‘You could be in a top Manhattan eatery, girl. You could apply for host or maître d’ and you’d get it. But at the very least you could wait tables there and meet a better class of people and not have to put up with Mike’s crap.’

‘You noticed that.’

‘His tongue keeps hitting the floor every time you pass him by,’ smiled Pammy. ‘Little tip? Bend down to pick something up. He’ll take the opportunity to brush up against you from behind. Then up you come, turn and give him an elbow in the nuts. Big apologies, then, “So sorry, boss, I’m so clumsy, did I hurt you?” He’ll get the message.’

75

75

Aysha Flynn was twenty years old and bored to tears. Right now she had a job in a dental supplies depot, pushing invoices around on a desk and answering the telephone to clients, and she hated it. She hated her life. Living at home with Mum, who was forever ordering her to do this, to stop doing that . . . And then there was Connor, her older brother, who saw her as nothing but a nuisance, she knew he did.

As for Dad, well, he didn’t want anything to do with her. He never had. He was all over Connor like a cheap suit, so what was wrong with her? She knew she’d been a pain in the arse in the past, playing up at school, refusing to study and so flopping at every exam, getting detention, once – famously – yanking one of her teachers’ gym shorts up the flagpole by the front gate. She’d been glad to get out of that pest-hole and into work.

But work was so fucking boring.

She’d asked Connor if she could do anything around the scrapyard, maybe work in the office, but he’d turned her down.

‘No fucking way,’ had been his exact words.

Turned out, the only bright spot in her otherwise grotty life was Joey Minghella.

Joey was so good-looking. His parents were no-hopers, it was true, but was that Joey’s fault? His Italian grandpa and grandma had come over from Naples years back and set up a tidy fleet of ice-cream vans making a profit around the area, but when they went off to the great ice-cream parlour in the sky, Joey’s dad had quickly run the business into the ground. Then he decided he’d rather sit on the dole than work. Since the day the vans went tits-up, Joey’s dad Frank hadn’t done a minute’s graft, and he liked it that way.

But Aysha didn’t care about any of that. She adored Joey. He was gorgeous. Very Italian in his looks. Dark-skinned, black-haired, with deep brown eyes that flashed with humour. She felt her stomach do backflips every time he came into view.