The Italian Tycoon's Mistress

by Cathy Williams

  ‘The only way I would ever want to secure my career,’ Amy said coldly, ‘is by proving to you that what we do is, in its own way, invaluable. Whether you and your father make amends is not my concern.’ As if to stress just how unconcerned she was, Amy shrugged and closed her knife and fork.

  ‘In fact,’ Rocco mused lazily, sitting back in his chair so that he could give her the full benefit of his attention, ‘nothing much is your concern, is it, aside from holding down your job? Have you ever not felt the desire to pack it in and try your hand at something completely different?’

  Amy didn’t know which of the two uninvited questions she wanted to respond to first so she looked at him blankly until he shook his head in apparent irritation.

  ‘There is no need to look so disconcerted simply because we have strayed off the topic of the disfranchised and what you can do to help them. Surely you have some experience in making small talk?’

  Rocco watched her face redden, either in confusion at his remark or else because she had taken affront at what he had said. Either way, it was a curiously intriguing response. His experiences with women had left him with the jaded feeling that they were really a very predictable species. Particularly the women he had wined, dined and inevitably bedded in New York were aggressively charming, self-confident and never backward at coming forward with details of themselves. They lapped up any questions about themselves as indications of devoted interest. Indeed, falling as they all did into the category of ‘Beautiful’, they always expected him to be interested in them. They were all women adept at playing the flirting game, enjoying the anticipation of ending up in his bed.

  And once they had slept with him, they inevitably moved into phase two of the game, that cosy phase when they attempted to woo him with home-cooked food, preferably cooked in his own gleaming kitchen, proof of their wifely potential, at which point his restlessness would begin to kick in, however sexually alluring the woman in question happened to be.

  The girl now staring at him warily was the human equivalent of a brick wall, he decided irritably. Loquacious when it came to spouting forth about charitable causes but aggravatingly uncooperative when it came to discussing anything about herself.

  ‘I’m not disconcerted,’ Amy said tightly, ‘and I do happen to know what small talk is. In fact, I thought that’s what we had been making all evening.’

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘I think we ought to be getting back.’

  ‘Actually, perhaps a glass of port would be nice. A typically English thing that I must say I have rather missed over the years. Late dinners followed by port and conversation. Americans tend to eat so much earlier than their European counterparts. Join me?’ He realised that he had barely touched any of the wine. He must have been more engrossed with the earnest preachings of the charity worker than he had thought. One glass of port certainly wouldn’t tip him over the balance.

  ‘I’m amazed you want to prolong the experience of being here with me,’ Amy remarked, still stinging from his implication that she was somehow a social misfit whose only focus in life was her job. ‘Considering I can’t make small talk.’ Now she sounded churlish and sulky, like a reprimanded child. Not the calm, efficient adult who was desperately trying to woo his interest in her cause. ‘I’ve never had port in my life,’ she said recklessly, ‘but yes, I would love to try a glass.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever want to come back to England?’ Amy heard herself saying, three sips of port later when her head was pleasantly beginning to swim a little. ‘I mean,’ she elaborated, frowning in concentration and dreadfully aware of those piercing blue eyes staring at her, ‘even if you didn’t want to have anything to do with Antonio, didn’t you ever miss life over here? Glasses of port and after-dinner conversation? Pots of tea and scones? The Queen, for heaven’s sake!’

  The corners of Rocco’s mouth twitched and he grinned, which distracted her into gulping down another large mouthful of port. ‘The port, yes. Even when I left at twenty-two, I had begun to enjoy it, but port, believe it or not, is not limited to the United Kingdom. Pots of tea and scones, decidedly. Somehow a cup of tea anywhere else in the world never quite tastes the same, would you not agree?’

  ‘I might if I had been to anywhere else in the world.’ Amy blushed, feeling gauche and frivolous in equal measure and not at all like the sober-minded girl she was accustomed to.

  ‘As for the Queen,’ Rocco drawled, ‘I never did manage to make her acquaintance, although I do recall standing outside my school when I was a kid waving a flag as she drove past. Sadly, that did not eventually transpire to an invitation to tea at the palace.’

  Amy found herself smiling, captive to his dry humour.

  ‘To answer your question seriously, to begin with, yes…I missed England. It was the only home I ever really knew. Italy was simply somewhere for long holidays. But returning then was not an option.’ He swirled his glass between his fingers and then sipped some of the port, looking at her over the rim of the glass. ‘Later, I discovered that time had done its thing and New York had gradually filled the void.’

  ‘And you never looked back? With nostalgia?’

  ‘Looking back is a pointless indulgence. The past cannot be changed and therefore it is useless to view it through misty rose-tinted spectacles.’

  ‘Oh.’ No wonder he had never made the slightest effort to reopen the lines of communication with his father. For him, Antonio would have been relegated to the past and, as such, to history. And proud Antonio would never have thought of trying to do battle with those sentiments.

  ‘You don’t agree, I take it.’ For one exasperating moment, he wondered why he was bothering to pursue a discussion that hardly mattered in the big picture.

  ‘I look back all the time,’ Amy confessed frankly. ‘I think it’s good not to let go of your past.’

  ‘Depends on what memories of your past you happen to have.’ Rocco’s voice was curt. They had both finished their glasses of port, and although it was on the tip of his tongue to order another, maybe because he could sense her itching to escape his company, he didn’t. Driving over the limit was never a good idea. ‘And don’t even think of giving me one of those speciality sympathetic looks of yours. If you didn’t spend all your time looking back into the past, don’t you think you would be doing something different now?’

  ‘Different like what?’

  The bill had been paid and as they stood up she realised that she was just a little reluctant to go. She could only put that down to the fact that she had not managed to persuade him over to her side, which, after all, had been the primary purpose of the evening.

  ‘You tell me. Surely social work wasn’t something you yearned to do ever since you were a little girl.’

  ‘It isn’t social work,’ Amy denied vigorously, head held high as they walked through the door, although her brain still felt nicely fuddled and her legs were a little on the unsteady side. ‘And I grew into the job.’

  ‘But what if you hadn’t had to leave school at sixteen? What would you have done then?’ He opened the passenger door for her, a small courtesy that surprised her because it was so old-fashioned in this day and age.

  Amy waited until he was in the car before answering. ‘I have no idea and, anyway, what’s the point of wondering something like that? Do you remember how to get back to my house?’

  ‘More or less.’ It was a lot quieter on the roads now and Rocco was surprised to find that it was after midnight. ‘Does working on these little projects of yours fulfil some unspoken need in you to be a carer? Having looked after your father, do you think that you simply conditioned yourself into putting other people and their lives ahead of yours?’

  ‘That’s absolute rubbish,’ Amy answered uneasily.

  ‘Maybe you got so accustomed to not having much lighthearted fun when you were growing up that it seemed natural to drift into the sort of job that you eventually ended up doing,’ Rocco persisted, musingly.

>   ‘My job is fun!’ Amy objected hotly. ‘I love doing what I do and don’t think that you can brainwash me into thinking that it’s a boring waste of time just because that happens to be what you think!’

  ‘I think that less after tonight,’ he surprised her by saying, but before she could capitalise on the admission he carried on, ‘not that I’ve had any change of heart. It’s still a massive waste of talented resources.’

  ‘And now we’re talented,’ she remarked, her eyes seeking out his perfectly chiselled profile and then remaining there. ‘Well, I suppose that’s an advance of sorts.’ She broke off her mesmerised inspection of his face to give him succinct directions to her street and then kept her eyes firmly averted from him, edgily aware that staring at him could become a very unhealthy habit.

  ‘How did you manage to put your team together?’ Rocco asked conversationally.

  ‘Usual way. Interviews.’

  ‘You conducted the interviews?’

  ‘Shocking, wouldn’t you agree? Little old me, without any qualifications and with only a handful of years’ worth of working experience behind me.’

  ‘Which just goes to show what you are capable of doing,’ Rocco mused. ‘Would you consider coming to New York to work?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘New York. My company could do with a member of staff like you. Competent, willing to take risks, inherently clever and none of those feminine frills that can so easily disturb the balance of a working environment.’

  Amy, having recovered from her initial surprise and, she had to admit, pleasure at his suggestion, now focused exclusively on the latter part of his description. No feminine frills. She knew what that meant all right. It meant that she was plain enough never to be seen by any man in any working arena as anything less than a competent colleague. She would never be a distraction because she just didn’t have what it took to distract.

  Amy blinked rapidly as tears of hurt threatened and masked it under a carefully amused laugh.

  ‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ she informed him, adding silently to herself than working for an unfeeling, undiplomatic, insulting bastard like you. How he had ever managed to make her feel frivolous of all things, was beyond her. Just the thought that he might have caught her staring at him, as she knew she had done during that meal, was enough to make her cringe with embarrassment. ‘I am perfectly happy here, doing what I do…’

  ‘Which may well be about to come to an untimely end.’

  ‘In which case, I shall simply do something else, something that I consider worthwhile, something that has nothing to do with the thankless pursuit of stockpiling money.’

  ‘How noble. And what would that something be?’

  ‘I have no idea. I could always return to formal education, get my A levels and then get a degree, go into teacher training…’

  They had reached the house before he could start asking too many awkward questions about this idea, though, now she began thinking about it, Amy realised that it was something she really would like to do, should her job collapse. Or when, judging from his relentless zeal to bulldoze them over.

  ‘Thanks for the dinner.’ She pushed open the car door and was taken aback to see him follow suit. More taken aback when he followed her to the front door.

  ‘I do have the odd gentlemanly bone in my body,’ he said, obviously reading her thoughts as she fumbled in her bag for the front-door key. As if to emphasise the point, he took the key from her fingers before she had time to take the necessary blocking action, and before she knew it he was pushing open the door, allowing her to step inside, allowing her to brush against him, which sent an unnerving feathering of dangerous sensation racing along her spine.

  Then, to her dismay, he followed her into the small hallway until she was eventually forced to say, brightly, ‘You know your way back to…to your father’s house?’ Amy hovered, a nervous tension building up inside her like a groundswell.

  ‘I thought I might have a cup of coffee before I begin the long trek back. Have a fifteen-minute break before I begin the journey.’

  ‘It shouldn’t take you long to get there,’ she dodged. ‘There won’t be any traffic at all on the roads at this time…’ This was greeted with unnerving silence until she cleared her throat and got a grip of her thundering heart. ‘Of course, if you feel you need a cup of coffee, then sure…’

  He did. Especially when he saw how reluctant she was to provide it. A cup of coffee in the confines of her house was probably way beyond the call of duty. Her brief was to convert him to her way of thinking and anything beyond that, such as a simple courteous gesture, was not within the specified parameters.

  Rocco looked around and pointedly shut the door behind him. Her house was small but cosy. No frills and nothing fussy, but he could tell from the pictures on the walls and the renovated pieces of furniture that everything had been bought carefully and with love.

  Sensing that she was watching him, he finally turned back to her.

  ‘The sitting room’s through there.’ Amy indicated a door to his right. ‘If you want to wait there I’ll bring you a cup of coffee.’

  ‘It’s no bother, is it?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘Why should it be? Anyway, you’ve just taken me out for a splendid meal…’

  She turned on her heel and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, leaving him to make his way to the small sitting room and ponder the unappreciated novelty of having the shoe on the other foot for the first time. He had been through enough times with women when they insisted on staying on, incapable of sensing his restlessness for them to leave.

  He could hear the distant noises of rustling in the kitchen as she reluctantly made the coffee he had insisted he needed, and was asking himself what he had to gain by being here when he could be driving back to his house when the telephone rang.

  The telephone right next to him.

  It was an automatic gesture to pick it up and answer it although he had only managed one sentence when she flew into the lounge just as he was replacing the receiver.

  ‘Did I just hear the phone?’

  ‘You did.’

  Amy looked at the phone, now resting inert in its cradle. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘And disturb you in the middle of your coffee-making exercise?’ The joke fell as flat as a lead balloon and gut reaction told him that the last thing he wanted to do was show any sign of amusement, although she presented a very amusing picture indeed, standing there with her hands on her hips, glaring at him, red in the face. ‘It was your boyfriend,’ Rocco informed her, ‘and I would have called you but I automatically picked it up because it was right next to me.’

  ‘Sam? It was Sam?’

  ‘I did offer to go and get you but he said not to bother, that he’d call you in the morning.’

  Amy walked into the sitting room and groaned.

  ‘You had no right to…to pick the phone up!’ she snapped belatedly.

  ‘What is the problem?’

  ‘The problem?’ She stalked further into the room, wondering how poor Sam would have reacted to the sound of that deep, lazy drawl down the end of the line at this ungodly hour of the night. ‘The problem is that you answered the phone! That’s the problem! I’d better phone him and explain. No. Better not. If I rush in immediately, I’ll sound guilty. Of course I’m not guilty, but I’ll sound guilty. Arghhh…’ She sat down on one of the chairs and glared at the uninvited sex god on the sofa. Typical. Cool as a cucumber when the whole thing was his fault!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ROCCO left Amy with her thoughts while he went into the kitchen, rescued his mug of coffee from the counter and made her one.

  Taste. The woman had taste as well. Not only was the décor a testimony to the pride she obviously took in her surroundings, it was also a testimony to taste. He had always assumed that raging feminists had no taste. Something to do with his belief that their every waking moment was spent furiously chasing boring cau
ses with yawn-inducing fervour. But the kitchen was charming. Bright yellow walls adorned with small posters of quirky pop art in clip frames, green wooden shutters at the window instead of curtains to match the units, which had been hand-painted, and a small kitchen table that was pale and smooth and clearly budget, but tasteful budget.

  He returned to the sitting room to find that she hadn’t budged.

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Coffee. Strong. You look as though you need it, although what the problem is is beyond me.’ He moved back to the sofa, sat down, sipped from his mug and proceeded to look at her.

  ‘There’s no problem,’ Amy said irritably, glancing across at him and feeling that he had somehow made yet more inroads into her personal life by going into her kitchen and making her some coffee. A perfectly innocuous gesture that countless people had done over the course of time, including all the men working with her and who had been visitors to her house over the years.

  ‘I would say that your reaction to Sam—it is Sam, isn’t it?—hearing my voice down the end of the line is a bit on the hysterical side. He did know that we would be spending the evening together, didn’t he?’

  ‘Of course he knew that we would be…would be spending the evening together.’ Amy stumbled over the words, which were literally accurate but unfortunately a bit too provocative for her liking. ‘On business,’ she added. ‘In fact, he thought that it was a brilliant idea for you to come along with me to have a look at our project.’