The Ranieri Bride

Fredo was thinking about the way the boy had kept glancing up to check on him all the way back here and the cheeky smile he’d worn on his little mouth. As they’d entered the building he’d turned and shouted, ‘Bye, monkey!’ before being dragged off chuckling by his mamma who’d refused to glance Fredo’s way at all.

Enrico did not feel as if he had so much as a drop of fun in him right now as he sat there staring at the child’s face; it was as if those ink-dark eyes were making a link with his own—he could feel it right down to the dregs of his swirling, tensing gut.

‘He is mine, I feel it,’ he uttered gruffly.

‘Si.’ Fredo nodded.

Why the sombre confirmation from his bodyguard further creased him up Enrico did not know—but it did.

‘Get down to the crèche and keep your eye on him,’ he instructed.

For the first time in all the years they’d been together Fredo balked at a command. ‘You want me to spend the afternoon in a nursery—with bambinos?’

He was horrified. Enrico looked at him. ‘Who the hell else can I trust to keep an eye on him while I work this mess out?’

‘But he cannot go anywhere without his mamma! She—’

Enrico got up, all lithe muscle and brooding unease. ‘She could run,’ he muttered. ‘I cannot afford to let her disappear until I know the truth.’

Fredo was silent. He might not like the job he was being handed but he saw the possibility in what Enrico said. With a fatalistic shrug of his big shoulders he turned to the door.

‘Where is Luca hiding out these days?’ Enrico sent grimly after him.

Fredo paused. ‘Last I heard he was in Hawaii with his latest rich puta.’

‘Arrange to keep him there,’ Enrico ordered. ‘Use threats or money or both if you have to.’ Though it closed up his throat to give his cousin a single euro. ‘I don’t need him turning up and queering this for me when he hears I have a son by Freya.’

‘How will he hear it?’ Fredo asked in bewilderment. Luca had been cast out of the Ranieri family; he did not even have contact with his own mother any more!

‘He will hear it like the rest of the world will hear it,’ Enrico said. ‘When I announce it publicly that I have a son and intend to marry the boy’s mother.’

There was a very thick pause, then Fredo said carefully, ‘You are going too fast with this, Enrico—’

A pair of black-ice eyes lanced Fredo with a look that made the other man sigh.

‘You need positive proof before you—’

‘The boy is mine. I want him. The mother comes with the package.’

‘Try telling the signorina that,’ Fredo said drily.

‘I intend to.’

Freya was wistfully wishing she lived on the other side of the world right now.

But she didn’t. She was standing right here in Hannard’s basement, mindlessly feeding paper into an old flatbed scanner so the information on it could be transferred to the mainframe computer.

Trapped, she thought bleakly, by the need to earn a living.

And frightened, because she didn’t know what Enrico was going to do.

It was all over the building that he’d bought out Josh Hannard. It was also all over the building that he’d accosted her in the foyer this lunchtime and caused an ugly scene.

Her telephone rang. It hadn’t stopped ringing since she’d got back from lunch, flooding her with calls from her fellow workmates wanting her to dish the dirt as to what Mr Ranieri had said to her. The whole place was agog with curiosity and scared out of their wits for their livelihoods…more scared if they had a child in Hannard’s crèche. All she could do was to lie and say, what confrontation? He was just asking about the quality of care at the crèche.

Because the real truth was way beyond her means to tell—even to herself. She didn’t want to think about what it was going to mean to her and Nicky.

She picked up the phone, ready with her by now well-practised light answers.

‘A Mr Scarsozi has taken up residence in the crèche,’ announced the familiar voice of Cindy, its manager. ‘He says he’s here under instructions from our new boss to watch over Nicky. Can you tell me what the heck is going on?’

Freya closed her eyes as her heart sank to her stomach, fresh fears clenching her fingers in a tight clasp around the phone receiver. ‘Has he—touched Nicky?’ she asked unsteadily.

‘No,’ came the firm reply. ‘If he tried I wouldn’t let him.’

Try stopping him, Freya thought with a shiver as she recalled the way Fredo’s strong arms had secured her son once already that day.

‘He just stands in a corner of the playroom watching him and scaring the rest of us half to death,’ Cindy went on. ‘Have you seen him, Freya? He’s built like a gorilla! I want the scary thing out of my crèche!’

‘Right,’ Freya said, beginning to shake all over again. ‘Is—is Nicky scared of him, too?’

‘Are you joking? Your son had the bold cheek to go right up to him and say, “Hi, monkey, want to come and play?” Does Nicky know him?’

Now, there was a question. How did she answer it—no or yes? If she said no, she would put everyone involved in the crèche into a panic. If she said yes, she was setting herself up for more questions she had no way of answering.

‘I’ll deal with it,’ she replied, going for the sidestep response.

What did Enrico think he was doing? she wondered helplessly as she put down the phone. Was he trying to intimidate her through Nicky before he’d even—?

‘Your tea break, Freya,’ a frosty voice intruded. ‘Though the way you’ve been stuck on that phone all afternoon I’d say you’ve already had the equivalent of several of them.’

Freya blinked, green eyes looking blankly at her head of department, a cool creature with dyed blonde hair and a tight pink mouth, who loved ruling over everyone like a tyrant.

‘Be so good as to keep your personal life out of my department in future, if you don’t mind.’

The woman was also miffed because, like everyone else, she’d asked Freya the same eager questions, only to receive the same stock, frustratingly unrevealing answers.

‘Yes. Sorry. Right,’ Freya mumbled—then she grabbed her bag and ran.

She had to talk to Enrico, and she had to do it now! Unearthing her mobile phone from her bag the moment she hit the outer corridor, she leant back against the wall and dialled into Hannard’s via Reception. Her fingers were still tense, her insides shaking. She didn’t want to speak to him but if she had to do it, then it was better over the phone than face-to-face.

She managed to get as far as his personal assistant—a male personal assistant—who coldly informed her that Mr Ranieri was in conference. Since Freya had once occupied the same post, she knew exactly what ‘in conference’ really meant. Enrico was talking to no one. He was too busy plotting her demise, no doubt.

‘Look,’ she said impatiently, too stressed and in need of sorting this situation out to play word games, ‘I need to speak to him urgently, so you will tell him that Freya will call back in five minutes and even if he is still in conference I’m coming right up!’

With that she severed the connection, not wanting to hear what the PA had to say to that piece of defiance. Then she shot off to the ladies’ room to use the next five minutes to freshen up.

Enrico received the message with his handsome face cut from granite. So she was panicking already. Good, he thought grimly. He wanted her to panic. He wanted her to live in fear for her life.

Freya had to wait in line for a cubicle. By the time she’d bagged one her five minutes were almost up and the panic Enrico was hoping for was really setting in. Quickly dragging her phone out of her bag, she rang into Hannard’s again.

It didn’t help that it took almost another two minutes to make the connection with his PA. There was a queue a mile long waiting to use the ladies’, and sitting there with her panties stretched taut across her knees and a mobile telephone clamped to her ear felt pretty damn weird to say the least.

‘I will put you through now, Miss Jenson,’ that cold male voice informed her.

The man knew her name, which made her stomach lurch because Enrico must have told him. What else had he said? Who else had he spoken to here about her?

‘I want you to leave me alone, Enrico,’ she rushed out in a driven whisper the moment the connection was made. ‘My son is not your son, so call off Fredo!’

‘Why are you whispering?’ he demanded.

‘I’m trying to talk seriously to you without half the building hearing me!’ she unleashed in an unsteady, husky hiss. ‘You can’t do this to me, Enrico. You can’t just stroll into my life and take it over. You can’t…’

Someone knocked on the cubicle door. ‘You all right in there?’ a female voice questioned. ‘You’ve been in there for an age!’

‘In where for an age?’ Enrico rasped out.

‘In the loo,’ Freya answered impatiently. ‘I’m in one of the loos because it happened to be where I was when my five minutes were up.’

‘The loo,’ he repeated, then went perfectly silent.

Freya plucked tensely at the lacy edge of her panties while she waited for him to recover from the shock. ‘We all need it some time, Enrico,’ she sighed out eventually. ‘Even you.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ he gritted. ‘You are speaking to me on this phone while sitting on the loo?’

‘It’s my afternoon break,’ she explained. ‘I only get ten minutes so I don’t have time to…freshen up and talk to you unless I combine the two.’

There was another of those telling silences. Why it had to tickle at the cluster of curls between her legs, Freya didn’t know—but it did.

She shifted uncomfortably. ‘Enrico, call off Fredo,’ she pleaded. ‘He’s scaring everyone!’

‘Pull your pants up and get up here, Miss Jenson,’ Enrico instructed coldly. ‘I expect to see you standing fully dressed in my office in five minutes—and don’t make me wait or you won’t like what I decide to do next.’

The line went dead. Freya didn’t have five minutes left of her break!

Hell, she did not have a life left if she didn’t stop this craziness now, before it raced out of her control.

It was beyond her control already, her brain grimly fed to her. Muttering a few curses beneath her breath, Freya shoved her phone back into her bag and got up, then quickly rearranged her clothing while trying desperately to calm herself before she opened the cubicle door.

She was met with a sea of impatient faces…faces that lit up when they saw who she was, and her cheeks began to burn as if she’d been doing something really shocking in there. But it wasn’t the length of time she’d spent locked in the loo that was making them stare at her, she admitted heavily. It was instant recognition and the curiosity value of being the woman their new boss had set upon in the foyer.

‘Do you know him, is that it?’ someone asked as she went to wash her hands.

‘No,’ she answered, and wished it were true.

‘Does he fancy you, then?’ someone else quizzed. ‘Did the utterly gorgeous Enrico Ranieri hit on you in the foyer, and you did your usual thing and told him to get lost? Is that why he was so angry after you rushed off?’

Had he been angry?

‘Eyes like icecaps on a volcano,’ someone described.

Freya dried her hands and imagined Enrico in one of his cold rages. She’d experienced enough of them in their time together to know how they looked.

The problem with Enrico was that he was an exciting mix of hot-blooded Italian and cool sophisticate. Put him in a temper and he could go either way—ice-cold or so blisteringly hot you could fear for your skin…or other parts.

Those other parts quivered so badly Freya had to squeeze her thighs together. Stop thinking about him like that! she told herself.

‘It wasn’t seeing your little boy that annoyed him, was it?’ The anxious question came from one of the other mothers with a child in the crèche. ‘I mean, if he doesn’t like children and decides to close down day care, I don’t know how I…’

‘Trust me, he isn’t quite that archaic,’ Freya heard herself say with enough tight sarcasm to make her wish she’d kept her impulsive mouth shut.

They pounced on that statement. ‘You do know him!’

‘No, I don’t.’ But her cheeks went hot.

‘He stopped dead when he saw you. I was there. I saw it happen. I thought he was going to grab hold of you by the neck and strangle you.’

So did I, Freya thought with a small inner shiver. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, ‘but my break is over.’ And she fled before they could grill her to the point that she really tripped herself up.

Damn you, Enrico, she thought as she hurried towards the bank of lifts. I hope you’re pleased with yourself for stirring this up!

Enrico wasn’t pleased at all. He was sprawled in a chair behind his desk, elbow resting on its arm, a long finger stroking the firm line of his mouth, eyes narrowed and glinting dangerously as he played out the image Freya had kindly placed in his head.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her in that position before, so it was easy for him to imagine it—though she’d usually been naked and almost always sitting there while he stood over her, enjoying the feel of her mouth around—

His groin released a spasm that funnelled right down the length of him in response to the warm, wet memory of her tasting tongue. He shot to his feet, angry—disgusted—that he could still respond so quickly to a woman who turned him so cold now.

Well, not right now, he conceded as he spun to stare out of the window while he tried to bring his libido in check.

She’d come to him so crazily innocent, she’d been shocked the first time he’d encouraged her to do that for him. By the end of their relationship she’d been so good with that sexy mouth that he had not been able to tolerate another woman doing it for him since.

‘Dio,’ he muttered. By the end, she’d been so good at a lot of things that he had barely been able to look at her without wanting her to try her newly acquired whiles out on him some more.

What he had not envisaged was her wanting to try those whiles out elsewhere—and especially not on his own cousin.

One-time cousin, Enrico grimly amended. The day he had kicked Freya out of his life, he’d kicked Luca out of it, too.

Luca, with the same dark good looks that the Ranieri family were known for, he thought cynically. He had not needed to hit on Freya when he could have had any other woman he desired.

Or was it Freya who’d hit on him?

Enrico didn’t know, had refused to discuss it with either of them. All he did know was that he’d gone away on business vaguely aware that she’d not been happy about something and had promised himself he would find out what was bothering her when he got home again. What he’d found when he’d got home had finished him as a loyal cousin and as a loyal lover.

And if you want to replay old memories, he told himself cynically, then replay the one where you walked in on the two of them sprawled half-naked on your own damn bed, with her legs splayed wide and his tight, tanned backside about to make its urgent thrust home.

It was a good point in his thoughts for Freya’s knock to sound at the door, he mused grimly as he turned around.

Moving back to his chair, he sat down in it before calling a cold, ‘Come in.’

Freya took a deep breath before reaching for the door handle, all too aware that Enrico’s PA was watching her and that he, like everyone else in this building, was wondering what was going on between her and his boss.

Her face was flushed due to her mad rush up here, eyes actually sparking with a mixture of fired-up aggression and fear. Stroking a hand over her hair in a nervous gesture at the same time as she turned the handle, she pressed her trembling lips together and stepped through the door.

The first thing to hit her was the bright light flooding into the room from all angles. The next thing to hit her was the sight of Enrico himself. He was seated behind a desk and looking exactly the same as he had done four years ago, when she’d first met him on the day he’d taken over the company she’d been working for then.

All sleek, smooth elegance and stunning good looks, wrapped around a truly rampant sex appeal. Memories flooded her of the way she’d tried so hard to appear professional and efficient back then, smiling nervously while blushing shyly and feeling generally like an awkward child in the presence of some great, awesome power.

That great, awesome power had been her first encounter with her own sexual stirrings. Until that moment she’d always laughed at friends who went all fluttery when they talked about new boyfriends and said silly things like, ‘Oh, you should see him! He made me so hot I wanted to drag off my clothes!’

Well, Enrico had made her feel like that. She’d been ready to drag off her clothes for this too-gorgeous-to-be-real new boss she’d been handed like one of those gifts you did not know what to do with or how to deal with.

The same crazy sensations washed right over her now as she stood there just inside the closed door and stared down the room at his seated, undeniably sexy but intimidating bulk, and she felt hot feelings spark into life, though they had no right—not for this man, who might be an amazing lover but had proved beyond a doubt that he was good for nothing else.

Her chin went up on that final denunciation. Enrico’s insides knotted as he watched it happen, felt the challenge in the gesture hit low in his gut and remain there taunting him, as he watched her toss fear and defiance at him in equal doses like some unruly employee dragged before the big boss because her work attitude was unsatisfactory.

What a joke, he thought as he studied the red flags highlighting her smooth, creamy cheeks and the ice-over-fear glazing her sea-green eyes. According to her personal records, Freya Jenson was so super-efficient it would take lies to make out she was incompetent. She was never late in, never sick and never left a minute earlier than she should do. She never moaned or complained about her frankly lousy working environment or the mindless job that she did. And she had never asked for more money, though she’d worked at Hannard’s for over two years and had never been given a single pay rise.

Why, Enrico asked himself, when it was perfectly obvious from the clothes she was wearing that she barely had enough money on which to exist? Why, when he could see even from here that that unflattering knot her hair was contained in needed a pair of scissors taken to it? And he liked her twisting, spiraling, glorious waist-length hair.

The boy had been dressed well. His head of black curls had been carefully cut and shaped into a fashionable style, and the shoes on his feet had not looked as if they’d seen better days in a scrap bin at a charity shop.

She had a good brain in her head, but she was working here as some nonentity filing clerk hidden away in the bowels of the building, while the boy lived it up on the second floor, in a nursery to beat all nurseries complete with a wide-open terrace and a veritable array of toys and care staff to entertain him.

The child was tough and unruly—loved his mamma to death and only responded to a scolding if it came from her. The nursery staff despaired of ever gaining control of him but adored him anyway because—apparently—he could make them fall about laughing just when they believed they were in danger of killing him.

He had a sense of humour, in other words. As Fredo had reminded him he used to have, when he drove everyone insane only to win them over at the last minute by some inner instinct that turned him from obnoxious brat to clown.

And Freya loved him, this boy they had made together. Everyone knew how much she loved him. Everyone knew she was the best mother in the entire world.

But she’d still kept her son from his father. Was that the move of a loving mother?

‘Come and sit down,’ he instructed coldly.

‘I prefer to stand,’ she refused.

‘Sit,’ he incised and felt his blood begin to race around his system while he waited for her to deny him once more.

She didn’t. It was almost a disappointment. At this precise moment he would have loved any excuse to tear her into shreds with his bare hands.

With eyes carefully lowered now she moved forwards, a reed-slender thing of five feet seven with hidden treasures lurking beneath the bad suit. Lounging there in his chair, Enrico let his eyelids sweep downwards over his eyes as he looked her over in a slow, cold study that did not reflect the burn of sexual anger taking place in his gut.

Wouldn’t she just love to know that his body had not forgotten her, even if his brain had done until a few short hours ago?

The dusky pink mouth was tense, he noted, though the way she was holding it like that did not hide the revealing little tremor which told him just how frightened she was.

Good, he thought as he watched her take the chair positioned on the other side of the desk, then sit down with a stiff spine and knees pressed modestly together.

Another joke, since she had proved she was perfectly happy to open those legs for anybody.

Including his cousin.

‘Do you think it is appropriate to hold a conversation with your employer via the telephone at the same time as you were relieving yourself in the lavatory?’ he asked.

That brought her eyes shooting upwards. Enrico received the full blast of her green stare. ‘I explained that,’ she said. ‘And I had finished relieving myself, for your information,’ she added. ‘But it is up to you to decide if you found my call offensive.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed without elaborating on the single comment.

She lowered her eyes again, those golden-tipped eyelashes fluttering down against her cheeks. Something else stung inside him, the desire to run his tongue across those satin-smooth cheekbones and feel those eyelashes quiver with pleasure as he did.

She was sexually receptive from her hairline to her toenails, built for the exclusive pleasures of the flesh. Yet she was sitting here like some prim spinster schoolmistress in her ugly, ill-fitting suit and with her pinned hair, tense mouth and frosted eyes.

Liar, he wanted to say as he let the silence grow between them until she shifted restively. You are just one big, in-my-face liar, Freya Jenson.

‘You demanded this meeting. So talk,’ he said.

‘Call Fredo off guard-watch,’ she responded instantly.

‘No.’

‘He’s worrying the children—’

A sleek dark eyebrow arched. ‘My son?’

Freya stiffened. ‘He is not your son.’

‘Luca’s, then?’

Her chin came up that bit higher, the pink mouth pushing into a stubborn pout, eyes steady when they linked with his, and she said—nothing.

Freya felt her silence spray like a million pinpricks down her front as she held his cold, narrowed stare. She hated him for asking that, but…

Dear heaven, he looked good, she found herself thinking helplessly. The silk black hair that didn’t dare to curl like Nicky’s did, unless it was early in the morning and he’d just woken up from a long night of loving and sleep; those dark eyes, half-lost beneath two sets of long eyelashes that gave him such a sexy, slumberous look when really he was as wide awake as a hunting shark. Then there was the mouth, hidden at the moment by the long, tanned finger he had resting along its slender width. That mouth could kill you with pleasure if you let it get close enough. It could make you lose touch with everything, but how it could make you feel!

And it could slice you into tiny pieces—or the white teeth that hid behind it could—and there was the tongue that could issue insults as effectively as it could devour you in other ways.

Her nipples pricked and she knew why they did. Just thinking about that mouth—angry or hell-bent on giving you pleasure—was enough to make her breasts respond in a greedy, tight leap of remembered bliss.

She pulled in some air. ‘I work here,’ she informed him. ‘What happened in the foyer this lunchtime has caused a big enough sensation in this building, without Fredo standing guard at the crèche and making the gossip ten times worse.’