The Boss′s Valentine
The Boss's Valentine
LYNNE GRAHAM
Lynne Graham was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon reader since her teens. She is very happily married with an understanding husband, who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
Lynne is one of Mills & Boon® Modern™’s top authors and her latest book, The Greek Tycoon’s Defi ant Bride, is out now, followed in April by The Italian Billionaire’s Pregnant Bride.
The Boss’s Valentine
by
Lynne Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
IT HAD been a hideous day at work.
On the way home, Poppy called into the corner shop and the first thing she noticed was that the big valentine card she had admired over a month earlier was still unsold. She couldn’t understand why nobody had bought it for she loved its glorious overblown pink roses and simple sentimental verse. She wondered why all the cards her more fortunate friends received were joke ones with comic, cruel, or even crude messages.
On an impulse, Poppy lifted the card and decided to buy it. Why shouldn’t she send a valentine card? True, nobody had ever sent her one, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t use the card as a means of brightening someone else’s day. As to the identity of that special, lucky someone, there was no doubt in her mind about who would receive the card…
Poppy had fallen head over heels in love with Santino Aragone in her first week working at Aragone Systems. She was all too well aware that Santino was as out of her reach as the moon. Santino was a hugely successful entrepreneur, blessed by spectacular sleek, dark Italian looks, and he had a never-ending string of gorgeous women in his life. But in an emergency Santino Aragone could also be incredibly kind. On her first day at work, when she’d got her finger trapped in a door, Santino had taken her to the hospital himself. When he had fainted dead away at the sight of a needle, Poppy had known he was the man for her…she had thought that was so sweet.
Starry-eyed over the idea that her small, anonymous gesture of a card might at least bring a brief smile to Santino Aragone’s brooding dark features on what she knew would be a difficult day for him, she was unlocking the door of her bedsit before her thoughts roamed uneasily back to her own horrendous day at work.
Desmond, the slick new head of marketing, had asked her if she had been born stupid or perhaps she’d got that way with effort? Having spilt coffee on his keyboard, Poppy had cleaned it up without telling him and in the process somehow wiped his morning’s work from his computer. Although she had made grovelling apologies, Desmond had still put in a complaint about her to Human Resources and she had been issued with a formal warning.
Her colleagues would have been surprised to learn that Poppy, famed for her laid-back nature, was even angrier with herself than Desmond had been. If she had not been so busy chatting, the coffee would never have been spilt. Time and time again, a lapse in concentration led to similar mistakes on her part. Sometimes she wondered if the problem had started when she was at school and her parents had, without ever meaning to, managed to undermine her every small triumph.
‘I’m sure you’ve done your best,’ her mother would say with a slight grimace when she scanned Poppy’s school reports. ‘We can’t expect you to match Peter’s results, can we?’
Her elder brother, Peter, had been born gifted and his achievements had set an impossible standard against which her more average abilities sank without trace. Punch-drunk with pride over their son’s academic successes, her parents had always concentrated their energies on Peter. Poppy would have liked to go to university, too, but when she was fifteen, her parents had told her that, as further education was so expensive and Peter would still be completing his doctorate, she would have to leave school and train for a job instead. It had seemed to her then that there was no point in striving for better grades. But it had been a conviction that she had since lived to regret.
Now painfully conscious that she didn’t have much in the way of academic qualifications and that she had been lucky to get a position in a slick city business, Poppy worked hard as a marketing assistant. She was willing, enthusiastic and popular with her colleagues, but employees who made foolish mistakes were frowned on at Aragone Systems. In addition, the warning she had received that day was her second in six months and if there was a third, she could be sacked. Ironically, it was not so much the fear of being fired that sent a chill down her taut spine, it was the terrifying knowledge that if she was fired she would never, ever set eyes on Santino Aragone again…
‘Is this someone’s idea of a joke?’ Santino Aragone demanded with incredulous bite when he opened the giant envelope two days later and found himself looking at the most naff of valentine cards awash with chintzy roses in improbable clashing pinks.
‘I’m as surprised as you are.’ His PA, Craig Belston, thought with considerable amusement that no woman could have chosen a worse way of trying to impress his sophisticated employer. Or indeed a worse day or even year to make such a declaration.
The staff Christmas party had been postponed after the sudden death of Santino’s father, Maximo, and rescheduled to take place as a Valentine’s Day event this evening. As bad luck would have it, Santino was attending another funeral of an old schoolfriend that very afternoon. Furthermore, it might be a little-known fact but Santino loathed Valentine’s Day in much the same way that Scrooge had loathed the festive season.
Lean, strong face grim, Santino opened the card. A faint whiff of an eerily familiar perfume made his nostrils flare and he frowned. Floral…jasmine? An old-fashioned scent, not the type of fragrance worn by a stylish woman. But so taken aback was he by the candid message on the inside of the card that he forgot about the perfume.
‘As always, I’m thinking of you and loving you today,’ ran the screed.
Had he become the unwitting target of some dreadful schoolgirl with a crush? Wincing at the very idea while he mentally ran through the very few teenage girls within his social circle, he made no demur when Craig took the liberty of turning the card round to peruse it for himself.
‘Tinkerbell…’ Craig pronounced in a tone of raw disbelief.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Santino prompted drily.
‘That dippy redhead in marketing. We call her Tinkerbell because she’s always flying about and putting her feet in it noisily. Well, Poppy’s certainly stuck her silly head above the parapet this time,’ the younger man remarked with an unpleasant smile. ‘I’m certain she sent this card. That’s her scent. She always wears it and guess who loves pink and flowers as well?’
Poppy Bishop, the marketing junior, hired six months ago by his late father in total defiance of HR’s choice of candidate while Santino had been on vacation. Why? Maximo had felt sorry for her because she had confided that it was her first interview after fifty-odd job applications. Poppy with her shy but sunny smiles, explosive Titian corkscrew curls and her comical penchant for floral prints and insane diets. Even in a large staff, Poppy was hard to ignore and calamity did follow her around.
‘Some women just live to embarrass themselves,’ Craig remarked thinly. ‘Shouldn’t someone have a word with her about this? The cheek of her too…a little nobody like her making up to the boss!’
Summoning up a recollection of how Poppy behaved in his vicinity, Santino decided she very probably was the culprit. He knew he made her nervous. Around him, she was more than usually clumsy, tongue-tied to the point of idiocy and enveloped in a continual hot blush. She also had a way of looking at him that suggested that with very little effort he might walk on water. Other women treated him to the same look but where they were concerned it was deliberate flattery, whereas Poppy’s expressive face paraded her every thought like a banner. He was relieved that she had not signed the card. She would not have appreciated that her trade-mark perfume and love of flowers might be a give-away and would undoubtedly cringe if she realised that she was even under suspicion. Instantly, Santino regretted allowing Craig to read the card.
‘I doubt that Poppy Bishop sent it,’ Santino murmured in a bored tone of dismissal as he dropped the card straight into the bin. ‘She’s just not the type. I imagine it’s more likely to have come from some schoolgirl, possibly the daughter of one of my friends. Now, since we’ve had our entertainment for the day, could you get me the MD of Delsen Industries on the phone?’
Later that morning, Santino’s attention wandered back to the bin where the card lay forlorn and rejected. A groan of exasperation escaped his wide, sensual mouth. What on earth had possessed her? His PA hated her guts and would do her a bad turn if he got the chance. Why? Craig was famous for hitting on the youngest, newest female employees, treating them to a one-night stand and then dumping them.
But when his PA had tried his routine on Poppy, she had turned him down and admitted that she had been told that he was the office romeo on her first day, a put-down that had hit Craig’s ego right where it hurt. Craig would have been more humiliated, however, had he realised that Santino had been the one to issue that warning. He still didn’t know why he had bothered. Maybe it was the fact that his father had warmed to the girl; maybe it was the sheer naivety he had seen in her blue pansy-coloured eyes…
Around ten o’clock that morning, Poppy had to stock up the stationery cupboard. She was glad that she had to trek down to the floor below to get fresh supplies. Anything capable of taking her mind off the valentine card she had sent was welcome.
To say that she had got cold feet about that card would have been a major understatement. It had been an insane impulse and she hadn’t stopped to think about what she’d been doing. Suspecting that Santino could hardly be looking forward to the staff party when it would only remind him of his father’s sudden demise at Christmas, she had overflowed with sympathy for, as far as she knew, Santino had no other close relatives. And although her own family were still alive, they had emigrated to Australia and she rarely heard from them.
Even so, her far-too-emotional frame of mind the night before last was no excuse for the personal message she had inscribed on that card. She also had the sinking suspicion that Santino, who was the very image of ruthless workplace cool and efficiency, might very much have disliked receiving a huge pink envelope at the office. Surely some of the executive staff must have commented on that bright envelope? And possibly laughed, which was not something she felt that Santino would have enjoyed either.
That idiotic declaration of love had been her biggest misjudgement of all. Why had she let herself get so carried away? Why hadn’t she had the wit to just sign it with only a question mark? Then the card might have been interpreted in a dozen ways and even as a harmless joke. But her statement of undying love had put that crazy card into an entirely different realm and might well rouse much greater curiosity.
Clutching a sheaf of paper and several bags of pens, Poppy headed back towards the lift, her steps slowing when she saw Santino chatting to several other men in the reception area. Her heartbeat quickened, her chest tightened, her mouth ran dry, symptoms that always assailed her when Santino Aragone was in view or even within hearing. The dark, deep timbre of his honeyed, accented drawl sent a positive tingle down her backbone. Santino could voice the most prosaic statistics and make them sound like poetry.
While pretending great interest in the supplies she was carrying, Poppy glanced up and stole a look at him. Bang…the full effect of Santino just exploded on her. She was entranced by the commanding angle of his dark head, the gloss of his black hair beneath the lights, the sheer height and breadth of him in a dark formal business suit that exuded classic designer tailoring. Yet when he moved he was as fluid as a big cat, and as graceful. As he turned his head to address someone she caught his profile, strong and distinctive from his lean, sculpted cheekbones to the proud jut of his nose and the aggressive angle of his jawline. His golden skin was stretched taut over his superb bone structure.
He made her ache. Just looking at Santino made her ache. As one of the bags of pens escaped the damp clutch of her nerveless fingers and fell to the floor Santino swung round and she collided with his incredible eyes, black as sloes below these harsh interior lights but the same shade as polished bronze in daylight. His gaze narrowed, spiky black lashes curling down to zero in on her. Then, instead of looking away again as she expected, he stared almost as if he had never seen her before.
It was as if time stopped dead for Poppy. Her heart was pumping blood so hard, she was as out of breath as if she had been running. There was a singing sound in her eardrums and her whole body felt oddly light and full of leaping energy. She looked back at him, wide, very blue eyes steady for possibly the very first time, and sank without trace in the glittering golden intensity of his appraisal.
Someone stooped and swept up the bag she had let fall, blocking her from Santino’s gaze and breaking that spell. She focused with dizzy uncertainty on Craig Belston, absorbed the sneer etched on his self-satisfied features and almost recoiled, her fair skin reddening.
‘You’re making a patsy of yourself,’ Craig murmured very low. ‘The old dropped hanky routine went out with the ark!’
Her face tightened in shaken disconcertion. ‘Sorry?’
Faint colour demarcating the hard slant of his cheekbones, Santino strode into the lift, hit the button to close the doors and left all his companions behind without even thinking about it. Poppy Bishop’s hair was a vibrant golden auburn and very unusual. Just for a moment under the lights her hair had looked quite dazzling and she had beautiful eyes. For once, although he was quite certain that it would have been something that would have jarred on him, he had not noticed what she was wearing. But he was not attracted to her; of course, he wasn’t.
Poppy was an employee, he reminded himself with relief. Not even if Cleopatra joined the staff would Santino have allowed himself to be tempted into an unsuitable liaison. That stupid card was still on his mind, that was all! He began with cool logic to list all Poppy’s flaws. She was only about five feet three and he preferred tall blondes. She was twenty-one and he liked women closer to his own age. She had such dreadful dress sense that she stuck out like a canary bird among the suits at a meeting. She talked too much, knocked things over, messed up royally on the computer on a regular basis. He was a technical whizz, a perfectionist, she was an accident that just kept on happening. She was also the kind of woman men married and he would die single. The prospect of the funeral he had to attend that afternoon was stressing him out. What he ought to have was a drink.
Poppy hurried back to the marketing department and went to fetch Desmond’s coffee. She was in turmoil. Why had Santino stared at her that way? Or had that just been her imagination? She was so ridiculously obsessed with him that her mind had probably played tricks on her. Why had she got this horrible suspicion that he knew she had sent that card? How could he possibly know? He couldn’t read minds, could he?
And why had Craig attacked her that way when he usually behaved as though she was beneath his lofty notice? For goodness’ sake, what had got into him? Craig Belston never deigned to speak to her, at least not since that first week when he had asked her out and badgered her to the point where she had been tactless enough to say that she had been warned about him. ‘The old dropped hanky routine’? Did Craig suspect her feelings for Santino? But how could he?
It was madness to let her discomfiture about that wretched card work her up into a state, Poppy told herself in annoyance. Short of dusting the card for fingerprints and matching them to hers, there was no way that anyone could identify the sender. As for Craig, well, he had few friends at Aragone Systems and was pleasant to even fewer. Brainy he might be, but he had a nasty tongue and a habit of smirking at other people’s misfortunes. So it would be foolish to read anything into those snide comments of his… Wouldn’t it?
CHAPTER TWO
‘NO…NO…NO!’ Desmond urged Poppy in loud dismay. ‘Just leave the coffee over there. I prefer to stretch my arm out!’
Although Poppy smiled like a good sport at the tide of amusement that those pointed instructions roused, she was cut to the bone. Hadn’t she suffered enough yet for the episode of the spilt coffee? A lecture about safety measures with liquids from the HR manager had set the seal on her shame while she had also been reminded of her first formal warning, which had resulted from poor timekeeping in her very first month at Aragone Systems. ‘One more strike and you’re out,’ had been the message she’d received after the coffee incident and she really was determined not to make any further blunders.
‘What are you wearing to the party tonight?’
Grateful for the interruption, Poppy glanced up with a smile from the unexciting graph she had been tinkering with on her monitor. It was Lesley, a tall, slim brunette on the market research team. ‘Nothing special. Just a dress.’
She listened while Lesley described her own outfit. She knew that without a doubt it would enhance every slender curve of the other woman’s enviable figure. As Desmond informed her that he wanted the graphs she had been working on for a meeting, she hurried into printing them, relieved that she had finished the last one in time.
‘I heard that Santino got a valentine card,’ Lesley continued, and as Poppy tensed she added, ‘I was more surprised to hear he didn’t get a whole sackful! I bet it was from his ex trying to get back in with him.’
‘Ex?’ Poppy queried, relaxing again.
‘Don’t you read the gossip columns? He dumped Caro Hartley a month back,’ Lesley informed her with authority. ‘I didn’t think that would last long. She’s quite a party girl and I suspect Santino got bored fast. He’s a very clever guy.’
‘I’m sure he’ll not be on his own for long,’ Poppy remarked, anxious eyes on Desmond, her boss, as he treated the printed graphs to a cursory appraisal. Had she changed the colouring of the one she had first done in pink for her own amusement? Yes, she was sure she remembered doing so. Even so, she didn’t lose her tension until he had slotted them into a folder.
Never, ever again would she play around with the colours of the graphs, she swore as she went into the cloakroom to freshen up at lunchtime. If it killed her, she was going to erase her every bad habit. She gave herself only the most fleeting look in the mirror. At least she had grown out of the spots and her skin now looked great. But her rippling auburn curls were a constant source of aggravation, for the little tendrils that gathered round her face ensured that her hair never looked as tidy as other women’s. However, cut short her riotous curls were even harder to handle, so she kept her hair long and wore it clipped back at the nape of her neck.
Her unfashionable curves were the biggest challenge, she conceded ruefully. She was in dire need of a new, inspiring diet. The banana regime had put her off bananas for life, and the cabbage soup one had ensured that she felt queasy just passing vegetables on a market stall. No, it was back to boring old salad and yogurt, which worked but meant that she spent most of her time fantasising about food and feeling so hungry she could have munched on wood.
When she returned to her desk, the email icon was flicking on her monitor and she opened it, hoping it was a cheering communication from a friend.
‘Pink graphs are inappropriate in a business environment,’ ran the email.
Poppy looked at the message in shock and then glanced around herself to see if anyone was looking at her, but nobody was. Who had seen her mucking about with that graph before lunch? Who was pulling her leg? It was unsigned and the address was a six-digit number and, as such, anonymous.
‘Says who?’ she typed in and sent the email back.
‘I like graphs in dark colours.’
‘That’s boring,’ Poppy told her correspondent.
‘Rational. Pink is a distraction.’
‘Pink is warm and uplifting,’ she protested in reply, typing at full tilt.
‘Pink is irritating, cute, feminine…inappropriate.’ That awful word, inappropriate again. Her correspondent was a guy, she decided, and certainly not Desmond, who regarded email as a time-wasting exercise and who would surely have gone into orbit the instant he saw a pink graph.
‘How did you see my graph?’ she typed.
‘Stick to the issue.’
Poppy grinned at that rejoinder. Definitely a guy.
‘One more warning and you could be out of work. Be sensible.’ That next message came in fast on the previous one without having given her the chance to respond.
Her grin fell off her lips at supersonic speed. ‘How do you know that?’ she typed.
But this time, infuriatingly, there was no answer. Thinking about her mystery correspondent, Poppy conceded that quite a few people would be aware of those warnings on her employment record. The very first time it had happened she had been so upset, she had talked about it herself and, after the coffee episode, Desmond had been so furious that he had announced his intent to complain about her in such ringing decibels that most of the department had heard him.
Intrigued by those emails, scanning her busy colleagues with intense curiosity, Poppy sent several more to the same address that afternoon but still received no further response. Then she began thinking about the party that evening and wondered what she would wear, since pink had become such a controversial issue…
’I’m amazed that you’re still laying on large supplies of alcohol for your employees.’ Jenna Delsen’s exquisite face emanated shocked disapproval as she scanned the low-lit noisy room full of party revellers. ‘Daddy used to help our staff to get sloshed at our expense, too, but not since I joined the company. Now we have a nice sober supper do. No loud music, no dancing, no drink and everyone behaves.’
‘I like my staff to enjoy themselves. It is only one night a year.’ Santino suppressed the ungenerous thought that the blonde could be a pious, penny-pinching misery, for she had been welcome company at the funeral that afternoon and he had enjoyed dining with her and her father at their home afterwards.
‘I suppose that’s the extrovert Italian in you. You threw some very riotous parties when we were at Oxford together.’ Jenna gave him a flirtatious, rather coy look as she reminded him that they had known each other since university.
In receipt of that appraisal, all Santino’s defensive antenna hit alarm status. ‘Let me get you a drink,’ he suggested faster than the speed of light, already mentally listing the unattached executives present on the slender but hopeful thought that she might take a shine to one of them instead. They had always been friends, never anything else.
Jenna curved a slender hand round his arm when he returned to her side. ‘I have a confession to make…for the whole of the time we were at uni together, I was in love with you.’
Santino conceded that what had started out as an unusual day, and had gravitated into being a very long day, was now assuming nightmarish proportions. ‘You’re kidding me.’
‘No.’ Jenna fixed her very fine green eyes on him in speaking condemnation. ‘And you never noticed. In four long years, you never once noticed that I felt rather more for you than the average mate.’
In one unappreciative gulp, Santino tipped back an entire shot of brandy meant to be savoured at leisure. He was transfixed and trapped by that censorious speech. There was no polite or kind way of telling her that, beautiful and intellectually challenging as she was—for she had a first-class brain—there had been no spark whatsoever on his side of the fence.
‘And I had to sit back and watch you chasing girls who couldn’t hold a candle to me,’ Jenna continued with withering bite.
‘Oddly enough, I don’t recall you sitting home alone many nights,’ Santino countered sardonically.
‘Once I understood that I was in love with a commitment-phobe, I trained myself to regard you only as a friend—’
‘Jenna…when you first met me, I was eighteen. Most teenage boys are commitment-phobes.’ Santino groaned, thinking what an absolute pain she seemed to have become, still nourishing her sense of injustice over the unwitting blow he had dealt to her ego so many years after the event. ‘I was no better and no worse than most—’
‘Oh, don’t be so modest,’ Jenna trilled in sharp interruption. ‘All the girls were crazy about you! You were spoilt for choice but you deliberately chose women whom you knew would only be short-term distractions. You always protected yourself from the threat of a steady relationship and you’re still doing it!’
When Santino went back to the bar for another drink, Jenna was so taken up with her discourse that she accompanied him. Santino’s temper was on a very short leash and his second drink went the way of the first. He was cursing the innate good manners that had persuaded him that he ought to invite the blonde to accompany him to the party. He was thinking of what a very much better time he would have had mixing with his staff. Then he glanced across the room and saw a figure hovering in the doorway and the remainder of Jenna’s barbed criticisms washed off him because he no longer heard them.
Noticing that she had lost his attention, Jenna followed the direction of his gaze. She saw a youthful redhead with a vibrant mane of curly hair. Small, very pretty, but not at all Santino’s style. Yet Santino was so busy watching the girl that he had forgotten Jenna was there.
Scanning the crowded room, Poppy finally picked out Lesley in her distinctive white and silver dress and began to move towards her, an apologetic smile on her lips. She was a little late but then some of her colleagues had opted to stay on in the city centre and warm up in a bar before attending the party. But Poppy loved getting ready to go out at home and had known that she didn’t have enough of a head for drink to have sustained a lengthy pre-party session.
‘I really like that dress,’ Lesley said warmly as she flipped out a seat for Poppy’s occupation. ‘Where did you buy it?’
‘It’s not new. I got it for my brother’s wedding,’ Poppy confided, and then added in an undertone. ‘To be honest, it’s my bridesmaid’s dress—’
‘I wish my best friend had let me wear an outfit like that for her big day. At least I could have worn it again afterwards.’ Lesley admired the strappy green dress that flattered Poppy’s shapely figure and slim length of leg, then drew Poppy’s attention to the drinks already lined up in readiness for her, pointing out that she was very much behind the rest of them, before continuing, ‘It must have been an unusual wedding.’
‘My sister-in-law, Karrie, wanted a casual evening do. She wore a short dress, too.’
Poppy’s attention, which had been automatically roaming the room in search of a certain tall, dark male, finally found Santino where he stood by the bar with a spectacular blonde woman clinging to his arm. She lifted the drink that Lesley had nudged into her fingers and sipped it to ease her tight throat, but she resisted the urge to ask the chatty brunette if she knew who Santino’s companion was. After all, what was the point? Did it make any difference who it was? And it was none of her business either.
Indeed, she should not even be looking at Santino Aragone, Poppy told herself guiltily, because looking was only feeding her obsession. Having thought over Craig’s sneering remarks earlier that day, Poppy had finally faced the unhappy fact that he at least suspected that she was rather too attached to their mutual employer. That conclusion had unnerved her for Craig’s reputation for making others the butt of his cruel sense of humour was well-known. So, she would have to be more circumspect in the future, for languishing like a lovelorn teenager over Santino could easily make her a laughing stock at work. In fact, she would be much better devoting her brain to sussing out the mystery identity of her email correspondent, who had to at least like her to have gone to the trouble of trying to give her a warning word of advice, she reflected.
‘Who is she?’ Jenna enquired very drily of Santino.
‘Who are you talking about?’ Santino asked with a magnificent disregard for the direction of his own gaze.
‘The little redhead with the pre-Raphaelite hair…the one whom you’ve been watching for at least three solid minutes,’ Jenna completed between gritted teeth.
‘I’m not watching her,’ Santino murmured with cool disdain.
‘But even though you employ hundreds of young women you know instantly who I’m referring to,’ Jenna noted with rapier-sharp feminine logic.
‘Did you get out of the wrong side of the bed this morning?’ Santino drawled with his sudden flashing smile. ‘Exactly why are you trying to wind me up?’
‘Before I tell you—’ Jenna gave him a grudging smile of approbation for finally registering that she had been set on evening the score for past injuries ‘—you tell me who the redhead is and I will give you ten very good reasons why one should never, ever date an employee.’
Santino drained his drink again and dealt her a mocking glance. ‘I don’t need them, Jenna. All ten of them are in my mind right now.’
Returning to her table after chatting to various friends, Poppy sat down again. Lesley and two other women were chatting about Santino’s date, who was evidently the daughter of the owner of Delsen Industries.
‘What do you think of Jenna?’ another, less welcome voice enquired.
Poppy’s head swivelled, her startled gaze only then registering that Craig Belston had joined their table during her absence. That question had been directed specifically at her and she was gripped by discomfiture. ‘Why would I think anything of her?’ she answered with a determined smile. ‘All the boss’s girlfriends are incredible beauties.’
‘Now why did I get the idea that you mightn’t have noticed that?’ Craig rested his pale blue probing eyes on Poppy and her mouth ran dry.
‘Santino’s leggy ladies are rather hard to miss.’ Lesley shot a frowning glance at Santino’s PA and added, ‘Come on. You’ve been keeping us all in suspense since we finished work. Who sent Santino the naff card?’
Poppy froze and then gulped down her drink as her colour heightened.
‘Did I mention that it was an inside job?’ Craig murmured with tormenting slowness and Poppy’s heart skipped an entire beat, her every tiny muscle pulling rigid.
‘No, you darned well didn’t!’ one of the other women piped up in exasperation. ‘Who on earth working for Santino would be daft enough to send him a valentine card swearing undying love? I mean, come on, yes, he’s hugely fanciable, but he’s the last guy around who would respond to that kind of blatant invitation from a member of staff.’
‘You said the card wasn’t signed,’ Lesley reminded Craig. ‘So how could you know it was sent by someone in Aragone Systems? It didn’t come through the internal mail, did it?’
‘Just assume that in this particular case we’re talking about someone who’s not very bright,’ Craig invited, and Poppy’s tummy began to churn where she sat. ‘Someone who assumed that only a name would expose her identity.’
‘You recognised the handwriting!’ someone exclaimed.
‘I really don’t think I like this conversation very much,’ Lesley remarked suddenly. ‘Valentine cards are just for fun.’
‘It wasn’t the handwriting. It was a combination of errors,’ Craig explained to the table at large. ‘A distinctive perfume, a predilection for a particular colour and a love of flowers.’
Poppy was now as pale as milk and feeling physically ill with humiliation. She could not bring herself to look at any of her companions and silence greeted Craig’s last explanation, an awful uneasy silence that left Poppy’s nerves screaming and her skin clammy.
‘Now who do we all know who wears jasmine scent?’ Craig murmured.
‘I don’t know anyone who wears that,’ Lesley chimed in, and the two other women followed her lead to say the exact same. Painfully conscious that her companions were trying to throw sand in Craig’s eyes and deflect him from his target, Poppy had to grit her teeth to prevent herself from lifting her drink and throwing it at her tormentor.
At the other side of the room, Jenna was still in full confiding mode, but Santino was having a hard time dragging his brooding scrutiny from his PA’s smug expression and Poppy’s pale, rigid face.
‘So, I hope you’ll forgive me for giving you a rough time tonight,’ Jenna murmured in dulcet continuation, ‘but I always promised myself that some day I would tell you the truth and make you sweat for a few minutes. Will you still come to my engagement party?’
Taken aback, Santino frowned. ‘Engagement party?’
‘I’m so grateful I’m not in love with you any more.’ Jenna sighed. ‘Didn’t you hear me telling you that I’m getting engaged to David Marsh and that he’s picking me up here in five minutes?’
It had been a long time since Santino had heard that much good news in one sentence; he was genuinely fond of Jenna and relief on his own behalf and pleasure on her behalf sliced through his growing tension. Realising that the blonde had merely been set on claiming a small slice of revenge for his past indifference to her, he flung back his handsome dark head and started to laugh with genuine appreciation.
The sight of Santino splitting his sides with laughter, and Jenna equally convulsed and holding onto him for support, filled Poppy with paranoia. Immediately, she assumed that Santino had told the blonde about her pathetic card and that they were laughing at her, for if Craig had guessed that she was the culprit he was certain to have told Santino. Feeling as if she had just had her heart ripped out while she was still breathing, Poppy nonetheless rose from her seat with as much dignity as she could muster, for she could not bear sitting there playing poor little victim for Craig’s benefit any longer.
‘You’re a real Sherlock Holmes, Craig,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m very impressed.’
Poppy walked away fast. Tears were stinging her eyes and blurring her vision, but she kept her head high and that was her final undoing. She didn’t see the small table laden with drinks in her path. She hit it with such force that the table tipped over with an enormous crash that seemed to turn every head in the room. For an instant, Poppy hovered, staring in horror at the smashed glass and liquid everywhere, not to mention the startled dancers leaping back from the mess she had created. Then her control just snapped and she fled.
‘Now,’ Lesley said icily to Craig, who was sniggering at Poppy’s noisy exit, ‘while you’re wondering why Poppy’s friends aren’t rushing after her to offer support, watch Santino and learn…’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Upsetting Poppy is not a career-enhancing move in Aragone Systems. You see, if you were a woman and in touch with the real newsbreaking gossip in this building, you would already know that Santino fancies the socks off Poppy, too—’
‘Rubbish!’ Craig snapped. ‘He binned the card!’
‘Did you check the bin at the end of the day?’ someone enquired drily.
‘Santino doesn’t know what’s hit him yet,’ one of the other women commented with immense superiority. ‘He’s more at home with his keyboard than his emotions.’
‘But when a bloke like Santino, who likes everything done by the book, starts telling poor Desmond that pink graphs are fresh and creative, he’s in very deep,’ Lesley completed.
In companionable and expectant silence, the three women then focused pointedly on Santino, who had stridden forward the instant that Poppy had sent the table flying. He swung round to speak to Jenna Delsen and not thirty seconds later left in the same direction as Poppy. Witnessing that demonstration, Craig turned the greyish colour of putty and groaned out loud.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN Poppy emerged from the function room at full tilt, several women were entering the cloakroom across the foyer and she wheeled away in the opposite direction.
Finding herself by the lifts, she stabbed the call button with a frantic hand and gulped back a sob. She had to find a quiet corner to pull herself back together again. Selecting the marketing floor, she slumped back against the lift’s cold steel wall as the doors closed. Wrapping her arms round herself, she hugged herself tight. But it was no help, no comfort, because all she could think about was what a fool she had made of herself.
When she saw the dark reception area on the marketing floor, it looked eerie and she hit the door button again in a hurry and tried another floor. Her eyes flooded with burning tears. Of course, Santino Aragone would have laughed when he was told who had sent that card. Everybody would be laughing! After all, she was just a junior member of staff, the plump little redhead Craig had nastily labelled, ‘Tinkerbell’ and hardly competition for the gorgeous women Santino specialised in. Why on earth hadn’t common sense intervened before she’d posted that stupid card to Santino at the office? Didn’t she have sense like other people? Her throat aching, she could no longer hold back the tears and a sob escaped her. How could she have exposed herself to that extent?
In the foyer below, Santino was watching the lights that indicated which floor the lift was at. The light flicked through the levels in descent again, made several brief stops and then sank as low as the floor above before beginning to ascend again. When the lift finally reached the executive level, he waited in taut suspense to see if it moved on again.
When the doors opened on the top floor, Poppy blinked in confusion for she had lost track. But low lights were burning and the floor was not in darkness like the others. Dimly recalling that Santino’s secretary had a private washroom, Poppy stumbled out. She needed to tidy herself up and fix her face before she could go home.
But shock was still setting in hard on Poppy. Only when it was far too late to change things did she see her mistake. She should have toughed out Craig’s insinuations. Instead she had fallen right into his trap and confirmed his suspicions. He couldn’t have proved anything, yet she had virtually confessed by saying what she had and leaving the table.
Taunting, wounding images were now bombarding her mind, increasing her distress. She had left the party with all the cool of a baby elephant let loose in a drawing room. She saw Craig’s self-satisfied smile, Santino laughing, the stiff, disapproving faces of the other women. Craig might as well have stripped her naked in public. Her trembling hands braced on the edge of the washroom vanity unit and, letting her head hang for she couldn’t stand to look at herself in the mirror when she hated herself so much for her own stupidity, she began to sob.
Santino had never made it from the lift to his secretary’s office so fast. But then those heartbreaking sobs acted on him like a shriek alarm. He would usually have gone quite some distance to avoid a crying woman, but the curious automatic pilot now overruling his normal caution ensured that he strode right through the open door of the washroom and gathered Poppy straight into a comforting embrace.
The sheer shock value of a pair of masculine arms closing round her when she had believed that she was alone provoked a startled cry from Poppy. Then she looked up and focused on Santino and even more shock froze her from head to toe. Bronze-coloured eyes set below lush black lashes were trained to hers, the lean, dark contours of his handsome features taut with concern.
‘It’s OK,’ he soothed in his gorgeous accented drawl.
‘Is it?’ Poppy’s voice emerged on the back of a breathless sob, for she could not have got oxygen into her lungs at that instant had her life depended on it. What was happening should have felt unreal but, in actuality, being in the circle of Santino’s arms felt very real and very right. Furthermore, it was something she had been dreaming of for so long that no power on earth could have sent her into retreat.
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LYNNE GRAHAM
Lynne Graham was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon reader since her teens. She is very happily married with an understanding husband, who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
Lynne is one of Mills & Boon® Modern™’s top authors and her latest book, The Greek Tycoon’s Defi ant Bride, is out now, followed in April by The Italian Billionaire’s Pregnant Bride.
The Boss’s Valentine
by
Lynne Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
IT HAD been a hideous day at work.
On the way home, Poppy called into the corner shop and the first thing she noticed was that the big valentine card she had admired over a month earlier was still unsold. She couldn’t understand why nobody had bought it for she loved its glorious overblown pink roses and simple sentimental verse. She wondered why all the cards her more fortunate friends received were joke ones with comic, cruel, or even crude messages.
On an impulse, Poppy lifted the card and decided to buy it. Why shouldn’t she send a valentine card? True, nobody had ever sent her one, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t use the card as a means of brightening someone else’s day. As to the identity of that special, lucky someone, there was no doubt in her mind about who would receive the card…
Poppy had fallen head over heels in love with Santino Aragone in her first week working at Aragone Systems. She was all too well aware that Santino was as out of her reach as the moon. Santino was a hugely successful entrepreneur, blessed by spectacular sleek, dark Italian looks, and he had a never-ending string of gorgeous women in his life. But in an emergency Santino Aragone could also be incredibly kind. On her first day at work, when she’d got her finger trapped in a door, Santino had taken her to the hospital himself. When he had fainted dead away at the sight of a needle, Poppy had known he was the man for her…she had thought that was so sweet.
Starry-eyed over the idea that her small, anonymous gesture of a card might at least bring a brief smile to Santino Aragone’s brooding dark features on what she knew would be a difficult day for him, she was unlocking the door of her bedsit before her thoughts roamed uneasily back to her own horrendous day at work.
Desmond, the slick new head of marketing, had asked her if she had been born stupid or perhaps she’d got that way with effort? Having spilt coffee on his keyboard, Poppy had cleaned it up without telling him and in the process somehow wiped his morning’s work from his computer. Although she had made grovelling apologies, Desmond had still put in a complaint about her to Human Resources and she had been issued with a formal warning.
Her colleagues would have been surprised to learn that Poppy, famed for her laid-back nature, was even angrier with herself than Desmond had been. If she had not been so busy chatting, the coffee would never have been spilt. Time and time again, a lapse in concentration led to similar mistakes on her part. Sometimes she wondered if the problem had started when she was at school and her parents had, without ever meaning to, managed to undermine her every small triumph.
‘I’m sure you’ve done your best,’ her mother would say with a slight grimace when she scanned Poppy’s school reports. ‘We can’t expect you to match Peter’s results, can we?’
Her elder brother, Peter, had been born gifted and his achievements had set an impossible standard against which her more average abilities sank without trace. Punch-drunk with pride over their son’s academic successes, her parents had always concentrated their energies on Peter. Poppy would have liked to go to university, too, but when she was fifteen, her parents had told her that, as further education was so expensive and Peter would still be completing his doctorate, she would have to leave school and train for a job instead. It had seemed to her then that there was no point in striving for better grades. But it had been a conviction that she had since lived to regret.
Now painfully conscious that she didn’t have much in the way of academic qualifications and that she had been lucky to get a position in a slick city business, Poppy worked hard as a marketing assistant. She was willing, enthusiastic and popular with her colleagues, but employees who made foolish mistakes were frowned on at Aragone Systems. In addition, the warning she had received that day was her second in six months and if there was a third, she could be sacked. Ironically, it was not so much the fear of being fired that sent a chill down her taut spine, it was the terrifying knowledge that if she was fired she would never, ever set eyes on Santino Aragone again…
‘Is this someone’s idea of a joke?’ Santino Aragone demanded with incredulous bite when he opened the giant envelope two days later and found himself looking at the most naff of valentine cards awash with chintzy roses in improbable clashing pinks.
‘I’m as surprised as you are.’ His PA, Craig Belston, thought with considerable amusement that no woman could have chosen a worse way of trying to impress his sophisticated employer. Or indeed a worse day or even year to make such a declaration.
The staff Christmas party had been postponed after the sudden death of Santino’s father, Maximo, and rescheduled to take place as a Valentine’s Day event this evening. As bad luck would have it, Santino was attending another funeral of an old schoolfriend that very afternoon. Furthermore, it might be a little-known fact but Santino loathed Valentine’s Day in much the same way that Scrooge had loathed the festive season.
Lean, strong face grim, Santino opened the card. A faint whiff of an eerily familiar perfume made his nostrils flare and he frowned. Floral…jasmine? An old-fashioned scent, not the type of fragrance worn by a stylish woman. But so taken aback was he by the candid message on the inside of the card that he forgot about the perfume.
‘As always, I’m thinking of you and loving you today,’ ran the screed.
Had he become the unwitting target of some dreadful schoolgirl with a crush? Wincing at the very idea while he mentally ran through the very few teenage girls within his social circle, he made no demur when Craig took the liberty of turning the card round to peruse it for himself.
‘Tinkerbell…’ Craig pronounced in a tone of raw disbelief.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Santino prompted drily.
‘That dippy redhead in marketing. We call her Tinkerbell because she’s always flying about and putting her feet in it noisily. Well, Poppy’s certainly stuck her silly head above the parapet this time,’ the younger man remarked with an unpleasant smile. ‘I’m certain she sent this card. That’s her scent. She always wears it and guess who loves pink and flowers as well?’
Poppy Bishop, the marketing junior, hired six months ago by his late father in total defiance of HR’s choice of candidate while Santino had been on vacation. Why? Maximo had felt sorry for her because she had confided that it was her first interview after fifty-odd job applications. Poppy with her shy but sunny smiles, explosive Titian corkscrew curls and her comical penchant for floral prints and insane diets. Even in a large staff, Poppy was hard to ignore and calamity did follow her around.
‘Some women just live to embarrass themselves,’ Craig remarked thinly. ‘Shouldn’t someone have a word with her about this? The cheek of her too…a little nobody like her making up to the boss!’
Summoning up a recollection of how Poppy behaved in his vicinity, Santino decided she very probably was the culprit. He knew he made her nervous. Around him, she was more than usually clumsy, tongue-tied to the point of idiocy and enveloped in a continual hot blush. She also had a way of looking at him that suggested that with very little effort he might walk on water. Other women treated him to the same look but where they were concerned it was deliberate flattery, whereas Poppy’s expressive face paraded her every thought like a banner. He was relieved that she had not signed the card. She would not have appreciated that her trade-mark perfume and love of flowers might be a give-away and would undoubtedly cringe if she realised that she was even under suspicion. Instantly, Santino regretted allowing Craig to read the card.
‘I doubt that Poppy Bishop sent it,’ Santino murmured in a bored tone of dismissal as he dropped the card straight into the bin. ‘She’s just not the type. I imagine it’s more likely to have come from some schoolgirl, possibly the daughter of one of my friends. Now, since we’ve had our entertainment for the day, could you get me the MD of Delsen Industries on the phone?’
Later that morning, Santino’s attention wandered back to the bin where the card lay forlorn and rejected. A groan of exasperation escaped his wide, sensual mouth. What on earth had possessed her? His PA hated her guts and would do her a bad turn if he got the chance. Why? Craig was famous for hitting on the youngest, newest female employees, treating them to a one-night stand and then dumping them.
But when his PA had tried his routine on Poppy, she had turned him down and admitted that she had been told that he was the office romeo on her first day, a put-down that had hit Craig’s ego right where it hurt. Craig would have been more humiliated, however, had he realised that Santino had been the one to issue that warning. He still didn’t know why he had bothered. Maybe it was the fact that his father had warmed to the girl; maybe it was the sheer naivety he had seen in her blue pansy-coloured eyes…
Around ten o’clock that morning, Poppy had to stock up the stationery cupboard. She was glad that she had to trek down to the floor below to get fresh supplies. Anything capable of taking her mind off the valentine card she had sent was welcome.
To say that she had got cold feet about that card would have been a major understatement. It had been an insane impulse and she hadn’t stopped to think about what she’d been doing. Suspecting that Santino could hardly be looking forward to the staff party when it would only remind him of his father’s sudden demise at Christmas, she had overflowed with sympathy for, as far as she knew, Santino had no other close relatives. And although her own family were still alive, they had emigrated to Australia and she rarely heard from them.
Even so, her far-too-emotional frame of mind the night before last was no excuse for the personal message she had inscribed on that card. She also had the sinking suspicion that Santino, who was the very image of ruthless workplace cool and efficiency, might very much have disliked receiving a huge pink envelope at the office. Surely some of the executive staff must have commented on that bright envelope? And possibly laughed, which was not something she felt that Santino would have enjoyed either.
That idiotic declaration of love had been her biggest misjudgement of all. Why had she let herself get so carried away? Why hadn’t she had the wit to just sign it with only a question mark? Then the card might have been interpreted in a dozen ways and even as a harmless joke. But her statement of undying love had put that crazy card into an entirely different realm and might well rouse much greater curiosity.
Clutching a sheaf of paper and several bags of pens, Poppy headed back towards the lift, her steps slowing when she saw Santino chatting to several other men in the reception area. Her heartbeat quickened, her chest tightened, her mouth ran dry, symptoms that always assailed her when Santino Aragone was in view or even within hearing. The dark, deep timbre of his honeyed, accented drawl sent a positive tingle down her backbone. Santino could voice the most prosaic statistics and make them sound like poetry.
While pretending great interest in the supplies she was carrying, Poppy glanced up and stole a look at him. Bang…the full effect of Santino just exploded on her. She was entranced by the commanding angle of his dark head, the gloss of his black hair beneath the lights, the sheer height and breadth of him in a dark formal business suit that exuded classic designer tailoring. Yet when he moved he was as fluid as a big cat, and as graceful. As he turned his head to address someone she caught his profile, strong and distinctive from his lean, sculpted cheekbones to the proud jut of his nose and the aggressive angle of his jawline. His golden skin was stretched taut over his superb bone structure.
He made her ache. Just looking at Santino made her ache. As one of the bags of pens escaped the damp clutch of her nerveless fingers and fell to the floor Santino swung round and she collided with his incredible eyes, black as sloes below these harsh interior lights but the same shade as polished bronze in daylight. His gaze narrowed, spiky black lashes curling down to zero in on her. Then, instead of looking away again as she expected, he stared almost as if he had never seen her before.
It was as if time stopped dead for Poppy. Her heart was pumping blood so hard, she was as out of breath as if she had been running. There was a singing sound in her eardrums and her whole body felt oddly light and full of leaping energy. She looked back at him, wide, very blue eyes steady for possibly the very first time, and sank without trace in the glittering golden intensity of his appraisal.
Someone stooped and swept up the bag she had let fall, blocking her from Santino’s gaze and breaking that spell. She focused with dizzy uncertainty on Craig Belston, absorbed the sneer etched on his self-satisfied features and almost recoiled, her fair skin reddening.
‘You’re making a patsy of yourself,’ Craig murmured very low. ‘The old dropped hanky routine went out with the ark!’
Her face tightened in shaken disconcertion. ‘Sorry?’
Faint colour demarcating the hard slant of his cheekbones, Santino strode into the lift, hit the button to close the doors and left all his companions behind without even thinking about it. Poppy Bishop’s hair was a vibrant golden auburn and very unusual. Just for a moment under the lights her hair had looked quite dazzling and she had beautiful eyes. For once, although he was quite certain that it would have been something that would have jarred on him, he had not noticed what she was wearing. But he was not attracted to her; of course, he wasn’t.
Poppy was an employee, he reminded himself with relief. Not even if Cleopatra joined the staff would Santino have allowed himself to be tempted into an unsuitable liaison. That stupid card was still on his mind, that was all! He began with cool logic to list all Poppy’s flaws. She was only about five feet three and he preferred tall blondes. She was twenty-one and he liked women closer to his own age. She had such dreadful dress sense that she stuck out like a canary bird among the suits at a meeting. She talked too much, knocked things over, messed up royally on the computer on a regular basis. He was a technical whizz, a perfectionist, she was an accident that just kept on happening. She was also the kind of woman men married and he would die single. The prospect of the funeral he had to attend that afternoon was stressing him out. What he ought to have was a drink.
Poppy hurried back to the marketing department and went to fetch Desmond’s coffee. She was in turmoil. Why had Santino stared at her that way? Or had that just been her imagination? She was so ridiculously obsessed with him that her mind had probably played tricks on her. Why had she got this horrible suspicion that he knew she had sent that card? How could he possibly know? He couldn’t read minds, could he?
And why had Craig attacked her that way when he usually behaved as though she was beneath his lofty notice? For goodness’ sake, what had got into him? Craig Belston never deigned to speak to her, at least not since that first week when he had asked her out and badgered her to the point where she had been tactless enough to say that she had been warned about him. ‘The old dropped hanky routine’? Did Craig suspect her feelings for Santino? But how could he?
It was madness to let her discomfiture about that wretched card work her up into a state, Poppy told herself in annoyance. Short of dusting the card for fingerprints and matching them to hers, there was no way that anyone could identify the sender. As for Craig, well, he had few friends at Aragone Systems and was pleasant to even fewer. Brainy he might be, but he had a nasty tongue and a habit of smirking at other people’s misfortunes. So it would be foolish to read anything into those snide comments of his… Wouldn’t it?
CHAPTER TWO
‘NO…NO…NO!’ Desmond urged Poppy in loud dismay. ‘Just leave the coffee over there. I prefer to stretch my arm out!’
Although Poppy smiled like a good sport at the tide of amusement that those pointed instructions roused, she was cut to the bone. Hadn’t she suffered enough yet for the episode of the spilt coffee? A lecture about safety measures with liquids from the HR manager had set the seal on her shame while she had also been reminded of her first formal warning, which had resulted from poor timekeeping in her very first month at Aragone Systems. ‘One more strike and you’re out,’ had been the message she’d received after the coffee incident and she really was determined not to make any further blunders.
‘What are you wearing to the party tonight?’
Grateful for the interruption, Poppy glanced up with a smile from the unexciting graph she had been tinkering with on her monitor. It was Lesley, a tall, slim brunette on the market research team. ‘Nothing special. Just a dress.’
She listened while Lesley described her own outfit. She knew that without a doubt it would enhance every slender curve of the other woman’s enviable figure. As Desmond informed her that he wanted the graphs she had been working on for a meeting, she hurried into printing them, relieved that she had finished the last one in time.
‘I heard that Santino got a valentine card,’ Lesley continued, and as Poppy tensed she added, ‘I was more surprised to hear he didn’t get a whole sackful! I bet it was from his ex trying to get back in with him.’
‘Ex?’ Poppy queried, relaxing again.
‘Don’t you read the gossip columns? He dumped Caro Hartley a month back,’ Lesley informed her with authority. ‘I didn’t think that would last long. She’s quite a party girl and I suspect Santino got bored fast. He’s a very clever guy.’
‘I’m sure he’ll not be on his own for long,’ Poppy remarked, anxious eyes on Desmond, her boss, as he treated the printed graphs to a cursory appraisal. Had she changed the colouring of the one she had first done in pink for her own amusement? Yes, she was sure she remembered doing so. Even so, she didn’t lose her tension until he had slotted them into a folder.
Never, ever again would she play around with the colours of the graphs, she swore as she went into the cloakroom to freshen up at lunchtime. If it killed her, she was going to erase her every bad habit. She gave herself only the most fleeting look in the mirror. At least she had grown out of the spots and her skin now looked great. But her rippling auburn curls were a constant source of aggravation, for the little tendrils that gathered round her face ensured that her hair never looked as tidy as other women’s. However, cut short her riotous curls were even harder to handle, so she kept her hair long and wore it clipped back at the nape of her neck.
Her unfashionable curves were the biggest challenge, she conceded ruefully. She was in dire need of a new, inspiring diet. The banana regime had put her off bananas for life, and the cabbage soup one had ensured that she felt queasy just passing vegetables on a market stall. No, it was back to boring old salad and yogurt, which worked but meant that she spent most of her time fantasising about food and feeling so hungry she could have munched on wood.
When she returned to her desk, the email icon was flicking on her monitor and she opened it, hoping it was a cheering communication from a friend.
‘Pink graphs are inappropriate in a business environment,’ ran the email.
Poppy looked at the message in shock and then glanced around herself to see if anyone was looking at her, but nobody was. Who had seen her mucking about with that graph before lunch? Who was pulling her leg? It was unsigned and the address was a six-digit number and, as such, anonymous.
‘Says who?’ she typed in and sent the email back.
‘I like graphs in dark colours.’
‘That’s boring,’ Poppy told her correspondent.
‘Rational. Pink is a distraction.’
‘Pink is warm and uplifting,’ she protested in reply, typing at full tilt.
‘Pink is irritating, cute, feminine…inappropriate.’ That awful word, inappropriate again. Her correspondent was a guy, she decided, and certainly not Desmond, who regarded email as a time-wasting exercise and who would surely have gone into orbit the instant he saw a pink graph.
‘How did you see my graph?’ she typed.
‘Stick to the issue.’
Poppy grinned at that rejoinder. Definitely a guy.
‘One more warning and you could be out of work. Be sensible.’ That next message came in fast on the previous one without having given her the chance to respond.
Her grin fell off her lips at supersonic speed. ‘How do you know that?’ she typed.
But this time, infuriatingly, there was no answer. Thinking about her mystery correspondent, Poppy conceded that quite a few people would be aware of those warnings on her employment record. The very first time it had happened she had been so upset, she had talked about it herself and, after the coffee episode, Desmond had been so furious that he had announced his intent to complain about her in such ringing decibels that most of the department had heard him.
Intrigued by those emails, scanning her busy colleagues with intense curiosity, Poppy sent several more to the same address that afternoon but still received no further response. Then she began thinking about the party that evening and wondered what she would wear, since pink had become such a controversial issue…
’I’m amazed that you’re still laying on large supplies of alcohol for your employees.’ Jenna Delsen’s exquisite face emanated shocked disapproval as she scanned the low-lit noisy room full of party revellers. ‘Daddy used to help our staff to get sloshed at our expense, too, but not since I joined the company. Now we have a nice sober supper do. No loud music, no dancing, no drink and everyone behaves.’
‘I like my staff to enjoy themselves. It is only one night a year.’ Santino suppressed the ungenerous thought that the blonde could be a pious, penny-pinching misery, for she had been welcome company at the funeral that afternoon and he had enjoyed dining with her and her father at their home afterwards.
‘I suppose that’s the extrovert Italian in you. You threw some very riotous parties when we were at Oxford together.’ Jenna gave him a flirtatious, rather coy look as she reminded him that they had known each other since university.
In receipt of that appraisal, all Santino’s defensive antenna hit alarm status. ‘Let me get you a drink,’ he suggested faster than the speed of light, already mentally listing the unattached executives present on the slender but hopeful thought that she might take a shine to one of them instead. They had always been friends, never anything else.
Jenna curved a slender hand round his arm when he returned to her side. ‘I have a confession to make…for the whole of the time we were at uni together, I was in love with you.’
Santino conceded that what had started out as an unusual day, and had gravitated into being a very long day, was now assuming nightmarish proportions. ‘You’re kidding me.’
‘No.’ Jenna fixed her very fine green eyes on him in speaking condemnation. ‘And you never noticed. In four long years, you never once noticed that I felt rather more for you than the average mate.’
In one unappreciative gulp, Santino tipped back an entire shot of brandy meant to be savoured at leisure. He was transfixed and trapped by that censorious speech. There was no polite or kind way of telling her that, beautiful and intellectually challenging as she was—for she had a first-class brain—there had been no spark whatsoever on his side of the fence.
‘And I had to sit back and watch you chasing girls who couldn’t hold a candle to me,’ Jenna continued with withering bite.
‘Oddly enough, I don’t recall you sitting home alone many nights,’ Santino countered sardonically.
‘Once I understood that I was in love with a commitment-phobe, I trained myself to regard you only as a friend—’
‘Jenna…when you first met me, I was eighteen. Most teenage boys are commitment-phobes.’ Santino groaned, thinking what an absolute pain she seemed to have become, still nourishing her sense of injustice over the unwitting blow he had dealt to her ego so many years after the event. ‘I was no better and no worse than most—’
‘Oh, don’t be so modest,’ Jenna trilled in sharp interruption. ‘All the girls were crazy about you! You were spoilt for choice but you deliberately chose women whom you knew would only be short-term distractions. You always protected yourself from the threat of a steady relationship and you’re still doing it!’
When Santino went back to the bar for another drink, Jenna was so taken up with her discourse that she accompanied him. Santino’s temper was on a very short leash and his second drink went the way of the first. He was cursing the innate good manners that had persuaded him that he ought to invite the blonde to accompany him to the party. He was thinking of what a very much better time he would have had mixing with his staff. Then he glanced across the room and saw a figure hovering in the doorway and the remainder of Jenna’s barbed criticisms washed off him because he no longer heard them.
Noticing that she had lost his attention, Jenna followed the direction of his gaze. She saw a youthful redhead with a vibrant mane of curly hair. Small, very pretty, but not at all Santino’s style. Yet Santino was so busy watching the girl that he had forgotten Jenna was there.
Scanning the crowded room, Poppy finally picked out Lesley in her distinctive white and silver dress and began to move towards her, an apologetic smile on her lips. She was a little late but then some of her colleagues had opted to stay on in the city centre and warm up in a bar before attending the party. But Poppy loved getting ready to go out at home and had known that she didn’t have enough of a head for drink to have sustained a lengthy pre-party session.
‘I really like that dress,’ Lesley said warmly as she flipped out a seat for Poppy’s occupation. ‘Where did you buy it?’
‘It’s not new. I got it for my brother’s wedding,’ Poppy confided, and then added in an undertone. ‘To be honest, it’s my bridesmaid’s dress—’
‘I wish my best friend had let me wear an outfit like that for her big day. At least I could have worn it again afterwards.’ Lesley admired the strappy green dress that flattered Poppy’s shapely figure and slim length of leg, then drew Poppy’s attention to the drinks already lined up in readiness for her, pointing out that she was very much behind the rest of them, before continuing, ‘It must have been an unusual wedding.’
‘My sister-in-law, Karrie, wanted a casual evening do. She wore a short dress, too.’
Poppy’s attention, which had been automatically roaming the room in search of a certain tall, dark male, finally found Santino where he stood by the bar with a spectacular blonde woman clinging to his arm. She lifted the drink that Lesley had nudged into her fingers and sipped it to ease her tight throat, but she resisted the urge to ask the chatty brunette if she knew who Santino’s companion was. After all, what was the point? Did it make any difference who it was? And it was none of her business either.
Indeed, she should not even be looking at Santino Aragone, Poppy told herself guiltily, because looking was only feeding her obsession. Having thought over Craig’s sneering remarks earlier that day, Poppy had finally faced the unhappy fact that he at least suspected that she was rather too attached to their mutual employer. That conclusion had unnerved her for Craig’s reputation for making others the butt of his cruel sense of humour was well-known. So, she would have to be more circumspect in the future, for languishing like a lovelorn teenager over Santino could easily make her a laughing stock at work. In fact, she would be much better devoting her brain to sussing out the mystery identity of her email correspondent, who had to at least like her to have gone to the trouble of trying to give her a warning word of advice, she reflected.
‘Who is she?’ Jenna enquired very drily of Santino.
‘Who are you talking about?’ Santino asked with a magnificent disregard for the direction of his own gaze.
‘The little redhead with the pre-Raphaelite hair…the one whom you’ve been watching for at least three solid minutes,’ Jenna completed between gritted teeth.
‘I’m not watching her,’ Santino murmured with cool disdain.
‘But even though you employ hundreds of young women you know instantly who I’m referring to,’ Jenna noted with rapier-sharp feminine logic.
‘Did you get out of the wrong side of the bed this morning?’ Santino drawled with his sudden flashing smile. ‘Exactly why are you trying to wind me up?’
‘Before I tell you—’ Jenna gave him a grudging smile of approbation for finally registering that she had been set on evening the score for past injuries ‘—you tell me who the redhead is and I will give you ten very good reasons why one should never, ever date an employee.’
Santino drained his drink again and dealt her a mocking glance. ‘I don’t need them, Jenna. All ten of them are in my mind right now.’
Returning to her table after chatting to various friends, Poppy sat down again. Lesley and two other women were chatting about Santino’s date, who was evidently the daughter of the owner of Delsen Industries.
‘What do you think of Jenna?’ another, less welcome voice enquired.
Poppy’s head swivelled, her startled gaze only then registering that Craig Belston had joined their table during her absence. That question had been directed specifically at her and she was gripped by discomfiture. ‘Why would I think anything of her?’ she answered with a determined smile. ‘All the boss’s girlfriends are incredible beauties.’
‘Now why did I get the idea that you mightn’t have noticed that?’ Craig rested his pale blue probing eyes on Poppy and her mouth ran dry.
‘Santino’s leggy ladies are rather hard to miss.’ Lesley shot a frowning glance at Santino’s PA and added, ‘Come on. You’ve been keeping us all in suspense since we finished work. Who sent Santino the naff card?’
Poppy froze and then gulped down her drink as her colour heightened.
‘Did I mention that it was an inside job?’ Craig murmured with tormenting slowness and Poppy’s heart skipped an entire beat, her every tiny muscle pulling rigid.
‘No, you darned well didn’t!’ one of the other women piped up in exasperation. ‘Who on earth working for Santino would be daft enough to send him a valentine card swearing undying love? I mean, come on, yes, he’s hugely fanciable, but he’s the last guy around who would respond to that kind of blatant invitation from a member of staff.’
‘You said the card wasn’t signed,’ Lesley reminded Craig. ‘So how could you know it was sent by someone in Aragone Systems? It didn’t come through the internal mail, did it?’
‘Just assume that in this particular case we’re talking about someone who’s not very bright,’ Craig invited, and Poppy’s tummy began to churn where she sat. ‘Someone who assumed that only a name would expose her identity.’
‘You recognised the handwriting!’ someone exclaimed.
‘I really don’t think I like this conversation very much,’ Lesley remarked suddenly. ‘Valentine cards are just for fun.’
‘It wasn’t the handwriting. It was a combination of errors,’ Craig explained to the table at large. ‘A distinctive perfume, a predilection for a particular colour and a love of flowers.’
Poppy was now as pale as milk and feeling physically ill with humiliation. She could not bring herself to look at any of her companions and silence greeted Craig’s last explanation, an awful uneasy silence that left Poppy’s nerves screaming and her skin clammy.
‘Now who do we all know who wears jasmine scent?’ Craig murmured.
‘I don’t know anyone who wears that,’ Lesley chimed in, and the two other women followed her lead to say the exact same. Painfully conscious that her companions were trying to throw sand in Craig’s eyes and deflect him from his target, Poppy had to grit her teeth to prevent herself from lifting her drink and throwing it at her tormentor.
At the other side of the room, Jenna was still in full confiding mode, but Santino was having a hard time dragging his brooding scrutiny from his PA’s smug expression and Poppy’s pale, rigid face.
‘So, I hope you’ll forgive me for giving you a rough time tonight,’ Jenna murmured in dulcet continuation, ‘but I always promised myself that some day I would tell you the truth and make you sweat for a few minutes. Will you still come to my engagement party?’
Taken aback, Santino frowned. ‘Engagement party?’
‘I’m so grateful I’m not in love with you any more.’ Jenna sighed. ‘Didn’t you hear me telling you that I’m getting engaged to David Marsh and that he’s picking me up here in five minutes?’
It had been a long time since Santino had heard that much good news in one sentence; he was genuinely fond of Jenna and relief on his own behalf and pleasure on her behalf sliced through his growing tension. Realising that the blonde had merely been set on claiming a small slice of revenge for his past indifference to her, he flung back his handsome dark head and started to laugh with genuine appreciation.
The sight of Santino splitting his sides with laughter, and Jenna equally convulsed and holding onto him for support, filled Poppy with paranoia. Immediately, she assumed that Santino had told the blonde about her pathetic card and that they were laughing at her, for if Craig had guessed that she was the culprit he was certain to have told Santino. Feeling as if she had just had her heart ripped out while she was still breathing, Poppy nonetheless rose from her seat with as much dignity as she could muster, for she could not bear sitting there playing poor little victim for Craig’s benefit any longer.
‘You’re a real Sherlock Holmes, Craig,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m very impressed.’
Poppy walked away fast. Tears were stinging her eyes and blurring her vision, but she kept her head high and that was her final undoing. She didn’t see the small table laden with drinks in her path. She hit it with such force that the table tipped over with an enormous crash that seemed to turn every head in the room. For an instant, Poppy hovered, staring in horror at the smashed glass and liquid everywhere, not to mention the startled dancers leaping back from the mess she had created. Then her control just snapped and she fled.
‘Now,’ Lesley said icily to Craig, who was sniggering at Poppy’s noisy exit, ‘while you’re wondering why Poppy’s friends aren’t rushing after her to offer support, watch Santino and learn…’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Upsetting Poppy is not a career-enhancing move in Aragone Systems. You see, if you were a woman and in touch with the real newsbreaking gossip in this building, you would already know that Santino fancies the socks off Poppy, too—’
‘Rubbish!’ Craig snapped. ‘He binned the card!’
‘Did you check the bin at the end of the day?’ someone enquired drily.
‘Santino doesn’t know what’s hit him yet,’ one of the other women commented with immense superiority. ‘He’s more at home with his keyboard than his emotions.’
‘But when a bloke like Santino, who likes everything done by the book, starts telling poor Desmond that pink graphs are fresh and creative, he’s in very deep,’ Lesley completed.
In companionable and expectant silence, the three women then focused pointedly on Santino, who had stridden forward the instant that Poppy had sent the table flying. He swung round to speak to Jenna Delsen and not thirty seconds later left in the same direction as Poppy. Witnessing that demonstration, Craig turned the greyish colour of putty and groaned out loud.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN Poppy emerged from the function room at full tilt, several women were entering the cloakroom across the foyer and she wheeled away in the opposite direction.
Finding herself by the lifts, she stabbed the call button with a frantic hand and gulped back a sob. She had to find a quiet corner to pull herself back together again. Selecting the marketing floor, she slumped back against the lift’s cold steel wall as the doors closed. Wrapping her arms round herself, she hugged herself tight. But it was no help, no comfort, because all she could think about was what a fool she had made of herself.
When she saw the dark reception area on the marketing floor, it looked eerie and she hit the door button again in a hurry and tried another floor. Her eyes flooded with burning tears. Of course, Santino Aragone would have laughed when he was told who had sent that card. Everybody would be laughing! After all, she was just a junior member of staff, the plump little redhead Craig had nastily labelled, ‘Tinkerbell’ and hardly competition for the gorgeous women Santino specialised in. Why on earth hadn’t common sense intervened before she’d posted that stupid card to Santino at the office? Didn’t she have sense like other people? Her throat aching, she could no longer hold back the tears and a sob escaped her. How could she have exposed herself to that extent?
In the foyer below, Santino was watching the lights that indicated which floor the lift was at. The light flicked through the levels in descent again, made several brief stops and then sank as low as the floor above before beginning to ascend again. When the lift finally reached the executive level, he waited in taut suspense to see if it moved on again.
When the doors opened on the top floor, Poppy blinked in confusion for she had lost track. But low lights were burning and the floor was not in darkness like the others. Dimly recalling that Santino’s secretary had a private washroom, Poppy stumbled out. She needed to tidy herself up and fix her face before she could go home.
But shock was still setting in hard on Poppy. Only when it was far too late to change things did she see her mistake. She should have toughed out Craig’s insinuations. Instead she had fallen right into his trap and confirmed his suspicions. He couldn’t have proved anything, yet she had virtually confessed by saying what she had and leaving the table.
Taunting, wounding images were now bombarding her mind, increasing her distress. She had left the party with all the cool of a baby elephant let loose in a drawing room. She saw Craig’s self-satisfied smile, Santino laughing, the stiff, disapproving faces of the other women. Craig might as well have stripped her naked in public. Her trembling hands braced on the edge of the washroom vanity unit and, letting her head hang for she couldn’t stand to look at herself in the mirror when she hated herself so much for her own stupidity, she began to sob.
Santino had never made it from the lift to his secretary’s office so fast. But then those heartbreaking sobs acted on him like a shriek alarm. He would usually have gone quite some distance to avoid a crying woman, but the curious automatic pilot now overruling his normal caution ensured that he strode right through the open door of the washroom and gathered Poppy straight into a comforting embrace.
The sheer shock value of a pair of masculine arms closing round her when she had believed that she was alone provoked a startled cry from Poppy. Then she looked up and focused on Santino and even more shock froze her from head to toe. Bronze-coloured eyes set below lush black lashes were trained to hers, the lean, dark contours of his handsome features taut with concern.
‘It’s OK,’ he soothed in his gorgeous accented drawl.
‘Is it?’ Poppy’s voice emerged on the back of a breathless sob, for she could not have got oxygen into her lungs at that instant had her life depended on it. What was happening should have felt unreal but, in actuality, being in the circle of Santino’s arms felt very real and very right. Furthermore, it was something she had been dreaming of for so long that no power on earth could have sent her into retreat.
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Линн Грэхем
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 Boss′s Valentine, электронная книга автора Линн Грэхем на английском языке, в жанре современная зарубежная литература