The Boss's Valentine

‘NO…NO…NO!’ Desmond urged Poppy in loud dismay. ‘Just leave the coffee over there. I prefer to stretch my arm out!’

Although Poppy smiled like a good sport at the tide of amusement that those pointed instructions roused, she was cut to the bone. Hadn’t she suffered enough yet for the episode of the spilt coffee? A lecture about safety measures with liquids from the HR manager had set the seal on her shame while she had also been reminded of her first formal warning, which had resulted from poor timekeeping in her very first month at Aragone Systems. ‘One more strike and you’re out,’ had been the message she’d received after the coffee incident and she really was determined not to make any further blunders.

‘What are you wearing to the party tonight?’

Grateful for the interruption, Poppy glanced up with a smile from the unexciting graph she had been tinkering with on her monitor. It was Lesley, a tall, slim brunette on the market research team. ‘Nothing special. Just a dress.’

She listened while Lesley described her own outfit. She knew that without a doubt it would enhance every slender curve of the other woman’s enviable figure. As Desmond informed her that he wanted the graphs she had been working on for a meeting, she hurried into printing them, relieved that she had finished the last one in time.

‘I heard that Santino got a valentine card,’ Lesley continued, and as Poppy tensed she added, ‘I was more surprised to hear he didn’t get a whole sackful! I bet it was from his ex trying to get back in with him.’

‘Ex?’ Poppy queried, relaxing again.

‘Don’t you read the gossip columns? He dumped Caro Hartley a month back,’ Lesley informed her with authority. ‘I didn’t think that would last long. She’s quite a party girl and I suspect Santino got bored fast. He’s a very clever guy.’

‘I’m sure he’ll not be on his own for long,’ Poppy remarked, anxious eyes on Desmond, her boss, as he treated the printed graphs to a cursory appraisal. Had she changed the colouring of the one she had first done in pink for her own amusement? Yes, she was sure she remembered doing so. Even so, she didn’t lose her tension until he had slotted them into a folder.

Never, ever again would she play around with the colours of the graphs, she swore as she went into the cloakroom to freshen up at lunchtime. If it killed her, she was going to erase her every bad habit. She gave herself only the most fleeting look in the mirror. At least she had grown out of the spots and her skin now looked great. But her rippling auburn curls were a constant source of aggravation, for the little tendrils that gathered round her face ensured that her hair never looked as tidy as other women’s. However, cut short her riotous curls were even harder to handle, so she kept her hair long and wore it clipped back at the nape of her neck.

Her unfashionable curves were the biggest challenge, she conceded ruefully. She was in dire need of a new, inspiring diet. The banana regime had put her off bananas for life, and the cabbage soup one had ensured that she felt queasy just passing vegetables on a market stall. No, it was back to boring old salad and yogurt, which worked but meant that she spent most of her time fantasising about food and feeling so hungry she could have munched on wood.

When she returned to her desk, the email icon was flicking on her monitor and she opened it, hoping it was a cheering communication from a friend.

‘Pink graphs are inappropriate in a business environment,’ ran the email.

Poppy looked at the message in shock and then glanced around herself to see if anyone was looking at her, but nobody was. Who had seen her mucking about with that graph before lunch? Who was pulling her leg? It was unsigned and the address was a six-digit number and, as such, anonymous.

‘Says who?’ she typed in and sent the email back.

‘I like graphs in dark colours.’

‘That’s boring,’ Poppy told her correspondent.

‘Rational. Pink is a distraction.’

‘Pink is warm and uplifting,’ she protested in reply, typing at full tilt.

‘Pink is irritating, cute, feminine…inappropriate.’ That awful word, inappropriate again. Her correspondent was a guy, she decided, and certainly not Desmond, who regarded email as a time-wasting exercise and who would surely have gone into orbit the instant he saw a pink graph.

‘How did you see my graph?’ she typed.

‘Stick to the issue.’

Poppy grinned at that rejoinder. Definitely a guy.

‘One more warning and you could be out of work. Be sensible.’ That next message came in fast on the previous one without having given her the chance to respond.

Her grin fell off her lips at supersonic speed. ‘How do you know that?’ she typed.

But this time, infuriatingly, there was no answer. Thinking about her mystery correspondent, Poppy conceded that quite a few people would be aware of those warnings on her employment record. The very first time it had happened she had been so upset, she had talked about it herself and, after the coffee episode, Desmond had been so furious that he had announced his intent to complain about her in such ringing decibels that most of the department had heard him.

Intrigued by those emails, scanning her busy colleagues with intense curiosity, Poppy sent several more to the same address that afternoon but still received no further response. Then she began thinking about the party that evening and wondered what she would wear, since pink had become such a controversial issue…

’I’m amazed that you’re still laying on large supplies of alcohol for your employees.’ Jenna Delsen’s exquisite face emanated shocked disapproval as she scanned the low-lit noisy room full of party revellers. ‘Daddy used to help our staff to get sloshed at our expense, too, but not since I joined the company. Now we have a nice sober supper do. No loud music, no dancing, no drink and everyone behaves.’

‘I like my staff to enjoy themselves. It is only one night a year.’ Santino suppressed the ungenerous thought that the blonde could be a pious, penny-pinching misery, for she had been welcome company at the funeral that afternoon and he had enjoyed dining with her and her father at their home afterwards.

‘I suppose that’s the extrovert Italian in you. You threw some very riotous parties when we were at Oxford together.’ Jenna gave him a flirtatious, rather coy look as she reminded him that they had known each other since university.

In receipt of that appraisal, all Santino’s defensive antenna hit alarm status. ‘Let me get you a drink,’ he suggested faster than the speed of light, already mentally listing the unattached executives present on the slender but hopeful thought that she might take a shine to one of them instead. They had always been friends, never anything else.

Jenna curved a slender hand round his arm when he returned to her side. ‘I have a confession to make…for the whole of the time we were at uni together, I was in love with you.’

Santino conceded that what had started out as an unusual day, and had gravitated into being a very long day, was now assuming nightmarish proportions. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No.’ Jenna fixed her very fine green eyes on him in speaking condemnation. ‘And you never noticed. In four long years, you never once noticed that I felt rather more for you than the average mate.’

In one unappreciative gulp, Santino tipped back an entire shot of brandy meant to be savoured at leisure. He was transfixed and trapped by that censorious speech. There was no polite or kind way of telling her that, beautiful and intellectually challenging as she was—for she had a first-class brain—there had been no spark whatsoever on his side of the fence.

‘And I had to sit back and watch you chasing girls who couldn’t hold a candle to me,’ Jenna continued with withering bite.

‘Oddly enough, I don’t recall you sitting home alone many nights,’ Santino countered sardonically.

‘Once I understood that I was in love with a commitment-phobe, I trained myself to regard you only as a friend—’

‘Jenna…when you first met me, I was eighteen. Most teenage boys are commitment-phobes.’ Santino groaned, thinking what an absolute pain she seemed to have become, still nourishing her sense of injustice over the unwitting blow he had dealt to her ego so many years after the event. ‘I was no better and no worse than most—’

‘Oh, don’t be so modest,’ Jenna trilled in sharp interruption. ‘All the girls were crazy about you! You were spoilt for choice but you deliberately chose women whom you knew would only be short-term distractions. You always protected yourself from the threat of a steady relationship and you’re still doing it!’

When Santino went back to the bar for another drink, Jenna was so taken up with her discourse that she accompanied him. Santino’s temper was on a very short leash and his second drink went the way of the first. He was cursing the innate good manners that had persuaded him that he ought to invite the blonde to accompany him to the party. He was thinking of what a very much better time he would have had mixing with his staff. Then he glanced across the room and saw a figure hovering in the doorway and the remainder of Jenna’s barbed criticisms washed off him because he no longer heard them.

Noticing that she had lost his attention, Jenna followed the direction of his gaze. She saw a youthful redhead with a vibrant mane of curly hair. Small, very pretty, but not at all Santino’s style. Yet Santino was so busy watching the girl that he had forgotten Jenna was there.

Scanning the crowded room, Poppy finally picked out Lesley in her distinctive white and silver dress and began to move towards her, an apologetic smile on her lips. She was a little late but then some of her colleagues had opted to stay on in the city centre and warm up in a bar before attending the party. But Poppy loved getting ready to go out at home and had known that she didn’t have enough of a head for drink to have sustained a lengthy pre-party session.

‘I really like that dress,’ Lesley said warmly as she flipped out a seat for Poppy’s occupation. ‘Where did you buy it?’

‘It’s not new. I got it for my brother’s wedding,’ Poppy confided, and then added in an undertone. ‘To be honest, it’s my bridesmaid’s dress—’

‘I wish my best friend had let me wear an outfit like that for her big day. At least I could have worn it again afterwards.’ Lesley admired the strappy green dress that flattered Poppy’s shapely figure and slim length of leg, then drew Poppy’s attention to the drinks already lined up in readiness for her, pointing out that she was very much behind the rest of them, before continuing, ‘It must have been an unusual wedding.’

‘My sister-in-law, Karrie, wanted a casual evening do. She wore a short dress, too.’

Poppy’s attention, which had been automatically roaming the room in search of a certain tall, dark male, finally found Santino where he stood by the bar with a spectacular blonde woman clinging to his arm. She lifted the drink that Lesley had nudged into her fingers and sipped it to ease her tight throat, but she resisted the urge to ask the chatty brunette if she knew who Santino’s companion was. After all, what was the point? Did it make any difference who it was? And it was none of her business either.

Indeed, she should not even be looking at Santino Aragone, Poppy told herself guiltily, because looking was only feeding her obsession. Having thought over Craig’s sneering remarks earlier that day, Poppy had finally faced the unhappy fact that he at least suspected that she was rather too attached to their mutual employer. That conclusion had unnerved her for Craig’s reputation for making others the butt of his cruel sense of humour was well-known. So, she would have to be more circumspect in the future, for languishing like a lovelorn teenager over Santino could easily make her a laughing stock at work. In fact, she would be much better devoting her brain to sussing out the mystery identity of her email correspondent, who had to at least like her to have gone to the trouble of trying to give her a warning word of advice, she reflected.

‘Who is she?’ Jenna enquired very drily of Santino.