Bought By Her Italian Boss

“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

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

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.”