His Virgin Secretary

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Oh, right.’ Bewildered, Katy tried to imagine what exactly Isobel lacked and then proceeded to deduce that if Isobel lacked anything, then Bruno was looking for the impossible, because with love removed from the equation, then she certainly had all the necessary requirements on paper. She could only assume that Joseph’s reaction had been telling enough for his godson to have second thoughts. Because there was no doubt that if Bruno had any love to distribute, then it was securely distributed onto one person, namely his godfather.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what the missing link is?’

  ‘Okay,’ Katy obliged, ‘what’s the missing link?’

  ‘This.’

  In the space of a split second, she knew what he was going to do and it was as if the slow burn of excitement inside her had licked its steady flame against dry tinder, sending everything into a vortex of supercharged heat. Katy thought that she might even have given a slight moan although she couldn’t be sure because time seemed to have stopped and, with it, her awareness of everything around her. There were just the two of them in this intense zone and as his dark head descended her lips parted without any deliberate thought on her part. Her body had moved into a state of hungry compliance and every sense in her was lost as she felt the warm touch of his mouth against hers, covering it, then turning a gentle kiss into something hard and demanding and unstoppable. He moved one hand to cup the nape of her neck and the other curved around her waist, pulling her into him until there was no mistaking the hard throbbing of his arousal pressed against her. With a whimper of complete and utter surrender, Katy reached up and coiled her fingers into his hair.

  As his prying tongue delved into her mouth, Katy forgot everything. She forgot where she was; she forgot Joseph resting in a chair only yards away from them; she forgot that Bruno was a man no sane woman should get involved with unless they had a deep-down suicide wish.

  The door being pushed open only dimly penetrated her consciousness and it was only when, eyes blissfully closed, she felt Bruno pull away sharply from her that she came to her senses and blankly looked where he was now looking. Namely at Isobel whose face was a picture of stony, thunderous fury.

  Before she could open her mouth, Bruno was striding towards her. At which point the reality, which Katy had happily relegated to the back of her mind, reared up in all its grim detail and she looked desperately around to see that Joseph still had his eyes shut.

  How he could continue dozing through what had happened was beyond her. True, they hadn’t been shouting or making any noise, but she wondered that some of the electrifying thickness of the atmosphere hadn’t wafted across to him and woken him up.

  Uncertain, she remained where she was, watching as Bruno led Isobel out of the room in a vice-like grip, then very quickly she snatched up her robe and covered herself with it.

  Leaving Joseph on his own was not an option. If he woke up to find her gone, he might panic, become disorientated. She imagined him stumbling into the pool in confusion and gently shook him.

  ‘Time for us to head in, Joseph.’ Did her voice sound normal? She hazarded a smile and then wondered whether it looked convincing. Her mind was whirling at what had just happened. Bruno had kissed her and she had felt as though she had suddenly been catapulted into orbit. There had been no question of resisting. She had just succumbed. One hundred per cent.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear? You look a little…fazed.’ He was finding it hard not to grin or at least toss her some little cliché about young people blithely assuming that the old were good for nothing except maybe dozing in a chair by a pool while they couldn’t keep their hands off one another. It had been something of a surprise when he had blinked open his eyes and watched the scenario being played out in front of him and he had been on the verge of leaping up, if his bones would enable him to do anything as energetic as leaping, so that he could interrupt, but he hadn’t. He might be an old man but he knew mutual attraction when he saw it. Thinking about it, he had seen glimpses of it ever since he had gone into hospital and they had come visiting and he knew better than to try and intervene with his pontificating. And besides, what was there to pontificate about? Bruno and Katy were his two favourite people in his life, and he could think of nothing better than seeing them together. Bruno was not suited to Isobel. He only imagined he was.

  ‘Fazed?’ Katy produced a jolly laugh from somewhere. ‘What about?’

  Joseph took refuge in a mumble and allowed himself to be helped back to the house, observing how he was guided as far as possible from the sitting room, where hopefully his godson was coming to his senses and dispatching the viper without delay.

  ‘Where is Bruno and…and…oh, dear, I seem to have forgotten the lady’s name…old age, you know…’

  Katy looked at him with raised eyebrows. She was already feeling calmer with Joseph at her side. Something about his tranquillity was rubbing itself off on her.

  ‘Her name’s Isobel, Joseph, as you well know. And they’re somewhere around…’ She waved one hand vaguely to encompass the part of the house where they weren’t.

  ‘Perhaps we should go and see them. Only polite.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Katy said hurriedly. ‘They…they’re probably busy. We’ll see them a bit later.’ She imagined Joseph bumbling into one great, big, swirling shouting match and shuddered. Isobel’s face had not promised a calm reaction to what she had seen. Her lover and the home help, as Katy well knew she considered her, in a clinch. She would never, ever, have thought that she would have the starring role in a situation like that and she was horribly, guiltily, aware that it had been her fault. She had allowed Bruno to kiss her and she had flung herself into the kiss with fervent excitement, instead of shoving him away.

  Her guilt grew with every step she took and, when she had finally established Joseph in the conservatory with a cup of tea and the newspaper, she was convinced that leaving Bruno to deal exclusively with Isobel’s wrath was all wrong. It might take all the courage at her disposal, but she felt morally compelled to at least set Isobel straight on one score. That their embrace had meant nothing, that it had been something that had happened out of the blue and would never be repeated. What she chose to do with the information was her business.

  ‘Where are you off to now?’ Joseph demanded as she headed in the direction of the door. ‘You’re behaving like a cat on a hot tin roof!’

  ‘Oh. To, you know, change. Have a bath. I’m still in my swimsuit.’ Joseph had used the changing room by the pool and was already in his trousers and neat collared shirt, as fresh as a daisy. ‘And I thought I might just, you know, see whether Bruno and Isobel wanted something to drink. Some tea, perhaps.’

  ‘Tea? Most normal people are having something a little stronger at this time of the evening.’

  ‘Well, something a little stronger then. Wine.’

  He gave an elaborate sigh, nodded, and Katy scooted out of the room and across the hall, walking steadily in the direction of the sitting room and resisting the urge to turn tail and dash up the stairs. She should really have a bath and change before she confronted them but she knew that if she headed up to her bedroom, chances were high that she would chicken out of doing what she felt she had to do.

  She heard their voices before she hit the door but at least they weren’t shouting. Actually, she couldn’t picture Bruno ever shouting but neither was Isobel. And there were no ominous sounds of things being hurled the width of the room. Maybe they had kissed and made up.

  If that was the case, then problem solved, Katy told herself firmly. She wouldn’t have to explain anything and she could return to being the hired help who had happened, for five minutes, to have a body that had sparked Bruno’s curiosity. She took a very deep breath, then she knocked on the door and pushed it open at the same time.

  Two pairs of eyes swivelled in her direction. Bruno looked incredibly calm. He was standing nonchalantly by the window with a drink in one hand. She had no idea what was going through his hea
d because his expression was shuttered and unrevealing. On the other hand, she had every idea what was going through Isobel’s head and it struck Katy that, despite the lack of shouting, the other woman was very, very angry. Her eyes were like chips of ice and her mouth was an indrawn line of suppressed rage.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Isobel spat out, taking two steps towards the door. Katy clung to the door handle until her knuckles were white.

  ‘I wanted to explain…’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Bruno drawled without moving or raising his voice. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

  Katy felt as though he had slapped her on the face, but she stood her ground although some of her resolve, admittedly, was wavering. A little voice was having a laugh at her expense, asking how she could have imagined herself to be anything but a bit player in the unfolding drama. That kiss had meant nothing to Bruno. It certainly would not have affected his feelings or lack of them towards Isobel.

  ‘Nothing to do with her?’ Isobel’s head whipped around and she narrowed her eyes at the casually lounging figure by the window. ‘You invite me up here to meet your godfather, you lead me to think that we might actually be going somewhere with this relationship, and then I find you slobbering over the staff?’

  Bruno looked icily at her. ‘It’s over, Isobel. Frankly, I can’t see what else there is to say on the subject.’

  It was such a witheringly blunt put-down that Katy felt a momentary pang of compassion for Isobel. She might not be Mother Teresa in disguise but she would still be suffering the humiliation of catching her man in the arms of another woman. She tentatively stepped into the room, towelling robe tightly wrapped around her, and cleared her throat.

  ‘I just want to say, Isobel, that what you witnessed, well, meant nothing…’

  ‘Do you really expect me to believe that?’ She had turned completely away from Bruno and, frankly, Katy didn’t blame her. His expression was cold and forbidding and very scary.

  ‘It’s the truth!’

  ‘You’ve been closeted in this place for weeks, so-called working, and you expect me to believe that on the one day I happen to come up, you just find yourselves in each other’s arms, snogging one another like two teenagers?’ She ended this on a choked sob, which she obviously found infuriating because she raised one clenched fist and pressed it against her mouth.

  ‘Well, yes!’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’ Furious eyes fastened onto Bruno. ‘I can’t believe you could be such a bastard. I can’t believe you could string me along for months and then waltz into the arms of someone else, the home help, for God’s sake, without a backward glance.’

  ‘Leave Katy out of this,’ was all he said, in a very low voice.

  ‘How can I? You obviously couldn’t!’ She grabbed her little bag from the chair and pulled herself up to her immense height. ‘Well, don’t think for a minute that you’re going to get away with this! I’m not just anybody, Bruno Giannella. You might have got away with walking all over women in the past, but this time you picked the wrong one!’

  Katy pressed herself against the wall and listened to this vicious speech with horror. Whatever Bruno said, she was responsible for this, with her girlish infatuation and lack of self-control. Okay, maybe he had come to the conclusion that he had made a mistake, but if they hadn’t been caught in flagrante, the tenor of this breakup would have been completely different. Isobel wouldn’t have been standing there making threats and meaning them, from the sounds of it.

  ‘Really.’ He sounded mildly interested. ‘And what do you intend to do?’

  Isobel was reduced to enraged silence.

  ‘Hire a hit man to kill me and save the rest of the female population from my hideous exploits? Sneak into my apartment and chop the sleeves off all my shirts?’ He lowered his fabulous eyes for the briefest of seconds. ‘Report my dastardly behaviour to the press?’

  Katy gasped and tried to imagine all of those possibilities. She snapped out of her reverie to hear Isobel swooshing towards her and watched as she strode towards the door with a tight smile on her face.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said in a voice that could curdle milk. ‘But—’ she paused to look at him, only inches away from Katy ‘—you’d be stupid to underestimate a scorned woman. As for you—’ she glanced down at Katy ‘—good luck. He might be a stallion in bed but don’t bank on anything more than a spot of good sex.’

  Katy found that she was shaking as Isobel swept out of the room. With just the two of them now in the room, she was acutely conscious of her dress but she couldn’t possibly dash upstairs to her bedroom with the risk of bumping into Isobel on the way out. She stared mutely at Bruno and then finally whispered, ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Are you? Interesting. What for?’

  ‘For…’

  ‘Like I said, you didn’t have anything to do with us breaking up so there’s no need to beat yourself up with a guilty conscience.’ He pushed himself away from the window and sat down on one of the chairs. ‘Where’s Joseph?’

  ‘In the conservatory. You were very unkind to her, Bruno.’

  Bruno looked at her in disbelief. ‘Me? Unkind? What on earth are you talking about? And why don’t you sit down? Before you fall down?’

  Katy sat and worriedly leant forward. ‘And what if she does try and do something…well…get even, so to speak…?’

  ‘What are we talking about here? The threats or my unkindness?’

  ‘Well, both, actually. I just think that you were so dismissive of her.’ Katy frowned earnestly at him and chewed her lip. ‘You just stood there and let her rant and rave without even trying to calm her down…it must have been awful for her to…well, you know…’

  ‘If you’d come in a bit earlier, you would have heard my efforts to calm her down. Isobel wasn’t open to being calmed down. Nor was she open to my explanation for the breakup. She didn’t want to hear that it might have been her fault in any way. She wanted a scapegoat. The fact is I came to my senses and realised that what she and I had just wasn’t quite good enough to last a lifetime, however good it all sounded in theory.’

  ‘So you were wrong.’

  ‘But big enough to admit it.’ He gave her a slow, crooked smile that sent that terrible, treacherous shiver through her all over again.

  ‘Right.’ She stood up and avoided his eyes. ‘I’d better go and change and start thinking about dinner. I guess Isobel’s going back to London…’

  ‘And I doubt she’ll be popping in to say goodbye.’

  ‘How can you be so cool?’ Katy asked with genuine bewilderment. Her two serious relationships had been mutually ended, but she had still agonised over the details—but then she kept forgetting that Bruno wasn’t like a normal human being.

  ‘I did us both a favour.’ He shrugged and looked away from her. ‘What Isobel needs is a very-well connected, very subservient man with plenty of family money and an over-developed desire to please. In the long run, I would have driven her crazy. It worked for a while because, when I think about it, we never spent any long periods of time together and we certainly never did the mundane things that most normal couples do. I was never around for long enough because of work demands.’

  He almost made it sound as though Isobel had been unreasonable to have reacted the way she did. ‘And you don’t feel a bit jittery about her threats?’

  ‘She doesn’t possess a key to the apartment,’ Bruno said, stretching his long legs out in front of him, ‘so she won’t be able to sneak in and shred my suits and I doubt even Isobel would be vengeful enough to pay someone to bump me off.’ He appeared to find the thought of that amusing.

  ‘And what about reporting you to the press…?’ Before she could stop feeling somehow to blame, Katy knew that she had to clear up these loose threads because she didn’t want Bruno to be hurt because of her. Even though she knew that he was probably incapable of being hurt by anyone. Still…

  ‘Well, I am a public figur
e, I guess…’ He rested his head against the back of the chair and half closed his eyes. ‘But a very private man. But you needn’t worry. Isobel was speaking in the heat of the moment. By the time she gets to London, she’ll have calmed down and by next week she’ll be counting her blessings and announcing to the world that she’s well rid of me…’

  Joseph certainly didn’t hide the fact that he considered his godson well rid of the bountiful blonde. With Katy, he was more open about his misgivings about any relationship they might have been nurturing, although over dinner, with Bruno, he was more circumspect in his musings, only saying that she hadn’t seemed to be the right type for his godson. When pressed by Bruno for a definition of what he considered his right type, Joseph was uncharacteristically reticent.

  Katy made very sure not to involve herself in this conversation. She couldn’t begin to contribute anyway since she didn’t know the first thing about men like Bruno. Not a mention had been made about that kiss they had shared by the pool. After Isobel had stormed out of the room, she had half expected him to say something about what had taken place between them, but not a word and his silence on the subject had been telling enough for her to steer well clear of it. She propped her chin in her hands and as male voices faded into vague background noise she allowed herself to go over in her head that wonderful sensation of when his mouth had met hers. Her head told her that she was pathetic even thinking about it, but her heart was all for an action replay. When she realised that Bruno and Joseph had lapsed into silence, she flushed and stood up to clear the dishes.

  ‘Leave them,’ Bruno commanded. ‘Let’s retire to the sitting room and have a drink. I think I need one.’

  Katy eyed the nearly finished bottle of wine, which he had single-handedly demolished.

  ‘A decent drink,’ he amended, reading her mind.

  ‘You two go ahead,’ Katy said. ‘Course, Joseph, you’ll be sticking to fruit juice…’

  ‘Possibly,’ Joseph grumbled. ‘Though I’m sure it’s not very good for my digestive system. Too much fruit juice isn’t, you know.’