Tempting the New Boss(65)
“Is that right? He obviously liked you just fine.” Now that they were alone, he was absorbed in his papers again.
She rubbed her eyes, hoping at the last minute she hadn’t smudged the little mascara she had on. “Italian men are all like that. Sorry for the generalization but it’s pretty much true.”
“Is it? You’ve known a lot of them, have you?”
She laughed. “You’re not seriously—”
“I’m seriously commenting that the guy was fucking you with his eyes.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
He sat back in his chair, meeting her eyes, his own narrowed. “If I keep my hands off you, how does this work? Am I going to have to see other guys looking down your blouse in the meantime?”
“Where the hell is this coming from?” she demanded. “Where do you get off talking to me like that?”
When she had agreed to stay on until replaced, she hadn’t meant he could ignore her as he seemed to being doing earlier or berate her as he was doing now.
“This is not okay, Mason.”
His cheeks were flushed, his jaw set. “I’m getting fucking sick of all these rules about what’s okay and what’s not okay.”
She stood up and he tugged her down, leaning toward her, whispering, “Where is this coming from? Where is this coming from? I’ll tell you where. Last night, I spent the first night without you since I met you and I didn’t like it. I wanted you beside me, to snuggle with you and watch you while you sleep. To wake up with me and talk to me—”
He took a deep breath, appearing to try to calm himself, and she ran her eyes over his face, shocked by all this emotion, but touched by it at the same time. She had spent a sleepless night herself last night. “Mason…”
“And then I have to sit here and watch that asshole flirt with you. Know that it’s okay for him to be with you because he’s not your boss. Isn’t that right?”
“No,” she rasped. “That isn’t right. For one thing, he’s on the other side. Conflict of interest.”
“How reassuring.”
A loud knock and Nigel came back in as Mason and Camilla automatically leaned away from each other. Lorenzo followed and they sat back down.
“Excuse me for intruding so soon. But as Lorenzo and I were discussing this briefly on our own, the possibility of lowering the range of acceptable purchase prices arose. It might be more constructive to frame our discussion around that for the purposes of this meeting and leave further due diligence questions for once the contract is signed.”
“Only if the contract has an out in it for anything we find unacceptable in the due diligence phase,” she insisted.
“Anything? That’s rather wide, my dear Miss Anderson,” Mancusa said with another trip of his eyes down her blouse. “Wide enough to shove something very big right through.”
What? she almost said. As an argument, that didn’t even make much sense. If there was a big problem discovered in the diligence, of course they would take the out. He undoubtedly meant that something small could slip through and be counted as an out. But that didn’t fit with what she gathered was supposed to be a lame penis metaphor. Maybe it worked better in Italian.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” she settled on. It was one of the more confusing legal truisms, but she liked throwing that one around sometimes.
“Granted,” Nigel admitted. “Let’s concede that we will negotiate the conditions to closing with an open mind on your concern there.”
Mason flipped through his notes. “I’m not signing any contract at all until I decide whether it’s even worth my trouble.”
Lorenzo sat back in a huff. “There’s been turbulence in the supply base. Fine. I admit it.”
“Your financials admit it,” Mason said. “And these aren’t even audited. God knows what an audit will turn up.”
“Are there foibles in this business as there are in any?” Nigel asked, holding his hands up, palms out. “Of course there are. But with your astute management team, I feel confident you’ll be equal to them, Mr. Talbot. Now about that purchase price range.”
But Mason would not be put off of further questions. He continued with them, sharp, on point, until Lorenzo finally said, with exasperation, “Please, Mr. Talbot. Won’t you and your lovely attorney come to my home, see my plant in our beautiful Venice, and then decide for yourself whether it is worth your time, as you say? We could be there in hours rather than haggling over insignificant matters at a stuffy conference table in,” he looked around as if not sure where he was, since it was so nondescript in comparison to Venice, “London.”