Page 42 of Resisting the Bossy Billionaire

His eyes gleamed. ‘Tell me.’

‘It turned out that Sheena and Ididkind of know each other. Our mothers used to work for the same accountancy firm!’

Oh, how she loved Marcello’s laughter at this, loved how when their drinks arrived he held his aloft so she could clink hers to it, loved how he urged her to try his and loved even more his laughter when she pulled a disgusted face—who putolive juicein a vodka, for heaven’s sake?—at its offensive taste.

‘Your tastebuds are warped,’ she informed him.

‘So you don’t want to share the seafood platter, then?’ he teased.

It was after they’d finished their first course, were on their third round of drinks and helping themselves to the enormous tray heaped with clams, oysters, tuna crudo, jumbo shrimps and lobster that had been delivered to their table, that he said, ‘Do you know, I have never asked what brought you to America?’

She looked up at him, startled by the observation. ‘Haven’t you?’

He shook his head. ‘I just assumed you had followed the American dream like most other people who emigrate here.’

The look that passed between them conveyed perfectly well that it didn’t need to be said that Marcello had turned his back on a nightmare rather than follow a dream.

‘I did have that dream,’ she admitted, squeezing lemon juice over the seafood she’d piled onto her plate. ‘But it wasn’t the dream of making a pot of money. It was the freedom New York promised that drew me.’

‘What kind of freedom were you seeking?’

‘All kinds. I’m from a small town with a small high street where all the shops close at five and the only night life are pubs where the only activities are games of darts and table skittles, and the music comes from twenty-year-old jukeboxes. New York seemed to promise everything I thought I was missing out on. The city that never sleeps? I wanted that, thank you very much.’

Marcello laughed and plucked a fat chip from the metal basket piled with them. ‘That aspect drew me too. Did you not consider moving to an Irish city or to England?’

‘All my favourite films were set in New York so for me it was a no-brainer. I couldn’t believe it when I was accepted into Columbia. I only chose business on a whim because I couldn’t think of anything else.’

‘You were eighteen?’

‘I’d just turned nineteen.’

He thought of himself at nineteen. He’d gone to university in Bologna, a four-hour drive from his family home in Rome. His parents had visited every other weekend armed with cases of freshly laundered clothes, which they’d swapped for the mounds of dirty clothes he’d piled all over his cramped room.

Where he’d been happily spoilt and cosseted by adoring parents, Victoria had fought to be seen by hers. Moving to New York meant Victoria had been on her own. In the eighteen months she’d worked for him, not a single member of her family had flown out to visit her.

‘That must have been daunting.’

‘It wasterrifying,’ she agreed gleefully.

‘And your family? What did they think of you leaving? Were they proud?’ He hoped as hard as he’d ever hoped for anything that they were.

‘They were delighted for me. I became the golden Cusack they could all brag about to their friends and casually drop into conversation about my life in The Big Apple.’ The gleefulness in her voice faded. ‘It took me leaving to make them actually remember my name.’

That was one thing he would never understand. He supposed in big families like the Cusacks, it was all too easy for one of them to feel lost within it. Marcello’s extended family was big, but when he was growing up, his immediate family had been just the four of them, their parents spoiling and cosseting Benito as much as they’d done him.

He found himself having to swallow a sudden lump in his throat. ‘Do you miss them?’

‘Not as much as I would without the technology we have. I’m in all the family group chats and stuff but...’ She gave a small shrug. ‘It’s silly but I still feel excluded. It’s my ownfault, I know. I chose to move across the Atlantic and live in a different time zone from them. But they answer each other’s posts within minutes, sometimes seconds whereas mine are often left hanging. The only one who always responds to mine is Grandma.’

Victoria gave a wistful shake of her head and tried to pull herself together and not let the despondency she’d worked so hard to smother that evening leach out. ‘I told you I’m being silly. It’s always great when I go home and we have such a lovely time together. I guess I just wish it didn’t feel like they forget me the minute I’m out of their sight.’

But as she said this, she realised that since working for Marcello, the sting of it had lost its needle precision. Her visits home had been happier occasions for her, not just because she no longer felt lost in the crowd of Cusacks but because she was happier and more confident in her own skin. And all because one man had seen something in her that had left a lasting impression.

Marcello had remembered her.

‘I can tell you this much,bella,’ he said.‘When you were ill, I nearly suffered a burst eardrum from all the calls I kept receiving from them.’

She spluttered a short burst of laughter at the imagery.

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