The Italian Tycoon's Mistress. CATHY WILLIAMS
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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?
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