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“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
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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