Page 20 of Don't Bite The Boss
“Egypt actually,” I shrug, “I’m thinking of becoming an archaeologist.”
“Right,” she doesn’t sound convinced, “Anyway, I still think you should tell him.”
“How are the puppies settling in?” I change the subject, knowing she can’t resist talking about them.
“They are learning Italian,” she laughs.
“Oh, fuck off,” I burst out giggling, momentarily forgetting that she has kept information from me, and is still keeping something from me.
“I swear,” she takes my arm as we walk together back towards her car. “The maid who walks them only talks to them in her language, and now they only come when you call vieni qui….,”
She prattles on about the dogs until Nick is ready and they leave together.
But my mind is not on dogs as they drive away; it is on the Cosa Nostra. And I’d like very much to talk to Tristan about this threat I was ignorant about, but he too has left, without saying goodbye, which is odd.
I decide to wrap up my excavations early tonight and go home as well since it seems to be the thing to do.
Showered and changed, and of course, replete from my three-course Italian buffet, I make my way to the library to have it out with my boss. If there is a threat to him, to me, to Charlotte and Nick, then I am pissed that he chose to share that with Nick, and not with me.
I wonder as I walk the long, cool terracotta-tiled hallways if he will even show given how he has been avoiding me. I sense that something is wrong, very wrong, and I just hope he will tell me what it is.
I think back to the last time I attacked him, and chew my nail as I walk, hoping it wasn’t something to do with that. I mean sure, I’d bitten a hole in another of his jackets. And yeah, I’d tackled him to the ground, fully intent on tearing his clothes off and feasting on him without getting my teeth tangled in silver chainmail. But he’d managed to get his legs around my neck, ankles resplendent in socks crisscrossed with silver thread, and flipped me over, effectively immobilising me and strangling me with hot metal.
His array of silver weaponry and his suppleness was truly interesting and annoying.
He’d sat on me then, tangled in a hot mess of arms and legs, and laughed as I lay panting, staring into his face and cursing him. Laughed as though beating me was starting to become a game he enjoyed. I hadn’t laughed, I’d screamed in rage, and bucked like a prone turtle, but as usual, he talked calmly to me until I was as normal as I was likely to get.
Intent on goading him, I’d spat that from what I knew of his family, his parents wouldn’t approve of him beating up on a woman. And he’d made me wish I could eat my words by telling me his parents had both died in a plane accident twelve years ago.
“I never got to say goodbye,” he had said quietly as I lay listening, struggling, but no longer with any real intent. “I left right after college, I didn’t want to have anything to do with people who would force their son into a loveless marriage, and I was pissed with Christopher for complying. I sailed for three years before making contact again, and that was only because Christopher found me and begged me to come back. Father had cancer. Mother was never involved in the business. Chris asked me to come back and take over the property portfolio, help him manage the family affairs. I returned, took control, and left again. I worked sporadically from the sea. The crash happened, I came home for the funeral, and left again – but I made regular trips home after that, because I’d met Valerie, and Christopher’s ex-wife, didn’t mind my visits. In some ways, I spent more quality time with Valerie as she was growing up than Christopher did, even though it was only here and there. She spent a couple of school holidays fishing with me on my little boat.”
“Little boat!” I’d snorted, wincing at the pain in my neck, but my teeth now retracted, “it’s a floating city!”
“No,” he shook his head and helped me to my feet, “I had a small sloop, a dingy behind for island excursions. I sailed and partied from place to place, game fishing was my thing, I spent a fair bit of time off Cuba.”
“All very Hemingway,” I’d snorted, imagining the string of women he must have had from coast to coast.
“Something like that,” he had smirked, oblivious to the jealousy coursing through me at his comment.
He’d closed up then, examined my neck and told me I’d live, which, of course, was a given, and driven away.
And I’d kept working.
Many of our nights at the villa grounds followed that pattern, and now that I think about it, that one was no different from any other. I attacked, he defended, usually with something I hadn’t seen before. He talked until I calmed, we commiserated over our war wounds and went our own ways. Honestly, I don’t know why he kept coming, since he knew he would be on the receiving end of a scuffle every time.
‘Perhaps he’s had a gut full. Perhaps that is it, Pru, you’ve driven him away with your ridiculous lack of self-control and thirst for his blood.’
“No,” I say aloud, “it’s something else upsetting him now.”
I find him sitting behind his desk, a whisky in hand, mobile phone face-down on the desk where he had obviously just finished a call, and I sit down, silently, in the chair before him.
“I’m sorry,” he says, sighing, “I never dreamed they would target you.”
I should give him a piece of my mind, but his expression stops me.
He takes a drink and, clearing his throat, hands over the plans for the villa.
“I’ve had a slight change of direction with the house,” he says, once more, strangely, not looking me in the eye, “and I think I might put it all on hold for a short time, concentrate on completing the town redevelopment, come back to the villa at a later stage.”
