At the Italian's Command

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Thank you.’ She turned to him and tried a pleasant smile on for size. ‘I didn’t realise that you’d come back to the office. Patricia said that you would probably go straight home from your last meeting.’

  ‘One or two things to do.’ The rain had dampened down the curls and turned the copper-red colour to an odd sort of brown. Her face, devoid of make-up, was pale and damp. He wondered whether she ever looked in a mirror at all. ‘Where are you staying?’

  Sophie gave him the address, which was on the outskirts of London, and Rafe frowned.

  ‘I haven’t got time to drop you there. You’ll have to drop me off first and then George will take you to where you live.’

  Sophie opened her mouth to argue the point and then nodded her head. She had to get out of the habit of feeling awkward in Rafe’s presence, at least if she were to do her job with any level of competency. She had to will herself to talk to him so that she could find out what made him tick. He treated her like a kid because his mind was stuck in that groove, but that gambit only worked if she allowed herself to be treated that way.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said coolly. ‘Did you have a productive day?’

  ‘The forecast is good on several fronts,’ Rafe said, sitting back and leaning against the door so that he could watch her more thoroughly. ‘What about you? Did you manage to make the rounds of the office and get hold of any juicy titbits about me?’

  ‘It seems you’re the perfect boss, Rafe. No one had a bad word to say about you, but then I don’t suppose they would have felt inclined to pour their hearts out to a virtual stranger.’

  ‘So, disappointment on that front, then.’

  ‘I admit my editor might have enjoyed some gossip,’ Sophie told him truthfully, ‘but it seems that you pay well and treat your employees fairly. Group meetings on a regular basis so that they can let off steam, pay reviews biannually, membership of a sports centre, bonus packages at the end of the year, the list goes on.’

  ‘What did you expect, Sophie? A tyrant who chained his workers to their desks and deprived them of everything but the basics?’

  ‘Of course not! But I’ve worked in an office. I know that there are always grumblings of discontent around if you look hard enough.’

  ‘Is that why you left your job? Because of the office politics?’ He realised that, although they had met socially off and on over the years, he knew very little about her. She had stuck in his head as someone who hovered on the sidelines, always standing out like a sore thumb but not for the right reasons. ‘You did a degree in Art,’ he remarked, remembering one piece of throwaway information his mother had given him at some point. He recalled thinking that that was exactly what he would have guessed she might have done, given her appearance.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘My mother must have told me at some point. Why the jump from art to office work?’

  ‘Because finding a job that involved my art degree was impossible,’ Sophie informed him shortly. ‘Why do you think you weren’t content on simply taking over your father’s business? It was extremely profitable. Why did you feel compelled to expand it to the extent that you have?’

  Rafe recognised the ploy. She was uncomfortable talking about herself and so made her answers as brief and monosyllabic as possible before changing the subject. He couldn’t blame her. When had he ever shown the slightest interest in her? But since they were cooped up with one another for two weeks, what normal human being wouldn’t show some level of interest?

  ‘Ah. The fascinating question of motivation,’ Rafe drawled. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I can’t write an article on what I think about you. I have to write an article based on what I observe and what you tell me about yourself.’

  ‘No one likes to rest on inherited wealth. I branched out because I had to flex my own intellectual muscles.’

  It was an answer within a non-answer. Yes, it provided facts in a nutshell, but that fascinating question of motivation that he had mentioned earlier remained unanswered. And Sophie got the feeling that he was all too aware of the fact and was not about to do anything about it. He was very private and any excavating of his character, which really was what her editor would want to see, would have to be done very carefully.

  She would have to make him feel relaxed in her company and maybe then he might let slip the odd remark that would reveal something about himself.

  It helped that he saw her as nothing more than an irritating kid who had grown up. Despite any surface interest he expressed in her and what she had been doing with her life, he honestly didn’t care.

  She tried not to feel vaguely hurt and insulted by that. In a way, she almost preferred the dismissive hint of impatience, the glancing look that barely took her in, to the look he was giving her now. Green eyes coolly detached, as though she just happened to be something sexless and characterless that had happened to stray within his line of vision, thereby forcing him to react in one way or another.

  In this case, pretending to show an interest in what she thought. Sophie decided that she didn’t much care. The object of the exercise was to get him to open up.

  ‘Well, it’s always good to set challenges for yourself,’ Sophie she said, hoping her voice had attained the right level of cosiness and warmth. ‘Actually, that’s what I told myself when I ended up working in an office.’

  Rafe’s voice was polite and only mildly interested. ‘That your dreams of being the next Picasso were nothing compared to the challenges of mastering the filing system and coming to grips with PowerPoint?’

  His wryly sarcastic response immediately had her hackles up. ‘Actually, I never had dreams of being the next Picasso. My degree wasn’t in fine art. I studied graphic design and illustration.’

  ‘And I take it the office where you worked had no available department that could make use of your skills?’

  Sophie smiled reluctantly. ‘Not many legal offices do, although I did acquire a very sound knowledge of the basics of family law.’

  Her face changed when she smiled. There was something graceful and cautious and very appealing about it.

  ‘We’ll be at my place in five minutes,’ he said abruptly. ‘I recommend you come inside and get into something dry. I don’t want the responsibility of sending you home in soaking wet clothes so that you can come down with pneumonia.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll take the responsibility away from you by telling you that I’m fine to make my way home and change when I get there. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t usually walk around with a spare set of clothes in my handbag.’

  Rafe wasn’t sure whether to be irritated or amused by her. She certainly wasn’t the silent little thing he had expected. On the other hand, he was in a hell of a rush and in no mood to listen to someone trying to have a meaningful conversation with him on the subject of life choices.

  ‘We’re here.’ The car had pulled up outside an exquisite mews town house, and Rafe was already pushing open his door. ‘I don’t intend to have a debate on the subject. I have spare clothes that my mother leaves from time to time when she visits. Granted, they may not be the height of youthful style, but I’d say you would be better off in them than enduring another forty minutes in soaking splendour. I’m due out this evening, and I’m running late. George can drop me off to the theatre and then take you home. Make your choice.’

  Common sense won over pride. She felt hideously uncomfortable. Her clothes were sticking to her like a layer of ice-cold cling film and Lord only knew what was happening to her coat on the ground by her feet. Probably developing a nice coating of mildew even as he spoke.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Sophie said, quickly shifting out of the car while he strode ahead of her. The driving rain had become a fine, sharp drizzle and she flung her coat loosely over her as she ran to keep pace with him.

  George, with whom Rafe clearly had a close rapport, took himself off in the direction of what she supposed was the kitchen and she
was left dripping in the hallway.

  ‘Follow me,’ Rafe commanded, barely bothering to look around.

  It hardly gave Sophie a chance to appreciate her surroundings, but what she glimpsed as she raced behind him was impressive and a little surprising. She had expected chrome and wood and the expensive furnishings of a bachelor living in the fast lane. Lots of leather everywhere, perhaps, and abstract paintings on the walls. Instead, she was surprised to see that his house was warm and lived in, without a hint of chrome anywhere. The floor was wood, certainly, but deep, rich wood with the patina of time showing in it.

  She would have liked to have had a look around some of the rooms, but he had already reached a bedroom that his mother obviously used when she visited.

  ‘Clothes,’ he said, opening a wardrobe. ‘More in the drawers. Bathroom just there.’ He nodded to an en suite bathroom. ‘You’ll need to be ready in half an hour if I’m to make this appointment in time. And leave your clothes. I’ll get Anya to take care of them tomorrow when she comes.’

  ‘Anya?’

  ‘My housekeeper.’ He paused and gave her a quick once-over. ‘You didn’t really think that I looked after this place without help, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t really give it much thought at all,’ Sophie returned without batting an eye. ‘I’ll be quick.’

  She was. Hardly any time to luxuriate in the bath, and it was a bathroom made for luxuriating. The bath was deep and someone had stocked up on some delightful miniature soaps and bottles of fragrant bath foam. Claudia, she suspected. Those little touches spoke of a woman and if she spent time regularly in London with her son, then she would have provided that feminine attention to detail that he would never have considered.

  Unless, of course, some other woman had seen fit to domesticate the house.

  Sophie dried quickly, her mind playing on that possibility. Her editor wanted human interest and that would be very interesting indeed. He was photographed often enough with some woman adorning his arm, not one but a succession of them. Small soaps in a glass jar and that porcelain jar of pot pourri spoke of someone a little more permanent than a passing notch on the bedpost.

  And he would have no problem finding any woman he wanted, she thought, dressing quickly in the first thing she could find. He had the sex-appeal syndrome in buckets.

  She thought back to the times she had seen him at his mother’s house or wandering through the town on an exeat or during the holidays. Even from the innocent perspective of a young teenager, she had been struck by his popularity with the opposite sex. In fact, they had danced attendance upon him. And the years had been unnaturally kind to him. He still had the athletic build, but now there was something more powerful about it, and his aggressive personality showed on his face. She, personally, found it off-putting, but not many women would.

  From the half a dozen or so outfits, she picked something the least formal. A straight brown skirt, a blouse, a camel-coloured cashmere jumper. Any attempt to do something neat with her hair, she abandoned completely, leaving it to curl disastrously around her face and down her back. The overall effect wasn’t too much of a catastrophe, and she was on time. In fact, early.

  Rafe got to the top of the stairs and paused, a little startled by the transformation.

  ‘Early,’ he said, descending the staircase and knotting his bow-tie at the same time. ‘Not a trait I’ve often found in a woman.’

  Sophie swung round at the sound of his voice and watched him as he walked slowly down towards her. She opened her mouth to say something and nothing came out. Her throat felt dry and her stomach was doing funny things too. Weird little somersaults.

  The logical voice in her head was telling her that, yes, he did look stunningly handsome. White shirt, black trousers, black bow-tie, black jacket, which he was casually slinging on as he descended the staircase. Her body, on the other hand, was reacting as though she were seeing him for the first time.

  ‘I’ll go and get George,’ Rafe said. ‘Don’t move. I’ll be back in two minutes.’

  Move? Sophie wondered whether her legs were capable of managing that perfectly normal function.

  It was only as he disappeared from the hallway that her common sense finally kicked in, and with a vengeance. If she couldn’t control some pathetic response to his masculinity, then she would have no choice but to admit defeat and hand the job over to someone else. The thought was tempting, but running away from the challenge of her first assignment would be signing her own death warrant as far as Noma Publishing was concerned, and she wanted the job. Badly.

  It wasn’t, she thought feverishly, as though she even liked the man. The visible package was good, but the contents left her cold.

  With that lodged firmly at the forefront of her mind, she was functioning a bit more normally when he appeared with George in tow.

  Her voice sounded steady as she slipped into the passenger seat and asked him normal, polite questions about what he was going to see and whether, for him, the outing would be rated as business or pleasure. All the time, she had to stop herself from staring. In the dark back seat of the car, his lean face was all shadows and angles. She managed to contort herself so that she was physically as far away from him as possible, but she was still aware of the tiny distance that separated their knees from touching. If it weren’t so pathetic, she knew it would have been laughable.

  ‘Sometimes the lines between business and pleasure overlap,’ he was saying, his deep, velvety voice perfectly cool and controlled. ‘The play will be good, I’m sure, and the networking will be invaluable.’

  ‘And, of course, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’ Sophie remarked more acidly than she had meant. He was quick to pick up on the intonation in her voice.

  ‘It’s how big business works, Sophie. Does that surprise you? Maybe you disapprove of the fact that client dinners and trips to the theatre are all methods of oiling the wheels. When I’m being entertained by people, I’m almost always aware that there’s a subtext, that the expensive restaurants are ways of making sure that I keep them in mind should I ever find myself in a position where I can do them a favour.’

  ‘And that doesn’t bother you?’

  ‘Why should it? On a smaller scale, it happens every day to all of us.’

  ‘I don’t make it a habit of buttering people up just in case I might find them useful at a later date.’

  ‘How heroic of you.’

  ‘There’s nothing heroic about it. I just don’t like the thought of using people.’

  ‘You mean,’ Rafe said thoughtfully, ‘you’re yourself whatever the situation…’ He looked at her earnest face and the cloud of wildly spiralling hair framing it and felt a surprising kick of interest. Her soft lips were drawn together in a tight line and disapproval radiated from her in waves. Not many women disapproved of him, he realised suddenly. In fact, most tripped over themselves to make sure that he noticed them in all the right ways. It made a change to be confronted with someone who didn’t slot easily into the box. Especially, he thought, since it was a temporary situation.

  ‘I like to think so.’

  ‘And if I told you that I don’t like women arguing with me, unless it’s in the boardroom, you wouldn’t edit your reactions at all? Not even if your assignment hung in the balance…?’

  ‘Are you saying that I have to agree with everything you say or else you refuse to let me shadow you?’ Anger bubbled in her and spilled over. ‘Is that some kind of threat? I think it’s very sad if you feel that you have to surround yourself with yes-people! Or maybe you’re just talking about the opposite sex! Is that it? You like women to be seen and not heard and if they’re heard, it’s only on the condition that they saying something to flatter you!’ She found that she was leaning towards him, trembling.

  Looking at her, Rafe was torn between bursting out laughing and carrying on with his infuriating line of chauvinistic arrogance just to see how far he could go. There was something infinitely invigorating about
her reaction. Whether she realised it or not, it was, in fact, proof that she refused to toe the line.

  She also looked quite pretty, all worked up like that. Her cheeks were flushed and that riotous hair gave her the look of an angry child.

  ‘It was a hypothetical question,’ Rafe said, raising his eyebrows in amusement. ‘Of course I don’t surround myself with yes-people.’

  ‘But I bet you don’t have too many women disagree with what you say,’ Sophie shrewdly flung back at him. ‘Forgetting the ones you meet in the boardroom.’ She sat back, a delayed reaction to the fact that she was much too close to him for comfort. He had been winding her up, she could see that now. It was infuriating. How could she do her job properly if he didn’t even take her seriously? What Claudia and her mother had seen as an advantage, the fact that he wasn’t a stranger to her, was conversely actually working against her.

  ‘I’m not generally disagreeable when I’m in the company of a woman,’ Rafe drawled. His eyes followed the movements of her hands as they gathered her hair behind her, twisting it into a makeshift pony-tail. No good. As soon as she released the tousled mass, it tumbled back around her. For someone who had not a streak of vanity in her, or so it seemed, he wondered why she hadn’t long ago had the lot chopped off. But maybe—he toyed with the tantalising idea—his one-dimensional idea of her wasn’t quite as accurate as he had imagined.

  ‘But then again,’ he mused, his eyes still lingering on her face, ‘they don’t usually set out to have arguments.’

  ‘I wasn’t arguing with you,’ Sophie said stubbornly. ‘I was voicing my opinions.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Fine distinction.’ With regret, he saw the theatre lit up ahead of them. ‘An argumentative woman is only one step away from being a shrew and not many men like a shrew.’

  Sophie’s mouth fell open. She decided that she wasn’t going to be caught again by him having a laugh at her expense. ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she said tartly. ‘Now, about tomorrow. What time would you like me to be there? Patricia’s printed off a list of your meetings over the next few days and I see that you have your first meeting in High Wycombe at nine-thirty. Shall I meet you there or would you like me to come to the office first?’