Italian Bachelors: Ruthless Propositions. Fiona Harper

purple-streaked distractions.

      Now, where was the earlier atrium design? The one where he’d pared it all back to the basics? He might as well get rid of all these silly changes and start from scratch.

      He rummaged through the papers on his mother’s antique desk. He’d had a printout of it. It had to be around here somewhere.

      * * *

      Ruby sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork. Not bad, even if she did say so herself. Maybe Max was right about her having some real artistic flair. Maybe she could do something with it, rather than just ‘messing around’, as her father called it.

      There was such beauty and simplicity in Max’s designs, but this one had just needed a little something—a curve here, a twirl there. By the time she’d finished, the arch on Max’s discarded plan was a strange hybrid between twenty-first-century industrial and Venetian Gothic, with a little bit of Ruby thrown in for fun.

      Perhaps she should be an architect?

      The fact she didn’t burst out laughing then roll on the floor at that thought was all thanks to Max. He’d believed in her ability to draw, seen something no one else saw, and she was starting to think she could even see it herself. She wanted to tell him that when they went out later, to thank him, but she didn’t really know how to put it into words without betraying everything else she was starting to feel.

      ‘More fish!’ Sofia demanded, grinning at Ruby so appealingly that Ruby didn’t have the heart to make her say please.

      ‘I think maybe it’s time Grandma tucked you into bed,’ she told Sofia, smiling. Fina rose from where she’d been reading a magazine in an armchair, and held her hand out for her granddaughter. After running and giving Ruby a hug, Sofia allowed herself to be led away and Ruby was once again alone in the salon.

      She tried not to look, but the gold clock on the mantelpiece drew her gaze like a magnet.

      Eight o’clock.

      A quick glance outside confirmed her suspicions. Compared to the brightly lit salon, the sky outside was bottomless and dark. Not helped by the heavy clouds that had started to gather over the city in the last half hour.

      Max had stood her up.

      She let her eyelids rest gently closed and inhaled. It didn’t matter.

      The heaviness in her heart called her a liar.

      But it shouldn’t be there. She was a paid employee. He owed her nothing more than her wages.

      It was just...

      She shook her head and opened her eyes again, then she got off up the floor and started piling the scattered bits of drawing up, putting the crayons back in their tub.

      Just nothing.

      She’d been fooling herself again, thinking this was something when it wasn’t. Max hadn’t seen inside her, he hadn’t spotted the potential that no one else had. He’d just paid her a compliment or two, that was all. And that kiss? Heat-of-the-moment stuff that produced nothing but regrets. She’d doled out a few of those herself in her time. Nothing to sweat about.

      Then why did she feel like going to her room, shutting the door behind her and bawling her eyes out?

      She gathered the sheets of paper in various sizes up in her arms and headed towards the door. She wasn’t quite sure where she was going to put these, but she suspected Fina wouldn’t want them scattered around her most formal living space. Maybe they could find a home for one or two of the best ones on the fridge door?

      She couldn’t have been looking where she’d been going, because when the salon door burst open and Max came barrelling through she didn’t have time for evasive manoeuvres. She stumbled sideways, the stack of paper went flying into the air and then fluttered noisily down like oversized confetti.

      Max just stood in the doorway, looking somewhat stunned.

      He didn’t say anything, but he shook himself slightly then bent to help her pick up the scattered drawings.

      Damn him for being such a gentleman. She wanted to hate him right now.

      ‘Here,’ he said, when they’d finished gathering up the last of them, and held a sheaf of papers in her direction.

      ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled, chickening out of looking him in the eye.

      Max must have been doing the same, because suddenly he got very interested in the top sheet of paper.

      ‘What the hell?’ he started to say, and then his expression grew thunderous. ‘What’s this?’

      Ruby rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said, feeling her cheeks heat. ‘I didn’t intend to make the cartoon of you being bitten by the crab at first, but Sofia thought it looked like you, because it was a man, probably, and then it just became a kind of joke and we—’

      ‘I’m not talking about a silly drawing!’ Max said, his voice getter louder.

      His words were like a punch to Ruby’s gut. ‘But I—’

      ‘I’m talking about this!’ And he thrust a sheet of paper so close to her face that she had to step back to focus on it. It was the doodle she’d just finished: Max’s arch with her little bit of decorative nonsense superimposed.

      Artist? Hah! Don’t kid yourself, Ruby.

      ‘It was just... I mean, I just...’ She let out a frustrated sigh and spiked her fingers through her neatly combed fringe. ‘It’s just a doodle, Max.’

      ‘A doodle?’

      Ruby’s heart thudded and her stomach dived into her ballet pumps. If the heat of Max’s anger hadn’t been scalding her face, his expression would have been kind of funny. She nodded, feeling all the while that she was walking into an ambush that she didn’t know how to avoid.

      ‘These are my plans!’ Max bellowed. ‘What on earth makes you think you have the right to doodle on them? Are you out of your mind?’

      Ruby’s mouth moved and she backed away. ‘But, it was there...’ her gaze flicked to the coffee table, where the pile of unmolested scrap paper still sat. ‘...with the stuff you tossed out the other day...on the top of the pile.’

      ‘This wasn’t scrap!’ he yelled. ‘These are my original plans. You had no right to use them for Sofia. No right at all.’

      Ruby was so puzzled that she couldn’t even react to Max’s anger at that moment. How had Max’s plans got there? How? He’d given them the sheaf of papers himself yesterday and, okay, she hadn’t noticed that one sitting on top then, but neither she nor Sofia had been anywhere near the library. The plans couldn’t have walked here on their own.

      ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, shaking her head.

      Max began to laugh. But it wasn’t the warm, rich sound she remembered from the the day they’d gone crabbing. It was a dark, rasping sound that made the hair on her arms stand up on end.

      ‘Of course,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have hired you. Why I didn’t listen to my gut I’ll never know. What was I thinking? You have no qualifications, no experience—’

      Now was the moment that the furnace of Ruby’s anger decided to whomph into life. She went from shivery and cold to raging inferno in the space of a heartbeat.

      ‘You’re right!’ she yelled back at him. ‘You want to know if I’m cut out to be a nanny? Well, I can answer that right now—I’m not! Not if it means I have to like working for closed-off, emotionally constipated jerks like you.’

      Max went very still and his expression was completely neutral. If anything, that was more worrying than all the bluff and fluster had been. Ruby felt herself start to shake. She knew she’d gone too far, that she shouldn’t have said that. But, as the sensible side of her brain tried to tell her that, the impulsive,