and with my guest-list.’
‘But wouldn’t that be a little rude? To so obviously want to take control of the situation?’ she ventured cautiously.
He looked at her thoughtfully. Sometimes she seemed to forget herself—to tell him what she thought instead of what he wanted to hear! Was that because he had grown to confide in her—so that some of the normal rules of hierarchy were occasionally suspended?
He realised that he spoke to Jessica in a way he wouldn’t dream of speaking to one of his assistants, or their secretaries—for he had seen the inherent dangers in doing that before.
An assistant or secretary often misjudged a confidence—deciding that it meant he wanted to share a lifetime of confidences with them! Whereas the gulf between himself as chairman and Jessica as cleaner was much too wide for her ever to fall into the trap of thinking something as foolish as that. Yet she often quietly and unwittingly hit on the truth. Like now. He leaned back in his chair and thought about her words.
He had no desire to offend Garth Somerville—nor to appear to snub his wife or her eager friends. And what harm would it do to attend a dinner with such women present? It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened, or the last.
Yet he was in no mood for the idle sport of fending off predatory females. Like a child offered nothing but copious amounts of candy, his appetite had become jaded of late. And it didn’t seem to matter how beautiful the women in question were. Sex so freely and so openly offered carried with it none of the mystique which most excited him.
‘Sì,’ he agreed softly. ‘It would be rude.’
Almost without him noticing, Jessica plucked a cloth and a small plastic bottle from the pocket of her overall and began to polish his desk. ‘So it looks like you’re stuck with going after all,’ she observed, and gave the desk a squirt of lemon liquid.
Salvatore frowned. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering just how old she was—twenty-two? Twenty-three? Why on earth was she cleaning offices for a living? Was she really happy coming in here, night after night, wielding a mop and a bucket and busying herself around him as he finished off his paperwork and signed letters?
He watched her while she worked—not that there was a lot to see. She was a plain little thing and always covered her hair with a tight headscarf, which matched the rather ugly pink overall she wore. The outfit was loose and he had never looked at her as man would automatically look at a woman. Never considered that there might be a body underneath it all, but the movement of her arm rubbing vigorous circles on his desk suddenly drew attention to the fact that the material of her overall was pulling tight across her firm young breasts.
And that there was a body beneath it. Indeed, there was the hint of a rather shapely body. Salvatore swallowed. It was the unexpectedness of the observation which hit him and made him a sudden victim to a heavy kick of lust.
‘Will you make me some coffee?’ he questioned unevenly.
Jessica put her duster down and looked at him and wondered if it had ever occurred to the famously arrogant boss of Cardini Industries that his huge barn of an office didn’t just magically clean itself. That the small rings left by the numerous cups of espresso he drank throughout the day needed to be wiped away, and the pens which he always left lying haphazardly around the place had to be gathered up and put together neatly in the pot on his desk.
She met the sapphire ice of his piercing stare without reacting to it. She doubted it. Men like this were used to their lives running seamlessly. To have legions of people unobtrusively working for them, fading away into the background like invisible cogs powering a mighty piece of machinery.
She wondered what he would say if she told him that she was not there to make his coffee. That it wasn’t part of her job description. That it was a pretty sexist request and there was nothing stopping him from making his own.
But you didn’t tell the chairman of the company that, did you? And, even putting aside his position of power, there was something so arrogant and formidable about him that she didn’t quite dare. As if he were used to women running around doing things for him whenever he snapped his fingers and as if those women would rejoice in the opportunity to do so.
She walked over to the coffee machine, which looked as if a small spacecraft had landed in the office, made him a cup and carried it over to his desk.
‘Your coffee, sir,’ she said.
As she leaned forward he got the sudden drift of the lemon cleaning fluid mixed with some kind of cheap scent and it was an astonishingly potent blend. For a second Salvatore felt it wash unexpectedly over his senses. And suddenly an idea so audacious came to him that for a moment he allowed it to dance across his consciousness.
Imagine if he took someone with him to the dinner party. Someone who might deflect the attention of women on the make. Wouldn’t a woman on the arm of a known commitment-phobe send out a loud message to the world that Salvatore Cardini might be taken? Especially if that woman was so unlikely as to take their collective breath away and give them something to gossip about!
The sound of the rain continued to lash against the windows of the penthouse office and Salvatore watched as Jessica picked up her cloth and began to attack a smear of dust. It was as if up until that moment she had been nothing but a piece of paper onto which the outline of a woman had been drawn and only now had the fine detail begun to emerge. Salvatore had an accurate and swiftly assessing eye where women were concerned and for the first time he used it on the woman who was dusting behind a lamp.
Her bottom was curved and her hips were womanly, that was for sure. For the first time he allowed himself to notice the indentation of her waist—and a tiny little waist it was, too.
And yet, although he could be a maverick in business, he liked as many facts as possible at his disposal before he made a decision. He never acted on instinct alone. She might be unsuitable for the task, in so many ways.
‘How old are you?’ he questioned suddenly, and as she turned round he could see that her eyes were grey and amazingly calm—like the stones you sometimes found at the bottom of a waterfall.
Jessica tried not to show her surprise. It was a very personal question from a man who had always treated her as part of the furniture in the past. Her hand fell from the lamp and the cloth hung limply by her side as she looked at him.
‘Me? I’m…I’m twenty-three,’ she answered uncertainly.
He stared at her bare fingers. No ring, but these days you could never be sure. ‘And you are not married?’
‘Married? Me? Good heavens—no, sir.’
‘No jealous boyfriend waiting for you at home, then?’ he questioned lightly.
‘No, sir.’ Now why on earth had he wanted to know that?
He nodded. It was as he had thought. He gestured to her bucket. ‘And you are contented with this kind of work, are you?’
Jessica looked at him from between narrowed eyes. ‘Contented? I’m afraid I don’t really understand the question, sir.’
He shrugged, gesturing towards her mop and her bucket. ‘Don’t you? You seem intelligent enough,’ he mused. ‘I would have thought that a young woman would have had horizons which lay beyond the confines of office cleaning.’
It hurt. Of course it hurt. Apart from being completely patronising he made her sound like some kind of mindless robot in a pinny! Yet surely his damning judgement showed just how arrogant and completely lacking in imagination he was.
Silently, Jessica counted to ten, knowing that several options lay before her. She could pick up her bucket and upend it over that dark head and handsome, mocking face, imagining the water soaking through that fine silk shirt—and his look of dismay and of shock. That would surely be the most satisfying reaction of all. Except, of course, she wouldn’t dream of doing it—because that really would be professional suicide.
Or