Page 219 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

When Marcello put his knife and fork together and slid off his stool, his body aimed at the door, Victoria folded her arms and glared at him. ‘Don’t even think about leaving me to clear this mess up.’

‘The staff will do it when they come in.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘There’s not going to be any staff, Marcello, not with the stay-at-home mandate.’

His forehead furrowed and he rubbed his fingers through his thick black hair.

‘It’s a suicide mission to walk out there,’ she added, reminding him of his own words.

She could see his clever brain thinking and was not in the least surprised when he said, ‘I will double your salary for the month if you do it.’

‘I’ve quit, remember?’

‘You still have to work the notice you haven’t given. Triple pay.’

‘No.’

If she was going to be stuck in this apartment with him for the next few days then she would not allow herself to be bribed and charmed—suckered—into taking on the domestic chores. She would not allow herself to fall into any kind of domesticity with him, and it wasn’t just because she hated housework. All five Cusack girls had been expected to muck in with household jobs. Victoria’s job had been to wipe the place mats and clean the table. As she was the second youngest, her designated job had been the second easiest of the lot and still she’d loathed doing it, but she’d had to do it because with a family as large as the Cusacks, everyone was expected to muck in. Having a family as large as theirs meant she could have slipped away unnoticed by everyone except sharp-eyed Kara, the middle sister who would have sat on her if she’d sloped off. If Victoria had wanted to be a domestic goddess she’d have done like her second oldest sister, Mags, and cheerfully offered help with all the undesignated chores too, not hidden in her room and pretended to be deaf on the very rare occasion her parents remembered her existence enough to call her name.

Her main reason, though, was that Marcello would absolutely take advantage if she gave so much as an inch. It would start with cleaning the kitchen and end with him expecting her to do his laundry and pour all his drinks. After all, he hadn’t started off as a total slave-driver when she’d first worked for him. He’d made unreasonable demands at all hours of the working week but initially her days off had been Marcello-free.

It had been over a year since she’d gone a whole day without at least talking to him. During her first Christmas in his employ, he’d called her twice during her week back in Ireland, and both calls had been necessary. The Christmas just gone, he’d called her every single day. In fairness, the call on Christmas Day itself had been to wish her a Merry Christmas from his family home in Rome.

It had been the strangest of calls, she remembered. There had been a melancholy in his voice, so faint that if she didn’t know him so well she would never have detected it. By the time she’d gone to bed she’d been cursing his name for making her spend her favourite day of the year worrying about what the cause of the melancholy could have been. Their next conversation, the melancholy had been absent and in the two weeks since their return to normal working life, she’d been unable to bring herself to ask about it.

Not liking the reminder of how sick she’d felt for him and the cause of his uncharacteristic melancholy, a reminder that increased the mild burning stabbing sensation in her head, Victoria pulled herself together and made an executive decision. ‘You load the dishwasher and I’ll clean the surfaces.’

He pulled his most unimpressed face.

She wasn’t in the least perturbed. ‘It’s either that or we let the mess fester. I’ll help but I’m not doing it on my own.’

‘Quadruple pay.’

She rubbed her forehead with her palm to try and ease the burny stab. ‘Quit the bribes and load the dishwasher.’

Marcello knew when he was beaten.

Giving a theatrical sigh, he picked up his plate. ‘How do I do it?’

With a roll of her eyes...ouch, that hurt...she shook her head. ‘You’re the smartest man I know. You can work it out.’

His ego inflating at the compliment, Marcello went in search of the dishwasher, then watched a video on how to load it and hoped the end result would be better than the video on grilling bacon.

He tried to remember when he’d last performed a domestic chore. Certainly before his short marriage with Livia ended. When they first married, they’d earned enough between them to employ a weekly cleaner. By the time grief drove them apart, Marcello had earned enough on his own for a full-time housekeeper. His mother had half-heartedly tried to domesticate him as an adolescent but he’d been excellent at feigning uselessness at it, so much so that she decided it was easier to just continue doing the chores herself.

Victoria, he thought, watching her lean over to wipe the marble island, would never put up with that. She’d insist the adolescent keep practising until they mastered the art of running a vacuum cleaner around a room...

She stretched right over the island to reach a spot in the middle. Her sweater had risen and suddenly he had a full display of curvy bottom clad in tight jeans in his eyeline.

Much practice meant he was able to immediately avert his gaze and give his attention back to trying to figure out how to turn the damned dishwasher on.

Experience had taught him the slightly weightier beats of his heart would soon lighten.

He’d headhunted Victoria as Denise’s replacement knowing intellectually that she was an attractive woman but never allowing himself to see her as such. There were occasions when he would observe her working on her computer or chatting on the phone or doing some other work-related task, and experience a wave of awareness. Other occasions, usually early mornings, when they shared the back of his car on the way to a meeting or an airport somewhere and she was still so fresh from the shower that he could smell her shampoo and the cleanliness of her skin, and have to block off his senses.

All those things were manageable. He made them manageable. Allowing himself to see her for the beautiful, curvaceously sexy woman she was would only lead to unwanted desires springing to life, which would then lead to a mess that would disrupt the efficiency of his life. And so he didn’t allow it. Victoria was his executive assistant, his right-hand woman. She’d become indispensable to him.

‘Here,’ she said, her musical lilt breaking into his thoughts and the curvaceously sexy body he was trying to tune out breaking into his space to stand beside him and place the grill pan in front of him. ‘You missed this.’

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