to imagining him with a bored, irritable expression and only half caught the tail-end of Sam’s remark.

‘I mean,’ he obligingly repeated for her benefit, ‘there would be no need then for you to get something as demanding as what you’re doing now. You could work part-time, perhaps. Maybe even in the capacity of a volunteer…’

‘Sam. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sorry. I’m just so tired. My thoughts were a million miles away.’

He looked annoyed and it flashed through her mind that that was one of his less endearing traits. He never actually blew his top but he could be sulky and petulant when things didn’t go his way, as he would have been if she had cancelled on him again.

‘I was saying,’ he stressed, ‘that we could take things a step further.’

‘A step further?’ The coffee that had been ordered on her behalf, which she hadn’t wanted, now seemed a brilliant focus for her distraction.

‘I think we should get engaged.’

‘You think we should get engaged? After three months?’

‘Knowing someone for years doesn’t necessarily mean a good marriage,’ Sam said testily. ‘I’m thirty-eight. I want to settle down, Amy, and I think I’ve found the right girl to settle down with. Someone who shares my interests, enjoys the simple pleasures in life.’ He reached over and enfolded her hand in his. ‘We do get along, don’t we?’

‘Yes, we do,’ Amy agreed, struggling to give his suggestion houseroom and feeling hunted in the process. ‘But I don’t want to rush into anything.’ She squeezed his hand and then tactfully withdrew hers.

‘Promise me you’ll think about it.’

‘Of course.’ She tried to picture being Sam’s wife. He would be a good husband, steady, reliable and would, one day, be a very good father. And they had a lot in common. ‘But I’m only twenty-six…’

‘Time waits for no man.’ He fell back on a cliché, and then was happy to change the conversation, to chat about the play and compare it to the other Shakespeare production they had seen two months previously.

Amy didn’t think, however, that his proposal would go away, that she could put it to the back of a cupboard and carry on with their undemanding, soothing relationship, even when two days later she told him that she really couldn’t commit to an answer, not just yet, not when there was so much stress in her life at the moment.

Rocco, unsurprisingly, hadn’t beaten a path to her door to be shown around her project in progress. She wondered whether he figured she and her project would just conveniently vanish into thin air. Or, more likely, his silence was a pointed way of informing her that, whatever she did, she would not be able to face him down, so what was the point in him bothering to look around anything with her?