скачать книгу бесплатно
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.”
