Taming Her Italian Boss

by Unknown

  He shook his head, perfectly aware of what had been filling it. That was why it would be so much better when he was back in London. He’d be able to get his brain round it then, removed from any distractions. Any strawberry-clad, purple-streaked distractions.

  Now, where was the earlier atrium design? The one where he’d pared it all back to the basics? He might as well get rid of all these silly changes and start from scratch.

  He rummaged through the papers on his mother’s antique desk. He’d had a printout of it. It had to be around here somewhere.

  * * *

  Ruby sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork. Not bad, even if she did say so herself. Maybe Max was right about her having some real artistic flair. Maybe she could do something with it, rather than just ‘messing around’, as her father called it.

  There was such beauty and simplicity in Max’s designs, but this one had just needed a little something—a curve here, a twirl there. By the time she’d finished, the arch on Max’s discarded plan was a strange hybrid between twenty-first-century industrial and Venetian Gothic, with a little bit of Ruby thrown in for fun.

  Perhaps she should be an architect?

  The fact she didn’t burst out laughing then roll on the floor at that thought was all thanks to Max. He’d believed in her ability to draw, seen something no one else saw, and she was starting to think she could even see it herself. She wanted to tell him that when they went out later, to thank him, but she didn’t really know how to put it into words without betraying everything else she was starting to feel.

  ‘More fish!’ Sofia demanded, grinning at Ruby so appealingly that Ruby didn’t have the heart to make her say please.

  ‘I think maybe it’s time Grandma tucked you into bed,’ she told Sofia, smiling. Fina rose from where she’d been reading a magazine in an armchair, and held her hand out for her granddaughter. After running and giving Ruby a hug, Sofia allowed herself to be led away and Ruby was once again alone in the salon.

  She tried not to look, but the gold clock on the mantelpiece drew her gaze like a magnet.

  Eight o’clock.

  A quick glance outside confirmed her suspicions. Compared to the brightly lit salon, the sky outside was bottomless and dark. Not helped by the heavy clouds that had started to gather over the city in the last half hour.

  Max had stood her up.

  She let her eyelids rest gently closed and inhaled. It didn’t matter.

  The heaviness in her heart called her a liar.

  But it shouldn’t be there. She was a paid employee. He owed her nothing more than her wages.

  It was just...

  She shook her head and opened her eyes again, then she got off up the floor and started piling the scattered bits of drawing up, putting the crayons back in their tub.

  Just nothing.

  She’d been fooling herself again, thinking this was something when it wasn’t. Max hadn’t seen inside her, he hadn’t spotted the potential that no one else had. He’d just paid her a compliment or two, that was all. And that kiss? Heat-of-the-moment stuff that produced nothing but regrets. She’d doled out a few of those herself in her time. Nothing to sweat about.

  Then why did she feel like going to her room, shutting the door behind her and bawling her eyes out?

  She gathered the sheets of paper in various sizes up in her arms and headed towards the door. She wasn’t quite sure where she was going to put these, but she suspected Fina wouldn’t want them scattered around her most formal living space. Maybe they could find a home for one or two of the best ones on the fridge door?

  She couldn’t have been looking where she’d been going, because when the salon door burst open and Max came barrelling through she didn’t have time for evasive manoeuvres. She stumbled sideways, the stack of paper went flying into the air and then fluttered noisily down like oversized confetti.

  Max just stood in the doorway, looking somewhat stunned.

  He didn’t say anything, but he shook himself slightly then bent to help her pick up the scattered drawings.

  Damn him for being such a gentleman. She wanted to hate him right now.

  ‘Here,’ he said, when they’d finished gathering up the last of them, and held a sheaf of papers in her direction.

  ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled, chickening out of looking him in the eye.

  Max must have been doing the same, because suddenly he got very interested in the top sheet of paper.

  ‘What the hell?’ he started to say, and then his expression grew thunderous. ‘What’s this?’

  Ruby rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said, feeling her cheeks heat. ‘I didn’t intend to make the cartoon of you being bitten by the crab at first, but Sofia thought it looked like you, because it was a man, probably, and then it just became a kind of joke and we—’

  ‘I’m not talking about a silly drawing!’ Max said, his voice getter louder.

  His words were like a punch to Ruby’s gut. ‘But I—’

  ‘I’m talking about this!’ And he thrust a sheet of paper so close to her face that she had to step back to focus on it. It was the doodle she’d just finished: Max’s arch with her little bit of decorative nonsense superimposed.

  Artist? Hah! Don’t kid yourself, Ruby.

  ‘It was just... I mean, I just...’ She let out a frustrated sigh and spiked her fingers through her neatly combed fringe. ‘It’s just a doodle, Max.’

  ‘A doodle?’

  Ruby’s heart thudded and her stomach dived into her ballet pumps. If the heat of Max’s anger hadn’t been scalding her face, his expression would have been kind of funny. She nodded, feeling all the while that she was walking into an ambush that she didn’t know how to avoid.

  ‘These are my plans!’ Max bellowed. ‘What on earth makes you think you have the right to doodle on them? Are you out of your mind?’

  Ruby’s mouth moved and she backed away. ‘But, it was there...’ her gaze flicked to the coffee table, where the pile of unmolested scrap paper still sat. ‘...with the stuff you tossed out the other day...on the top of the pile.’

  ‘This wasn’t scrap!’ he yelled. ‘These are my original plans. You had no right to use them for Sofia. No right at all.’

  Ruby was so puzzled that she couldn’t even react to Max’s anger at that moment. How had Max’s plans got there? How? He’d given them the sheaf of papers himself yesterday and, okay, she hadn’t noticed that one sitting on top then, but neither she nor Sofia had been anywhere near the library. The plans couldn’t have walked here on their own.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, shaking her head.

  Max began to laugh. But it wasn’t the warm, rich sound she remembered from the the day they’d gone crabbing. It was a dark, rasping sound that made the hair on her arms stand up on end.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have hired you. Why I didn’t listen to my gut I’ll never know. What was I thinking? You have no qualifications, no experience—’

  Now was the moment that the furnace of Ruby’s anger decided to whomph into life. She went from shivery and cold to raging inferno in the space of a heartbeat.

  ‘You’re right!’ she yelled back at him. ‘You want to know if I’m cut out to be a nanny? Well, I can answer that right now—I’m not! Not if it means I have to like working for closed-off, emotionally constipated jerks like you.’

  Max went very still and his expression was completely neutral. If anything, that was more worrying than all the bluff and fluster had been. Ruby felt herself start to shake. She knew she’d gone too far, that she shouldn’t have said that. But, as the sensible side of her brain tried to tell her that, the impulsive, emotional side blocked its ears and sang la la la.

  ‘I should fire you for this,’ he said, and his voice was as
cold as the marble floor beneath their feet.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she shot back, making enough heat and anger for both of them. ‘I quit. I’m not cut out for this and I don’t want to be.’ And she dumped the pile of paper she’d been holding onto Max’s pile and stomped off towards the door. Thank goodness she only had that one rucksack to pack. She could be out of here within the hour.

  ‘That’s right,’ Max said, his voice low and infuriatingly even as she reached the door. ‘Run out on another job.’

  She spun round to face him. ‘You know nothing about me. So don’t you dare judge me.’

  He stared her down. The fire from a few moments earlier was gone, doused by a healthy dollop of concrete, if his expression was anything to go by.

  ‘I know that you bail when the going gets tough, that you’ve never seen a single job through to the end.’

  ‘So? That’s my business, not yours. You’ve made that abundantly clear.’

  He stepped forward. ‘I’m afraid it is my business when you’re leaving before the end of your contract.’

  That was when Ruby smiled. She really shouldn’t, but it started somewhere deep down inside and bubbled up until it reached her lips. ‘And there’s your problem, Mr Hot Shot. I don’t have a contract, remember?’

  And, leaving him to chew on that, she stalked down the corridor. Pity she was wearing ballet slippers, because it would have been so much more effective in heels.

  ‘We had a verbal agreement!’ he yelled after her.

  Ruby’s response was to keep walking but use some non-verbal communication she was pretty sure was offensive in just about any language you cared to mention.

  An angry shudder ripped through her as she headed for her room, already mentally packing her rucksack. And she’d thought she was attracted to this man? She really was insane. The sooner she got out of Venice, the better.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MAX WAS SO FURIOUS he couldn’t speak, could hardly even breathe. How dare she act as if he were in the wrong? And how dare she bail on him after only one week? What was he going to do now? Knowing his mother, she’d make an impulsive decision and say she couldn’t possibly keep Sofia here on her own, and then he’d be stuck here, right when it was more urgent than ever that he leave this tangled family mess behind and concentrate even harder on his work.

  He wanted to march after Ruby, to give her a piece of his mind, but he suspected she was in no mood to listen. She was stubborn as hell, that woman, and bound to dig her heels in if he went in with all guns blazing.

  He’d give her half an hour. Then he’d go and find her, make her see sense.

  He looked down at the stack of papers in his hands. His scribbled-on plans were on top. Just the sight of them made his temperature rise a couple of notches. He turned and headed for the library. At least he’d be able to distract himself for a short while trying to see if anything was salvageable. Once he was there, he dropped the stack of papers on the desk and sank into the chair.

  It had to have been her fault. She must have come and got more paper from his makeshift office at some point, despite what she’d said, because how else could his pristine plans have ended up on Sofia’s drawing-paper pile? They hadn’t been outside the library all week.

  A cold feeling washed through him from head to toe.

  Except...

  Last night, when he’d taken some papers into the salon as a cure for insomnia, and the plans had been amongst them. It had worked, too. After an hour and a half of poring over them, going over every detail, he’d woken himself up, his head lolling against his chest, and then he’d stumbled back to bed.

  Oh, hell.

  And he had no idea if he’d stumbled back into the library first and replaced the plans.

  He stared at the clean, narrow printed-out lines of his plans, with Ruby’s thicker doodlings over the top. It was his fault, wasn’t it? Not hers. While he hadn’t exactly put them on Sofia’s paper stack by leaving them lying around in the salon he’d opened up the way for them to get muddled into it during the course of the day.

  Max exhaled heavily and let his forehead drop so it rested on the pile of papers.

  Damn.

  And he’d lost his temper. Something he never did. He’d always hated losing control like that. Not just because when his really long fuse went, it tended to verge on apocalyptic, but because of how he was feeling right now. Raw. Open. Weak.

  If it had been Sofia that had done the drawing he knew he wouldn’t have reacted the same way. Oh, he’d have been cross, but he wouldn’t have exploded like that, and not just because she was only two and he would have scared the living daylights out of her.

  There was something about Ruby that just got under his skin.

  He sat up, ran his hand through his hair and stared at the dark green wallpaper.

  He should let her leave, shouldn’t he?

  She wanted to. It would certainly be better for him.

  But he needed her.

  He shook his head. No. He didn’t need anyone. Especially not a woman who ran at the first sniff of trouble, which was exactly what Ruby had done, proving his point very nicely for him.

  He needed a nanny. That was all.

  The choice was up to her. If she still wanted to go he wouldn’t stop her, but there was one thing he needed to do first—apologise.

  In a bit, though. Ruby was probably still spitting fire, and if he tried to knock on her door now, he’d probably get a few more of those wonderfully eloquent hand gestures.

  A smile crept across his face, even though he knew it wasn’t really funny at all.

  She was a pill, that one.

  He sighed and turned his attention back to the plans in front of him, unfolding the paper and having a good look. It was interesting what she’d drawn. She’d taken his plain, square arch and added some traditional Venetian style to it. She really had been paying attention to the shapes and patterns of the buildings, hadn’t she? Here was an ogee arch, and here a lobed one. She’d reproduced them perfectly, even when she’d only been doodling.

  That was when something smacked him straight between the eyebrows.

  The shapes.

  Ruby had been talking about the geometric shapes, the other day, the way simple ones interlocked to make more complicated ones. All he’d been able to see when he came to Venice was the fuss, the frilliness. He’d forgotten that even the most of ornate fasciae were constructed of much simpler, cleaner elements.

  If he took Ruby’s idea and pared it back, using simpler shapes, overlapping and juxtaposing them to create something, not exactly elaborate, because that wasn’t his style, but something more intricate that still kept that essence of simple elegance.

  He grabbed one of Sofia’s scrap-paper sheets and a pen and began to scribble. Semicircular arches here and here, intersecting to create a more pointed version, with slender pillar for support. His hand flew over the paper, sketching shapes and lines, at first for the arches in the atrium, but then taking the same idea and applying it to other aspects of the space, giving it all a cohesive feel.

  He could see it so clearly. Just a hint of gothic style, built in glass and steel. Modern materials that echoed back to classic design. It was just what he needed to tie the new wing and the existing institute building together and make them feel like one space.

  He kept going, filling sheet after sheet, until he suddenly realised he’d been at this for ages.

  Ruby!

  He still hadn’t gone and apologised.

  He shoved away from the desk, sending a stack of Sofia’s colourful drawings flying, and then sprinted down the corridor in the direction of her and Ruby’s rooms. He didn’t bother knocking when he got there, just flung the door open and raced inside, expecting to find her shoving clothes into her rucksack, a sco
wl on her face.

  Wrong again, Max.

  She can pack in under ten minutes, remember? Sometimes five.

  Where Max had expected to find Ruby stewing and muttering insults under her breath, there was nothing but empty space.

  Ruby Lange was gone.

  * * *

  Ruby shivered as she waited on the little creaky dock outside Ca’ Damiani. The clouds had sunk closer to the water and coloured everything a murky grey. A drop of rain splashed on her forehead. Great.

  Her rucksack was at her feet, leaning against her lower legs, and she craned to see if the light bobbing towards her, accompanied by the sound of a motor, was the taxi she’d ordered. She needed to get out of here and she needed to do it right now.

  This was so not how she’d imagined seeing Venice by water this evening.

  More raindrops, one after the other. She could hear them plopping into the canal near her feet.

  The approaching craft turned out to be a private boat that puttered past and stopped outside one of the buildings opposite. Ruby felt her whole body sag.

  Stupid, stupid girl. You take on a job you know nothing about—just because some random guy says he needs you—and you think he’s going to see past all of your inexperience and believe you’re something special? Get real. The only thing Max Martin believed about her was that she was a flaky screw-up, just like everyone else on this planet.

  She hugged her arms tighter around her, wishing she hadn’t packed her jacket in the very bottom of the rucksack.

  Not everyone believes you’re a screw-up.

  Okay, maybe she was being a little dramatic. A number of her bosses over the years had begged her to stay when she’d realised the job wasn’t for her and had given in her notice. They’d said she was competent and organised and they’d love to promote her, but she hadn’t been able to ignore that itchy feeling once it started. The only way to stop the intense restlessness, the only way to scratch it enough so it went away, was to move on. But Max was wrong. She didn’t run away. She ran to the next thing. There was a whole world of difference.