Bought By Her Italian Boss

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.”