fighting?
Marco Speranza had made up his mind the moment he laid eyes on her. She had taken two steps when she realised she was falling back into a pattern of behaviour—graceful defeat translated as failure.
Her father had faith in her; her sisters would not have wimped out this way but she wasn’t even trying. They’d all be kind when she crawled back with her tail between her legs but she knew that privately they’d be disappointed.
What did she have to lose?
The frustration welled up inside her and expanded, a solid presence in her chest, until she felt as though she couldn’t breathe.
Jaw set she turned and walked back to the desk. ‘You haven’t given me a chance!’ she accused loudly.
Marco Speranza’s eyes lifted from the laptop.
The astonishment in his face might on another occasion have made her laugh, but Sophie, who was hearing the disappointment in her father’s voice when he realised his faith in her had been misplaced, planted her hands on her hips.
‘Well, did you?’ she demanded belligerently. ‘You wrote me off the moment you walked in here.’
The hands-on-the-hip stance was not good when you did not want to draw attention to their unfortunate width, but Sophie was beyond caring if he thought she was chunky. Chances were he had not even noticed she was female, let alone that she had horribly generous curves.
He didn’t bother denying it. ‘I do that when people are so committed they fall asleep. And can you really expect to be taken seriously, appearing in someone’s office dressed as you are?’ He stopped twirling the pen in his long fingers and laid it on the table. ‘You know, I think you’ll go farther if you invest in a comb…’ he mused.
Her cobalt-blue eyes—the intense colour reminded him of the sea along the Ionian coast—slid from his and as he watched she bit into her trembling lower lip.
Marco suddenly felt less than thrilled with his clever comeback; the moment he had allowed things to become personal he had lost the moral and every other sort of high ground. This English girl was enough to try the patience of a saint, but nothing excused behaviour that had drifted worryingly close to bullying.
‘Look, if you have notes, sketches, leave them. I will look at them and get back to your boss.’
Anticipating a certain amount of tearful gratitude for his generous compromise he was taken aback when the eyes that lifted slowly to his were not misty with gratitude but sparking with anger.
‘How dare you patronise me!’
Sophie’s first reaction to his scathing put-down had been to laugh, then with a sudden flash of insight she realised that this was yet another coping mechanism.
People had been making her a joke all her life, and she had been letting them. She had been telling herself she didn’t care.
Sophie suddenly realised she did care—she cared a lot.
‘Patronise!’ This woman gave unreasonable a whole new meaning.
‘All you’ve done is sneer and look down your nose at me. People like you make me sick—people who think they are entitled to what they want, when they want it, just because of what their name is. Well, I hate that world and I don’t want to live in it.’
‘Where do you want to live?’
Sophie’s blue eyes narrowed warily. ‘We are not talking about me.’
‘My mistake,’ Marco drawled, thinking that even if she had a presentation that was mind-blowing he would be insane to take someone on his payroll who had such obvious issues. ‘Do you ever pause for breath when you speak?’
‘I only babble when I get nervous.’
‘And I make you nervous?’
She glared and thought, You’d like that, wouldn’t you? ‘You make me…’ She stopped, conscious of something that bore a worrying similarity to exhilaration circulating in her veins.
She was not enjoying this! He was a horrible man and she hated arguing. He was just so convinced he was right, when in reality he was so wide of the mark that he was not even on the right page. The man was infuriating.
‘You only value things that are beautiful.’
He blinked at the accusation.
‘You!’ she declared, waving a condemnatory finger at him. ‘Judge by appearances…!’ The last time she’d said this much was when she had drank too much—if two glasses of champagne deserved that title—after her nephew Oliver’s christening.
She had fallen into the fountain; people were still teasing her about it.
The transformation from mouse-like timidity to bristling bosom-heaving antagonism interested Marco as much as the charge.
‘What else am I meant to judge you on?’ he asked, watching the finger that was being waved in his direction and thinking appearances in this instance were definitely deceptive.
This reasonable question made Sophie pause. ‘You said my outfit meant you couldn’t take me seriously.’
‘That was rude—I was out of order, but I’ve had a bad day.’
‘You’ve had a bad day!’ she squeaked, throwing up her hands. ‘You,’ she told him with husky quivering emphasis, ‘know nothing about bad days, and for your information it’s nothing to do with my clothes. I have sisters, as I’m sure you know, who could make a bin sack look fashionable and sexy.’
‘So you decided not to compete.’
Her mouth was already open to refute the ludicrous claim, but a look of doubt spread slowly across Sophie’s face. She closed her mouth with a snap. It wasn’t true…was it? The man was a total stranger; how could he have a clue as to what made her tick?
‘It’s not about competition, it’s about recognising I’m not…’ An image of her sisters flashed before her eyes, each beautiful and talented in their own unique and very photogenic way, and she thought again, Is he right?
With a tiny shake of her head she dismissed the idea and stuck out her chin.
‘I’m not like them.’ If she was, he wouldn’t be ignoring her…only he wasn’t; there was an interest of the clinical variety in the green eyes that rested on her flushed face.
‘Why are you sure I know you have sisters?’
‘Because I’m a Balfour.’ His blank expression was not one that Sophie had ever encountered previously after revealing her identity. Thrown by the response, her next words held a note of disbelief. ‘My father is Oscar Balfour.’
Sophie gave a self-deprecating shrug that turned out to be unneeded. Marco Speranza’s brows lifted in recognition of the name, though he still did not look impressed.
‘I have never met the man, though obviously I know his reputation. I’m sure I would be more
