The Italian Boss's Secretary Mistress

‘I haven’t done anything to my hair, Gabriel, aside from having it trimmed, and shall we leave the subject of me behind just for a moment…?’ She fiddled with the letter, not quite knowing how she was going to give it to him without having to sit through the torturous process of watching him read it.

‘Why? I’m fascinated by the transformation. I thought you were going over to help your sister with her new baby. I had no idea you were going for a complete make-over.’

‘I did go to help Grace!’

‘And in the process decided to go on a crash diet, cut your hair and lounge around in a bikini all day so that you could go brown…?’

Rose counted to ten and wondered what exactly she saw in a man who was as arrogant as they came and saw nothing amiss in barging through every warning red light she was giving off without a second’s thought.

‘Have you ever been in the company of a newborn, Gabriel?’

‘Now that’s something I’ve always tried to avoid…’

‘Thought so, because if you had you would know that screaming newborns and tanning on loungers are two things that don’t go hand in hand.’

‘Surely your sister didn’t expect you to look after the thing the whole time!’

‘It wasn’t a thing. It was a baby. A beautiful little boy. They called him Ben.’ Her voice softened as she remembered the feel of that small, wriggling, plump body in her arms, a sensation that had kick-started her determination to change the rut into which she had comfortably sunk. Grace, two years older than her, had been so blissfully happy. Next to her, Rose had had an ugly vision of her own life and its sad limitations and she hadn’t cared for what she had glimpsed. In two years’ time she would be twenty-eight, the same age as her sister, but would she be cradling a newborn infant with a loving husband by her side if she continued doing what she was doing—working flat out for a man who didn’t have a clue she existed aside from her role as his capable secretary? Or would she be the eternal career girl who spent her life improving her house and bettering her lifestyle with nothing to show for it in the end? Well, nothing worth having, anyway. A certain wistfulness crept into her voice as she told him about her experiences in Australia. Grace’s husband, Tom, was an orthopaedic surgeon and had needed his nights to be free of interruption so that he could get enough sleep to enable him to operate safely. Hence, Rose’s input had been more than just a luxury. She had done her fair share of waking up during the nights, settling the baby back to sleep after his feed, but she had enjoyed every minute of it.

Gabriel was hardly listening to her spiel about the baby. Babies would doubtless eventually come for him—he was, after all, half Italian—but for the moment he couldn’t care less about the antics of some undersized human being on the other side of the world.

He was far too engrossed in the nut-brown creature sitting in front of him. The nut-brown creature with the abundant breasts, to which his eyes were repeatedly drawn.

At the risk of appearing pathetically lecherous and feeling an unwelcome stirring in his loins, Gabriel removed himself back to his chair and tried to focus on what she was saying about baby Ben and the crazy inaccuracy of his baby clock. He had never seen that soft look in her eyes before, and he suddenly frowned.

‘I hope this trip hasn’t put ideas into your head,’ he said, interrupting her in mid-sentence, and Rose blinked.

‘Sorry?’

‘Trip? Ideas? Your head?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Rose told him bluntly.

‘I’m talking about my perfect secretary suddenly deciding that the time has come for her to dip her toes into motherhood. All that baby business can prove contagious sometimes. I know that for a fact.’

‘Oh, really, Gabriel…’ Rose felt a cold anger sweep through her and she had to make a big effort to keep her voice level. ‘And how would you know that?’

‘I have two sisters and a brother and both my sisters have children, roughly the same ages. I have it on good authority that other women are often afflicted by maternal feelings the minute they get too close to a newborn baby…’

Rose looked at that dangerously sexy face and was unsurprised at his dismissive tone when referring to babies, parenthood and all that that implied. He was a man to whom settling down would be a notion best left on the back burner for as long as was humanly possible. Why complicate a perfectly satisfactory life, having any woman at the click of a finger, by choosing one woman and then, to compound the error, having a child? A screaming, demanding infant that would put paid to all thoughts of mobility?

‘I don’t intend to be trying motherhood any time soon,’ Rose said coolly. ‘I believe it’s necessary to have a serious partner before a woman takes a step like that.’

In that one sentence Gabriel had more insight into Rose than he had ever had. He had always assumed that there was no man on the scene but only because she had never mentioned one and women generally couldn’t help mentioning the men in their lives. Now it was confirmed and he was quietly pleased.

‘And there’s no man in your life at the moment?’ he risked, pressing on in the face of her obvious reluctance to prolong the subject.

Rose flushed and wanted to kick herself for the revealing crack in her armour. She had managed to keep their relationship on a strictly business level by making sure never to reveal anything about herself. She had instinctively known that the more he knew about her, the more dangerous her silly infatuation with him became. He could charm the birds from the trees and without really trying he could easily have sussed how she felt about him had he known anything about her private thoughts.

Of course it no longer mattered. She was forgetting that in the heat of the moment. The realisation gave her the strength she needed and she smiled nonchalantly.

‘They come and go,’ she said airily. ‘You know how it is. I’m between chaps at the moment.’ The small white lie was worth every penny just to see the incredulity in his eyes and she smiled demurely, daring him to voice his shock that she might actually have a life outside his corporation. ‘Anyway…’ she fingered the letter nervously ‘…now that I’ve told you all about my trip to Australia, there’s something I need to give you…’ She stretched forward and placed the white envelope on his desk and a sudden rush of sickening nerves flooded through her in a tidal sweep.

But she reminded herself that she was absolutely doing the right thing. She had talked it over with Grace and just voicing her thoughts had been sufficient to make her realise what she needed to do, how badly she needed to escape the powerful net Gabriel had spread around her over the years to the point where he was always somewhere in her head, whatever the time of day or night, whoever she might or might not be with. It was dangerous and getting more so with each passing day. In another four years’ time her emotions would be so tethered to him that she might well find herself crippled by her own inability to find a suitable mate without resorting to unfavourable comparisons.

He was looking at the letter warily, but he eventually took it, ripped it open and quickly scanned the contents. Several times. Obviously thinking that he had misread something. Finally, when her nerves were on the point of totally shredding, he said, very softly, ‘What’s going on here, Rose?’ Shock and disbelief flared in his deep blue eyes and Rose automatically cringed back, her normal assertive crispness abandoning her in the face of his concentrated, focused energy.

‘It’s my letter…of…of resignation…’

‘I know what it is! I can read perfectly well! What I don’t understand is why it’s staring me in the face!’ The pleasant anticipation with which his day had optimistically dawned, when he had contemplated the satisfaction of his life being returned to normal, now seemed like a distant thing of the past.

First of all, she had strolled in way later than she normally would have, sporting a changed look that would have had every man’s head reeling in appreciation as she strode through the office and, as if that hadn’t been bad enough, she had flung a resignation note down on his desk with all the preliminaries of someone who could not give a damn.

Gabriel, in addition to feeling rage and bewilderment, was assailed by a sense of bitter betrayal.

‘I just feel…’

‘I mean, no warning!’ he said, interrupting her harshly, waving the sheet of paper about in an accusatory fashion. ‘You stroll in here at God only knows what time…’

‘Eight-forty-five!’ Rose objected. ‘Fifteen minutes before I’m technically due to start the working day!’

Gabriel chose to ignore her input. ‘And suddenly you’re telling me that you’re walking out on me!’

‘I’m not walking out on you.’ Rose cleared her throat and willed herself to meet his eye. ‘You’re being melodramatic…’

‘Don’t you dare accuse me of being melodramatic!’ Gabriel bellowed, leading her to fear that in a minute the rest of the office would come hurtling through the outside door to see what the commotion was all about. He stood up and placed both his hands squarely on his desk, every muscle in his body rigid with threat. He couldn’t have felt more shocked by her resignation than if he had walked into his office only to find a gaping hole waiting for him instead.

‘I let you go to Australia,’ he thundered, ‘at massive inconvenience to myself…’

Rose, unwilling as she was to wave any red flags in front of charging bulls, was not about to let Gabriel get away with implying that she had cleared off for three months and left him in the lurch. In fact, she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had not been available for him. She had worked late more evenings than she cared to remember, had eaten takeaway food in front of her desk way after the rest of the workforce had departed, had cancelled friends at short notice so as not to let him down.

‘I arranged a perfectly good stand-in for you in my absence,’ she pointed out quietly.

‘You arranged to have an emotional wreck take over! A woman who spent the duration of her appointment to me on the brink of a nervous breakdown! Not my idea of a perfectly good stand-in!’

‘And the rest of them?’ Rose hung on to her temper with difficulty.

‘Useless. Surprised they could find jobs anywhere. Can’t imagine what that agency was thinking, having them on their books.’

‘Maybe you should have looked at the pattern,’ Rose murmured under her breath but not so softly that Gabriel didn’t hear exactly what she said.

‘What are you trying to say?’ he roared and Rose jumped and glanced nervously over her shoulder.

‘Nothing!’ she said placatingly.

Wrong move. If anything, her attempts to soothe had stoked his anger even further and he shot out of his chair and moved round the desk to where she was sitting, pressed back against the soft tan leather, hands clenched on her lap.

‘Well!’ He leaned over the chair until his face was thrust aggressively into her line of vision. Rose flinched.