Janice Maynard - Innocent In The Boardroom - At Her Boss's Pleasure / Her Boss by Day... / How to Sleep with the Boss

‘Well, what happened, in that case?’ And now his tone had changed. Very subtly. Because he’d discovered that he was curious about this mystery guy who hadn’t chucked her on his discards pile. ‘And don’t think about launching into a little sermon about it being none of my business. You don’t seem to have too many qualms about speaking your mind, so you can answer one or two questions of your own.’

‘We broke up.’ She shrugged and tore her eyes away from his lean, aggressive face. ‘The timing was wrong,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘I was very busy. I wasn’t in the right place to fully cultivate the relationship the way it deserved to be cultivated...’

‘Ah...so an amicable parting of ways...?’

Kate could have thought of other ways of describing their inevitable split. Amicable didn’t feature on the list.

‘So here’s the thing,’ he said, voice as smooth as silk and yet razor-sharp. ‘You seem to be under the impression that every relationship that doesn’t end in a walk up the aisle is a relationship that involves one person using the other. But life’s not like that. Yes, it may have been so for your mother, but your mother was a certain type of personality. Your mother—and I’m no expert on this—may have been searching for something, and the only way she could conduct her search was by offering what she had and hoping it got picked by the right kind of guy...’

‘You’re right. You don’t know my mother.’

‘Maybe your mother was fundamentally insecure,’ he carried on relentlessly. ‘But that doesn’t mean that everyone is like her. She’s not the benchmark.’

‘I never said she was.’

‘No?’

‘I should never have said anything,’ she breathed resentfully. ‘It’s awful when you tell someone something and they then proceed to use it against you like in a court of law.’

But didn’t he have a point? She refused to concede that he did, but her conscience nagged in a way it never had before. He had stripped her of her convenient black-and-white approach and she didn’t want that. It was easier to set a course when you weren’t distracted by grey areas and murky questions.

‘It’s not about the outcome,’ she muttered in a driven voice. ‘It’s about the intent.’

‘Explain.’

‘I don’t want to be having this conversation.’ She gazed at the tepid coffee in her cup and wished she had something to fiddle with. ‘Maybe we ought to find out whether we should be boarding. Or something.’

‘They’ll call us when it’s time for us to board the plane. Relax.’

She was as tense as a bowstring, her body rigid. So much emotion contained behind that bland exterior. He reached out and brushed his finger against the soft skin on the underside of her wrist and she tensed.

And he tensed.

Electric. Unexpected. A high-voltage charge that suddenly ran between them.

He withdrew his hand quickly. ‘You initiate conversations,’ he said coolly, ‘and when the going gets a little tricky you back away because you’re too scared to carry on. Weren’t you ever taught to finish what you start?’

The lazy teasing had gone, wiped out by that ferocious assault on his senses when he had casually touched her. Watching and speculating was one thing. But what he had felt just then, when he had briefly touched her...

It had felt like a loss of control. For a couple of seconds he had been knocked back by a reaction he had not expected. Curiosity had stoked his libido, but now...now he felt something as powerful as a depth charge. The shock of the unexpected jacked his responses into full alert. For once, toying with the idea of a woman in his bed seemed a dangerous adventure not to be undertaken.

‘Okay...’ Kate surreptitiously rubbed her wrist where his finger had been. ‘If you really want to know, there’s a difference between starting a relationship in the hope that it’ll develop into something and starting a relationship knowing that it’s going to crash and burn when you decide it’s time to move on.’

‘And I’m a crash-and-burn guy...?’

She shrugged and he stared her down, his dark eyes cool, his expression unreadable.

Was he storing away everything she said to be used at a later date? Did he even care one way or another what she said? She decided that, no, he probably didn’t. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would tolerate personal comments on his moral choices. She couldn’t picture any woman sitting him down with a cup of tea and sharing her opinions on his ethics and his principles. They might have a rant when he chucked them over for a new model, but that was different.

Yet here he was now, waiting for her to say something. If he didn’t care about her opinions he wouldn’t be allowing her this leeway. Would he?

‘Sort of... I guess... It’s not for me to say...’

‘Easy to make assumptions, isn’t it?’ he said softly. ‘You criticized me for making assumptions about how your background influenced you...yet here you are... A bit hypocritical, wouldn’t you say?’

The question hung in the air between them. Suddenly it felt as though they were the only two people sitting here. Background noise—not that there was much of that—faded, until she could almost hear the beating of her own heart.

It had been easy to tell herself that she could redefine the lines between them. Sitting here, she couldn’t understand how those good intentions had been swept aside so fast and so completely.

‘If you can’t take the heat,’ Alessandro drawled, ‘then you should stay out of the kitchen. You think it’s okay to offer your opinions on what you imagine my personal life is like...? Well, it’s a two-way street...’

He beckoned across a young girl who was on the hunt for empty plates and glasses and asked her to fetch him a cup of black coffee, and all the while his eyes remained fastened on Kate’s flushed face.

‘But I’m glad you brought this up,’ he continued, obviously not getting the vibes she was transmitting, ‘because, like I said, a week of constant silent disapproval isn’t what I need...’

‘I didn’t have to come,’ Kate muttered.

‘But here you are. And, incidentally, you actually did have to come. You had to come because I requested it. So, now we’re having this cosy little chat, let me fill you in on your misconceptions. I don’t pick women up and drop them, having led them up the garden path. I don’t make promises I have no intention of fulfilling in exchange for sex.’

Kate stared mutinously at the ground, wishing it would do her a favour and open up and swallow her.

She was being chastised. Like a misbehaving kid in a classroom.

‘Trust me—I don’t have to do that.’

Coffee was brought to him and Kate noticed the way the young girl half curtseyed and stared at him, goggle-eyed. He might make noises about not wanting to be treated like royalty, and laugh because maybe he really did mean it, but he was treated like royalty.

‘So you don’t leave any broken hearts behind you?’ she finally asked, prompted into filling the silence.

He looked at her thoughtfully.

‘Maybe I do,’ he mused. ‘But through no fault of my own.’

Kate’s mouth fell open. Talk about ditching responsibility! Her face must have revealed what was going through her head, but this time he relaxed, sipped the coffee that had been brought to him and smiled.

‘I don’t want commitment and I never pretend that I do,’ he said, and she bit down hard on the ready retort rising to her lips. ‘I lay my cards on the table from the start.’

‘And what would those cards happen to be?’ Kate asked politely. She thought that they probably came from the same deck that all commitment-phobes used.