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“I’ve been rushed off my feet all evening. I just thought I’d go outside and take a few minutes’ time out.” Her cheeks were burning and she couldn’t meet his eyes. The room he had pulled her into was a small snug, the least grand of all the rooms she had seen. It felt small and oppressive and the silence suddenly thick between them. Rosie clasped her hands tightly together.
Next to all the gloriously and elaborately dressed women out there strutting their stuff, next to the small blonde in the short dress smoking and flirting with Angelo, playing all those tried and tested games, Rosie was dully aware of the uninspiring sight she must make. Her face felt greasy and she had sensibly tied her hair back but she no longer had the sort of long hair that could easily be tied back. Strands hung limply against her face, and her outfit might be practical but it was bland and indifferent. Then again, she told herself, she was invisible, an employee, as he had made sure to demonstrate by ignoring her for the duration of the evening. She was his bit on the side, a little secret. It was sharply brought home to her how low down the pecking order she was in his estimation.
“Can I go now?” she asked politely, and Angelo frowned. It was neither the time nor the place but his hands itched to tug her hair free and to have her right here, right now, with the door shut and guests milling about outside.
“You’re doing a good job,” he said. “Correction—you did a good job, an excellent job. Everyone complimented the food and the evening went like clockwork. The jazz band was perfect.”
“Thank you.”
“Is that it?”
“What do you expect, Angelo?” Her eyes flashed and she tilted her head to glare at him. “You paid me to do a good job and I’m pleased that I did a good job, along with all the people who helped me. I know the food went down well because lots of people told me.”
“And I didn’t. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
Rosie remained silent. She didn’t want to sound as though she was whining. She was a professional and professionals didn’t whinge because their employers were sparse in their praise.
“You were busy,” she said eventually. She could feel his fabulous green eyes on her but she kept her face averted and stared fixedly at the open fireplace and the painting above it.
“Are you in a mood because you happened to see me outside with a woman?”
Rosie thought she could detect amusement in his voice, and anger flared like a firecracker exploding inside her, but she wasn’t going to let it take her over. She gritted her teeth together and stubbornly refused to look at him.
“Well?” Angelo prompted. Through the closed door, the sound of the party outside was a muffled blur interspersed with laughter. He thought he might possibly be missed if they remained in the room any longer but he didn’t really care. He was intrigued by the slow flush of colour spreading across her cheeks.
“Who was she?” This time, Rosie did look at him. If he tried lying, she would see right through it and the need to know was greater than the need to contain herself and feign indifference.
“You’re jealous.”
“I’m not going to be one of a number,” Rosie said tightly. “You don’t have to tell me that this isn’t going to last, but whilst it’s ongoing then I’m either the only woman you share a bed with or it’s goodbye.”
Angelo laughed mirthlessly. “I don’t respond well to threats like that,” he told her grimly. Suddenly she was full of scruples and moral principles? Hilarious. “I also don’t do jealousy. That’s not part of what we’ve got.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Really? Because that’s what I see written all over your face.” He was saying all the right things, all the things he knew he should be saying, so why did he still want to push her up against the wall and make love to her until she was a quivering wreck? He could already feel his erection pushing painfully against his zip, big, bold and eager to feel the uniqueness of her body as he thrust into her.
“Then you need to get your eyes checked.” But had he answered her question? No. Had he told her who the mystery blonde was? No. The walls of the snug seemed to be pressing down on her. She was suffocating. “If you can’t even tell me who that woman is, and if all you can do is accuse me of being jealous and then give me a long lecture on jealousy not being part of the deal, then...”
“Then what?”
“I have to get back to the kitchen. There are liqueurs to be served. The staff will be starting to wonder where I’ve gone.”
“Then what?”
Rosie knew that he was pressing her for an answer and she was afraid that she knew only too well what that meant—he wanted her to push him into a decision he had already made for himself. He wanted her to end it to spare him the trouble of ending it himself.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Angelo raked his fingers through his hair and looked at her with rampant frustration. “Okay, so she’s a high-powered lawyer and the first time I met her was tonight.”
Rosie wondered if it was possible to hear the sound of her relief. So he still didn’t do jealousy, it was still one of the many things not allowed in the strange relationship they had, but he had answered her question. Mostly. She didn’t say anything.
“And you went outside with her?”
Angelo was tempted to tell her that further cross-examination was out of the question. But then, at the end of the day, he had warned her about getting jealous, and really what harm was there in handing over a few meaningless facts that would set her mind at rest? “To get some fresh air. I had no intention of doing anything, if you must know. And that’s that subject covered.”
There were other things she would have liked to ask him—such as whether he found the mystery blonde more attractive than her—but she was ashamed even to think that.
“I’ll have to return with my team in the morning to tidy.” Her voice was still stiff as she shuffled from foot to foot, resisting the magnetic pull of his masculinity and keeping as much healthy distance as she could.
She was about to launch into the most impersonal conversation she could think of, which involved details of what rooms he wanted them to clean and whether he would provide his own cleaning service for the bedrooms once guests had vacated. She had no time. There was a rap on the door and then Beth was there, wringing her hands, clearly anxious.
Disaster: one drunk guest. All the petits fours on the ground, most of them crushed. The trays were all waiting to be filled, Beth practically wailed, and there was nothing much to put on them.
“Leave it to me.” The diversion was a blessing in disguise because Rosie had felt her mind wandering away, gearing up for more questions about the mystery blonde, risking everything to satisfy her raging curiosity. “I have a few things in my larder. I’ll work something out.”
“And I’ll dispatch the drunk.” Angelo was walking out of the room while Beth and Rosie scurried behind him. No one batted an eye at the trio. The point about parties that were a swinging success was that inhibitions were lowered and mellow good-will prevented too many interested questions being asked about goings-on between the guests, or in this case between employer and employee. Rosie thought that her father would have adored this party and, in fairness to him, would never have fallen onto a stack of petits fours. Romantic melancholy had been much more his thing.
Rosie was thinking on her feet as she and Angelo dashed out to his car.
“I have boxes of biscuits and stuff on the top shelf of my larder,” she was telling him as they covered the short distance between mansion and cottage. “Rainy-day stuff.”
“Which is why you so richly deserved that old banger.”
“You wait out here,” she instructed, leaping out of the car. “I won’t be a minute.”
She shouldn’t have been. She literally should have been five minutes, grabbing sufficient ingredients to do something clever and decorative with biscuits and dark chocolate.
Angelo waited impatiently for almost twenty minutes when, with mounting panic, he entered the cottage...
CHAPTER NINE
HE FOUND HER in the sitting room where she was huddled on the sofa. She had switched on the lamp on the table next to her and it bathed her in a pool of light.
“What’s going on?” Angelo came to an abrupt halt at the doorway and stared at her. Not for the first time he wondered how it was that she could draw his eyes and keep them there, as if spellbound.
Rosie looked up at him silently. She thought how events and circumstances had a weird way of altering the course of people’s lives. If she had never come to London; if she hadn’t been working on the one night in that bar when Angelo had happened to come; if Mandy hadn’t left the cottage to her; if she hadn’t reconnected in a moment of weakness after the business with Ian... The ifs could go on and on once you started listing them down.
“Well?” Angelo demanded. He flipped on the overhead light, and now he could see that she was as white as a sheet and there was a little bundle of papers in her lap with some garish costume jewellery. In one stride, he was by her, staring down at the jumble of papers. “What’s all this? I’ve been waiting out there for you in the car. Have you forgotten that there’s a party going on which we are due to return to?”
