by Dani Collins
Her face blanked. She touched between her furrowed brow.
“They’ve been setting me up this whole time, haven’t they? That’s why I got this promotion. They thought I was too inexperienced to see what they were up to. As soon as I proved I wasn’t, they turned me into their fall guy. They just pushed me off the roof!”
She was very convincing, right down to the way her trembling hand moved to cover her mouth and her eyes glassed with anxious outrage.
He tried to hang on to his cynicism, but he was entertaining similar thoughts. The very idea ignited a strange fury in him. He knew better than most what happened when a corrupt man took advantage of an ingenuous woman. His father had done it to his mother and she had wound up dead.
His phone vibrated. He glanced at the text from his cousin. Fabrizio claims it was all her. Any progress on your end?
Vito glanced at Gwyn, at the way her shaking fingers smoothed her hair behind her ear while her concubine mouth pouted with very credible fear.
He wasn’t without concern himself. Even if Paolo managed to build a case against Fabrizio, Kevin Jensen had positioned himself very well to walk away along the high ground, leaving the bank wearing a cloak of muddied employees. An institution that staked its success on a reputation of trustworthiness would cease to appear so.
Vito refused to let that happen. He protected his family at all costs. They would, and had, done the same for him.
And this would cost him. Gwyn was dangerous. The fact that he was drawn to her, looking to see her as an innocent despite the very real fact she might be involved in crimes against the bank, was unnerving. Being close to her would be a serious test of his mettle.
But his glimpse into her phone had revealed a move to him that even a master chess player like Kevin Jensen wouldn’t see coming, even though it was one of the basic rules of the game: if a pawn was pushed far enough into the field of play, she could be promoted to a formidable queen.
CHAPTER THREE
VITTORIO PLUCKED HIS handkerchief from his jacket pocket and moved to dampen it under the tap of the water cooler.
Gwyn watched him, wondering what he was doing, then noticed her purse was over his shoulder, looking incongruous against his tailored charcoal suit.
“Did you get my stuff from my desk?”
Fabrizio seeing her naked was creepy. Vittorio touching her possessions was...intimate. Disturbing.
“I did.” He came back to tilt up her chin and started to run a blessedly cool, damp, linen-wrapped fingertip beneath her eye.
His touch sent an array of sensation outward through her jawline and down her throat, warm tingles that unnerved her. She tried to jerk away, but he firmed his hold and finished tidying her makeup, telling her, “Hold your head high as we walk to the elevator.”
His tone was commanding, his mouth a stern line, while he gave her a circumspect look and tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear.
She knocked his hand away, chest tightening again. “I just explained that they’re using me. You won’t even take a second to consider that might be true? You’re just going to fire me and throw me to the wolves?”
“Your termination can’t be helped, Gwyn. I have to think about the bank.”
His detached tone sent a spike of ice right into her heart. “Thanks a lot.”
They wound up in another stare down that pulled her already taut nerves to breaking point. She hated that he was standing while she was still seated. He seemed to have all the power, all the control and advantage.
She hated that, with their gazes locked like this, her mind turned to sexual awareness, refusing to let her stay in a state of fixed hatred. She wondered things like how his lips would feel against hers and grew hot as an allover body flush simmered against the underside of her skin.
She stood abruptly, forcing him to take a step back.
“Good girl,” he said, moving to the door.
“I’m not obeying you. I—” She cut herself off. She wanted to leave, she did. She wanted to lock herself in her flat where she could lick her wounds and figure out what to do next.
“The reporters won’t leave until you do,” he said heartlessly. “People will be trying to go for lunch.”
Don’t inconvenience the staff with your petty disaster of a life, Gwyn. Think of others in the midst of your crisis.
“Everyone’s going to stare,” she mumbled, trying to find her guts, but her insides were nothing but water.
“They will,” he agreed, still completely unmoved. “But it’s only two minutes of your life. Look straight ahead. Come. Now.”
Her heels wanted to root to the floor in protest. She wanted to beg him to let her hide here until after closing, but he was right. Better to get it over with.
She knew then what it was like to walk toward execution. While her low heels took her closer to the door, her heart began slamming in panic. Sweat cooled the ardor she’d experienced a moment ago, leaving her in something close to shock.
She sought refuge in her old yoga lessons, concentrating on breathing in through her nose, out through her narrowly parted lips, holding reality at bay, picturing the crown of her head being pulled by an invisible wire toward the ceiling.
“Good,” Vittorio said as he opened the door, then settled his arm around her, tucking her shoulder under his armpit as his hand took possession of her waist.
She stiffened in surprise at the contact. A disconcerting rush of heat blanketed her, making her knees weaken.
He supported her, forcing her forward and keeping her on her feet when she would have stumbled. He matched their steps perfectly, as though they had walked as a couple many times before.
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.<
br />
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.”
Oh, wonderful. He wasn’t coming on to her. Why did she care either way?
“It would still make it look like I’m sleeping my way to the top,” she muttered, flashing him a glance, but quickly jerking her attention back to the window, not wanting him to see how deeply this jabbed at her deepest insecurities.
From the moment she’d developed earlier than her friends, she’d been struggling to be seen as brains, not breasts. A lot of her adolescent friends had been fair weather, pulling Gwyn into their social circles because she brought boys with her, but eventually becoming annoyed that she got all the male attention and cutting her loose. The workplace had been another trial, learning to cope with sexual harassment and jealousy from her female coworkers, realizing this was one reason why her mother had changed jobs so often.
Her mom had been a runner. Gwyn tried to stay and fight. It was the reason she had stuck it out in school despite the cost. Training for a real profession had seemed the best way to be taken seriously. Yet here she was, being pinned up as a sex object in the locker room of the internet, set up by men who believed she lacked the brains to see when people were committing crimes under her nose.
And the solution to this predicament was to sleep with her boss? Or appear to? What kind of world was this?
She looked around, but there was nowhere to go. She might as well have been trapped in a prison cell with Vittorio.
He swore under his breath and withdrew her phone from his shirt pocket, scowling at it. “This thing is exploding.” His frown deepened as he looked at whatever notification was showing up against her Lock screen. “Who is Travis?”
His tone chilled to below freezing and his handsome features twisted with harsh judgment. She could practically see the derisive label in a bubble over his head.
“My stepbrother,” she said haughtily, holding out her hand, not nearly as undaunted as she tried to appear. Her intestines knotted further as she saw that she’d missed four calls and several texts from Travis, along with some from old schoolmates and several from former coworkers in Charle
ston.
All the texts were along the lines of, Is it really you? Call me. I just saw the news. They’re saying...
Nausea roiled in her. She clicked to darken the screen.
Travis had been vaguely amused with her concern over not having every skill listed in this job posting for Milan. Do you know why men get promoted over women? Because they don’t worry about meeting all the criteria. Fake it ’til you make it, had been his advice.
Really great advice, considering what such a bold move had got her into, she thought dourly.
But his laconic opinion had been the most personable he’d ever been around her. He was never rude, just distant. He never reached out to her, only responded if she texted him first. He didn’t know that she’d overheard him shortly before her mother’s wedding to his father, when he’d cautioned Henry against tying himself to a woman without any assets. There are social climbers and there are predators.
Henry had defended them and Gwyn had walked away hating Travis, but not really blaming him. Had their situations been reversed, she would have cautioned her mother herself. It had still fueled her need to be self-reliant in every way.
She had been so proud to tell Travis she’d landed this job, believing she’d been recognized for her education, qualifications and grit. Ha.
“I guess we can assume the photos have crossed the Atlantic,” she muttered, cringing anew.
It was afternoon here. Travis would be starting his day in Charleston, and the fact that he’d learned so quickly of the photos told her exactly how broadly these things were being distributed. Maybe reporters had tracked down the family connection and were harassing him and Henry?
Damn that Kevin Jensen. His headline name was turning her into a punch line.
She set her phone on the table, unable to think of anything to say except I’m sorry, and that was far too inadequate.
She swallowed back hopelessness, realizing a door had just closed on her. She could go back to America, but she couldn’t take this mess to Henry’s doorstep. He’d been too good to her to repay him like that. Travis might make her cut off ties for good.