The Ranieri Bride
The Ranieri Bride
Michelle Reid
Michelle Reid
The Ranieri Bride
FOR Love OR MONEY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
COMING NEXT MONTH
CHAPTER ONE
ENRICO RANIERI was striding across Hannard’s foyer with his dark head lowered. He was late and he was frowning, too preoccupied with the meeting he was about to attend to notice the drop-jaw looks of recognition he and his small entourage were receiving as they passed through.
It was the finest—finest—hint of a sound crashing into his consciousness that made him lift up his head. After that he stopped dead, every important thought preceding this moment wiped clean away by the sight that met his ink-dark gaze.
She was about ten feet away, just stepping out of one of the lifts. His insides flipped and then rolled as if he’d been put into a sudden steep dive. He struggled to believe it—or did not want to. It was years since he’d so much as clapped eyes on her, yet as she uttered some small, indistinguishable sound he found himself rendered so immobile he couldn’t make his brain move beyond the fact that she was right there before him in the flesh!
She had not noticed him yet because her head was lowered, her glorious mane of bright auburn hair caught up on the top of her head in one of those unflattering knots that had always challenged him to tug it free.
It challenged him again now, setting a couple of nerves flicking in his fingers, while something far more potent flicked at other parts of him.
Freya…
Her name sizzled across his senses in a tight, complicated mix of hate and pleasure. Three years ago he’d kicked her out of his life without conscience, then spent the next memorable year taking that decision out on anyone who fancied taking him on. Business or pleasure, he had not been fussy. She had worked for him. He’d trusted her. No woman before or since had ever earned that level of trust. She’d lived in his apartment and slept in his bed. He slept alone now and any physical activities always took place somewhere else.
In fact, she’d stolen so much away from him, it was no wonder he was sizzling with hate.
But—Dio—she looked good. Even wearing that unflattering grey suit, which looked at least one size too big for her, she was stinging his senses with first-hand knowledge of what lay hidden beneath the layers of high-street-cheap.
Like the clothes she used to wear before he’d taken her in hand and turned the scrappy sow’s ear into a breathtakingly beautiful silk purse.
That odd feeling moved to his chest, turning into a swirling, coiling stab of discomfort when he remembered how she had left all the silk behind when he’d kicked her out.
Now here she was, walking towards him with her head tilted downwards as if she was as preoccupied with her thoughts as he had been with his. His eyes narrowed as he watched her come closer. A fine layer of sweat went bristling across the surface of his skin as he waited for the silken arc of her gold-tipped eyelashes to lift up and show him a pair of vivid green eyes destined to turn as dark as his own with shock.
He wanted to see her shock—needed to see it, like a man possessed with a fevered desire to watch another human being squirm.
Did she work at Hannard’s? Had he unwittingly logged into a way to make the beautiful but deceiving Freya Jenson pay yet again for what she had done to him?
His white teeth came together with a snap of tension as he waited for the glinting red head to lift up. She was almost upon him. Hell, his senses were going crazy. Any second now she was going to cannon right into him! Anticipation leapt inside him like a mad, snarling wolf ready to attack.
She pulled to a stop suddenly and all of that swirling, tingling war of feeling completely blanketed him because he thought she had sensed his presence at last.
Then he heard her speak—
‘No, Nicky,’ she said. ‘It’s no use trying to pull free of my hand when you know Mummy is not going to let it go.’
Like a man hurled from a storm into a maelstrom, Enrico dropped his gaze downward. If his senses had made a violent dive when he’d first seen her, it was nothing to what he experienced now as his eyes came to rest on the small denim-clad boy who was fighting to get free of her restraining hand.
Curling black hair crowned a handsome little face, and a pair of fiercely determined ink-black eyes glared up at his mother.
Nicky, he thought.
Nicolo, he extended.
She had named her son Nicolo.
Right there in Hannard’s foyer, Enrico Ranieri, hardheaded businessman and cold, ruthless operator, quite simply crashed and burned.
The ‘terrible twos’ were an apt label when it came to her son, Freya thought ruefully as she fought to keep a grip on his hand. Give him the chance and he’d be off causing mayhem wherever he could wreak it. Lose concentration on him for a single second and he became a terrifying danger to himself.
She was going to have to purchase leading reins, she decided as she stood waging battle with one determined little boy. They would cause serious offence to his dignity, but hanging on to a writhing, kicking two-year-old meant that she was in danger of hurting him in her effort to keep him contained.
‘The park,’ she said, using a favoured destination as a key to unlock the door to her son’s more compliant side. ‘Be a good boy and walk nicely, and we will go to the park.’
‘Monkeys,’ he replied.
‘No,’ Freya returned firmly. ‘The monkeys live at the zoo. The park is closer.’
‘I like monkeys.’
‘I have hold of one right here,’ she laughed. ‘Be a good boy today, and we will go and see the monkeys tomorrow when we have more—’
‘He’s mine,’ a deep voice rasped like coarse sandpaper across her exposed nape.
Freya actually shivered, the blood in her veins beginning to freeze before she’d even lifted up her head and let her eyes clash with a pair of black eyes that flashed with raw hostility.
Her heart gave a shocked thump against her ribcage, then almost stopped altogether. It was like being hit over the head by your worst nightmare, she likened as she stared at six feet three inches of hard masculine aggression standing right over her and threatening hell. The black hair, the black eyes, the almost-black suit covering his tightly muscled framework, even the shiny black shoes on his long, narrow feet, all screamed: The devil has come to collect.
‘No,’ she breathed, not wanting to believe that Enrico, of all the rotten people in the world she could possibly meet again, was standing less than two feet away.
‘Madre de Dio, he is!’ Enrico bit out on a hushed, driven hiss of sizzling fury.
Freya blinked, still too locked in shock to realise that he had misunderstood her choked little negative. Then she watched his eyes drop to her son and fire up with the most ungodly flame of possessive rage.
Even Nicky was affected by that fierce look. Instead of continuing to tug on Freya’s hand, he clung tightly to it and shifted his wiry little body behind her legs. It was that defensive move from her normally fearless little boy that made anger burn out the deep freeze of her shock. With a lifting of her chin, Freya looked the hard, cruel, unrelenting devil right in the eye and repeated coldly, ‘No, he is not.’
Enrico moved with a tight shift of his lean body. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ he rasped out, dragging his eyes away from the little boy to fix back on his mother’s face. ‘You ruthless witch. I am going to make you pay for this!’
Freya could see that he meant it by the murderous glint in his eyes and that thin-lipped way in which he was holding his mouth. An attractive mouth once, she found herself thinking, a gorgeously knowing and very seductive mouth. Like the rest of him: gorgeously sexy and disgustingly aware of it.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she denied stiffly.
Black eyes flared. He took a step towards her. For a horrible moment, Freya thought he was going to take hold of her by the throat. She gasped and took a step backwards, almost tripping over her son.
‘Enrico…’ Someone placed a warning hand on his arm.
It was only then that Freya became aware again of where it was they were standing. The whole foyer had gone silent and dozens of curious faces were turned on them. Enrico appeared to have forgotten his own entourage, one member of which was trying to remind him that they had an audience.
He glanced around, soot-black eyelashes flickering against fiercely jutting cheekbones. The whole structure of his lean, attractive face was savagely clenched. The atmosphere in the foyer was fizzing and popping with his barely contained violence, which he swung away from Freya and turned onto the person touching his arm.
Freya shuddered. Her grip on her son must have loosened in that mad moment of relief, because Nicky suddenly broke away from her. In the split second it took her to swing round to try and recapture the small boy he was already out of reach and heading straight for the exit like a mini-hostage suddenly set free.
Nicky knew those exit doors and exactly how to make them work: break the magic beam and they would swing open on a whole world of excitement for a small and fearless two-year-old.
‘Nicky—no!’ Freya cried out and went running after him.
He just gave a squeal of delight and kept going, little legs carrying him ever closer to freedom and the narrow pavement outside, which was the only point of safety between him and one of London’s busiest streets. Freya was already seeing his little body crushed beneath the wheels of a double-decker bus as she ran. Her skin had gone clammy, her heart was pounding agonisingly in her breast.
Then an arm reached out and a big body bent to scoop the child right off the ground. As Freya watched it happen through a haze of wild terror, she found her eyes fixing on yet another sickeningly familiar face.
Fredo Scarsozi, Enrico’s long-term bodyguard, was holding her son in a circle of formidable muscle-bound power. Her stomach rolled over. Nicky was yelling in frustrated temper while Fredo stood looking down at him—just looking.
Fredo could see the resemblance too, she realised as she skidded to a halt in front of him.
‘Give him to me,’ she demanded breathlessly, holding out her arms for her son.
Fredo switched his gaze to her face and did nothing. True, unfettered fear closed her throat off and congealed her blood. Nicky suddenly stopped yelling, the curiosity value of being held by this big man winning over his protests, and an inquisitive frown puckered his face.
‘Please,’ Freya begged, lifting her arms higher.
The husky wobble in her voice grabbed her son’s attention. She was trembling all over. A restless stir was starting up around the foyer because the onlookers were uncomfortable with what was happening here, though they were not sure as to what that actually was.
Then Fredo switched his gaze to a place over her right shoulder. Icy fingers of dread stroked right down Freya’s spine because she knew he was looking to Enrico for instructions. One negative glint from those angry black eyes and it would take an army to drag her son free.
‘Monkey?’ Nicky questioned, and startled the tough Fredo Scarsozi into glancing at him. Then the big man’s mouth stretched into a reluctant grin.
‘Gratzi, bambino,’ he murmured drily.
Nicky grinned, too, all white baby teeth and excruciating little-boy charm.
‘Please give him back to me,’ Freya begged unsteadily.
‘Do as she says,’ Enrico coldly put in.
Heart thundering out of control now, Freya didn’t look round, didn’t breathe, didn’t do anything but stand there and wait for her son to arrive safely back where he belonged. As Fredo handed him over, her arms closed around that precious little body so tightly that Nicky let out a protest, but she didn’t—couldn’t—slacken her grip.
One final wild glance into Fredo’s knowing face and then she and Nicky were out of the Hannard building as if the wild dogs of hell were after them.
Which was not far from what Enrico was about to put on their tails.
‘Go after her,’ he instructed Fredo.
With a nod, the bodyguard moved off with a muscle-bound lope that belied his lightness of foot.
Enrico turned and looked at the frozen crowd in the foyer. His expression was controlled now, the trampling mayhem that had been going on inside him grimly crushed to a low burn. His small clutch of assistants just stood there staring at him as if he’d lost his sanity. Others—complete strangers to him—were staring at him with fascination that was tinged with recognition and also understanding as to what his presence here had to mean.
Trouble—big trouble.
Enrico Ranieri was known throughout Europe as an acquirer of struggling businesses, a troubleshooter notorious for taking no prisoners as he worked to turn ailing companies’ fortunes around.
And he always struck without warning—a tactic that gave him the quick upper hand. So when Enrico turned up in your foyer, you didn’t only stop and stare, you felt your own vulnerability right through to your shoes.
When he was confronting one of your own, because she happened to have her child with her, you could see his reputation for ruthless throat-cutting acted out before your horrified eyes.
They think I dislike children, Enrico realised. They think they are seeing Hannard’s crèche being wiped out with a swift, decisive flick of my hand. And maybe I will do it, he thought brutally, as his cold eyes dismissed every one of them and he strode across the foyer and into one of the lifts.
He stabbed a button then turned to watch his now wary entourage rush to get into the carriage before the doors closed. No one spoke. They had the sense not to. He felt as if he’d been turned to a pillar of stone. Nothing was going on inside him now—nothing other than—
Freya had given birth to his son.
The lift stopped and the doors slid open at the executive top floor, where he was met by yet another sea of faces forming an anxious wall of greeting in front of him.
Enrico did not want it. He did not want anything to do with damned business right now. He wanted…
As he stepped out of the lift, the icy shards glinting in his eyes had the wall of suits parting in front of him, welcoming smiles withering, the hands half lifted to shake his hand dropping nervously away.
‘This way, Mr Ranieri,’ some brave soul prompted.
He nodded, flat lipped, and followed while everyone else fell into silent step behind. He was shown into a large office filled with light spilling in from wall-to-wall windows. Enrico stood for a couple of seconds taking in nothing—nothing, until the silent tension behind him finally got to him and he turned.
Ignoring each wary face but for that of Carlo, his PA, he instructed, ‘I want the personal profiles of every employee sent to my laptop within the next ten minutes.’
The Hannard suits shifted on a tidal wave of discomfort. His personal staff were wise enough to keep their body language under control.
‘Postpone the board meeting until tomorrow. And I will want to meet anyone with decision-making powers before it begins.’ He continued his instruction like a shark circling its next meal. ‘That is all.’
It was a dismissal. He turned his back on the lot of them before he strode over to the carefully cleared and freshly polished desk that used to belong to Josh Hannard but now was his. Behind him the shuffle of a mass exit began to take place.
‘But we thought we were going to have a working lunch so we could introduce everybody,’ he heard someone mutter in hushed bewilderment.
‘If I were you, I would skip lunch and start boning up on what it is you do here to earn your salary,’ one of his own people advised.
‘But Mr Hannard—’
‘Mr Hannard is no longer in charge here, Mr Ranieri is. And he has a nasty habit of chewing on spare flesh and spitting out the bones.’
Enrico smiled as he heard that. Quite a character reference, he mused thinly. Then he lifted his eyes to the rooftop view of London he could see through the window and the smile died.
His son—his son!
‘Cagna,’ he muttered. She was going to pay for this!
He, Enrico Ranieri, was going to chew on Freya Jenson’s delectable flesh and spit out her deceiving, lying, cheating bones!
Freya sat on the grass in the park surrounded by ducks while her son fed them the remains of her uneaten sandwiches—and she shivered despite the heat of the summer sun.
Icy cold was how she always felt when she let herself think about Enrico. Hurt, hatred and contempt could turn a warm-blooded woman to a block of ice.
So could fear.
Of the unknown.
Of what Enrico was going to do next.
She shifted, blinking her green eyes as a hungry beak pecked at her fingers. Relinquishing the small crust to the greedy duck, she turned to Nicky, who was sitting there in his element, smiling—and looking so much more like his father than she’d ever let herself see before, that it came as a shock each time she gazed at him now.
Now that she had seen his father in the flesh again.
Now that she had seen the grown-up version of her son’s handsome face, those black eyes, the stubborn mouth and determined chin.
The fact that Enrico had been so quick to recognise himself in Nicky had shaken her to her very roots. How dared he—how dared he do that after all he’d said and done to disown responsibility?
She’d come to hate him for doing that.
‘Get out of my life,’ he’d ripped at her three years ago. ‘You are a cheat and a slut and I never want to see you again so long as I live.’
Bitter, cold, heartless. Arrogant, superior, judgemental; deaf…
She ran out of adjectives and made do with a sigh instead.
Maybe he’d had second thoughts about Nicky by now, she thought hopefully. He might have seen a miniature mirror image of himself in her little boy, but there again his cousin Luca was yet another reflection of those disgustingly handsome Ranieri features. A sly, mean, nasty mirror of Enrico, but the likeness was there, and Enrico would have remembered that by now and dismissed her and Nicky out of his nasty suspicious—
Then it hit her—the one thing she had been trying very hard not to think about.
What had he been doing in Hannard’s foyer, anyway?
He hadn’t bought Hannard’s—had he? He wasn’t about to become her boss again?
Her spine tensed up as nerve ends crashed together, her cold fingers twisting tightly on her lap. No, she thought—no! Don’t look for the worst-case scenario. He could have just been passing through. Maybe he was a friend of Josh Hannard and was only meeting him for lunch.
And maybe pigs can fly, she was then forced to tell herself. When Enrico Ranieri appeared in a company’s foyer with his faithful entourage stacking up behind him, then he was there for only one purpose.
It was a buy-out and, with his usual tactics, he was making a surprise hit on a new acquisition like a lethal bolt of lightning striking out of the blue.
A shiver ran down her back. Oh, no, she thought, and lowered her face to her knees because she just couldn’t face the idea of him having the power to ruin her life—again.
Once had been enough.
Once upon a time three years ago she’d had a wonderful job as his personal assistant. She’d lived a wonderful life as his live-in lover. They’d barely survived being out of each other’s sight. Two hot lovers with passionate and feverishly possessive temperaments, they’d matched each other, fire for sizzling fire.
Then she’d met his cousin and within weeks it was all over.
‘Monkey,’ Nicky said levelly.
‘We will see the monkeys tomorrow,’ Freya promised, lifting her head to look at this dark-haired little boy who was the most important thing in her life—whoever his father was.
‘No, monkey over there,’ he insisted, pointing with a finger.
Turning her head, Freya found her eyes fixing on the bulky shape of Fredo Scarsozi. He was standing beneath the shade of a tree not twenty feet from them. As she stared he sent her a brief nod in acknowledgement and she knew then, knew with every single fractured nerve she possessed that, far from dismissing them, Enrico was right there watching them from behind the steady gaze of his most trusted employee.
Well, this was one fight he was going to have with himself because she was not going to play any part in it, she decided as she clambered to her feet. Nicky was her son and only hers, and it was going to be up to Enrico to prove otherwise.
If he cared enough.
Bitterness welled, and anger—a hard, cold rod of contempt that straightened her spine as she held a hand out to her son.
‘Come on, sweetie,’ she murmured. ‘It’s time for us to go back now.’
Nicky came without argument. With no bread left, the ducks had scooted back into the pond. Plus her son was used to the routine he had been living with since he was three months old and she had been so very fortunate to land a job at Hannard’s with its crèche all ready and waiting to take in her son.
The job itself might be basic and the pay reflected the money it cost her to place Nicky in day care, but at least he was right there in the same building with her and she could see him whenever she needed to. Their little flat might be poky and erring towards shabby but they managed.
They were happy—content to have just each other. They did not need a man in their lives and once Enrico had recovered from the shock of seeing them he would realise that he could not want anything to do with them.
‘The monkey is following us,’ Nicky informed her.
‘He’s not a monkey, he’s a man,’ Freya corrected and refused to glance back at Fredo—refused.
But that cold chill was striking at her again, the grim knowledge that she was lying to herself if she dared to believe that Enrico was going to let her off the hook without knowing the truth.
He was ruthless and tenacious.
CHAPTER TWO
LYING, cheating, vindictive whore…
Enrico sat behind the desk, silently throwing those insults at the photograph sourced from Hannard’s security files that looked out at him from his computer screen.
She looked so cute, so sweetly innocent, he mocked acidly. As if butter would not melt in her mouth.
But it did melt.
With a flick of the mouse he blanked her out by pulling up a photograph of the boy and once again felt that soul-shattering, crash-and-burn feeling rock his insides.
‘What do you think—is he mine or Luca’s?’ he asked Fredo.
Fredo gave one of his shrugs. ‘If he is Luca’s, then the bambino has been fortunate enough to miss out on his papa’s less savoury genes,’ the bodyguard said drily before adding quietly, ‘He has your eyes and mouth and your—stubbornness. He also has your sense of fun…’
Fredo was thinking about the way the boy had kept glancing up to check on him all the way back here and the cheeky smile he’d worn on his little mouth. As they’d entered the building he’d turned and shouted, ‘Bye, monkey!’ before being dragged off chuckling by his mamma who’d refused to glance Fredo’s way at all.
Enrico did not feel as if he had so much as a drop of fun in him right now as he sat there staring at the child’s face; it was as if those ink-dark eyes were making a link with his own—he could feel it right down to the dregs of his swirling, tensing gut.
‘He is mine, I feel it,’ he uttered gruffly.
‘Si.’ Fredo nodded.
Why the sombre confirmation from his bodyguard further creased him up Enrico did not know—but it did.
‘Get down to the crèche and keep your eye on him,’ he instructed.
For the first time in all the years they’d been together Fredo balked at a command. ‘You want me to spend the afternoon in a nursery—with bambinos?’
He was horrified. Enrico looked at him. ‘Who the hell else can I trust to keep an eye on him while I work this mess out?’
‘But he cannot go anywhere without his mamma! She—’
Enrico got up, all lithe muscle and brooding unease. ‘She could run,’ he muttered. ‘I cannot afford to let her disappear until I know the truth.’
Fredo was silent. He might not like the job he was being handed but he saw the possibility in what Enrico said. With a fatalistic shrug of his big shoulders he turned to the door.
‘Where is Luca hiding out these days?’ Enrico sent grimly after him.
Fredo paused. ‘Last I heard he was in Hawaii with his latest rich puta.’
‘Arrange to keep him there,’ Enrico ordered. ‘Use threats or money or both if you have to.’ Though it closed up his throat to give his cousin a single euro. ‘I don’t need him turning up and queering this for me when he hears I have a son by Freya.’
‘How will he hear it?’ Fredo asked in bewilderment. Luca had been cast out of the Ranieri family; he did not even have contact with his own mother any more!
‘He will hear it like the rest of the world will hear it,’ Enrico said. ‘When I announce it publicly that I have a son and intend to marry the boy’s mother.’
There was a very thick pause, then Fredo said carefully, ‘You are going too fast with this, Enrico—’
A pair of black-ice eyes lanced Fredo with a look that made the other man sigh.
‘You need positive proof before you—’
‘The boy is mine. I want him. The mother comes with the package.’
‘Try telling the signorina that,’ Fredo said drily.
‘I intend to.’
Freya was wistfully wishing she lived on the other side of the world right now.
But she didn’t. She was standing right here in Hannard’s basement, mindlessly feeding paper into an old flatbed scanner so the information on it could be transferred to the mainframe computer.
Trapped, she thought bleakly, by the need to earn a living.
And frightened, because she didn’t know what Enrico was going to do.
It was all over the building that he’d bought out Josh Hannard. It was also all over the building that he’d accosted her in the foyer this lunchtime and caused an ugly scene.
Her telephone rang. It hadn’t stopped ringing since she’d got back from lunch, flooding her with calls from her fellow workmates wanting her to dish the dirt as to what Mr Ranieri had said to her. The whole place was agog with curiosity and scared out of their wits for their livelihoods…more scared if they had a child in Hannard’s crèche. All she could do was to lie and say, what confrontation? He was just asking about the quality of care at the crèche.
Because the real truth was way beyond her means to tell—even to herself. She didn’t want to think about what it was going to mean to her and Nicky.
She picked up the phone, ready with her by now well-practised light answers.
‘A Mr Scarsozi has taken up residence in the crèche,’ announced the familiar voice of Cindy, its manager. ‘He says he’s here under instructions from our new boss to watch over Nicky. Can you tell me what the heck is going on?’
Freya closed her eyes as her heart sank to her stomach, fresh fears clenching her fingers in a tight clasp around the phone receiver. ‘Has he—touched Nicky?’ she asked unsteadily.
‘No,’ came the firm reply. ‘If he tried I wouldn’t let him.’
Try stopping him, Freya thought with a shiver as she recalled the way Fredo’s strong arms had secured her son once already that day.
‘He just stands in a corner of the playroom watching him and scaring the rest of us half to death,’ Cindy went on. ‘Have you seen him, Freya? He’s built like a gorilla! I want the scary thing out of my crèche!’
‘Right,’ Freya said, beginning to shake all over again. ‘Is—is Nicky scared of him, too?’
‘Are you joking? Your son had the bold cheek to go right up to him and say, “Hi, monkey, want to come and play?” Does Nicky know him?’
Now, there was a question. How did she answer it—no or yes? If she said no, she would put everyone involved in the crèche into a panic. If she said yes, she was setting herself up for more questions she had no way of answering.
‘I’ll deal with it,’ she replied, going for the sidestep response.
What did Enrico think he was doing? she wondered helplessly as she put down the phone. Was he trying to intimidate her through Nicky before he’d even—?
‘Your tea break, Freya,’ a frosty voice intruded. ‘Though the way you’ve been stuck on that phone all afternoon I’d say you’ve already had the equivalent of several of them.’
Freya blinked, green eyes looking blankly at her head of department, a cool creature with dyed blonde hair and a tight pink mouth, who loved ruling over everyone like a tyrant.
‘Be so good as to keep your personal life out of my department in future, if you don’t mind.’
The woman was also miffed because, like everyone else, she’d asked Freya the same eager questions, only to receive the same stock, frustratingly unrevealing answers.
‘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.
Luca, with the same dark good looks that the Ranieri family were known for, he thought cynically. He had not needed to hit on Freya when he could have had any other woman he desired.
Or was it Freya who’d hit on him?
Enrico didn’t know, had refused to discuss it with either of them. All he did know was that he’d gone away on business vaguely aware that she’d not been happy about something and had promised himself he would find out what was bothering her when he got home again. What he’d found when he’d got home had finished him as a loyal cousin and as a loyal lover.
And if you want to replay old memories, he told himself cynically, then replay the one where you walked in on the two of them sprawled half-naked on your own damn bed, with her legs splayed wide and his tight, tanned backside about to make its urgent thrust home.
It was a good point in his thoughts for Freya’s knock to sound at the door, he mused grimly as he turned around.
Moving back to his chair, he sat down in it before calling a cold, ‘Come in.’
Freya took a deep breath before reaching for the door handle, all too aware that Enrico’s PA was watching her and that he, like everyone else in this building, was wondering what was going on between her and his boss.
Her face was flushed due to her mad rush up here, eyes actually sparking with a mixture of fired-up aggression and fear. Stroking a hand over her hair in a nervous gesture at the same time as she turned the handle, she pressed her trembling lips together and stepped through the door.
The first thing to hit her was the bright light flooding into the room from all angles. The next thing to hit her was the sight of Enrico himself. He was seated behind a desk and looking exactly the same as he had done four years ago, when she’d first met him on the day he’d taken over the company she’d been working for then.
All sleek, smooth elegance and stunning good looks, wrapped around a truly rampant sex appeal. Memories flooded her of the way she’d tried so hard to appear professional and efficient back then, smiling nervously while blushing shyly and feeling generally like an awkward child in the presence of some great, awesome power.
That great, awesome power had been her first encounter with her own sexual stirrings. Until that moment she’d always laughed at friends who went all fluttery when they talked about new boyfriends and said silly things like, ‘Oh, you should see him! He made me so hot I wanted to drag off my clothes!’
Well, Enrico had made her feel like that. She’d been ready to drag off her clothes for this too-gorgeous-to-be-real new boss she’d been handed like one of those gifts you did not know what to do with or how to deal with.
The same crazy sensations washed right over her now as she stood there just inside the closed door and stared down the room at his seated, undeniably sexy but intimidating bulk, and she felt hot feelings spark into life, though they had no right—not for this man, who might be an amazing lover but had proved beyond a doubt that he was good for nothing else.
Her chin went up on that final denunciation. Enrico’s insides knotted as he watched it happen, felt the challenge in the gesture hit low in his gut and remain there taunting him, as he watched her toss fear and defiance at him in equal doses like some unruly employee dragged before the big boss because her work attitude was unsatisfactory.
What a joke, he thought as he studied the red flags highlighting her smooth, creamy cheeks and the ice-over-fear glazing her sea-green eyes. According to her personal records, Freya Jenson was so super-efficient it would take lies to make out she was incompetent. She was never late in, never sick and never left a minute earlier than she should do. She never moaned or complained about her frankly lousy working environment or the mindless job that she did. And she had never asked for more money, though she’d worked at Hannard’s for over two years and had never been given a single pay rise.
Why, Enrico asked himself, when it was perfectly obvious from the clothes she was wearing that she barely had enough money on which to exist? Why, when he could see even from here that that unflattering knot her hair was contained in needed a pair of scissors taken to it? And he liked her twisting, spiraling, glorious waist-length hair.
The boy had been dressed well. His head of black curls had been carefully cut and shaped into a fashionable style, and the shoes on his feet had not looked as if they’d seen better days in a scrap bin at a charity shop.
She had a good brain in her head, but she was working here as some nonentity filing clerk hidden away in the bowels of the building, while the boy lived it up on the second floor, in a nursery to beat all nurseries complete with a wide-open terrace and a veritable array of toys and care staff to entertain him.
The child was tough and unruly—loved his mamma to death and only responded to a scolding if it came from her. The nursery staff despaired of ever gaining control of him but adored him anyway because—apparently—he could make them fall about laughing just when they believed they were in danger of killing him.
He had a sense of humour, in other words. As Fredo had reminded him he used to have, when he drove everyone insane only to win them over at the last minute by some inner instinct that turned him from obnoxious brat to clown.
And Freya loved him, this boy they had made together. Everyone knew how much she loved him. Everyone knew she was the best mother in the entire world.
But she’d still kept her son from his father. Was that the move of a loving mother?
‘Come and sit down,’ he instructed coldly.
‘I prefer to stand,’ she refused.
‘Sit,’ he incised and felt his blood begin to race around his system while he waited for her to deny him once more.
She didn’t. It was almost a disappointment. At this precise moment he would have loved any excuse to tear her into shreds with his bare hands.
With eyes carefully lowered now she moved forwards, a reed-slender thing of five feet seven with hidden treasures lurking beneath the bad suit. Lounging there in his chair, Enrico let his eyelids sweep downwards over his eyes as he looked her over in a slow, cold study that did not reflect the burn of sexual anger taking place in his gut.
Wouldn’t she just love to know that his body had not forgotten her, even if his brain had done until a few short hours ago?
The dusky pink mouth was tense, he noted, though the way she was holding it like that did not hide the revealing little tremor which told him just how frightened she was.
Good, he thought as he watched her take the chair positioned on the other side of the desk, then sit down with a stiff spine and knees pressed modestly together.
Another joke, since she had proved she was perfectly happy to open those legs for anybody.
Including his cousin.
‘Do you think it is appropriate to hold a conversation with your employer via the telephone at the same time as you were relieving yourself in the lavatory?’ he asked.
That brought her eyes shooting upwards. Enrico received the full blast of her green stare. ‘I explained that,’ she said. ‘And I had finished relieving myself, for your information,’ she added. ‘But it is up to you to decide if you found my call offensive.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed without elaborating on the single comment.
She lowered her eyes again, those golden-tipped eyelashes fluttering down against her cheeks. Something else stung inside him, the desire to run his tongue across those satin-smooth cheekbones and feel those eyelashes quiver with pleasure as he did.
She was sexually receptive from her hairline to her toenails, built for the exclusive pleasures of the flesh. Yet she was sitting here like some prim spinster schoolmistress in her ugly, ill-fitting suit and with her pinned hair, tense mouth and frosted eyes.
Liar, he wanted to say as he let the silence grow between them until she shifted restively. You are just one big, in-my-face liar, Freya Jenson.
‘You demanded this meeting. So talk,’ he said.
‘Call Fredo off guard-watch,’ she responded instantly.
‘No.’
‘He’s worrying the children—’
A sleek dark eyebrow arched. ‘My son?’
Freya stiffened. ‘He is not your son.’
‘Luca’s, then?’
Her chin came up that bit higher, the pink mouth pushing into a stubborn pout, eyes steady when they linked with his, and she said—nothing.
Freya felt her silence spray like a million pinpricks down her front as she held his cold, narrowed stare. She hated him for asking that, but…
Dear heaven, he looked good, she found herself thinking helplessly. The silk black hair that didn’t dare to curl like Nicky’s did, unless it was early in the morning and he’d just woken up from a long night of loving and sleep; those dark eyes, half-lost beneath two sets of long eyelashes that gave him such a sexy, slumberous look when really he was as wide awake as a hunting shark. Then there was the mouth, hidden at the moment by the long, tanned finger he had resting along its slender width. That mouth could kill you with pleasure if you let it get close enough. It could make you lose touch with everything, but how it could make you feel!
And it could slice you into tiny pieces—or the white teeth that hid behind it could—and there was the tongue that could issue insults as effectively as it could devour you in other ways.
Her nipples pricked and she knew why they did. Just thinking about that mouth—angry or hell-bent on giving you pleasure—was enough to make her breasts respond in a greedy, tight leap of remembered bliss.
She pulled in some air. ‘I work here,’ she informed him. ‘What happened in the foyer this lunchtime has caused a big enough sensation in this building, without Fredo standing guard at the crèche and making the gossip ten times worse.’
‘He is guarding my son.’
‘He is not your son.’ She was going to go on repeating that until hell froze over.
‘White panties or grey to match the miserable suit?’ he said, making her eyes flicker in confusion. ‘I only ask because you left me with this…image after your very novel telephone call,’ he explained. ‘White or grey used to be the sum total colour in your underwear drawer when I first met you. Plain cotton, very practical things with no hint of silk or lace in sight.’
‘What I’m wearing is none of your business!’ Freya responded, but she could suddenly feel the intricate lace pattern of her panties acutely against her skin.
‘And tights,’ he continued regardless. ‘You used to be very practical about pantihose until I introduced you to the special pleasures of stockings with very sexy lace tops.’
Suddenly very aware of the lacy tops on her stay-ups, Freya shifted uncomfortably. ‘I suppose you think you can say anything you like to me because we were once lovers,’ she said stiffly.
‘Also those awful cotton bras you wore a full cup size too big—in case your breasts decided to grow into them, I always presumed,’ he persisted. ‘Did they grow when you were carrying my son?’
‘He is not your son!’ she sliced hotly at him.
He uncoiled from the chair like a big black snake rising upwards, then he leant towards her and placed his hands flat on the desk.
‘Did they?’ he spat at her through tightly gritted white teeth. ‘Did your breasts grow plump and your body grow round, and did your lousy conscience prick you even once, that you were keeping my son from me?’
CHAPTER THREE
FREYA leapt to her feet, shaking with anger and quaking with alarm at this second act of threatened violence he was treating her to. She stared into those flashing black eyes and wanted to take a defensive step back, but she would not allow herself to do it.
Instead, heart thundering, she planted her hands on his desk and took him on hard, look for look.
‘Not once,’ she shook out angrily. ‘I didn’t think about you once, Enrico. Why would I? What were you but just another guy who’d got what he’d wanted and then walked away?’
‘You walked. I threw you out!’
‘And weren’t you happy to see me go?’ she hit back. ‘Perhaps you even set Luca up for me to give you an excuse to throw me out!’
‘You could have said no to him.’
But he did not deny the charge! ‘And spoil the Ranieri sport?’ Freya retaliated. ‘At least Luca had the honesty to tell me to my face that he only wanted me for the sex!’
He’d gone white but she was whiter, the amount of anger bouncing between them acting like a static cocoon to close them into a tight corridor of seething eye contact that sizzled and sparked and spat across the desk.
‘I hope I would not be quite so crass as to say that to any woman,’ he fed to her like vile-tasting poison.
It hit its spot, too, sank into her flesh and hurt.
Freya straightened up, quivering like crazy. ‘Stand where I’m standing, Enrico,’ she responded huskily. ‘Believe me, from this side of the desk you are as crass as they come.’
With that she turned, arms folding around her as she slumped down against the edge of the desk, feeling weak and shaky now because it had all become so heated when she’d been determined to—
He moved behind her. The fine hairs across her nape tingled as she waited in the thrumming, drumming silence that had fallen to find out what he was going to do or say next.
It was annoying to feel it, but tears began pricking at her backs of her eyes and her throat. She had loved this man once, and so thoroughly she’d believed nothing he could ever do would kill that love.
Maybe it wasn’t dead, she thought then as her silly, dipping, thumping heart gave a squeeze to remind her that some feeling for him was still there—like a desperately hurt and wounded love that was suddenly threatening to strangle her breath.
Bleakly she stared fixedly down at her feet. Her shoes were scuffed, she noticed inconsequentially. She’d forgotten to buff them up this morning before she left the flat. And her skirt was creased.
Unclipping a hand from beneath her other arm, she tried to smooth out the creases with fingers that trembled so badly she gave up and shoved the hand back where it had been.
He appeared on the periphery of her lowered vision. A pair of long masculine legs wrapped in the finest silk-wool mix striding with long grace across the office. His shoes weren’t scuffed, she saw. That almost black suit wouldn’t dare to show a crease.
‘Want something?’ he offered.
She heard the chink of glass and shook her head. ‘I have to get back…’
‘To the riveting job scanning hard copy?’
That brought her head up, dignity firing up her green eyes. ‘It pays my wages, Enrico.’
‘Meagre wages,’ he derided. ‘You earned ten times that amount when you worked for me. Josh Hannard did not know what a gem he had hiding in his basement. You could have run this place more efficiently than he did standing on your head with your hands tied behind your back.’
‘You sacked me—’
‘For colluding with my cousin to rob me.’ He nodded. ‘I remember it so well. Luca made some big mistakes in his life but that one got him caught and thrown out of the family. You were only thrown out of a job.’
And your life, Freya tagged on silently. ‘Without a good reference from you I was virtually unemployable.’
He just lifted his drink to his mouth and drank. Indifferent, uncaring, cold, arrogant…
She was back to those adjectives, she realised and heaved in a deep breath. ‘I didn’t do it. He set me up. I caught him with his fingers in your safe and threatened to tell the police.’
‘Only threatened?’ A sleek eyebrow arched cynically.
And that, Freya thought, had been her downfall. Luca was family. She’d worked and lived with Enrico long enough to know that you did not shop family to anyone, especially to the police.
Or thought she knew it.
‘I decided that it was up to you to make that decision. So I went back to the apartment to wait for you to get home. He arrived drunk as a skunk. I’d just got out of the bath. He had a key he said you’d given him so he could let himself in. He was standing there in our bedroom stark naked and l-laughing at me, telling me that you’d handed me over to him because—’
‘You know I don’t want to hear this, so why are you saying it?’ Enrico cut in coldly.
‘One reason,’ she said, cramming the rest of that ugly scene back down inside her. ‘I have as much right as the next person to defend myself against the slur you Ranieris placed on my character.’
‘But I did not listen to you then, so why do you think I will listen now?’
‘Because you want something from me that you are not going to get without giving me a fair hearing and then reparation for what you and your rotten cousin did to me.’
‘Are we talking about my son?’
‘He isn’t your son.’
The tension was heating up again. Enrico stiffened infinitesimally. ‘He is my son,’ he insisted.
‘I want proof of that.’
‘Perdono?’ He stared at her. ‘Isn’t that my line?’
Freya crossed her arms more tightly and refused to rise to his sarcasm. ‘I don’t need to prove anything,’ she bluffed. ‘And since I don’t want you to be Nicky’s father I am contesting your claim. If you’re that sure of yourself then prove it,’ she challenged. ‘I want DNA proof.’
‘Is this your idea of a joke?’ he demanded.
Not so she’d noticed. Freya gave a small shrug. ‘I’m the woman you believe tripped like a butterfly from Ranieri to Ranieri—’
‘Will you stop saying my name as if it is an insult?’ he ground out.
But the name was an insult to her. ‘If what you believe about me is true, then even this man-tripping butterfly would not know if you are my son’s father. So I demand proof before I let you near Nicky,’ she repeated.
‘But anyone with eyes can tell that he belongs to me!’ Enrico bit out.
‘Or Luca,’ she said, and watched with grim satisfaction as his handsome face locked up. ‘Unless, of course, what you believe about me is just a pack of wicked lies you enjoyed swallowing…’
‘I did not enjoy it,’ he answered stiffly.
‘Then in my place,’ she continued, undeterred by the interruption, ‘no caring mother would want a man who can believe such bad things about her to have anything to do with her child. Your cynical view of me would inevitably rub off on him and poison his mind about the mother he loves.’
‘I would not do that.’
‘I don’t believe you. So I repeat, you prove Nicky is your son because I am not going to help you.’
He turned on her then, slamming the glass down. ‘But you know he’s my son!’
‘Do I?’
‘Stop playing this game, Freya.’ He frowned impatiently. ‘This is stupid. I know he is mine, even if you cannot be sure.’
‘Oh, that was good, Enrico.’ She smiled. ‘I turn the tables on you and you’re turning them back again—but that was a mistake,’ she declared. ‘Because all you’ve just managed to do is to confirm what a truly uncaring and cynical bastard you are. So let me put it bluntly…’ Freya straightened from the desk. ‘I don’t want you having any influence in my son’s life, therefore I will do whatever it takes to keep you out of it. I’ll fight you with medical science if you make me, then I’ll fight you in court.’
‘You have the cash handy to back that up?’
‘There is such a thing as legal aid in this country,’ she pointed out. And on that she turned for the door. ‘Call Fredo off,’ she added as she started walking. ‘Or I will inform the authorities that we have a child-stalker in the building.’
‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’
Freya’s head went back. ‘I’m walking out of here—’
‘Out of your job—?’
The challenge landed like a barb to hit dead centre of its target, acting like a lead weight that dropped at her feet and pulled her to a stop.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘Need it, do you, Miss Jenson?’ he drawled. ‘Need the meagre wages it pays into your bank?’
‘Yes,’ she breathed.
‘Need the day care it gives to your son, also? Now, just how would you manage if it wasn’t there…?’
Freya’s insides began trembling, the meaning behind each single taunt making her feel suddenly very sick. Cold defiance was only effective as a weapon when you had the resources to back it up.
Enrico had just shown her that she had none.
She turned slowly. It was the only way to do it if she didn’t want to collapse in a heap on the floor. He was still standing by the drinks cabinet, lounging there now like some super-arrogant modern sculptured Italian god, with his long legs crossed at the ankles and his casual air of sartorial elegance, his power and confidence knocking the spots off her attempt to gain the upper hand. The afternoon sun was pouring in through the windows, catching hold of his lean, golden features and glinting, hard eyes, and his even harder-looking mouth clipped by a tight, taunting smile.
She’d gone quite nicely pale, Enrico noted with grim satisfaction. Toss your head at me now if you dare.
‘You wouldn’t,’ she husked out.
‘Why not?’ he countered. ‘I am the crass bastard who hands you over to his cousin for a bit of good sex, remember? I am capable of doing anything.’
He didn’t mean it, Freya told herself anxiously. He was just getting his own back on her for calling him crass. ‘But it would hurt so many other mothers with—’
‘Oh, come on, Freya,’ he cut in, ‘you worked with me for a year so you know the score. If you wanted to cut costs at Hannard’s, where would you begin—?’
‘Not with the crèche!’ she cried out.
‘Because you have a vested interest there?’ Her eyes were flashing with fear, not defiance now, Enrico noted. ‘Whereas I do not.’
‘You—you…’ The words trailed off, bitten back before she could say them.
Enrico leant forward slightly. ‘Yes?’ he prompted. ‘Were you about to say something important then, cara? Were you about to tell me that I do have a vested interest there?’
‘No,’ she choked out.
He relaxed back again. ‘Your own job, then,’ he moved on with a zealous, razor-like slice. ‘If you had to sit on my side of the desk, what other cost-cutting exercise would you be looking at? The filing department, perhaps?’ he suggested. ‘That vast paper storeroom in the basement of this building that uses up expensive workspace that could be leased out to some other business for a damn good return?’
‘Every business has files to store.’ Her arms were back round her body again, trying to defend the panic erupting beneath their tight clasp.
‘All the efficiently run businesses I know do not employ a clutch of mindless people for the exclusive task of feeding paper into a couple of ancient scanning machines,’ he responded with contempt. ‘I could contract out—bring in fifty people with fifty state-of-the-art machines and clear that whole basement of paper in a week. It would cost me maximum—’ He named a figure that made Freya blench. ‘That makes your job and the jobs of your fellow paper-scanners redundant. Now, where do I turn next to cut costs?’
Freya was really trembling now—no, shivering, her skin as cold as ice. In one easy shift of his brain he’d threatened to relieve her of her job, plus those of the dozen others who worked in the basement with her. And if that wasn’t enough, he was also threatening to relieve thirty-four other mothers of their child-care facility, thereby making the staff that ran the crèche redundant, too.
‘You don’t deserve a son,’ she breathed thickly. ‘You don’t deserve to be standing there at all! You should be crawling around in some gutter right now, getting your just deserts for being such an outright low-down, no-good excuse for a man!’
Impervious to insults, Enrico just shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘I am in the business of saving drowning companies, not people,’ he answered. ‘And I can tell you bluntly that this place runs on pure fresh air right now. Everyone working here has been living on borrowed time,’ he added grimly. ‘There is not a single employee I would willingly keep on.’
‘And I will be the first one to go,’ she muttered. ‘I h-hate you,’ she added on a driven breath.
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Michelle Reid
Michelle Reid
The Ranieri Bride
FOR Love OR MONEY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
COMING NEXT MONTH
CHAPTER ONE
ENRICO RANIERI was striding across Hannard’s foyer with his dark head lowered. He was late and he was frowning, too preoccupied with the meeting he was about to attend to notice the drop-jaw looks of recognition he and his small entourage were receiving as they passed through.
It was the finest—finest—hint of a sound crashing into his consciousness that made him lift up his head. After that he stopped dead, every important thought preceding this moment wiped clean away by the sight that met his ink-dark gaze.
She was about ten feet away, just stepping out of one of the lifts. His insides flipped and then rolled as if he’d been put into a sudden steep dive. He struggled to believe it—or did not want to. It was years since he’d so much as clapped eyes on her, yet as she uttered some small, indistinguishable sound he found himself rendered so immobile he couldn’t make his brain move beyond the fact that she was right there before him in the flesh!
She had not noticed him yet because her head was lowered, her glorious mane of bright auburn hair caught up on the top of her head in one of those unflattering knots that had always challenged him to tug it free.
It challenged him again now, setting a couple of nerves flicking in his fingers, while something far more potent flicked at other parts of him.
Freya…
Her name sizzled across his senses in a tight, complicated mix of hate and pleasure. Three years ago he’d kicked her out of his life without conscience, then spent the next memorable year taking that decision out on anyone who fancied taking him on. Business or pleasure, he had not been fussy. She had worked for him. He’d trusted her. No woman before or since had ever earned that level of trust. She’d lived in his apartment and slept in his bed. He slept alone now and any physical activities always took place somewhere else.
In fact, she’d stolen so much away from him, it was no wonder he was sizzling with hate.
But—Dio—she looked good. Even wearing that unflattering grey suit, which looked at least one size too big for her, she was stinging his senses with first-hand knowledge of what lay hidden beneath the layers of high-street-cheap.
Like the clothes she used to wear before he’d taken her in hand and turned the scrappy sow’s ear into a breathtakingly beautiful silk purse.
That odd feeling moved to his chest, turning into a swirling, coiling stab of discomfort when he remembered how she had left all the silk behind when he’d kicked her out.
Now here she was, walking towards him with her head tilted downwards as if she was as preoccupied with her thoughts as he had been with his. His eyes narrowed as he watched her come closer. A fine layer of sweat went bristling across the surface of his skin as he waited for the silken arc of her gold-tipped eyelashes to lift up and show him a pair of vivid green eyes destined to turn as dark as his own with shock.
He wanted to see her shock—needed to see it, like a man possessed with a fevered desire to watch another human being squirm.
Did she work at Hannard’s? Had he unwittingly logged into a way to make the beautiful but deceiving Freya Jenson pay yet again for what she had done to him?
His white teeth came together with a snap of tension as he waited for the glinting red head to lift up. She was almost upon him. Hell, his senses were going crazy. Any second now she was going to cannon right into him! Anticipation leapt inside him like a mad, snarling wolf ready to attack.
She pulled to a stop suddenly and all of that swirling, tingling war of feeling completely blanketed him because he thought she had sensed his presence at last.
Then he heard her speak—
‘No, Nicky,’ she said. ‘It’s no use trying to pull free of my hand when you know Mummy is not going to let it go.’
Like a man hurled from a storm into a maelstrom, Enrico dropped his gaze downward. If his senses had made a violent dive when he’d first seen her, it was nothing to what he experienced now as his eyes came to rest on the small denim-clad boy who was fighting to get free of her restraining hand.
Curling black hair crowned a handsome little face, and a pair of fiercely determined ink-black eyes glared up at his mother.
Nicky, he thought.
Nicolo, he extended.
She had named her son Nicolo.
Right there in Hannard’s foyer, Enrico Ranieri, hardheaded businessman and cold, ruthless operator, quite simply crashed and burned.
The ‘terrible twos’ were an apt label when it came to her son, Freya thought ruefully as she fought to keep a grip on his hand. Give him the chance and he’d be off causing mayhem wherever he could wreak it. Lose concentration on him for a single second and he became a terrifying danger to himself.
She was going to have to purchase leading reins, she decided as she stood waging battle with one determined little boy. They would cause serious offence to his dignity, but hanging on to a writhing, kicking two-year-old meant that she was in danger of hurting him in her effort to keep him contained.
‘The park,’ she said, using a favoured destination as a key to unlock the door to her son’s more compliant side. ‘Be a good boy and walk nicely, and we will go to the park.’
‘Monkeys,’ he replied.
‘No,’ Freya returned firmly. ‘The monkeys live at the zoo. The park is closer.’
‘I like monkeys.’
‘I have hold of one right here,’ she laughed. ‘Be a good boy today, and we will go and see the monkeys tomorrow when we have more—’
‘He’s mine,’ a deep voice rasped like coarse sandpaper across her exposed nape.
Freya actually shivered, the blood in her veins beginning to freeze before she’d even lifted up her head and let her eyes clash with a pair of black eyes that flashed with raw hostility.
Her heart gave a shocked thump against her ribcage, then almost stopped altogether. It was like being hit over the head by your worst nightmare, she likened as she stared at six feet three inches of hard masculine aggression standing right over her and threatening hell. The black hair, the black eyes, the almost-black suit covering his tightly muscled framework, even the shiny black shoes on his long, narrow feet, all screamed: The devil has come to collect.
‘No,’ she breathed, not wanting to believe that Enrico, of all the rotten people in the world she could possibly meet again, was standing less than two feet away.
‘Madre de Dio, he is!’ Enrico bit out on a hushed, driven hiss of sizzling fury.
Freya blinked, still too locked in shock to realise that he had misunderstood her choked little negative. Then she watched his eyes drop to her son and fire up with the most ungodly flame of possessive rage.
Even Nicky was affected by that fierce look. Instead of continuing to tug on Freya’s hand, he clung tightly to it and shifted his wiry little body behind her legs. It was that defensive move from her normally fearless little boy that made anger burn out the deep freeze of her shock. With a lifting of her chin, Freya looked the hard, cruel, unrelenting devil right in the eye and repeated coldly, ‘No, he is not.’
Enrico moved with a tight shift of his lean body. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ he rasped out, dragging his eyes away from the little boy to fix back on his mother’s face. ‘You ruthless witch. I am going to make you pay for this!’
Freya could see that he meant it by the murderous glint in his eyes and that thin-lipped way in which he was holding his mouth. An attractive mouth once, she found herself thinking, a gorgeously knowing and very seductive mouth. Like the rest of him: gorgeously sexy and disgustingly aware of it.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she denied stiffly.
Black eyes flared. He took a step towards her. For a horrible moment, Freya thought he was going to take hold of her by the throat. She gasped and took a step backwards, almost tripping over her son.
‘Enrico…’ Someone placed a warning hand on his arm.
It was only then that Freya became aware again of where it was they were standing. The whole foyer had gone silent and dozens of curious faces were turned on them. Enrico appeared to have forgotten his own entourage, one member of which was trying to remind him that they had an audience.
He glanced around, soot-black eyelashes flickering against fiercely jutting cheekbones. The whole structure of his lean, attractive face was savagely clenched. The atmosphere in the foyer was fizzing and popping with his barely contained violence, which he swung away from Freya and turned onto the person touching his arm.
Freya shuddered. Her grip on her son must have loosened in that mad moment of relief, because Nicky suddenly broke away from her. In the split second it took her to swing round to try and recapture the small boy he was already out of reach and heading straight for the exit like a mini-hostage suddenly set free.
Nicky knew those exit doors and exactly how to make them work: break the magic beam and they would swing open on a whole world of excitement for a small and fearless two-year-old.
‘Nicky—no!’ Freya cried out and went running after him.
He just gave a squeal of delight and kept going, little legs carrying him ever closer to freedom and the narrow pavement outside, which was the only point of safety between him and one of London’s busiest streets. Freya was already seeing his little body crushed beneath the wheels of a double-decker bus as she ran. Her skin had gone clammy, her heart was pounding agonisingly in her breast.
Then an arm reached out and a big body bent to scoop the child right off the ground. As Freya watched it happen through a haze of wild terror, she found her eyes fixing on yet another sickeningly familiar face.
Fredo Scarsozi, Enrico’s long-term bodyguard, was holding her son in a circle of formidable muscle-bound power. Her stomach rolled over. Nicky was yelling in frustrated temper while Fredo stood looking down at him—just looking.
Fredo could see the resemblance too, she realised as she skidded to a halt in front of him.
‘Give him to me,’ she demanded breathlessly, holding out her arms for her son.
Fredo switched his gaze to her face and did nothing. True, unfettered fear closed her throat off and congealed her blood. Nicky suddenly stopped yelling, the curiosity value of being held by this big man winning over his protests, and an inquisitive frown puckered his face.
‘Please,’ Freya begged, lifting her arms higher.
The husky wobble in her voice grabbed her son’s attention. She was trembling all over. A restless stir was starting up around the foyer because the onlookers were uncomfortable with what was happening here, though they were not sure as to what that actually was.
Then Fredo switched his gaze to a place over her right shoulder. Icy fingers of dread stroked right down Freya’s spine because she knew he was looking to Enrico for instructions. One negative glint from those angry black eyes and it would take an army to drag her son free.
‘Monkey?’ Nicky questioned, and startled the tough Fredo Scarsozi into glancing at him. Then the big man’s mouth stretched into a reluctant grin.
‘Gratzi, bambino,’ he murmured drily.
Nicky grinned, too, all white baby teeth and excruciating little-boy charm.
‘Please give him back to me,’ Freya begged unsteadily.
‘Do as she says,’ Enrico coldly put in.
Heart thundering out of control now, Freya didn’t look round, didn’t breathe, didn’t do anything but stand there and wait for her son to arrive safely back where he belonged. As Fredo handed him over, her arms closed around that precious little body so tightly that Nicky let out a protest, but she didn’t—couldn’t—slacken her grip.
One final wild glance into Fredo’s knowing face and then she and Nicky were out of the Hannard building as if the wild dogs of hell were after them.
Which was not far from what Enrico was about to put on their tails.
‘Go after her,’ he instructed Fredo.
With a nod, the bodyguard moved off with a muscle-bound lope that belied his lightness of foot.
Enrico turned and looked at the frozen crowd in the foyer. His expression was controlled now, the trampling mayhem that had been going on inside him grimly crushed to a low burn. His small clutch of assistants just stood there staring at him as if he’d lost his sanity. Others—complete strangers to him—were staring at him with fascination that was tinged with recognition and also understanding as to what his presence here had to mean.
Trouble—big trouble.
Enrico Ranieri was known throughout Europe as an acquirer of struggling businesses, a troubleshooter notorious for taking no prisoners as he worked to turn ailing companies’ fortunes around.
And he always struck without warning—a tactic that gave him the quick upper hand. So when Enrico turned up in your foyer, you didn’t only stop and stare, you felt your own vulnerability right through to your shoes.
When he was confronting one of your own, because she happened to have her child with her, you could see his reputation for ruthless throat-cutting acted out before your horrified eyes.
They think I dislike children, Enrico realised. They think they are seeing Hannard’s crèche being wiped out with a swift, decisive flick of my hand. And maybe I will do it, he thought brutally, as his cold eyes dismissed every one of them and he strode across the foyer and into one of the lifts.
He stabbed a button then turned to watch his now wary entourage rush to get into the carriage before the doors closed. No one spoke. They had the sense not to. He felt as if he’d been turned to a pillar of stone. Nothing was going on inside him now—nothing other than—
Freya had given birth to his son.
The lift stopped and the doors slid open at the executive top floor, where he was met by yet another sea of faces forming an anxious wall of greeting in front of him.
Enrico did not want it. He did not want anything to do with damned business right now. He wanted…
As he stepped out of the lift, the icy shards glinting in his eyes had the wall of suits parting in front of him, welcoming smiles withering, the hands half lifted to shake his hand dropping nervously away.
‘This way, Mr Ranieri,’ some brave soul prompted.
He nodded, flat lipped, and followed while everyone else fell into silent step behind. He was shown into a large office filled with light spilling in from wall-to-wall windows. Enrico stood for a couple of seconds taking in nothing—nothing, until the silent tension behind him finally got to him and he turned.
Ignoring each wary face but for that of Carlo, his PA, he instructed, ‘I want the personal profiles of every employee sent to my laptop within the next ten minutes.’
The Hannard suits shifted on a tidal wave of discomfort. His personal staff were wise enough to keep their body language under control.
‘Postpone the board meeting until tomorrow. And I will want to meet anyone with decision-making powers before it begins.’ He continued his instruction like a shark circling its next meal. ‘That is all.’
It was a dismissal. He turned his back on the lot of them before he strode over to the carefully cleared and freshly polished desk that used to belong to Josh Hannard but now was his. Behind him the shuffle of a mass exit began to take place.
‘But we thought we were going to have a working lunch so we could introduce everybody,’ he heard someone mutter in hushed bewilderment.
‘If I were you, I would skip lunch and start boning up on what it is you do here to earn your salary,’ one of his own people advised.
‘But Mr Hannard—’
‘Mr Hannard is no longer in charge here, Mr Ranieri is. And he has a nasty habit of chewing on spare flesh and spitting out the bones.’
Enrico smiled as he heard that. Quite a character reference, he mused thinly. Then he lifted his eyes to the rooftop view of London he could see through the window and the smile died.
His son—his son!
‘Cagna,’ he muttered. She was going to pay for this!
He, Enrico Ranieri, was going to chew on Freya Jenson’s delectable flesh and spit out her deceiving, lying, cheating bones!
Freya sat on the grass in the park surrounded by ducks while her son fed them the remains of her uneaten sandwiches—and she shivered despite the heat of the summer sun.
Icy cold was how she always felt when she let herself think about Enrico. Hurt, hatred and contempt could turn a warm-blooded woman to a block of ice.
So could fear.
Of the unknown.
Of what Enrico was going to do next.
She shifted, blinking her green eyes as a hungry beak pecked at her fingers. Relinquishing the small crust to the greedy duck, she turned to Nicky, who was sitting there in his element, smiling—and looking so much more like his father than she’d ever let herself see before, that it came as a shock each time she gazed at him now.
Now that she had seen his father in the flesh again.
Now that she had seen the grown-up version of her son’s handsome face, those black eyes, the stubborn mouth and determined chin.
The fact that Enrico had been so quick to recognise himself in Nicky had shaken her to her very roots. How dared he—how dared he do that after all he’d said and done to disown responsibility?
She’d come to hate him for doing that.
‘Get out of my life,’ he’d ripped at her three years ago. ‘You are a cheat and a slut and I never want to see you again so long as I live.’
Bitter, cold, heartless. Arrogant, superior, judgemental; deaf…
She ran out of adjectives and made do with a sigh instead.
Maybe he’d had second thoughts about Nicky by now, she thought hopefully. He might have seen a miniature mirror image of himself in her little boy, but there again his cousin Luca was yet another reflection of those disgustingly handsome Ranieri features. A sly, mean, nasty mirror of Enrico, but the likeness was there, and Enrico would have remembered that by now and dismissed her and Nicky out of his nasty suspicious—
Then it hit her—the one thing she had been trying very hard not to think about.
What had he been doing in Hannard’s foyer, anyway?
He hadn’t bought Hannard’s—had he? He wasn’t about to become her boss again?
Her spine tensed up as nerve ends crashed together, her cold fingers twisting tightly on her lap. No, she thought—no! Don’t look for the worst-case scenario. He could have just been passing through. Maybe he was a friend of Josh Hannard and was only meeting him for lunch.
And maybe pigs can fly, she was then forced to tell herself. When Enrico Ranieri appeared in a company’s foyer with his faithful entourage stacking up behind him, then he was there for only one purpose.
It was a buy-out and, with his usual tactics, he was making a surprise hit on a new acquisition like a lethal bolt of lightning striking out of the blue.
A shiver ran down her back. Oh, no, she thought, and lowered her face to her knees because she just couldn’t face the idea of him having the power to ruin her life—again.
Once had been enough.
Once upon a time three years ago she’d had a wonderful job as his personal assistant. She’d lived a wonderful life as his live-in lover. They’d barely survived being out of each other’s sight. Two hot lovers with passionate and feverishly possessive temperaments, they’d matched each other, fire for sizzling fire.
Then she’d met his cousin and within weeks it was all over.
‘Monkey,’ Nicky said levelly.
‘We will see the monkeys tomorrow,’ Freya promised, lifting her head to look at this dark-haired little boy who was the most important thing in her life—whoever his father was.
‘No, monkey over there,’ he insisted, pointing with a finger.
Turning her head, Freya found her eyes fixing on the bulky shape of Fredo Scarsozi. He was standing beneath the shade of a tree not twenty feet from them. As she stared he sent her a brief nod in acknowledgement and she knew then, knew with every single fractured nerve she possessed that, far from dismissing them, Enrico was right there watching them from behind the steady gaze of his most trusted employee.
Well, this was one fight he was going to have with himself because she was not going to play any part in it, she decided as she clambered to her feet. Nicky was her son and only hers, and it was going to be up to Enrico to prove otherwise.
If he cared enough.
Bitterness welled, and anger—a hard, cold rod of contempt that straightened her spine as she held a hand out to her son.
‘Come on, sweetie,’ she murmured. ‘It’s time for us to go back now.’
Nicky came without argument. With no bread left, the ducks had scooted back into the pond. Plus her son was used to the routine he had been living with since he was three months old and she had been so very fortunate to land a job at Hannard’s with its crèche all ready and waiting to take in her son.
The job itself might be basic and the pay reflected the money it cost her to place Nicky in day care, but at least he was right there in the same building with her and she could see him whenever she needed to. Their little flat might be poky and erring towards shabby but they managed.
They were happy—content to have just each other. They did not need a man in their lives and once Enrico had recovered from the shock of seeing them he would realise that he could not want anything to do with them.
‘The monkey is following us,’ Nicky informed her.
‘He’s not a monkey, he’s a man,’ Freya corrected and refused to glance back at Fredo—refused.
But that cold chill was striking at her again, the grim knowledge that she was lying to herself if she dared to believe that Enrico was going to let her off the hook without knowing the truth.
He was ruthless and tenacious.
CHAPTER TWO
LYING, cheating, vindictive whore…
Enrico sat behind the desk, silently throwing those insults at the photograph sourced from Hannard’s security files that looked out at him from his computer screen.
She looked so cute, so sweetly innocent, he mocked acidly. As if butter would not melt in her mouth.
But it did melt.
With a flick of the mouse he blanked her out by pulling up a photograph of the boy and once again felt that soul-shattering, crash-and-burn feeling rock his insides.
‘What do you think—is he mine or Luca’s?’ he asked Fredo.
Fredo gave one of his shrugs. ‘If he is Luca’s, then the bambino has been fortunate enough to miss out on his papa’s less savoury genes,’ the bodyguard said drily before adding quietly, ‘He has your eyes and mouth and your—stubbornness. He also has your sense of fun…’
Fredo was thinking about the way the boy had kept glancing up to check on him all the way back here and the cheeky smile he’d worn on his little mouth. As they’d entered the building he’d turned and shouted, ‘Bye, monkey!’ before being dragged off chuckling by his mamma who’d refused to glance Fredo’s way at all.
Enrico did not feel as if he had so much as a drop of fun in him right now as he sat there staring at the child’s face; it was as if those ink-dark eyes were making a link with his own—he could feel it right down to the dregs of his swirling, tensing gut.
‘He is mine, I feel it,’ he uttered gruffly.
‘Si.’ Fredo nodded.
Why the sombre confirmation from his bodyguard further creased him up Enrico did not know—but it did.
‘Get down to the crèche and keep your eye on him,’ he instructed.
For the first time in all the years they’d been together Fredo balked at a command. ‘You want me to spend the afternoon in a nursery—with bambinos?’
He was horrified. Enrico looked at him. ‘Who the hell else can I trust to keep an eye on him while I work this mess out?’
‘But he cannot go anywhere without his mamma! She—’
Enrico got up, all lithe muscle and brooding unease. ‘She could run,’ he muttered. ‘I cannot afford to let her disappear until I know the truth.’
Fredo was silent. He might not like the job he was being handed but he saw the possibility in what Enrico said. With a fatalistic shrug of his big shoulders he turned to the door.
‘Where is Luca hiding out these days?’ Enrico sent grimly after him.
Fredo paused. ‘Last I heard he was in Hawaii with his latest rich puta.’
‘Arrange to keep him there,’ Enrico ordered. ‘Use threats or money or both if you have to.’ Though it closed up his throat to give his cousin a single euro. ‘I don’t need him turning up and queering this for me when he hears I have a son by Freya.’
‘How will he hear it?’ Fredo asked in bewilderment. Luca had been cast out of the Ranieri family; he did not even have contact with his own mother any more!
‘He will hear it like the rest of the world will hear it,’ Enrico said. ‘When I announce it publicly that I have a son and intend to marry the boy’s mother.’
There was a very thick pause, then Fredo said carefully, ‘You are going too fast with this, Enrico—’
A pair of black-ice eyes lanced Fredo with a look that made the other man sigh.
‘You need positive proof before you—’
‘The boy is mine. I want him. The mother comes with the package.’
‘Try telling the signorina that,’ Fredo said drily.
‘I intend to.’
Freya was wistfully wishing she lived on the other side of the world right now.
But she didn’t. She was standing right here in Hannard’s basement, mindlessly feeding paper into an old flatbed scanner so the information on it could be transferred to the mainframe computer.
Trapped, she thought bleakly, by the need to earn a living.
And frightened, because she didn’t know what Enrico was going to do.
It was all over the building that he’d bought out Josh Hannard. It was also all over the building that he’d accosted her in the foyer this lunchtime and caused an ugly scene.
Her telephone rang. It hadn’t stopped ringing since she’d got back from lunch, flooding her with calls from her fellow workmates wanting her to dish the dirt as to what Mr Ranieri had said to her. The whole place was agog with curiosity and scared out of their wits for their livelihoods…more scared if they had a child in Hannard’s crèche. All she could do was to lie and say, what confrontation? He was just asking about the quality of care at the crèche.
Because the real truth was way beyond her means to tell—even to herself. She didn’t want to think about what it was going to mean to her and Nicky.
She picked up the phone, ready with her by now well-practised light answers.
‘A Mr Scarsozi has taken up residence in the crèche,’ announced the familiar voice of Cindy, its manager. ‘He says he’s here under instructions from our new boss to watch over Nicky. Can you tell me what the heck is going on?’
Freya closed her eyes as her heart sank to her stomach, fresh fears clenching her fingers in a tight clasp around the phone receiver. ‘Has he—touched Nicky?’ she asked unsteadily.
‘No,’ came the firm reply. ‘If he tried I wouldn’t let him.’
Try stopping him, Freya thought with a shiver as she recalled the way Fredo’s strong arms had secured her son once already that day.
‘He just stands in a corner of the playroom watching him and scaring the rest of us half to death,’ Cindy went on. ‘Have you seen him, Freya? He’s built like a gorilla! I want the scary thing out of my crèche!’
‘Right,’ Freya said, beginning to shake all over again. ‘Is—is Nicky scared of him, too?’
‘Are you joking? Your son had the bold cheek to go right up to him and say, “Hi, monkey, want to come and play?” Does Nicky know him?’
Now, there was a question. How did she answer it—no or yes? If she said no, she would put everyone involved in the crèche into a panic. If she said yes, she was setting herself up for more questions she had no way of answering.
‘I’ll deal with it,’ she replied, going for the sidestep response.
What did Enrico think he was doing? she wondered helplessly as she put down the phone. Was he trying to intimidate her through Nicky before he’d even—?
‘Your tea break, Freya,’ a frosty voice intruded. ‘Though the way you’ve been stuck on that phone all afternoon I’d say you’ve already had the equivalent of several of them.’
Freya blinked, green eyes looking blankly at her head of department, a cool creature with dyed blonde hair and a tight pink mouth, who loved ruling over everyone like a tyrant.
‘Be so good as to keep your personal life out of my department in future, if you don’t mind.’
The woman was also miffed because, like everyone else, she’d asked Freya the same eager questions, only to receive the same stock, frustratingly unrevealing answers.
‘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.
Luca, with the same dark good looks that the Ranieri family were known for, he thought cynically. He had not needed to hit on Freya when he could have had any other woman he desired.
Or was it Freya who’d hit on him?
Enrico didn’t know, had refused to discuss it with either of them. All he did know was that he’d gone away on business vaguely aware that she’d not been happy about something and had promised himself he would find out what was bothering her when he got home again. What he’d found when he’d got home had finished him as a loyal cousin and as a loyal lover.
And if you want to replay old memories, he told himself cynically, then replay the one where you walked in on the two of them sprawled half-naked on your own damn bed, with her legs splayed wide and his tight, tanned backside about to make its urgent thrust home.
It was a good point in his thoughts for Freya’s knock to sound at the door, he mused grimly as he turned around.
Moving back to his chair, he sat down in it before calling a cold, ‘Come in.’
Freya took a deep breath before reaching for the door handle, all too aware that Enrico’s PA was watching her and that he, like everyone else in this building, was wondering what was going on between her and his boss.
Her face was flushed due to her mad rush up here, eyes actually sparking with a mixture of fired-up aggression and fear. Stroking a hand over her hair in a nervous gesture at the same time as she turned the handle, she pressed her trembling lips together and stepped through the door.
The first thing to hit her was the bright light flooding into the room from all angles. The next thing to hit her was the sight of Enrico himself. He was seated behind a desk and looking exactly the same as he had done four years ago, when she’d first met him on the day he’d taken over the company she’d been working for then.
All sleek, smooth elegance and stunning good looks, wrapped around a truly rampant sex appeal. Memories flooded her of the way she’d tried so hard to appear professional and efficient back then, smiling nervously while blushing shyly and feeling generally like an awkward child in the presence of some great, awesome power.
That great, awesome power had been her first encounter with her own sexual stirrings. Until that moment she’d always laughed at friends who went all fluttery when they talked about new boyfriends and said silly things like, ‘Oh, you should see him! He made me so hot I wanted to drag off my clothes!’
Well, Enrico had made her feel like that. She’d been ready to drag off her clothes for this too-gorgeous-to-be-real new boss she’d been handed like one of those gifts you did not know what to do with or how to deal with.
The same crazy sensations washed right over her now as she stood there just inside the closed door and stared down the room at his seated, undeniably sexy but intimidating bulk, and she felt hot feelings spark into life, though they had no right—not for this man, who might be an amazing lover but had proved beyond a doubt that he was good for nothing else.
Her chin went up on that final denunciation. Enrico’s insides knotted as he watched it happen, felt the challenge in the gesture hit low in his gut and remain there taunting him, as he watched her toss fear and defiance at him in equal doses like some unruly employee dragged before the big boss because her work attitude was unsatisfactory.
What a joke, he thought as he studied the red flags highlighting her smooth, creamy cheeks and the ice-over-fear glazing her sea-green eyes. According to her personal records, Freya Jenson was so super-efficient it would take lies to make out she was incompetent. She was never late in, never sick and never left a minute earlier than she should do. She never moaned or complained about her frankly lousy working environment or the mindless job that she did. And she had never asked for more money, though she’d worked at Hannard’s for over two years and had never been given a single pay rise.
Why, Enrico asked himself, when it was perfectly obvious from the clothes she was wearing that she barely had enough money on which to exist? Why, when he could see even from here that that unflattering knot her hair was contained in needed a pair of scissors taken to it? And he liked her twisting, spiraling, glorious waist-length hair.
The boy had been dressed well. His head of black curls had been carefully cut and shaped into a fashionable style, and the shoes on his feet had not looked as if they’d seen better days in a scrap bin at a charity shop.
She had a good brain in her head, but she was working here as some nonentity filing clerk hidden away in the bowels of the building, while the boy lived it up on the second floor, in a nursery to beat all nurseries complete with a wide-open terrace and a veritable array of toys and care staff to entertain him.
The child was tough and unruly—loved his mamma to death and only responded to a scolding if it came from her. The nursery staff despaired of ever gaining control of him but adored him anyway because—apparently—he could make them fall about laughing just when they believed they were in danger of killing him.
He had a sense of humour, in other words. As Fredo had reminded him he used to have, when he drove everyone insane only to win them over at the last minute by some inner instinct that turned him from obnoxious brat to clown.
And Freya loved him, this boy they had made together. Everyone knew how much she loved him. Everyone knew she was the best mother in the entire world.
But she’d still kept her son from his father. Was that the move of a loving mother?
‘Come and sit down,’ he instructed coldly.
‘I prefer to stand,’ she refused.
‘Sit,’ he incised and felt his blood begin to race around his system while he waited for her to deny him once more.
She didn’t. It was almost a disappointment. At this precise moment he would have loved any excuse to tear her into shreds with his bare hands.
With eyes carefully lowered now she moved forwards, a reed-slender thing of five feet seven with hidden treasures lurking beneath the bad suit. Lounging there in his chair, Enrico let his eyelids sweep downwards over his eyes as he looked her over in a slow, cold study that did not reflect the burn of sexual anger taking place in his gut.
Wouldn’t she just love to know that his body had not forgotten her, even if his brain had done until a few short hours ago?
The dusky pink mouth was tense, he noted, though the way she was holding it like that did not hide the revealing little tremor which told him just how frightened she was.
Good, he thought as he watched her take the chair positioned on the other side of the desk, then sit down with a stiff spine and knees pressed modestly together.
Another joke, since she had proved she was perfectly happy to open those legs for anybody.
Including his cousin.
‘Do you think it is appropriate to hold a conversation with your employer via the telephone at the same time as you were relieving yourself in the lavatory?’ he asked.
That brought her eyes shooting upwards. Enrico received the full blast of her green stare. ‘I explained that,’ she said. ‘And I had finished relieving myself, for your information,’ she added. ‘But it is up to you to decide if you found my call offensive.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed without elaborating on the single comment.
She lowered her eyes again, those golden-tipped eyelashes fluttering down against her cheeks. Something else stung inside him, the desire to run his tongue across those satin-smooth cheekbones and feel those eyelashes quiver with pleasure as he did.
She was sexually receptive from her hairline to her toenails, built for the exclusive pleasures of the flesh. Yet she was sitting here like some prim spinster schoolmistress in her ugly, ill-fitting suit and with her pinned hair, tense mouth and frosted eyes.
Liar, he wanted to say as he let the silence grow between them until she shifted restively. You are just one big, in-my-face liar, Freya Jenson.
‘You demanded this meeting. So talk,’ he said.
‘Call Fredo off guard-watch,’ she responded instantly.
‘No.’
‘He’s worrying the children—’
A sleek dark eyebrow arched. ‘My son?’
Freya stiffened. ‘He is not your son.’
‘Luca’s, then?’
Her chin came up that bit higher, the pink mouth pushing into a stubborn pout, eyes steady when they linked with his, and she said—nothing.
Freya felt her silence spray like a million pinpricks down her front as she held his cold, narrowed stare. She hated him for asking that, but…
Dear heaven, he looked good, she found herself thinking helplessly. The silk black hair that didn’t dare to curl like Nicky’s did, unless it was early in the morning and he’d just woken up from a long night of loving and sleep; those dark eyes, half-lost beneath two sets of long eyelashes that gave him such a sexy, slumberous look when really he was as wide awake as a hunting shark. Then there was the mouth, hidden at the moment by the long, tanned finger he had resting along its slender width. That mouth could kill you with pleasure if you let it get close enough. It could make you lose touch with everything, but how it could make you feel!
And it could slice you into tiny pieces—or the white teeth that hid behind it could—and there was the tongue that could issue insults as effectively as it could devour you in other ways.
Her nipples pricked and she knew why they did. Just thinking about that mouth—angry or hell-bent on giving you pleasure—was enough to make her breasts respond in a greedy, tight leap of remembered bliss.
She pulled in some air. ‘I work here,’ she informed him. ‘What happened in the foyer this lunchtime has caused a big enough sensation in this building, without Fredo standing guard at the crèche and making the gossip ten times worse.’
‘He is guarding my son.’
‘He is not your son.’ She was going to go on repeating that until hell froze over.
‘White panties or grey to match the miserable suit?’ he said, making her eyes flicker in confusion. ‘I only ask because you left me with this…image after your very novel telephone call,’ he explained. ‘White or grey used to be the sum total colour in your underwear drawer when I first met you. Plain cotton, very practical things with no hint of silk or lace in sight.’
‘What I’m wearing is none of your business!’ Freya responded, but she could suddenly feel the intricate lace pattern of her panties acutely against her skin.
‘And tights,’ he continued regardless. ‘You used to be very practical about pantihose until I introduced you to the special pleasures of stockings with very sexy lace tops.’
Suddenly very aware of the lacy tops on her stay-ups, Freya shifted uncomfortably. ‘I suppose you think you can say anything you like to me because we were once lovers,’ she said stiffly.
‘Also those awful cotton bras you wore a full cup size too big—in case your breasts decided to grow into them, I always presumed,’ he persisted. ‘Did they grow when you were carrying my son?’
‘He is not your son!’ she sliced hotly at him.
He uncoiled from the chair like a big black snake rising upwards, then he leant towards her and placed his hands flat on the desk.
‘Did they?’ he spat at her through tightly gritted white teeth. ‘Did your breasts grow plump and your body grow round, and did your lousy conscience prick you even once, that you were keeping my son from me?’
CHAPTER THREE
FREYA leapt to her feet, shaking with anger and quaking with alarm at this second act of threatened violence he was treating her to. She stared into those flashing black eyes and wanted to take a defensive step back, but she would not allow herself to do it.
Instead, heart thundering, she planted her hands on his desk and took him on hard, look for look.
‘Not once,’ she shook out angrily. ‘I didn’t think about you once, Enrico. Why would I? What were you but just another guy who’d got what he’d wanted and then walked away?’
‘You walked. I threw you out!’
‘And weren’t you happy to see me go?’ she hit back. ‘Perhaps you even set Luca up for me to give you an excuse to throw me out!’
‘You could have said no to him.’
But he did not deny the charge! ‘And spoil the Ranieri sport?’ Freya retaliated. ‘At least Luca had the honesty to tell me to my face that he only wanted me for the sex!’
He’d gone white but she was whiter, the amount of anger bouncing between them acting like a static cocoon to close them into a tight corridor of seething eye contact that sizzled and sparked and spat across the desk.
‘I hope I would not be quite so crass as to say that to any woman,’ he fed to her like vile-tasting poison.
It hit its spot, too, sank into her flesh and hurt.
Freya straightened up, quivering like crazy. ‘Stand where I’m standing, Enrico,’ she responded huskily. ‘Believe me, from this side of the desk you are as crass as they come.’
With that she turned, arms folding around her as she slumped down against the edge of the desk, feeling weak and shaky now because it had all become so heated when she’d been determined to—
He moved behind her. The fine hairs across her nape tingled as she waited in the thrumming, drumming silence that had fallen to find out what he was going to do or say next.
It was annoying to feel it, but tears began pricking at her backs of her eyes and her throat. She had loved this man once, and so thoroughly she’d believed nothing he could ever do would kill that love.
Maybe it wasn’t dead, she thought then as her silly, dipping, thumping heart gave a squeeze to remind her that some feeling for him was still there—like a desperately hurt and wounded love that was suddenly threatening to strangle her breath.
Bleakly she stared fixedly down at her feet. Her shoes were scuffed, she noticed inconsequentially. She’d forgotten to buff them up this morning before she left the flat. And her skirt was creased.
Unclipping a hand from beneath her other arm, she tried to smooth out the creases with fingers that trembled so badly she gave up and shoved the hand back where it had been.
He appeared on the periphery of her lowered vision. A pair of long masculine legs wrapped in the finest silk-wool mix striding with long grace across the office. His shoes weren’t scuffed, she saw. That almost black suit wouldn’t dare to show a crease.
‘Want something?’ he offered.
She heard the chink of glass and shook her head. ‘I have to get back…’
‘To the riveting job scanning hard copy?’
That brought her head up, dignity firing up her green eyes. ‘It pays my wages, Enrico.’
‘Meagre wages,’ he derided. ‘You earned ten times that amount when you worked for me. Josh Hannard did not know what a gem he had hiding in his basement. You could have run this place more efficiently than he did standing on your head with your hands tied behind your back.’
‘You sacked me—’
‘For colluding with my cousin to rob me.’ He nodded. ‘I remember it so well. Luca made some big mistakes in his life but that one got him caught and thrown out of the family. You were only thrown out of a job.’
And your life, Freya tagged on silently. ‘Without a good reference from you I was virtually unemployable.’
He just lifted his drink to his mouth and drank. Indifferent, uncaring, cold, arrogant…
She was back to those adjectives, she realised and heaved in a deep breath. ‘I didn’t do it. He set me up. I caught him with his fingers in your safe and threatened to tell the police.’
‘Only threatened?’ A sleek eyebrow arched cynically.
And that, Freya thought, had been her downfall. Luca was family. She’d worked and lived with Enrico long enough to know that you did not shop family to anyone, especially to the police.
Or thought she knew it.
‘I decided that it was up to you to make that decision. So I went back to the apartment to wait for you to get home. He arrived drunk as a skunk. I’d just got out of the bath. He had a key he said you’d given him so he could let himself in. He was standing there in our bedroom stark naked and l-laughing at me, telling me that you’d handed me over to him because—’
‘You know I don’t want to hear this, so why are you saying it?’ Enrico cut in coldly.
‘One reason,’ she said, cramming the rest of that ugly scene back down inside her. ‘I have as much right as the next person to defend myself against the slur you Ranieris placed on my character.’
‘But I did not listen to you then, so why do you think I will listen now?’
‘Because you want something from me that you are not going to get without giving me a fair hearing and then reparation for what you and your rotten cousin did to me.’
‘Are we talking about my son?’
‘He isn’t your son.’
The tension was heating up again. Enrico stiffened infinitesimally. ‘He is my son,’ he insisted.
‘I want proof of that.’
‘Perdono?’ He stared at her. ‘Isn’t that my line?’
Freya crossed her arms more tightly and refused to rise to his sarcasm. ‘I don’t need to prove anything,’ she bluffed. ‘And since I don’t want you to be Nicky’s father I am contesting your claim. If you’re that sure of yourself then prove it,’ she challenged. ‘I want DNA proof.’
‘Is this your idea of a joke?’ he demanded.
Not so she’d noticed. Freya gave a small shrug. ‘I’m the woman you believe tripped like a butterfly from Ranieri to Ranieri—’
‘Will you stop saying my name as if it is an insult?’ he ground out.
But the name was an insult to her. ‘If what you believe about me is true, then even this man-tripping butterfly would not know if you are my son’s father. So I demand proof before I let you near Nicky,’ she repeated.
‘But anyone with eyes can tell that he belongs to me!’ Enrico bit out.
‘Or Luca,’ she said, and watched with grim satisfaction as his handsome face locked up. ‘Unless, of course, what you believe about me is just a pack of wicked lies you enjoyed swallowing…’
‘I did not enjoy it,’ he answered stiffly.
‘Then in my place,’ she continued, undeterred by the interruption, ‘no caring mother would want a man who can believe such bad things about her to have anything to do with her child. Your cynical view of me would inevitably rub off on him and poison his mind about the mother he loves.’
‘I would not do that.’
‘I don’t believe you. So I repeat, you prove Nicky is your son because I am not going to help you.’
He turned on her then, slamming the glass down. ‘But you know he’s my son!’
‘Do I?’
‘Stop playing this game, Freya.’ He frowned impatiently. ‘This is stupid. I know he is mine, even if you cannot be sure.’
‘Oh, that was good, Enrico.’ She smiled. ‘I turn the tables on you and you’re turning them back again—but that was a mistake,’ she declared. ‘Because all you’ve just managed to do is to confirm what a truly uncaring and cynical bastard you are. So let me put it bluntly…’ Freya straightened from the desk. ‘I don’t want you having any influence in my son’s life, therefore I will do whatever it takes to keep you out of it. I’ll fight you with medical science if you make me, then I’ll fight you in court.’
‘You have the cash handy to back that up?’
‘There is such a thing as legal aid in this country,’ she pointed out. And on that she turned for the door. ‘Call Fredo off,’ she added as she started walking. ‘Or I will inform the authorities that we have a child-stalker in the building.’
‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’
Freya’s head went back. ‘I’m walking out of here—’
‘Out of your job—?’
The challenge landed like a barb to hit dead centre of its target, acting like a lead weight that dropped at her feet and pulled her to a stop.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘Need it, do you, Miss Jenson?’ he drawled. ‘Need the meagre wages it pays into your bank?’
‘Yes,’ she breathed.
‘Need the day care it gives to your son, also? Now, just how would you manage if it wasn’t there…?’
Freya’s insides began trembling, the meaning behind each single taunt making her feel suddenly very sick. Cold defiance was only effective as a weapon when you had the resources to back it up.
Enrico had just shown her that she had none.
She turned slowly. It was the only way to do it if she didn’t want to collapse in a heap on the floor. He was still standing by the drinks cabinet, lounging there now like some super-arrogant modern sculptured Italian god, with his long legs crossed at the ankles and his casual air of sartorial elegance, his power and confidence knocking the spots off her attempt to gain the upper hand. The afternoon sun was pouring in through the windows, catching hold of his lean, golden features and glinting, hard eyes, and his even harder-looking mouth clipped by a tight, taunting smile.
She’d gone quite nicely pale, Enrico noted with grim satisfaction. Toss your head at me now if you dare.
‘You wouldn’t,’ she husked out.
‘Why not?’ he countered. ‘I am the crass bastard who hands you over to his cousin for a bit of good sex, remember? I am capable of doing anything.’
He didn’t mean it, Freya told herself anxiously. He was just getting his own back on her for calling him crass. ‘But it would hurt so many other mothers with—’
‘Oh, come on, Freya,’ he cut in, ‘you worked with me for a year so you know the score. If you wanted to cut costs at Hannard’s, where would you begin—?’
‘Not with the crèche!’ she cried out.
‘Because you have a vested interest there?’ Her eyes were flashing with fear, not defiance now, Enrico noted. ‘Whereas I do not.’
‘You—you…’ The words trailed off, bitten back before she could say them.
Enrico leant forward slightly. ‘Yes?’ he prompted. ‘Were you about to say something important then, cara? Were you about to tell me that I do have a vested interest there?’
‘No,’ she choked out.
He relaxed back again. ‘Your own job, then,’ he moved on with a zealous, razor-like slice. ‘If you had to sit on my side of the desk, what other cost-cutting exercise would you be looking at? The filing department, perhaps?’ he suggested. ‘That vast paper storeroom in the basement of this building that uses up expensive workspace that could be leased out to some other business for a damn good return?’
‘Every business has files to store.’ Her arms were back round her body again, trying to defend the panic erupting beneath their tight clasp.
‘All the efficiently run businesses I know do not employ a clutch of mindless people for the exclusive task of feeding paper into a couple of ancient scanning machines,’ he responded with contempt. ‘I could contract out—bring in fifty people with fifty state-of-the-art machines and clear that whole basement of paper in a week. It would cost me maximum—’ He named a figure that made Freya blench. ‘That makes your job and the jobs of your fellow paper-scanners redundant. Now, where do I turn next to cut costs?’
Freya was really trembling now—no, shivering, her skin as cold as ice. In one easy shift of his brain he’d threatened to relieve her of her job, plus those of the dozen others who worked in the basement with her. And if that wasn’t enough, he was also threatening to relieve thirty-four other mothers of their child-care facility, thereby making the staff that ran the crèche redundant, too.
‘You don’t deserve a son,’ she breathed thickly. ‘You don’t deserve to be standing there at all! You should be crawling around in some gutter right now, getting your just deserts for being such an outright low-down, no-good excuse for a man!’
Impervious to insults, Enrico just shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘I am in the business of saving drowning companies, not people,’ he answered. ‘And I can tell you bluntly that this place runs on pure fresh air right now. Everyone working here has been living on borrowed time,’ he added grimly. ‘There is not a single employee I would willingly keep on.’
‘And I will be the first one to go,’ she muttered. ‘I h-hate you,’ she added on a driven breath.
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Michelle Reid
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Ranieri Bride, электронная книга автора Michelle Reid на английском языке, в жанре современная зарубежная литература