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Rosa won the second game. Fortified by more colourful cocktails than was good for her, she could not stop laughing about it—especially when Nico pretended to sulk.
‘Ha!’ she snorted. ‘Beaten by a girl.’
‘That’s a very sexist remark, young lady,’ he said, adopting a mock-grave voice.
She swept the tiles into the small green sack and flashed him a saccharine smile. ‘That’s because you’re a very sexist man.’
His brows shot up. ‘In what possible way am I sexist? I employ hundreds of women, many of them at senior or director level. I would employ more if the mining industry was not so male-dominated. We don’t get enough women applying for positions.’
‘That would be a valid point, but I don’t think you see the women you employ as female.’
‘You are confusing me.’
‘It seems to me that if a woman isn’t a tall, blonde stick-insect with silicone boobs you don’t recognise her as a woman. She’s just another drone in your employ.’
‘If I were to flirt with any woman in my employ I would be asking for trouble. It’s a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.’
‘Possibly,’ she conceded. ‘Or it could just be that you don’t fancy a woman who has to use her brains to earn a living rather than her body.’
‘Ouch.’ He winced. ‘How does that theory explain why I fancy you?’
‘It doesn’t—but that’s because you don’t fancy me. Not really. You just don’t like losing, and for me to leave our marriage means you’ll have lost.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
FOR A MOMENT it felt as if Rosa had looked inside his head and scoffed at what she found.
‘Which brings me to the second point of my argument,’ she continued, her husky voice full of amusement. ‘You married a drone instead of a stick-insect because you assumed marrying a high-maintenance supermodel would be hell on earth. Did you ever seriously consider marrying any of your lovers?’
Fascinated, Nico shook his head.
Rosa was pretty much bang on the money.
Growing up, he had had minimal contact with the opposite sex. For twenty-one years women had been a remote, alien species.
And then he had met Galina, the first woman to prove to him that females were not a mysterious sub-gender.
Beautiful, intelligent, emotionally needy Galina...
Whenever he thought about her he could still taste failure on his tongue. Thinking about her always served as a reminder of why it was for the best for him to divide the women in his life into two camps.
In the first camp were his lovers—beautiful socialites who looked good on his arm. He was not so immodest as not to know he was fortunate in his looks and physique, but when it came to socialites those particular attributes came a low second to the size of his wallet. He was certain he could look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and they would still want him. The thought of marrying any of them filled him with horror. As sexy and as beautiful as they were, the thought of waking up to one of them, sharing a roof, the demands they would place on him, were all things he found intolerable.
In the second camp were the women who worked for him, women employed for their brains and not their looks. As he had found with Galina, intelligent women tended to be more emotionally literate too. A rigidly enforced dress code ensured none of them came to work dressed as if for a nightclub. This kept things on a professional basis for everyone.
Although he had always desired marriage for the respectability and stability it afforded, he had never expected to meet someone to whom he could make that commitment. He had never imagined meeting a woman who could straddle both camps.
That night in California when he had got to know the real Rosa, the woman under the starchy surface, he had been delighted to discover someone with an easy wit to match her quick brain. Her understated attractiveness had blossomed. She would, he had realised, make boring corporate functions tolerable without clinging like a limpet to his arm.
Best of all, she was vehemently against emotional entanglements. He had come to suspect that in Rosa, as in himself, that particular gene had been switched off.
But even emotionally illiterate people had physical needs. Rosa was no exception.
And neither was he.
The blossoming he had first spotted in California had now flowered into a sexy radiance of creamy skin hidden by far too much material. Soon, he vowed, Rosa would unpeel the clothing covering her delectable body and reveal herself to his willing, devouring eyes. And then he would devour her.
‘There are a couple of things I want to correct you on,’ he said, his voice throaty. ‘I do not regard my female employees as “drones”. They are simply my employees, and they are afforded the respect they deserve for the quality of their work and not their gender.’
