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

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СКАЧАТЬ the next minute she had launched into a personal attack on his moral standards. Or as good as!

      Trapped by her own idiocy, she frantically tried to think of a clever way to change the conversation, but he was waiting for her to say something. And not a sudden commentary on the weather or the state of the economy. No such luck. Why would he rescue her from her hideous discomfort when he could get a kick from pinning her to the wall and watching her wriggle like a worm on a hook?

      ‘I don’t approve of men who...use women. Maybe that’s the wrong word,’ she corrected hastily. ‘I mean I don’t approve of men who slide in and out of relationships, trying them on for size and then discarding the ones that don’t quite fit.’

      ‘And what about women who try men on for size?’

      ‘That doesn’t happen.’

      ‘No?’ He raised his eyebrows in a cool question. ‘Ever had a boyfriend, Kate?’

      ‘Of course I have!’ she said hotly. ‘And I don’t see what that has to do with anything!’

      ‘Where is he now?’

      ‘I beg your pardon?’

      ‘Where is this wonder guy now?’ He peered around him, as if at any moment the man in question would stride out from where he had been hiding behind a computer terminal.

      ‘We... It finished...’

      ‘Ah.’ Alessandro sat back and linked his fingers lightly on his lap. ‘So it didn’t work out?’

      ‘No, it didn’t,’ Kate said uncomfortably.

      ‘Was it a case of him using you ruthlessly before tossing you aside on the discarded heap?’

      ‘No!’ she cried, as flustered as a witness sitting in the box, being picked apart by the prosecution.

      ‘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?’

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