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!’
‘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,