Bought By Her Italian Boss
Dani Collins
An affair of convenience! Gwyn Ellis is in big trouble. Scandalous photos of her have been released online, slandering her as an adulteress and threatening her hard-earned job with Donatelli International Bank. No one wants to hear how she's been framed...no one except her boss, the darkly sexy Vittorio Donatelli! Vittorio will do anything to protect his company from scandal - he's kept the secret of his true parentage hidden for years. So if it means making stunning Gwyn his mistress to combat the vicious rumors, then he'll do it...with pleasure!
“You’re embarrassed by how strong the attraction is,” Vittorio deduced after watching her for a moment.
He sounded amused. Gwyn’s stomach cramped with self-consciousness. Could her face get any hotter?
“This releasing of compromising photos is very shrewd,” he said in an abrupt shift.
His tone suggested it was an item of political news, not a gross defilement of her personal self. His finger rested across his lips in contemplation.
“Jensen has very cleverly made himself appear a victim,” he said. “Whatever story he comes up with, it will point all the scandal back to you and the bank.”
“I’m aware that my life is over, thanks,” she bit out.
“Nothing is over,” he said with a cold-blooded smile. “Jensen has landed a punch, but I will hit back. Hard. You must want to set things straight? If so, you’ll help me make it clear you have zero romantic interest in Jensen.”
“How?” she choked, wondering what was in his drink that he thought he could accomplish that.
“By going public with our own affair.”
Canadian DANI COLLINS knew in high school that she wanted to write romance for a living. Twenty-five years later, after marrying her high school sweetheart, having two kids with him, working several generic office jobs and submitting countless manuscripts, she got ‘The Call’. Her first Modern Romance novel won the Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best First in Series from RT Book Reviews. She now works in her own office, writing romance.
Bought by Her Italian Boss
Dani Collins
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For my editor, Kathryn, because she ‘loved, loved, loved’ it.
Contents
COVER (#ub271a774-debf-5cdd-8e16-75d187f0dd21)
INTRODUCTION (#uc46f171a-50e5-5b1e-a23f-3413ebd92655)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#u1d65d6f1-3e2e-5db9-9284-9a158e24af6b)
TITLE PAGE (#u7bf13c86-e8dd-5c21-b10a-65d710376dfe)
DEDICATION (#u5bbc5a36-f25a-55a6-9628-5b56a970b516)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_29cecec4-ef9d-5caf-a62a-181f5bbd1dab)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_1df48a6d-90a3-583c-9e90-4af713ca20e3)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a3143749-a1f9-582e-971d-4de6a8893d52)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_179d56e2-8144-5112-bb07-efafe36f9d9e)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
EXTRACT (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_e3dafb30-a891-5ab3-851c-137932d95f6b)
GWYN ELLIS LOOKED from the screen to Nadine Billaud, the public relations manager for Donatelli International, then back to the screen.
“This is you, oui?” Nadine prodded.
Gwyn couldn’t speak. Her heart had begun slamming inside her rib cage the moment she had recognized herself. Cold sweat coated her skin. Air wouldn’t squeeze past her locked throat, let alone words.
That was her. Naked. Right there on that computer, the line of her bare bottom clear as the crack of dawn, neatly framed by her hot pink thong. Everyone had a backside that looked more or less like that, but she was extremely selective about showing hers to anyone. She certainly didn’t email shots like this to men she barely knew. Or post them online.
Her whole body felt like a frozen electrical current was vibrating through her, paralyzing her.
The photo changed and that bare torso with the sheet rumpled across her upper thighs was all her, too. The way her breasts lifted as she arched her back and ran fingers through her hair bordered on deliberately erotic, coupled with that blissful, upturned expression. She looked like she’d been making love all day—as if she even knew what that felt like!
Then the final one came up again. She was adjusting the band of her hot pink undies across her cocked hip, looking like she was teasingly deciding whether to keep them on or remove them, eyes still lazily drooped and soft satisfaction painted across her lips.
The lighting was golden and her skin faintly gleamed—with oil, she realized as her brain began to function past the shock. These had been taken at the spa where she’d had a massage, trying to fix the ache between her shoulder blades that had been torturing her for weeks. She was sitting up and dressing after her appointment, relaxed and comfortable in what she had perceived as complete privacy.
The massage table had been cropped from the images, leaving muted sage-green walls and indistinct, blurred flowers in the background. It could have been a hotel room, a bedroom—whatever the viewer wanted to imagine.
Her stomach roiled. She thought she might be hyperventilating because she could hear a distant hiss. She wanted to throw up, pass out, die. Please God, take me now.
“Mademoiselle?” Nadine badgered.
“Yes,” she stammered. “It’s me.” Then, as the sheer mortification of the whole thing struck, she added a strident, “Can you close that, please?”
She glanced at Signor Fabrizio, her supervisor. He sat next to her with a supercilious expression on his middle-aged face.
“Why are you showing those like that? With him in here?” Gwyn asked. “Couldn’t we have done this privately?”
“They’re available to anyone with an online connection. I’ve seen them,” Fabrizio said pithily. “I brought them to Nadine’s attention.”
He’d already taken a long look? Gross.
Tears hit her eyes like the cut of a hard, biting wind. An equally brutal blow seemed to land in her stomach, pushing nausea higher into the back of her throat.
“Surely you knew this could happen when you took those photos and sent them to Mr. Jensen?” Nadine said.
Nadine had kept her snooty nose high in the air from the moment Gwyn had followed Fabrizio into her office. Fabrizio kept giving her darkly smug looks, like he was staring right through her perfectly respectable blue pencil skirt and matching jacket.
He made her skin crawl.
And worry for her job. Her palms were sweating.
“I didn’t take those photos,” she said as strongly as her tight throat would allow. “And you think I would send something like that to a client? They’re—oh, for the love of God.” She heard the door opening behind her and shot to her feet, reaching to push the lid of Nadine’s laptop down herself, wishing the images could be quashed that easily.
Deep in the back of her psyche, she knew she was going to cry. Soon. Pressure was building behind her collarbone, compressing her lungs, pushing behind her eyes. But for the moment she was in a type of shock. Like she’d been shot and still had the strength to run before the true depth of her injuries debilitated her.
“Signor Donatelli.” Nadine rose. “Thank you for coming.”
“You notified him?” Signor Fabrizio jerked to his feet, sounding dismayed.
Whatever remained of Gwyn’s composure went into free fall. The owner of the bank was here? She tried to gather herself to face yet another denigrating expression.
“It’s protocol with something this dangerous to the bank’s reputation,” Nadine said stiffly, adding to the weight on Gwyn’s heart.
“She’s being dismissed,” Fabrizio hurried to assure Signor Donatelli. “I was about to tell her to collect her things.”
Time stopped as Gwyn processed that she was being fired. Stupid her, she had thought she was being called in to talk about a client’s possible misappropriation of funds, not to be disgraced in front of the entire world.
Literally the entire world. This was what online bullying felt like. This was persecution. A witch hunt. Stoning. She couldn’t take in how monumentally unjust this was.
The only experience she could liken it to was when her mother had been diagnosed. Words were being said, facts stated that couldn’t be denied, but she had no real grasp of how the next minute or week or the rest of her life would play out from this moment forward.
She didn’t want to face it, but she had no choice.
And the silence around her told her they were all waiting for her to do so.
Very slowly, she turned to the man who’d just entered, but it wasn’t Paolo Donatelli, president and head of the family that owned Donatelli International. No, it was far worse.
Vittorio Donatelli. Paolo’s cousin, second-in-command as VP of operations. A man of, arguably, even more stunningly good looks, at least in her estimation. His features were as refined and handsome as his Italian heritage demanded. He was clean-shaven, excruciatingly well dressed in a tailored suit and wore an air of arrogance that came as much from his lean height as his aloof expression. His ability to dominate any situation was obvious in the way they all stood in silence, waiting for him to speak.
He didn’t know her from Adam, she knew that. She’d smiled brightly at him not long after arriving here in Milan, forgetting that secret crushes didn’t know they were the object of such yearnings. He’d looked right through her and it had stung. Quite badly, illogically.
“Nadine. Oscar,” Vittorio said with a brief flick of his gaze to the other occupants of the room before coming back to give Gwyn a piercing stare from his bronze eyes.
Her heart gave a skip between pounds, reacting to him even when she was verging on hysteria. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t make it stretch into a smile. She doubted she would ever smile again. The strange buzz inside her intensified.
“Miss Ellis,” he said with a hostile nod of acknowledgment.
He knew her name from Nadine’s report, she supposed. The furious accusation in his eyes told her he’d seen the photos. Of course he’d seen them. That’s why he had stooped from the lofty heights of the top floor to the midlevel of the Donatelli Tower.
Gwyn’s shallow breaths halted and her knees quivered. She was weirdly shocked by how defenseless the idea of his seeing her naked made her feel, but the effect this very perfect stranger had had on her from the start was unprecedented. She’d seen him stride through the offices in Charleston once and that simple glimpse of an incredibly handsome and dynamic man had made her view the postings at the head office in Milan that much more favorably than any other branch in the organization. She had wanted to advance, would have taken whatever promotions she could land, but this was her dream location.
Because it gave her the chance to see him.
Be careful what you wish for. She mashed her lips together into a hard, steady line, heart scored, then turned her face away, trying to recover.
He was, quite obviously, nothing like the man she’d constructed in her mind. Italian men were warm and gregarious and adored women, she had thought, expecting he’d flirt with her if they ever actually spoke. She had expected him to give her a chance to intrigue him, despite the fact that she worked for him.
But the man she had been obsessing over had not only glimpsed her naked, he was completely unmoved by what he’d seen. He was repelled. Blamed her. Was privately calling her a whore and worse—
She stopped herself from spiraling. The pieces of her shattered world were being kicked around enough. She had to keep a grip.
But she wasn’t used to being rejected out of hand, seeing no interest whatsoever from a man. The reaction was usually the opposite. Her body had always pulled a certain amount of male attention. She didn’t encourage it and was pretty boring personality-wise. She worked in banking, for heaven’s sake. Her hair was the most common brown you could find and she wasn’t terribly pretty. Her face was only elevated from plain to pleasant by her mother’s exceptionally good skin and a cheery nature that usually kept a smile on her mouth. So she shouldn’t be that surprised when a man who could have his pick of women showed no interest in her.
It made her ache all the same.
Think, she ordered herself, but it was hard when she was stuck in this swamp of feeling so thoroughly scorned by a man who enthralled her.
“I want a lawyer,” she managed to say.
“Why would you need one?” Vittorio asked with a wrathful lift of his brows, so godlike.
“This is wrongful dismissal. You’re treating me like a criminal when those photos are illegal. They were taken at a spa without my knowledge. They’re not selfies, so how could I have sent them to Kevin Jensen? Or anyone? His wife is the one who recommended I go there for my shoulder!”
Vito flicked his gaze to the laptop, mentally reviewing images that would have been very titillating if they were a private communication between lovers. For long seconds as he’d reviewed the photos, he’d been captivated against his will, having to force himself to move past his transfixion with her sensual figure to the fact that this was a hydrogen bomb aimed directly at the bank that was his livelihood and the foundation that supported his entire extended family.
But the photos weren’t selfies. That was true. He had thought Jensen must have taken them.
Nadine seemed to think his shift of attention was a prompt for her to bring them up for another look. She started to open her laptop.
“Would you stop showing those to people, you freak?” Gwyn cried.
“Let’s keep this professional,” Nadine snapped.
“How would you react if you were me?” Gwyn shot back.
Gwyn Ellis was not what he had expected. There was an American wholesomeness to her that neutralized some of the femme fatale that had come across on-screen. He had expected, and received, an impact of female sexuality when he had entered the room. He’d felt the same thing the day she’d smiled at him in the lobby.
She’d already been under suspicion, so he’d pretended not to notice her, but nothing could downplay her allure. That body of hers didn’t stop, with her firm, well-rounded breasts that sat high beneath her neatly cut jacket and her waistline that begged for a man’s hands to clasp before sliding down to the flare of her hips and her gorgeously plump ass that he dreamed of kneading. Knees were not something he’d normally catalogue, but she had cute ones.
An image of cupping them as he held them apart drifted through his brain.
She was a very potent woman. Her shoulders were stiff, her frame tense and defensive, but her slight stature and smooth curves announced to the animal kingdom that she was undeniably a female of the species, of fertile age and irresistibly ripe.
She called to the male in him, quickening the blood of the beast that he suppressed at all costs.
Visceral reactions like lust were something he indulged in very controlled quantities. This was not the time and, judging by his reaction to her, Gwyn was not the woman. High-octane risk-taking was his cousin’s bailiwick. Vito controlled his bloodlust ruthlessly—even though there was a part of him that beat with excitement for the challenge of throwing himself into this perfect storm of chemistry to see if he could survive it.
What they could do to one another...
He turned his mind from speculating, hearing Nadine aim a very pointed barb at Gwyn. “I wouldn’t sleep with a married man. This wouldn’t happen to me.”
“Who said I slept with Kevin Jensen?” Gwyn challenged hotly. “Who? I want a name.”
So indignant. This was not the reaction of a woman who had posed for a lover, running the risk of exposure. She ought to be furious with Jensen or his wife, perhaps tossing her hair in defiance of judgment over her decision to pose naked for her paramour. Instead, she was a woman on the edge of her control, reacting to a catastrophe with barely contained hysteria.
“His wife said you slept with him. Or want to. Obviously,” Oscar Fabrizio interjected, “since she posted these filthy photos when she discovered them on his phone. You’ve been having lunches and dinners with him.”
Vito found that attack interesting. He had brought certain suspicions about their nonprofit accounts manager to Paolo’s attention a few weeks ago. The assumption had easily been made that the New Girl was in on the arrangement, facilitating.
“Kevin wanted to do things—have our meetings, I mean,” Gwyn quickly clarified, “away from the office.” She was visibly distraught, looking to Vito in entreaty. “He’s a client. I didn’t have a choice but to go to him if that’s what he requested.”
Vito had to accept that. Excellence of customer service was a cornerstone at Donatelli International. If a client of Jensen’s caliber wanted a house call, employees were expected to make them.
“You didn’t take those photos?” he pressed her.
“No!”
“So they’re not on that phone?” He nodded at where she clutched her device in a death grip.
Gwyn had forgotten she was holding it, but she always grabbed it out of habit when she left her desk, and had switched it to silent as she came into this meeting. Now she stared at it, surprised to see it there. At least she could say with confidence, “No. They’re not.”
“You’ll let me confirm that?” He held out his hand.
On the surface it was a very reasonable request, but, oh, dear Lord, no. She had something on here that was beyond embarrassing. It would make this situation so much worse... So much worse.
She knew her face was falling into lines of panicked guilt, but couldn’t help it.
His nostrils flared and his jaw hardened. The death rays coming out of his eyes told her she’d be lucky to merely lose her job.
“This phone is mine,” she stammered, trying not to let him intimidate her. If she hadn’t already been violated, she might not have been so vehement, but he was going to have to knock her out cold to pry this thing out of her hand if he wanted access. “I get an allowance to offset my using it for company business, but it’s mine. You don’t have any right to look at it.”
“Can it clear you of suspicion or not?” His gaze delved into her culpable one.
She couldn’t hide the turmoil and resentment coursing through her at being put on the spot. “My privacy has been invaded enough.”
She was naked. On the internet. She supposed everyone in the building was staring at her image right now. Men saying filthy, suggestive things. Women judging whether her stomach was flat enough, saying she had cellulite, calling her too bony or too tall or too something so they could feel better about their own body issues.
Gwyn wanted to hang her head and sob.
All she could think was how hard she’d worked not to be pushed around by life the way her mother had been. At every stage, she’d tried to be self-reliant, autonomous, control her future.
Breathe, she commanded herself. Don’t think about it. She would fall apart. She really would.
“I think we have our answer,” Fabrizio said pitilessly.
She was starting to hate that man. Gwyn wasn’t the type to hate. She did her best to get along with everyone. She was a happy person, always believing that life was too short for drama and conflict. Being the first to apologize made her the bigger person, she had always thought, but she doubted she would ever forgive these people for how they were treating her right now.
A muted buzz sounded and Nadine looked at her own phone. “The press is gathering. We need to make a statement.”
The press? Gwyn circled around Fabrizio to the window and looked down.
Nadine’s office was midway up the tower, but the crowd at the entrance, and the cameras they held, were like ants pouring out of a disturbed hill. It was as bad as a royal birth down there.
She swallowed, stomach turning again.
Kevin Jensen was an icon, a modern day, international superhero who flew into disaster aftermath to offer “feet on the ground” assistance. Anyone with half a brain saw that he exploited heart-wrenching situations on camera to increase donations and boost his own profile, but the bottom line was he showed up to terrible tragedies and brought aid. He did real, necessary work for the devastated.
But lately Gwyn had been questioning how he spent some of those abundant donations.
Had this been his answer? A massive discrediting that would get her fired?
She hugged herself. This sort of thing didn’t happen to real people. Did it?
Her gaze searched below for an escape route. She couldn’t even leave the building to get to her rented flat here in Milan. How would she get back to America? Even if she got that far, then what? Look to her stepfather to shelter her? Who was going to hire her with this sort of notoriety? Ever?
She’d be exactly what she’d tried so hard to avoid being: a burden. A leach.
Oh, God...oh, God. The walls were beginning to creak and buckle around her composure. The pressure behind her cheekbones built along with weight on her shoulders and upper arms.
Nadine was talking as she typed, “...say that the bank was unaware of this personal relationship and the employee has been terminated—”
“Our client has stated that the photos were not invited,” Fabrizio interjected.
Gwyn spun around. “And your employee states that she’s been targeted by a peeping tom and an online porn peddler and a vengeful wife.”
Nadine paused only long enough to send her a stern look. “I strongly advise you not to speak to the press.”
“I strongly advise you that I will be speaking to a lawyer.” It was an empty threat. Her savings were very modest. Very. Much as she would love to believe her stepbrother would help her, she couldn’t count on it. He had his own corporate image to maintain.
The way Vittorio Donatelli continued to emanate hostility made her want to crawl into a hole and die.
“How long have you been with the company?” Nadine asked.
“Two years in Charleston, four months here,” Gwyn said, trying to recall how much room her credit card balance had for plane fare and setting up house back in Charleston. Not enough.
“Two years,” Nadine snorted, adding an askance. “How did you earn a promotion like this after only that short a time?” Her gaze skimmed down Gwyn’s figure, clearly implying that Gwyn had slept her way into the position. Night school and language classes and putting in overtime counted for nothing, apparently.
Fabrizio didn’t defend her, despite signing off on her transfer and giving her a glowing review after her first three months.
Vittorio’s expression was an inscrutable mask. Was he thinking the same thing?
A disbelieving sob escaped her and she hugged herself, trying to stay this side of manic.
While Vittorio brought his own phone from his pants pocket and with a sweep and tap connected to someone. “Bruno? Vito. I need you in Nadine Billaud’s office. Bring some of your men.”
“For my walk of shame?” Gwyn presumed. Here came the tears, welling up like a tsunami with a mile of volume behind it. Her voice cracked. “Don’t worry. I plan to leave quickly and quietly. I can’t wait to not work here anymore.”
“You’ll stay right here until I tell you to leave.” His tone was implacable, making her heart sink in her hollow chest while another part of her rose in defiance, wanting to fight and rail and physically tear at him to get out of here. She was the quintessential wounded animal that needed to bolt from danger to its cave.
To Nadine, he added, “Confirm the photos belong to one of our employees. For privacy and legal reasons we have no other comment. Ask the reporters to disperse and enlist the lobby guards to help. Issue a similar statement to all employees. Add a warning that they risk termination if they speak to the press or are observed viewing the photos on corporate equipment or company grounds. Oscar, I need a full report on how these photos came to your attention.”
“Signor Jensen contacted me this morning—”
“Not here.” Vittorio moved to the door as a knock sounded. “In your office. Wait here,” he said over his shoulder to Gwyn, like she was a dog to be left at home while he went to work. He urged the other two from the room and pulled the door closed behind the three of them.
“Yeah, right,” Gwyn rasped into the silence of Nadine’s empty office, hugging herself so tightly she was suffocating.
A twisting, writhing pain moved in her like a snake, coiling around her organs to squeeze her heart and lungs, tightening her stomach and closing her throat. She covered her face, trying to hide from the terrible reality that everyone—everyone in the world—was not only staring at her naked body, but believing that she had had sex with a married man.
She could live with people staring at her body. Almost. They did it, anyway. But she was a good person. She didn’t lie or steal or come on to men, especially married ones! She was conservative in the way she lived her life, saving her craziest impulses for things like her career where she did wildly ambitious things like sign up for Mastering Spreadsheets tutorials in hopes of moving up the ladder.
The pressure in her cheekbones and nose and under her eyes became unbearable. She tried to press it back with the flats of her hands, but a moan of anguish was building from the middle of her chest. A sob bounced like a hard pinball, bashing against her inner walls, moving up from her breastbone into her throat.
She couldn’t break down, she reminded herself. Not here. Not yet. She had to get out of this place and the sooner the better. It was going to be awful. A nightmare, but she would do it, head high and under her own steam.
Gritting her teeth, she reached for the door and started to open it.
A burly man wearing a suit and a short, neat haircut was standing with his back to the door. Guarding her? He grabbed the doorknob, keeping her from pulling it open. His body angled enough she could see he also wore some kind of clear plastic earpiece. His glance at her was both indifferent and implacable.
“Attendere qui, per favore.” Wait here, please.
She was so shocked, she let him pull the door from her lax grip and close her into Nadine’s office again.
Actually, it slipped freely from her clammy hand. The room began to feel very claustrophobic. She moved to the window again, seeing the crowd of reporters had grown. She couldn’t tell if Nadine was addressing them. She could hardly see. Her vision was blurring. She sniffed, feeling the weight of all that had happened so deeply she had to move to the nearest chair and sink into it.
Her breath hitched and no amount of pressure from her hands would push back the burn behind her eyes.
The door opened again, startling her heart into lurching and her head into jerking up.
He was back.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_efaddda4-61e0-5aab-b7ca-a430736f0fea)
GWYN ELLIS LOOKED like hell had moved in where her soul used to be, eyes pits of despair, mouth soft and bracketed by lines of disillusion. Her brow was a crooked line of suffering, but she immediately sat taller, blinking and visibly fighting back her tears to face him without cowering.
“I want to leave,” she asserted.
The rasp in her voice scraped at his nerves while he studied her. Vixens knew how to use their sexuality on a man. If she was a victim, he would expect her to appeal to the protector in him. Either way, he wouldn’t expect her to be so confrontational.
Gwyn was a fighter. He didn’t want to find that dig-deep-and-stay-strong streak in her admirable. It softened him when he was in crisis control mode, trying to remember that she had, quite possibly, colluded to bilk the bank and a completely legitimate nonprofit organization of millions of euros in donations.
“We have more to talk about,” he told her. He had made the executive decision to question her himself, like this, privately. And he wasn’t prepared to ask himself why.
“An exit interview? I have two short words,” she said tightly.
That open hostility was noteworthy. Oscar Fabrizio had been full of placating statements until Paolo had been patched through on speakerphone. Then Oscar had seemed to realize he was under suspicion. He’d asked for a lawyer. Sweat had broken across his brow and upper lip when Vito had ordered his computer and phone to be analyzed. Both were company issued and it had been obvious Oscar was dying to contact someone—Kevin Jensen perhaps? A plainclothes investigator was on the way. A full criminal inquiry was being launched down the hall.
While here...Vito was sure she was an accomplice, except...
“You say you had no knowledge of those photos,” he challenged.
“No. I didn’t.” Her chin came up and her lashes screened her eyes, but there was no hiding the quiver of her mouth. She was deeply upset about their being made public. That was not up for dispute. “They were taken after a massage. I didn’t know there was a camera in the room.”
The images were imprinted on his brain. The photos would have made a splash without Jensen’s name attached, he thought distantly. She was built like Venus.
But he saw how they could have been taken during a private moment and manipulated to appear like shots between lovers. He had made certain presumptions on sight: that she was not only having an affair with a client, but was engaged in criminal activity with him. If Jensen was prepared to steal from charity donations, would it be such a stretch to photograph a banking underling in an attempt to cover it up?
Powerful men exploited young, vulnerable women. He knew that. It was quite literally in his DNA.
“Are you picturing me naked?” she challenged bitterly, but her chin crinkled and she fought for her composure a moment, then bravely firmed her mouth and controlled her expression, meeting his gaze with loathing shadowing the depths of her brown eyes.
Such a contrary woman with her wounded expression and quiet, forest-creature coloring of dark eyes and hair, then that devastatingly powerful figure of generous curves and lissome limbs.
“Wondering if you are having an affair with Jensen,” he replied.
“I’m not!” There was a catch in her voice before her tone strengthened. “And I wasn’t trying to start one, either. I barely know him.” She crossed her arms. “I actually think he’s been skimming funds from his foundation for himself.”
“He is.” He steadily returned the shocked brown stare she flashed at him. Her irises had a near-black rim around the dark chocolate brown, he noted, liking the directness it added to her subtly tough demeanor.
Her pupils expanded with surprise, further intriguing him.
“You know that for a fact?” Her brows were like distant bird wings against the sky, long and elegant with a perfect little crook above her eyes. She was truly beautiful.
He wanted her. Badly.
He ignored the need pulling at him, stating, “We also know someone in the bank is colluding with him. We’ve been conducting an extremely delicate investigation that blew up today, thanks to your photos.”
Vito was angry with himself. He was a numbers man, calculating all the odds, all the possible moves an opponent might try, but he hadn’t seen this one coming.
“I’m not colluding with anyone!” Her expression was earnest and very convincing. But he was a mistrustful man at heart, too aware of the secrets and lies he lived under himself to take for granted that other people weren’t self-protecting or withholding certain facts to better their own position.
“And yet you won’t let me look at your phone,” he said pointedly.
Her jaw set and she turned the device over in her hands. With a shaky little sigh that smacked of defeat, she tapped in her access code, surprising him with her sudden willingness.
“Look at my emails,” she urged. “You’ll see I was counseling him that certain requests could be interpreted as shady.” She offered him the phone.
Gwyn didn’t know much about climbing out of a hole, but she knew you had to bounce off rock bottom, so she went there. At least this humiliation was her choice and only between the two of them, now that the room was empty. At least she was getting a chance to speak her side. Maybe he’d see that she didn’t have anything to hide except a stupid attraction. Hopefully he’d read between the lines and also see that she wasn’t the least bit interested in stupid Kevin Jensen.
Still, it was hard to sit here with the anticipation of further shame washing over her. He would see that her handful of texts and emails with friends back home were innocuous and seldom. She was friendly with many, but actual friends with very few. It was a symptom of moving so much through her childhood, as her mother had tried to find better positions for herself. Gwyn kept in touch with people she liked, mostly through social media, but she didn’t bond very often. She had learned early that it hurt too much when she had to move on. The person she was closest to, her stepfather, didn’t “do” computers. They talked the old-fashioned way, over the phone or face-to-face.
If Vittorio glanced through her social media accounts, he’d see she followed liberal pundits and quirky celebrities. If he looked at her apps, he’d discover she kept her checking account in the black, played Sudoku when she was bored, read mostly romance and had finished her period three days ago.
And if he looked at her photos, he’d see that she had been taking in the sights of Milan on lunches and weekends. Sights that included his extremely handsome head shot hanging in the main foyer of the Donatelli International building.
Her cheeks stung as she waited out his discovery of the incriminating photo. She’d taken it in a fit of infatuation the other day. After passing the fountain in the lobby a million times since her arrival, she’d noticed someone taking a selfie with the burbling water in the background. It had made her realize she could pretend to take a selfie and capture the image of her obsession on the wall.
Why? Why had she followed through on such a silly impulse? It had been as mature as pinning up a poster of a movie star in her bedroom and talking to it.
Especially when he’d been so dismissive the one time she’d smiled at him, like he couldn’t imagine why she, a lowly minion, would send such a dazzling welcome his direction. He worked at such a high level in the bank, he barely showed up to the offices at all. He didn’t consort with peasants like her.
How many times had she even seen him since arriving here? Four?
She mentally snorted at herself. Like she hadn’t counted each glimpse as if they were days until Christmas. She looked for him all the time. It was a bit of a sickness, really. Why? What on earth had convinced her that she had anything in common with a man like him?
Her heightened awareness of him picked up on the subtle stillness that overcame him.
She refused to look at him, certain he was staring at his own image. He must be thinking she was a weird, stalker type now. By any small miracle, was he also noticing that she didn’t have those stupid nudes on there?
“Today is full of surprises.” Vittorio clicked off her phone and tucked it into his shirt pocket, drawing her startled glance. His hammered-gold eyes held an extra glitter of male speculation, something dark and predatory, like he’d just noticed the plump bird that had landed nearby.
Her stomach swooped.
“Did you read the emails?” she asked shakily.
“I glanced over them.”
“And?”
“They appear to support your claim that you weren’t involved.”
“Appear to support,” she repeated. “Like I wrote those emails as some kind of premeditated attempt to cover my butt?” Her translucent skin was growing pink with temper. “Look, you have to know it’s tricky to tell a client an outright ‘no.’ I’ve been trying to do it nicely while Mr. Jensen and Signor Fabrizio—”
Her face blanked. She touched between her furrowed brow.
“They’ve been setting me up this whole time, haven’t they? That’s why I got this promotion. They thought I was too inexperienced to see what they were up to. As soon as I proved I wasn’t, they turned me into their fall guy. They just pushed me off the roof!”
She was very convincing, right down to the way her trembling hand moved to cover her mouth and her eyes glassed with anxious outrage.
He tried to hang on to his cynicism, but he was entertaining similar thoughts. The very idea ignited a strange fury in him. He knew better than most what happened when a corrupt man took advantage of an ingenuous woman. His father had done it to his mother and she had wound up dead.
His phone vibrated. He glanced at the text from his cousin. Fabrizio claims it was all her. Any progress on your end?
Vito glanced at Gwyn, at the way her shaking fingers smoothed her hair behind her ear while her concubine mouth pouted with very credible fear.
He wasn’t without concern himself. Even if Paolo managed to build a case against Fabrizio, Kevin Jensen had positioned himself very well to walk away along the high ground, leaving the bank wearing a cloak of muddied employees. An institution that staked its success on a reputation of trustworthiness would cease to appear so.
Vito refused to let that happen. He protected his family at all costs. They would, and had, done the same for him.
And this would cost him. Gwyn was dangerous. The fact that he was drawn to her, looking to see her as an innocent despite the very real fact she might be involved in crimes against the bank, was unnerving. Being close to her would be a serious test of his mettle.
But his glimpse into her phone had revealed a move to him that even a master chess player like Kevin Jensen wouldn’t see coming, even though it was one of the basic rules of the game: if a pawn was pushed far enough into the field of play, she could be promoted to a formidable queen.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_825dcfdf-d42c-54b2-be1f-d50ed0562035)
VITTORIO PLUCKED HIS handkerchief from his jacket pocket and moved to dampen it under the tap of the water cooler.
Gwyn watched him, wondering what he was doing, then noticed her purse was over his shoulder, looking incongruous against his tailored charcoal suit.
“Did you get my stuff from my desk?”
Fabrizio seeing her naked was creepy. Vittorio touching her possessions was...intimate. Disturbing.
“I did.” He came back to tilt up her chin and started to run a blessedly cool, damp, linen-wrapped fingertip beneath her eye.
His touch sent an array of sensation outward through her jawline and down her throat, warm tingles that unnerved her. She tried to jerk away, but he firmed his hold and finished tidying her makeup, telling her, “Hold your head high as we walk to the elevator.”
His tone was commanding, his mouth a stern line, while he gave her a circumspect look and tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear.
She knocked his hand away, chest tightening again. “I just explained that they’re using me. You won’t even take a second to consider that might be true? You’re just going to fire me and throw me to the wolves?”
“Your termination can’t be helped, Gwyn. I have to think about the bank.”
His detached tone sent a spike of ice right into her heart. “Thanks a lot.”
They wound up in another stare down that pulled her already taut nerves to breaking point. She hated that he was standing while she was still seated. He seemed to have all the power, all the control and advantage.
She hated that, with their gazes locked like this, her mind turned to sexual awareness, refusing to let her stay in a state of fixed hatred. She wondered things like how his lips would feel against hers and grew hot as an allover body flush simmered against the underside of her skin.
She stood abruptly, forcing him to take a step back.
“Good girl,” he said, moving to the door.
“I’m not obeying you. I—” She cut herself off. She wanted to leave, she did. She wanted to lock herself in her flat where she could lick her wounds and figure out what to do next.
“The reporters won’t leave until you do,” he said heartlessly. “People will be trying to go for lunch.”
Don’t inconvenience the staff with your petty disaster of a life, Gwyn. Think of others in the midst of your crisis.
“Everyone’s going to stare,” she mumbled, trying to find her guts, but her insides were nothing but water.
“They will,” he agreed, still completely unmoved. “But it’s only two minutes of your life. Look straight ahead. Come. Now.”
Her heels wanted to root to the floor in protest. She wanted to beg him to let her hide here until after closing, but he was right. Better to get it over with.
She knew then what it was like to walk toward execution. While her low heels took her closer to the door, her heart began slamming in panic. Sweat cooled the ardor she’d experienced a moment ago, leaving her in something close to shock.
She sought refuge in her old yoga lessons, concentrating on breathing in through her nose, out through her narrowly parted lips, holding reality at bay, picturing the crown of her head being pulled by an invisible wire toward the ceiling.
“Good,” Vittorio said as he opened the door, then settled his arm around her, tucking her shoulder under his armpit as his hand took possession of her waist.
She stiffened in surprise at the contact. A disconcerting rush of heat blanketed her, making her knees weaken.
He supported her, forcing her forward and keeping her on her feet when she would have stumbled. He matched their steps perfectly, as though they had walked as a couple many times before.
Two minutes, she repeated to herself, leaning into him despite how much she resented him. She’d never realized how long a minute was until she had to bear the rustle of heads turning and chairs squeaking, conversation stopping and keyboard tapping halting into a blanket of silence.
Vittorio’s aftershave, spicy and beguiling, enveloped her. It was dizzying. An assault to already overloaded senses. Were her legs going to hold her? Amazing how being escorted like this made you feel like a criminal as well as look like one.
Her eyes were seared blind. She couldn’t tell who was looking, couldn’t really see the rest of the open-plan office because Vittorio kept her on his side closest to the wall and stayed a quarter step ahead of her so his big shoulders blocked her vision of the rest of the floor.
Another man paced on his far side, broad and burly and carrying a file box that held a green travel cup that she thought might be hers. Had they also collected the snapshot of her with her mother and stepfather, she worried?
The elevator was being held open by another hitman type with a buzz cut. He couldn’t care less about her silly scandal, his watchful indifference seemed to say. He was here to bust heads if anyone stepped out of line.
The elevator closed and she let out her breath, but rather than dropping as she expected, the elevator climbed, making her stagger and clutch instinctively at Vittorio’s smooth jacket.
He cradled her closer, steadying her, fingers moving soothingly at her waist. Disturbing her with the intimacy of his touch.
“Why aren’t we going down?” she asked shakily.
“The helicopter will avoid the scrum.”
“Helicopter?” she choked out, mind scattering as she tried to make sense of this turn of events.
“Thirty seconds,” he warned, tone gruff, and nudged her a step forward as the elevator leveled out with a ding.
His arm remained firm across her back, urging her through the opening doors.
She trembled, trying not to fold into him, but he was the only solid thing in her world right now. She had to remember that despite his seeming solicitude, he wasn’t on her side. This was damage control. Nothing more.
The refinement at this height in the building was practically polished into the stillness of the air. Nevertheless, humans were humans. Heads came up. Eyes followed.
Vittorio addressed no one, only steered her down a hall in confident, unhurried steps, past a boardroom of men in suits and women with perfectly coiffed hair, past a lounge where a handful of people stood drinking coffee and into a glass receiving area beyond which a helicopter stood, rotors beginning to turn.
The security guard took her box of possessions ahead of them and tucked it into a bulkhead, then moved into the cockpit.
Wow. This wasn’t a helicopter like she’d seen on television, where people were crammed into three seats across the back wall, shoulder to shoulder, and had to put on headphones and shout to be heard.
This was an executive lounge that belonged on a yacht. She didn’t have to duck as she moved into it. The white leather seats were ten times plusher than the very expensive recliner she’d purchased for her stepfather two Christmases ago. The seats rotated, she realized, as Vittorio pointed her to one, then turned another so they would sit facing each other.
There was a door to the pilot’s cockpit, like on an airplane. An air hostess smiled a greeting and nodded at Vittorio, taking a silent order from him that he gave with the simple raising of two fingers. She arrived seconds later with two drinks that looked suspiciously like scotch, neat.
Vittorio lowered a small table between them with indents to hold their glasses.
Gwyn took a deep drink of her scotch, shivering as the burn chased down her throat, then replaced her glass into its holder with a dull thud. “Where are you taking me?”
“This isn’t a kidnapping,” he said dryly. “We’re going to Paolo’s home on Lake Como. It’s in his wife’s name and not on the paparazzi’s radar.”
“What? No,” she insisted, reaching to open her seatbelt. “My passport is in my apartment. I need it to get home.”
“To America? The press there is more relentless than ours. Even if you managed to drop out of sight, I would still have an ugly smudge on the bank’s reputation to erase.”
“I care as much about the bank as it does about me,” she informed him coldly.
“Please stay seated, Gwyn. We’re lifting off.” He pointed to where the horizon lowered beneath them. “Let’s talk about your photo of me.”
A fresh blush rose hotly from the middle of her chest into her neck. “Let’s not,” she said, squishing herself into her seat and fixing her gaze out the window.
“You’re attracted to me, sì?”
She sealed her lips, silently letting him know he couldn’t make her talk.
Nevertheless, he had her trapped and demonstrated his patience with an unhurried sip of his own drink and a brief glance at the face of his phone.
“You smiled at me one day,” he said absently. “The way a woman does when she is inviting a man to speak to her.”
And he hadn’t bothered to.
“I play a game with a friend back home,” she muttered. “It’s silly. Man Wars. We send each other photos of attractive men. That’s all it was,” she lied. “If it makes you feel objectified, well, you have a glimpse into how I feel right now.”
Her insides were churning like a cement mixer.
“You’re embarrassed by how strong the attraction is,” he deduced after watching her a moment. He sounded amused.
Her stomach cramped with self-consciousness. Could her face get any hotter?
“This releasing of compromising photos is very shrewd,” he said in an abrupt shift. His tone suggested it was an item in political news, not a gross defilement of her personal self. His finger rested across his lips in contemplation.
“Jensen has very cleverly made himself appear a victim,” he said. “The moment we accuse him of wrongdoing, he’ll claim he only took advice from you and Fabrizio. Fabrizio may eventually implicate him, trying to save his own skin, but Jensen has this excellent diversion. He can say you came on to him, maybe that you were working with Fabrizio, that you sent those photos to ruin his marriage. Perhaps they were cooked up by the two of you to blackmail him into skimming funds. Whatever story he comes up with, it will point all the scandal back to you and Fabrizio and the bank.”
“I’m aware that my life is over, thanks,” she bit out.
“Nothing is over,” he said with a cold-blooded smile. “Jensen landed a punch, but I will hit back. Hard. If he and Fabrizio were in fact using you, you must also want to set things straight? You’ll help me make it clear you had zero romantic interest in Jensen.”
“How?” she choked out, wondering what was in his drink that he thought he could accomplish that.
“By going public with our own affair.”
* * *
Gwyn pinched her wrist.
Vittorio noted the movement and his mouth twitched.
She shook her head, instinctively refusing his suggestion while searching for a fresh flash of anger. Outrage was giving her the strength to keep from crying, but his proposition came across as so offhanded and hurtful, so cavalier when she couldn’t deny she was weirdly infatuated with him, it smashed through her defenses and smacked down her confidence.
“I don’t have affairs,” she insisted. She looked out the window at the rust-red rooftops below. The houses below were short, the high-rises in the center of the city gone, green spaces more abundant. They were over outlying areas, well out of Milan. Damn it.
She wanted to magically transport back to Charleston and the room where she had stayed during her mother’s short marriage to Henry. She wanted to go back in time to when her mother was still alive.
“It’s such a pathetically male and sexist response to say that sleeping together would solve anything. To suggest I do it to save my job—no, your job—” She was barely able to speak, stunned, ears ringing. Her eyes and throat burned. “It’s so insulting I don’t have words,” she managed, voice thinning as the worst day of her life grew even uglier.
“Did I say we’d sleep together? You’re projecting. No, I’m saying we must appear to.”
Oh, wonderful. He wasn’t coming on to her. Why did she care either way?
“It would still make it look like I’m sleeping my way to the top,” she muttered, flashing him a glance, but quickly jerking her attention back to the window, not wanting him to see how deeply this jabbed at her deepest insecurities.
From the moment she’d developed earlier than her friends, she’d been struggling to be seen as brains, not breasts. A lot of her adolescent friends had been fair weather, pulling Gwyn into their social circles because she brought boys with her, but eventually becoming annoyed that she got all the male attention and cutting her loose. The workplace had been another trial, learning to cope with sexual harassment and jealousy from her female coworkers, realizing this was one reason why her mother had changed jobs so often.
Her mom had been a runner. Gwyn tried to stay and fight. It was the reason she had stuck it out in school despite the cost. Training for a real profession had seemed the best way to be taken seriously. Yet here she was, being pinned up as a sex object in the locker room of the internet, set up by men who believed she lacked the brains to see when people were committing crimes under her nose.
And the solution to this predicament was to sleep with her boss? Or appear to? What kind of world was this?
She looked around, but there was nowhere to go. She might as well have been trapped in a prison cell with Vittorio.
He swore under his breath and withdrew her phone from his shirt pocket, scowling at it. “This thing is exploding.” His frown deepened as he looked at whatever notification was showing up against her Lock screen. “Who is Travis?”
His tone chilled to below freezing and his handsome features twisted with harsh judgment. She could practically see the derisive label in a bubble over his head.
“My stepbrother,” she said haughtily, holding out her hand, not nearly as undaunted as she tried to appear. Her intestines knotted further as she saw that she’d missed four calls and several texts from Travis, along with some from old schoolmates and several from former coworkers in Charleston.
All the texts were along the lines of, Is it really you? Call me. I just saw the news. They’re saying...
Nausea roiled in her. She clicked to darken the screen.
Travis had been vaguely amused with her concern over not having every skill listed in this job posting for Milan. Do you know why men get promoted over women? Because they don’t worry about meeting all the criteria. Fake it ’til you make it, had been his advice.
Really great advice, considering what such a bold move had got her into, she thought dourly.
But his laconic opinion had been the most personable he’d ever been around her. He was never rude, just distant. He never reached out to her, only responded if she texted him first. He didn’t know that she’d overheard him shortly before her mother’s wedding to his father, when he’d cautioned Henry against tying himself to a woman without any assets. There are social climbers and there are predators.
Henry had defended them and Gwyn had walked away hating Travis, but not really blaming him. Had their situations been reversed, she would have cautioned her mother herself. It had still fueled her need to be self-reliant in every way.
She had been so proud to tell Travis she’d landed this job, believing she’d been recognized for her education, qualifications and grit. Ha.
“I guess we can assume the photos have crossed the Atlantic,” she muttered, cringing anew.
It was afternoon here. Travis would be starting his day in Charleston, and the fact that he’d learned so quickly of the photos told her exactly how broadly these things were being distributed. Maybe reporters had tracked down the family connection and were harassing him and Henry?
Damn that Kevin Jensen. His headline name was turning her into a punch line.
She set her phone on the table, unable to think of anything to say except I’m sorry, and that was far too inadequate.
She swallowed back hopelessness, realizing a door had just closed on her. She could go back to America, but she couldn’t take this mess to Henry’s doorstep. He’d been too good to her to repay him like that. Travis might make her cut off ties for good.
“You’re not going to call him?” Vittorio asked.
“I don’t know what to say,” she admitted.
“Tell him you’re safe at least.”
“Am I?” she scoffed, meeting his gaze long enough for his own to slice through her like a blade, as if he could see all the way inside her to where she squirmed.
And where she held a hot ember of yearning for his good opinion.
“He’s not worried,” she dismissed, feeling hollow as she said it. “We’re not close like that. He just wants to know what’s going on.” So he could perform damage control on his side.
She had worked so hard to keep Travis from seeing her as a hanger-on, so he wouldn’t think she was only spending time with his elderly father in hopes of getting money out of him and possibly cut her off. She was vigilant about paying her own way, refusing to take money unless it was a little birthday cash which she invariably spent on groceries, cooking a big enough dinner to fill her stepfather’s freezer with single-serve leftovers. She always invited Travis to join them if she was planning to see Henry, never wanting him to think she was going behind his back.
Now whatever progress she’d made in earning Travis’s respect would be up in smoke. But what did that matter when apparently no one else would have any for her after this?
“Do you have other family you should contact?” Vittorio asked.
“No,” she murmured. Her mother, a woman without any formal training of any kind, had married an American and wound up losing her husband two years into her emigration to his country. He’d been in the service, an only child with elderly parents already living in a retirement home. They had died before Gwyn had been old enough to ask about them.
With no home or family to go back to in Wales, her mother, Winnifred, had struggled along as a single mom, often working in retail or housekeeping at hotels, occasionally serving for catering companies. She’d taken anything to make ends meet, never deliberately making Gwyn feel like an encumbrance, but Gwyn was smart enough to know that she had been.
That’s why Gwyn was so determined to prove to Travis her attachment to Henry was purely emotional. It was deeply emotional. Henry was the only family she had.
“You do make an easy target, don’t you? A single woman of no resources or support,” Vittorio commented. Perhaps even desperate, she could hear him speculating.
“You must think so, offering an affair when I’m at my lowest,” she said. “You might as well hang around bus stations looking for teenaged runaways.”
Something flashed in his gaze, ugly and hard and dangerous, but he leaned forward onto the table between them and smiled without humor.
“It’s not an offer. Until I say otherwise, you’re my lover. I’m a very powerful man, Gwyn. One who is livid on your behalf and willing to go on the offensive to reinstate your honor.”
His words, the intense way he looked at her, snagged inside her heart and pulled, yanking her toward a desire to believe what he was saying.
“You mean the bank’s behalf. To reinstate the bank’s honor,” she said, as much to remind herself as to mock him. Her prison-cell analogy had been wrong. This was the lion’s cage she was trapped in with the king of beasts flicking his tail as he watched her.
“You understand me,” he said with a nod of approval. “We’ve been very discreet about our relationship, given that you work for us,” he continued in a casual tone, sitting back and taking his ease. “But I assure you, I’m intensely possessive. And very influential. This crime against you—” the bank “—won’t go unpunished.”
He was talking like it was real. Like they were actually going forward with this pretense. Like they were really having an affair.
She choked on a disbelieving laugh, pointing out, “That just switches out one scandal for another. It doesn’t change anything. I still look like a slut.”
She might have thought he didn’t care, he remained so unmoving. But sparks flew in the hammered bronze of his irises, as if he waged a knife fight on the inside.
He still sounded infinitely patronizing when he spoke.
“Sex scandals have a very short lifespan in this country. A little one like a boss-employee thing, between two single adults?” He made a noise and dismissed it with a flick of his fingers. “Old news in a matter of days. I would rather weather that than have the bank suspected of corruption. The impact of something like that goes on indefinitely.”
“Do you even care if I’m innocent? All you really want is to protect the bank, isn’t it?” She looked at where she’d unconsciously torn off the whites of two fingernails, picking with agitation at them.
“Of course the bank is my priority. It’s a bank. One that not only employs thousands, but influences the world economy. Our foundation is trust or we have nothing. So yes, I intend to protect it. The benefit to you could be exoneration—which I would think you would pursue whether you’re guilty or not. We’ll imply that Paolo knew of our affair and that’s how he and I were made aware of Jensen’s activities. We kept you in place to build the case.”
“Will I keep my job?” she asked, as if she was bargaining when they both knew her position was so weak she was lucky she wasn’t being questioned by the police right now. Or being hurled from this stupid helicopter.
“No,” he said flatly. “Even if you prove to be innocent, putting you back on our payroll would muddy the waters.”
“Let’s pretend for a minute that I’m as innocent as I say I am,” she said with deep sarcasm. “All I get out of this, out of being targeted by your client with naked photos that will exist in the public eye for the rest of my life, is a clean police record. I still lose my job and any chance of a career in the field I’ve been aiming at for years. Thanks.”
He didn’t own the patent on derision. She found enough scorn to coat the walls of this floating lounge, then turned her dry, stinging eyes to the window.
After a long moment, he said, “If you are innocent, you won’t be left with nothing. Let me put it another way. Cooperate with me and I’ll personally ensure you’re compensated as befits the end result.”
“You’re going to pay me to lie?” she challenged, her tone edging toward wild. “And what happens when that comes out? I still look like an opportunist.”
He didn’t flinch, only curled his lip as he asked, “Which lie is closer to the truth, Gwyn? That you want to sleep with Kevin Jensen? Or that you’ve been sleeping with me?”
Could he see inside her thoughts? Did he know what she fantasized about as she drifted into slumber every night? She sincerely hoped not. Talk about dirty images!
Blushing hotly all over, she crushed the fingers of one hand in the grip of the other, trying to keep herself from ruining any more of her manicure. Having him aware of her attraction made this worse, just as she had suspected. It was mortifying to be this transparent around him.
All she had to do was picture Nadine’s disapproving face to know how far protesting with the truth would get her, though. If she had more time, she might have come up with a better solution, but the helicopter was much lower now, seeming to aim for a stretch of green lawn next to a lakeside villa.
On the table before her, her phone vibrated with yet another message.
It didn’t matter who it was from. Everyone she knew was being told she had sent naked photos of herself to a married man. The existence of the photos was bad enough, but she was prepared to do just about anything, as the people in Nadine’s line of work would say, to change the narrative. Vittorio said this would cut the scandal down to a few short days and she had to agree that it was a more palatable lie than the one Kevin Jensen had put forth.
“Fine,” she muttered, swallowing misgivings. “I’ll pretend we were having an affair. Pretend,” she repeated. “I’m not sleeping with you.”
He smiled like he knew better.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_f298bd51-7a05-5bec-a5b6-dc3787be6cad)
HE LET HER into the house, then watched her wander it as he made a call, allowing her to listen as he greeted someone with a warm, “Cara. Come stai?”
Gwyn took it like a punch in the stomach, wondering how crazy she was to agree that he could call her his lover if he already had one.
The restored mansion was unbelievable, she noted as she clung to her own elbows and stared at the view of Lake Como that started just below the windows off the breakfast nook. The rest of the interior was warmly welcoming, with a spacious kitchen and May sunshine that poured through the tall windows and glanced off the gleaming floors with golden promise. Family snapshots of children and gray-haired relatives and the handsome owner and his wife adorned the walls, making this a very personal sanctuary.
This felt like a place where nothing bad ever happened. That’s what home was supposed to be, wasn’t it? A refuge?
Would she ever build such a thing for herself, she wondered?
Gwyn moved into the lounge and lowered into a wingback chair, listening to the richness of Vittorio’s voice, but not bothering to translate his Italian, aching to let waves of self-pity erode her composure. She felt more abandoned today than even the day her mother had died. At least then she’d had Henry. And a life to carry on with. A career. Something to keep her moving forward. Now...
She stared at her empty hands. Vittorio had even stolen her phone again, scowling at its constant buzz before powering it down and pocketing it.
She hadn’t argued, still in a kind of denial, but she was facing facts now. She had no one. Nothing.
In the other room, Vittorio concluded with, “Ciao, bella,” and his footsteps approached.
He checked briefly when he saw her, then came forward to offer the square of white linen that was still faintly damp and stained with her mascara.
So gallant. While she felt like some kind of sullied lowlife.
She rejected it and him by looking away.
“No tears? That doesn’t speak of innocence, mia bella,” he jeered softly.
She never cried in front of people. Even at the funeral, she’d been the stalwart organizer, waiting for privacy before allowing grief to overwhelm her.
“Is that all it would take to convince you?” she said with an equal mixture of gentle mockery. “Would you hold me if I did?” She lifted her chin to let him see her disdain.
“Of course,” he said, making her heart leap in a mixture of alarm and yearning. “No man who calls himself a man allows a woman to cry alone.”
“Some of us prefer it,” she choked out, even though there was a huge, weak part of her that wanted to wallow in whatever consolation he might offer. She’d had boyfriends. She knew that a man’s embrace could create a sense of harbor.
But it was temporary. And Vittorio was not extending real sanctuary. They were allied enemies at best.
He wasn’t even attracted to her. He thought she was a criminal and a slut.
“Just show me where I can sleep.” She was overdue for hugging a pillow and bellyaching into it.
His silence made her look up.
“Paolo is still tied up questioning Fabrizio. His wife has very kindly offered her wardrobe.” He waved toward the stairs. “She has excellent taste. Let’s find something appropriate.”
“For?” She glanced down at her business suit, which was a bit creased, but in surprisingly good shape despite her colossal besmirching.
“Our first public appearance,” he replied in an overly patient tone, like he was explaining things to a child.
“You said we just had to wait out the scandal for a few days.” A strange new panic began creeping into her, coming from a source she couldn’t identify.
“Oh, no, cara,” he said with a patronizing shake of his head. “I said that the worst of the scandal should pass in a few days. We are locked into our lie for a few weeks at least. You don’t get seasick, do you? The wind might come up this evening and the dinner cruise could get rocky.”
* * *
Vito wondered sometimes, when his dispassionate, ruthless streak arose this strongly, whether his father’s genes were poking through the Donatelli discipline he had so carefully nurtured to contain it.
The mafiosi were known for their loyalty to family, he reasoned. The ferocity of his allegiance to Paolo and the bank had its seeds in his DNA. Of course he would do everything and anything to protect both. Of course he would do whatever was necessary to neutralize the threat Jensen posed.
Vito was aware of something deeper going on inside him, though. A pitiless determination to crush Jensen. It was positively primeval and he wasn’t comfortable with it.
He glanced across at the fuel for his suppressed rage and was impacted by intense carnal desire.
Why?
Oh, Gwyn was beautiful. He couldn’t deny it, even though she was pale beneath a light layer of makeup. It had been expertly applied by Lauren’s very trustworthy stylist from Como. Like anyone who worked for society’s high-level players, the stylist knew any sort of indiscretion meant a loss of more than just one lucrative client. Lauren had sent the woman “to help a friend.” The stylist kept her finger on the pulse of celebrity gossip. She had recognized Gwyn with a very subtle start, then grinned and put her at ease so Gwyn had been smiling as she emerged as a butterfly from the chrysalis of a guest bedroom an hour later.
Her smile had faded when she had found Vito waiting for her. That had bothered him, making him feel a small kick of guilt, like he was responsible for her unhappiness.
...targeted by your client with naked photos that will exist in the public eye for the rest of my life...
He had asked her for the name of the spa and had ordered a team to look into it, wondering if a connection to Jensen might turn up beyond his wife recommending Gwyn visit it for physiotherapy.
Gwyn could have used something to relax her in that moment, as she’d stood so stiffly, projecting hostility as she seemed to wait out his judgment on her appearance.
He could hardly breathe looking at her. She was a vision in a long, sparkling blue skirt with a high slit and a black, equally glittering halter top that clung lovingly to the swells of her ample breasts. Her midriff was bare and her hair loose so her face was squarely framed by the blunt cut across her brow and the straight fall of rich, mahogany brown. She wore silver hoop earrings and a dozen thin bangles supplied by the stylist. Lauren’s shoes were a half size too big, but Gwyn’s toes were freshly painted a passionate red.
“You’re stunning,” he had told her sincerely.
Her hands had grown white where she clutched a small black pocketbook. Averting her face, she’d said, “Not sure why I bothered when people are going to look through what I’m wearing.”
“Do you need me to tell you you’re beautiful either way?”
She flinched. “Took a long look, did you?”
So much resentment. It annoyed him to be lumped in with all the other voyeurs. He had spent the past hour taking stock of how thoroughly Jensen was arrowing those images back at the bank, how the world media was exploiting Gwyn’s naked body for ratings. He had looked at everything but her photographs, deliberately sparing her one more pair of male eyes and himself the disturbing dual reaction of arousal and fury.
The thought that men around the world were licking their lips in lascivious heat over her figure was making him grow murderously affronted.
So he didn’t appreciate her goading him.
“They’re imprinted on my mind,” he said without apology, watching something tense and disturbed flash across her expression before she quelled it. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t mean that from a physical standpoint, but that’s true, as well.”
She reacted with a startled stare of confused vulnerability.
“That sounds almost kind. Are you practicing? Because there’s no one here to overhear you being nice to me.” Her mouth pouted in consternation, lips possibly trembling a moment before she firmed them.
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