Italian Bachelors: Ruthless Propositions. Fiona Harper

in hot pursuit. She launched herself at Ruby and landed on her lap.

      Fina pressed a hand to her chest, and said breathlessly, ‘She’s full of beans tonight, and she wanted to come and see you.’

      ‘That’s okay.’ Then she turned to Sofia. ‘Perhaps doing something quiet together for a few minutes will help you get ready for bed. What do you say, young lady?’

      ‘Daw!’ said Sofia loudly and pointed to the crayons and scrap paper that had been left out after their earlier colouring session.

      Ruby chuckled and let Sofia slip off her lap before she joined her kneeling by the coffee table. ‘And what would you like to draw this evening?’

      Sofia thought for a moment. ‘Naughty fish!’

      Of course.

      Ruby couldn’t remember how many mischievous crabs she’d sketched since that first one: on the bottom of the lagoon, in a carnival mask, and Sofia’s favourite—clinging determinedly to her uncle’s big toe with a pair of razor-sharp pincers. She quickly did an outline in black pen, a gentler scene this time, something more in keeping with bedtime. She drew the cheeky crab in the back of a gondola with his equally cheeky crustacean girlfriend, being punted along by a singing gondolier in the moonlight.

      When she realised what she’d done, how romantic she’d made the scene, she sighed and pushed it her charge’s way.

      There Venice went again...messing with her head.

      ‘Here you go. And make sure you colour nicely. I don’t want it all scribbled over in two seconds flat.’

      Sofia nodded seriously, then set to work giving the lady crab a shock of purple hair, which Ruby approved of most heartily.

      The sun was down behind the buildings now. Ruby stood and walked to the window, drawn closer by a patchwork sky of yellows and pinks and tangerines, sparsely smeared with silvery blue clouds. Venice, which often had an oddly monochrome feel to its palette, was bathed in golden light.

      She walked back over to where Sofia was colouring and complimented her on her hard work, even though the cartoonish drawing she’d provided her with was almost entirely obliterated with heavy strokes of multicoloured crayon. She pulled out a piece of paper for herself. Most of the sheets had writing on the back. They’d gone through Fina’s meagre stash of drawing paper and now were wading through documents Max had discarded, using them as scrap. Ruby flipped it over and looked at what was on the printed side.

      It was a detail for an interior arch in one of the galleries of the National Institute of Fine Art. The shape was square with no adornment, and Ruby could see where the metal and studs of a supporting girder were left unhidden, giving it a textured, yet industrial air. She thought of the buildings Max had shown her up and down the canal, how he’d explained the Venetians had taken styles from the countries they visited with their own to make something unique, and, instead of turning the sheet back over again and drawing another princess, she picked up a pen and began to embellish.

      She sighed, her heart heavy inside her chest. She might as well occupy herself while she waited.

      * * *

      ‘You need to get back here right away,’ Alex, Max’s second-in-command at Martin & Martin insisted, more than a hint of urgency in his tone.

      Max closed his eyes to block out the dancing cherubs above his head. He’d been pacing to and fro in his mother’s library and he was starting to get the uncanny feeling they were watching him. ‘I know.’

      ‘Vince McDermot wants the institute commission and he wants it bad.’

      Max opened his eyes and stared at the screen on his laptop. ‘I know. But the institute board have committed to giving me this extra few weeks to tweak our designs. They won’t go back on that.’

      Alex sighed. ‘True, but McDermot has been out and about wining and dining key members of the board behind our backs. Either you need to come back to London and start schmoozing this instant or we need to come up with a design that’ll blow that slimy little poser out of the water.’

      Max knew this. He also knew he wasn’t good at schmoozing. ‘You’re better at buttering clients up than I am.’

      Alex let out a low, gruff laugh. ‘Damn right, but it’s you they want, Max. It’s time to stop playing happy families and get your butt back here.’

      Now it was Max’s turn to laugh. Happy families? Yeah, right.

      ‘I’ve been doing what needs to be done to focus on the work, Al. You know that.’

      Alex grunted. ‘All I’m saying is that there’s no point in us burying our heads in the sand about this. Otherwise, the month will be up, we’ll submit new designs and, even if they do have the “wow factor”, the board will be more inclined to go with that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy.’

      One of the reasons Max liked Alex, both as a colleague and a friend, was that he didn’t mince his words. Alex had a point, though. Vince McDermot was London’s new architectural wunderkind. Personally, Max thought his designs impractical and crowd-pleasing. They’d never stand the test of time.

      ‘I’m flying back to London tomorrow afternoon, so that’s that sorted,’ he told Alex. ‘The other stuff? Well, that’s another story, but if we can keep them sweet for the next fortnight, it’ll give us time to come up with what they’re looking for.’

      It had to come at some point, didn’t it? He’d been hailed for his ‘ground-breaking minimalist and elegant style’, won awards for it. But that had been before. Now he couldn’t come up with anything fresh and exciting. It was as if his talent had been buried with his father.

      Alex made a conciliatory noise. ‘Listen, I should have more of an idea of who exactly he’s been sliming up to in the next fifteen minutes. Do you want me to call back, or are you going to hold?’

      Max looked at the clock. It was half past seven.

      He hadn’t forgotten what that meant.

      He was late. Really late.

      ‘I’ll hold,’ he said.

      His conscience grumbled. He let the relief flooding through him drown it out.

      It was better this way. It was getting harder and harder to remember Ruby was his employee. Harder and harder to stop himself relaxing so much in her presence that he kept letting his guard down. He couldn’t afford to do that. Not here. Not with his mother so close.

      Better to put a stop to it now.

      So Max made himself sit down. He made himself tinker with the designs for the institute’s atrium. He made himself ignore the clawing feeling deep inside that told him he was being a heel, that he was hurting her for no reason.

      Unfortunately, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Probably because the lines and angles in front of him on the screen kept going out of focus, and he kept imagining what it would be like to be out in the boat with Ruby, the dark wrapping around them, enclosing them in their own little bubble while the lights of the city danced on the lagoon.

      That only made him crosser.

      Damn her. It was all her fault, waltzing into his neatly ordered life, turning it upside down.

      You asked her. Hell, you practically commanded her to come with you.

      Yeah? Well, everybody made mistakes. Even him. Occasionally.

      It was only when he stood up to pace around the room again that he realised he’d put the phone down on Alex at some point in the last five minutes and hadn’t even noticed. He said a word that should have made the cherubs on the ceiling put their fingers in their ears.

      And all that messing around he’d done on the atrium plans was a load of rubbish! In fact, all the work he’d done on them in the last couple of days had been tired and uninspiring. What had he been thinking?

      He