The Ranieri Bride

‘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.