we’re stuffed!
‘Isabella, many women come back to work the week after they’ve given birth or when they’ve had a Caesarean.’
His PA forgot her stately calm enough to laugh. ‘Well, I’m not superwoman. I need six months and then I think we might discuss flexible hours.’
Marco put down the phone—the woman had him wound round her finger and she knew it, damn her!
Scowling to himself he left his car and walked into the lift. His temporary PA was scared of him, which might not have been a bad thing if this fear made her efficient, but it didn’t. She gibbered and looked at him as though he was going to eat her and spoke so quietly he couldn’t hear her.
And to make the situation worse he suspected his protégé was falling in love with her.
Love! Marco could not even think the word without a contemptuous sneer forming on his broad brow. Love did not mix well with the smooth running of his office. When he had spent the time and effort to groom Francesco he had taken an ability to keep his personal life separate from the demands of work as a given.
He did not seek to impose his views on his employees—what they did in their free time, including falling in love, did not concern him—but when love affairs crossed the line into the work place it became his concern.
When Marco walked into the office, Francesco broke off his conversation with the young woman whose fingers were flying across the keyboard.
Marco glanced their way but did not speak as he stalked towards the wall lined with files, impatience etched not just in every line of his startlingly good-looking face but in every tense muscle and sinew of his lean, athletic body.
He angled a sardonic brow. ‘Did you want to see me, Francesco?’ he asked, locating the file he was seeking and withdrawing it.
‘No.’
Marco maintained a speaking silence, but though the younger man looked uncomfortable he did not look away. Marco gave a reluctant smile; his protégé was a fool but he was a fool who stood his ground, which was good. There was no place at a senior level for a man he could intimidate.
His smile faded when he turned his attention to the blushing young woman; incompetence always irritated him. ‘I do not wish to be disturbed for the next two hours.’
‘Oh, dear!’
Marco took his hand off the door handle of his office, stopped and swung back. ‘Oh, dear?’ He angled a questioning brow and waited.
Francesco cleared his throat. ‘Slight problem there. Your two-thirty has been here since, well…’ He glanced at his wristwatch which now read six-thirty. ‘Well, two-thirty.’
Marco’s brows drew into a disapproving straight line above the hawkish nose that bisected his chiselled features.
‘I asked for you to reschedule.’
Again it was Francesco who spoke up. ‘We tried, but we couldn’t contact her in time. Miss Balfour had apparently lost her phone.’
Marco’s expression accurately reflected his opinion of people who lost phones. ‘My appointment was not with anyone called Balfour.’
‘Well, that’s who came.’
‘And you put her in my office?’ Marco’s incredulous interrogative glare was directed towards his temporary secretary. ‘You let a total stranger into my office?’
‘That was my idea, Marco, when she wouldn’t go away.’
‘Wouldn’t go away?’ Marco echoed, his glance drifting towards the protective hand that Francesco had placed on the shoulder of his temporary secretary.
The expression in the girl’s eyes seemed to confirm his worst suspicions. Great, he thought, just what I need—an office romance. Which means I either turn a blind eye or come the heavy and be about as popular as the plague.
Fortunately he did not need people to love him.
‘When you say…wouldn’t go away…’
The sardonic inflection in his boss’s voice brought a flush to the younger man’s face but he defended his decision and nodded.
‘And frankly, I didn’t have the heart to throw her out. The kid looked ready to cry when Analise—’ he flashed a warm look at the seated woman and she blushed prettily ‘—suggested she could come back another day.’
‘Kid?’
His secretary finally spoke up. ‘My sister Toni is eighteen and she looks older than her.’
Marco, whose interest in her sister Toni was not immense, struggled to contain his growing impatience while Francesco added the weight of his opinion.
‘She does look very young, Marco. She arrived direct from the airport and she’d lost her bags and she looked—’
‘Pretty?’ It was the other man’s problem if he had a weakness for a pretty face, but when he allowed the Achilles heel to encroach into office hours it became a problem.
‘No, not pretty,’ Francesco said, struggling and failing to recall the features of the young English girl who had arrived looking scared stiff. ‘She wasn’t ugly or anything…Her eyes were blue,’ he added, recalling the electric-blue eyes that had peeked out from under a long floppy fringe.
‘Not pretty…I’m intrigued,’ Marco drawled, sounding in reality both bored and irritated. ‘Call her a cab.’
‘I’ll take her back to her hotel,’ Francesco said to Marco’s retreating back.
Marco turned and stared at his protégé with a perplexed expression. ‘I suppose you gave her lunch too.’
‘Sandwiches.’
‘You’re joking.’
In the office Marco saw that he had not been joking.
The crumbs on the plate testified to the meal.
Chapter Four
MARCO’S first view of his two-thirty was a hank of waving fairish hair hanging over the arm of a leather swivel chair that faced the window. Presumably the occupant was so busy looking at the view she had not heard him enter.
When he cleared his throat it did not cross his mind for an instant that his guest would not respond appropriately to the cue.
When she didn’t, his aggravation levels climbed to a new high. His green eyes narrowed as he walked across the room; skirting the desk that stood between the chair and him he loosened his tie and said, ‘This is not a convenient time. I must ask—’
His hand fell away from his throat and his dark brows tugged into a dark interrogative line. While he did not expect or enjoy people jumping to attention when he walked into a room, he was not accustomed to being ignored.
The
