Bought by Her Italian Boss (10 page)

She trusted him, she realized. It was a weird sort of trust. He could and probably would hurt her, but he wasn’t making any false promises not to. He wouldn’t lie to her, even if the truth was harsh and unpalatable.

His governance over her world proved very advantageous when she made her statement to the police, too. Had she been merely a midlevel bank employee with no connections or legal team behind her, her complaint probably wouldn’t have been such a priority, but she was assured charges against her masseuse would be forthcoming.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. There was a very short press conference announcing the birth of Paolo’s son, Vito’s assumption of his cousin’s position for the next few weeks and he confirmed rumors that a formal internal investigation had been launched against an unnamed, but high profile account.

“For privacy and legal reasons, we can’t expound on that,” Vito said.

Then he sent a look to Gwyn that said everything his mouth did not. His expression spoke of regret and guardianship and the suppressed anger of a warrior who must wait for the war. Which might have been a bit of overacting for the cameras, but she thought it had its seeds in what he had said earlier about Jensen not going unpunished.

And she was touched all over again.

The press conference had been held at a hotel where Vito was due to meet with various heads of the bank’s branches before attending a mixer with those same people, their spouses and an exclusive list of their top-tier investors.

“It was scheduled a year ago, long before any of this hit the fan,” he said, sending her to a penthouse suite with an entourage who coached her on everything from staying on message—
The investigation is ongoing. I can’t comment.
—to how to lengthen her lashes most effectively.

She was mentally and emotionally exhausted when they all finally left her alone, seriously wishing she could go to bed instead of having to go out.

Then Vito materialized from the second bedroom like a freshly groomed panther, his black tuxedo a second skin, the white of his pleated shirt and bow tie a blaze that set off his swarthy skin tone, hollow cheeks and straight black brows. His hair, just a shade too long to be a conservative business cut, gave him the perfect balance between decadent playboy and powerful executive.

His silk pocket square exactly matched the reflective, lake blue of her gown.

She’d never worn anything so elegant or daring, with its strapless bodice and low back. The sweep of the skirt was gathered in loose edges, forming a slit over her left leg, and was ruched together with a sparkling broach on her hip, making her feel graceful and sexy at once.

She felt sensual. Beautiful. And, as she stood looking at the beautiful man before her, she felt for the first time like she was his match.

Vito was trying to make it to the end of a trying day. He understood the concerns of those around him, the questioning of his choice in female companionship, but he couldn’t understand why he was so angered by all of it. He kept telling himself it was the bank he wanted to defend. To protect.

But it was Gwyn. He wanted to sweep a sword through the air to cut down all this resistance against his being with her.

And this was why.

She stood before him like a water deity, wearing that swirl of river blue and sapphires that gleamed like bubbles against her neck and ears. Her hair was caught in a low knot against the back of her neck, wisps framing her introspective expression, mysterious and enthralling.

She was a prize, a weapon, an illicit substance. She was something he wanted. Badly.

His libido was becoming a monster, first hooked by spending nearly every moment with her for the past forty-eight hours, then feeling her absence as he’d pushed her to the sidelines to weather attacks from close quarters.

It had left him keyed up, mood balanced on a knife’s edge, the outlaw in him looking to ignore any sort of rules or propriety and simply take her, make her his. This wasn’t the first time he’d chafed against the constraints he placed upon himself, but he always maintained this veneer of civility painted onto him by the family who had kept him alive, safe and living within the law.

She didn’t want cheap gratification, he reminded himself, and heard Paolo again.
If she’s a victim, don’t make her more of one
. He kept remembering that look in her eye as they’d played house for an hour with Paolo’s children. If only the world understood how laughable it was to think
she
was inferior to
him
.

“You look nice,” he said gruffly, trying not to let the vision she made break the shackles controlling him. He moved to hold the door. “Let’s get this over with.”

She made a noise that might have been one of injury and muttered, “That’s what she said,” as she passed him into the hall.

“
What
did you just say?” he asked tightly.

Gwyn grappled her feelings back into their box, telling herself to quit taking his lack of real interest in her as a slight.

“It’s just something people say. One of those online memes,” she said, striding purposefully beside him toward the elevator. “Why are you so grouchy?”

The hotel was pure opulence, the carpets cushioning each step, the rail dripping leafy plants in terraced layers down to the lobby forty stories below.

He pressed the call button for the elevator and said, “I’m not.”

She glanced around, saw they were alone and said, “You know, we may not have much, but I thought we had honesty. If you don’t want to tell me, say it’s none of my business. But don’t lie.”

His gaze widened at her audacity, making her swallow. But honestly. She was doing everything she was told, letting him treat her like a puppet after she’d already been misused. What else did he want from her?

The elevator arrived and an older couple stepped off, leaving them to enter the empty car alone, replacing what might have been an air of relaxed camaraderie with a charged energy that bounced off the refined walls.

At least it wasn’t one of those glass boxes that made you feel airsick as you descended. It was red velvet and had mirrored panels split by a flat rectangle of gold for a handrail. A chipper, understated soft shoe drifted from the speakers, sounding incongruous.

“If you must have the truth,
cara
, I’ve been warned several times today that our relationship is ill-advised,” he said, stabbing at a floor number, then thumbing hard into the door close button. “I know they’re right, but I don’t care. I want you, anyway. If we’d stayed in the room, I would have kept you there.”

“Really?” she derided. “I thought I just asked you not to lie to me? Because you’ve never once acted like you wanted anything to do with me.”

“Ha!” He punched the side of his fist into the red emergency button, stalling the elevator with a jar and a short buzz, making her stagger and reach for the rail. “The very fact that you can’t read the signs tells me how ill-suited you are for an affair. But, just so we’re crystal clear,
cara
, I don’t care about that, either.
I want you.
”

She couldn’t look away from him, fascinated by the way his gold-brown eyes shot glittering shards of bronze.

He stepped closer, setting one hand then the other on the wall next to her head, leaning in. “I wanted you when you smiled across the lobby and you were already under suspicion, so I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. I wanted you when I looked at this...” His boiling metal gaze slid down her front, scalding her. “And I knew every other man in the world was looking at you, too.” His gaze flashed up, bright and piercing. “I want to kill each and every one of them,” he added tightly. “Especially Jensen.”

Her knuckle bumped his side and she realized her hand had lifted of its own volition, moving to press against her chest and keep her heart inside its cage. It slammed hard and fast.

He looked at her splayed fingers. “Scared?”

“I honestly didn’t think you...” Her voice trailed off as his expression hardened with accusation.

“How could you not know? You look at me constantly. I
feel
it. How could you not be aware that I’m watching you, too?” He picked up her hand and pressed it to his own chest, where his heart punched against her palm. “You felt this in the car, when just my touch made you scream with pleasure. How could you not know it’s the same for me?”

Emotion pressed at the backs of her eyes and thickened her throat.

He watched her struggle to swallow and cupped his hand under her jaw, palm against her throbbing artery, thumb caressing the hollow below her ear.

“The only thing holding me back,
mia bella
, is your indecision. Have you made up your mind yet? Do you want cheap, physical gratification?” The bitterness in his tone scraped at something in her, making her squirm in a kind of guilt.

She had hurt him with that? She searched his eyes, the windows into his soul. “What else would it be?” she asked in a near whisper.

His lips hardened and his brow lowered in consternation. “I don’t know. But it would be a hell of a lot more than that.”

She lifted her hand to the side of his face, drew him in and pressed a kiss of apology onto his mouth. It was perfect and sweet and healing.

And a mistake.

With a moan from her and a tortured groan from him, they laced themselves together, mouths opening with instant passion, dragged together like magnets meeting its attractor. His fingers dug into her back, her bottom, crushing her close. She arched into his steely body, loving his strength and the smell of him and that firm evidence of arousal that was not purely incidental, but his reaction to
her
.

He pressed her into the wall with his body, stilling the rock of her hips with a hard pin of his own. “You want me,” he said against her lips. It was a demand for confirmation.

“I do,” she admitted with an ache of helpless need.

“Now?”

“Wh-what?” She opened her eyes to see a fiery passion in him that was barely controlled. This man who seemed to have command of the entire world was so affected by her, he was looking at her with a kind of desperation. She thought she could feel each pulse pound in him, rocking his entire being.

“Here?” she asked. She was achy and heavy and ready. The thought of waiting until they were upstairs—it was too far.

This was insanity. Complete insanity.

“No?” He shuffled closer, feet between hers, one hand going to the slit in her skirt, finding her bare thigh and stroking across her skin like magic. “If not here, say so now.”

She might have hung on to a shred of decorum if he hadn’t found the front of her lace undies and traced lightly while his mouth found the side of her neck at the same time. Need flooded through her at that light caress. She gasped with longing, clinging to his shoulders, trying to keep her knees locked so she wouldn’t wilt right to the floor.

“Open my pants,” he said, breath hot on her skin while the nibble of his lips made her shiver with pleasure and that exploring touch worked past the edge of lace into wetness and need. She made a guttural sound of pure excitement as he circled and pressed the swollen bud he found. His other hand was gathering her skirt out of the way, lifting her bare thigh to his hip, opening her to his flagrant touch.

“We can’t,” she gasped, but her hands worked the button on his pants, the fly. She had never tunneled her hand into the heated front of a man’s trousers, but there was his shape filling her palm, naked and hot and silky. He was commando, shockingly bare to her touch, smooth with a graze of rough hair at the base, so steely and thickly aroused she gasped and clenched in anticipation.

He bent his knees, urging her to line him up as he shifted her underwear to the side. He traced his thick tip along her seam, parted, sliding easily against her then probing. “Do I need a condom?”

Late for that, wasn’t it? She was dying! Panting with excitement.

“I’m on the pill,” she managed to say, moving in invitation. She wanted him so badly.
Now.

Their breaths mingled. His nostrils flared as he found her opening and pressed with more purpose. Nerves made her stiffen slightly, but she was eager, anxious as she looked into his eyes, wanting him to like it, wanting this to be good.

“Oh,” she whispered as he pushed the tip in, stretching her. Her gaze clouded and her breaths grew uneven. When she clenched on him, little shock waves of pleasure jolted through her. Her eyelids grew heavy and wanted to close.

He pressed farther in, his weight driving her against something that dug into her back. She wriggled, making a noise of discomfort. “The rail—”

He smoothly lifted her, one hand going under her bottom where he balanced her above that infernal rail and then he was firmly seated all the way in, eye to eye with her. It was incredibly intimate. Man and woman. Steel and silk. Their panting breaths humid against each other’s lips.

“Hold on to me,” he rasped.

She closed her legs around his waist, twined her arms over his shoulders.

He moved, watching her expression as he withdrew and returned, driving in deep, holding there a moment, then dragging out slow, tantalizing her to new heights, arousing her with each thrust. Then he built the tempo to swift thrusts that were exciting and delicious and sent her racing up the slopes of need.

She clung to him with every part of her. He was hard everywhere, tense and determined. Her lips ached to be kissed, but she needed air. She couldn’t look away from his gaze, watchful, waiting, demanding. It was too wild, too erotic, too scorchingly fast. She was there, right there, shuddering and flying apart. Finally closing her eyes as the pleasure detonated into something otherworldly.

A deeply animalistic noise left him as he arched deep and pulsed inside her, holding her in that state of ecstasy.

She gloried in the moment, body electrified as they completely possessed each other, united in this moment of culmination.

CHAPTER EIGHT

G
WYN
COULDN
’
T
BELIEVE
she had let him do that to her. Her legs were still trembling as she joined him inside the ballroom, having slipped into the ladies’ room the minute they left the elevator to recover herself.

“
Cara
, please meet some friends of mine,” he said, settling his arm around her as he introduced her.

It was different. She was different and they were different. Her world had been upended all over again. The sexual awareness was still there, but instead of being a sharp, unmet need, it was a deep, perilous knowledge. She knew what her body was capable of. He did. They both knew what he could do to her, how he could strip her of willpower and blind her with desire. She wondered if she had really done the same to him because he didn’t seem as affected.

His arm sat heavier on her, more possessive, but when his glance came into her eyes, his held the light of memory and male satisfaction, but none of her wariness.

She was suffering all the same crush and attraction and fascination, but it was even more painful now. Before, she had yearned for him to match this feeling. Now she knew it didn’t matter if he did. She was lost regardless.

It made the stares and the curled lips and the dismissive way people treated her as he introduced her all the harder to bear.

She said nothing, still wondering how on earth she would survive Vito let alone the rest of all that had happened. It made her desperate for reassurance, but he was no help, standing here looking indifferent, letting one of his executives from New York talk his ear off about some policy Vito had assigned him to write.

To her, it sounded a lot like a guy trying to impress the boss by telling him how hard he was working, rather than actually doing the work.

Meanwhile, Gwyn realized she knew the woman from the Charleston branch who had just caught her eye. Here would come a gauntlet of questions. This was going to be the worst night of her life.

The moment she tried to excuse herself, however, Vito’s arm hardened on her.

“I should say hello to Ms. Tamsin,” Gwyn said, caught between homesickness and dread. She would love to hear the news on her former colleagues, but really didn’t want to talk about herself.

“I’ll come with you.” Vito nodded at the man who’d been pontificating.

“But I want your advice!” the executive blurted.

Gwyn was so far into her own head, she completely misplaced where she was and who they were talking to. In that moment, a coworker was asking for guidance so she offered it. “Why don’t you use the UK model as a template? Tailor it to US regulations and plug in that bit about interstate transfers. The section on overseas rates should work almost word for word.”

The surprised pause and dumbfounded stares from both men were almost laughable, except Gwyn realized how badly she’d overstepped and instantly wanted to die of embarrassment. She never would have spoken to Oscar Fabrizio or any other higher-up that way. No, she would have done that work for him, she thought privately, and let him take the credit. Such was the life of lower-level administrators.

The executive was taken aback and glanced between her and Vito, as if to say,
Are you going to let your porn star girlfriend talk to me like that?

“Excellent suggestion,” Vito said. “Why reinvent the wheel? I’ll expect to see the draft tomorrow,” he told his executive and walked her away.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“For what?”

“Interjecting like that.”

“Why? You were right. I would have thought of it myself eventually, but I wasn’t really listening. Too busy thinking of something else,” he said with a pointed look that shot sexual heat from her heart to her loins. “I’ve never gone without a condom before. That was exciting.
Grazie, mia bella.
”

Her hand tightened on his sleeve as her knees wobbled, making him smile like a shark.

The rest of the evening was a trial, but she got through it. And when they were leaving, he surprised her by taking her downstairs to a waiting car instead of back up to the penthouse he’d already paid for.

“What about the early morning meetings you have here tomorrow?” She tilted her head at the hotel. “I thought that’s why we were staying here.”

“I want you in my bed.”

Her skin tightened in reaction. “Okay.”

* * *

Vittorio was not a weak or needy man. He loved his family and would certainly be a lesser man without them, but he considered himself a supporter of
them
, not the other way around. He wasn’t a dependent personality, either. He drank a glass of wine most days because it was a cultural habit, not because he was addicted.

Gwyn was another story.

As he tied his tie, he glanced at her sleeping form reflected beyond his shoulder, brunette hair spilled across his pillow where she’d rolled to hug it when he’d risen, murmuring a sleepy and satisfied, “Thank you,” before falling back asleep.

Words she had promised him he would never hear, he thought edgily, still high on the powerful orgasm they’d shared from a very lazy missionary lock in the predawn hour, the paroxysm holding them gasping for long, exquisite moments.

It had been two weeks and, if anything, the chemistry between them was stronger. If he was in her presence, he wanted to touch her. If he touched her, he wanted to have sex with her.

His desire was becoming the sort of all-consuming hunger that he arranged the rest of his life around. If he had other thoughts, they tended to be of the reckoning kind: dark acts of retaliation against Jensen and his cohorts. He wanted justice for Gwyn, but not necessarily the legal kind that would put an end to their reason for being together.

“I’m jealous,” Gwyn said in a soft morning voice that lifted the hairs all over his body.

“Of whom?” he asked, reaching for his suit jacket, shrugging it on like armor.

He’d had these sorts of conversations before, but he had to admit to shock that Gwyn would have any reason to feel possessive. Had he even looked at another woman since meeting her? If he had, it was a comparison that Gwyn always won. Not just in looks, either. If he heard a woman laugh, he thought the sound too sharp or coarse, not the perfect joyful huskiness of Gwyn’s. None seemed to have her same intuitive ability with conversation either, steering seamlessly from business to small talk to current events. His lack of interest in other women might have worried him if his libido hadn’t been showing such vigor and health in bed with this one.

“You,” she answered ruefully, rolling onto her back and throwing her arm over her head. “Going to work.” She touched the headboard, looking up to the pattern her finger found and traced.

Her remark didn’t entirely surprise him. He might have had innumerable mistresses who expected to be supported, but his sisters and the bank’s abundance of female employees told him that many women enjoyed their careers as much as men did. Gwyn was bright and confident and had had clear goals before Jensen had derailed her. A life of leisure was not something she had aspired to—which was yet another side of her character that set her apart and shone a favorable light upon her in his eyes.

It was also why he enjoyed supporting her. She didn’t expect to be spoiled so her reaction was priceless when he collared her with precious stones and shackled her with gold bracelets. Her protests against his generosity were refreshing, her newness to belonging to a man endearing.

He moved to the bed and lowered to hitch his hip beside hers, splaying his hand over the rumpled sheet that covered her belly. “I thought you enjoyed the art exhibit yesterday?” He had liked watching her face light with enthusiasm as she had told him about it last night.

“I did. I’m not sure your bodyguards did, though.” She covered his hand, traced her light touch over the backs of his fingers, sending a ripple of pleasure down his back, as if he was a wolf being petted by a maiden.

“Well-secured places like art galleries make their job easy. They’re happy to follow you around one.” That wasn’t the real issue, he could tell, but he didn’t know what else she needed to hear. Perhaps, “Rather than go back to Milan when I finish here, why don’t we take a few days on the water?” he suggested. “I’ll hire a yacht.”

Her gaze met his. “I feel like I’m back in my childhood, moving around before I can establish myself, not even trying to make friends because there’s no point.”

He frowned, having supposed that she connected with her friends online when he wasn’t around, but she never mentioned any conversations or told anecdotes, he realized. She’d already told him that the family she did have was a very loose tie. She was still too embarrassed to speak directly to her stepfather and was keeping to short texts with her stepbrother.

He couldn’t imagine living in that sort of social desert. He had curtailed a lot of his nonbusiness dinners because of work pressures and was sidestepping family occasions to avoid awkward questions about his relationship with Gwyn, but he was Italian. An active social life was in his biological makeup.

“Why did you move so often?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “Every reason. Lost job, better job, good luck, bad luck, harassment, location... I think the biggest reason was that Mom had itchy feet. That’s why she married my dad, to move to America. She and Henry were going to travel once I finished school.” Her fingertips smoothed under his cuff, tracing the band of his watch. “I wanted to see the world, too, but by moving to a new city and settling in, so I could absorb the culture and become part of the community.”

Whatever friendships she’d made in Milan had been blown apart by the photos and her termination. He hadn’t forbidden her from contacting any of her coworkers or neighbors, but she had isolated herself and he’d been pleased to keep things simple. He wondered now if he should make more of an effort to draw her into his own circles, but to what end? This was a temporary affair, not a relationship.

And knowing their time together was finite, he found himself very unwilling to share her.

“No news from Paolo about how much longer the investigation will take?” she asked.

“No,” he said so abruptly her eyes widened and a shadow of injury crept across the back of her gaze. He mentally kicked himself for revealing the brute that he was, but her question almost sounded as though she was anxious to end things and he wasn’t ready.

“Living in limbo is hard,” she said in stiff explanation, trying to sit up.

He gathered her tense form into his lap, looking at the pugnacious glare she tilted up at him. He pressed a kiss against her firmly closed mouth.

“I’m hearing you,” he told her, thinking about those times when he caught a faraway, melancholy expression on her face. He had put those moments down to her distress over the photos, but there was more to it, he realized now. She was a woman longing to put down roots. “I’m not dismissing you. But there’s nothing I can do right now.”

“And nothing I can do either, apparently.”

“Fold my socks?” he suggested, since she often nagged him to pick his up.

She snapped her teeth at him in playful retaliation.

He kissed her again and this time she softened and kissed him back.

But he was still thinking about her discontent when he broke from his meeting with the Hong Kong consortium and picked up a message from Paolo:
Fabrizio is asking for leniency in exchange for full disclosure. We could see charges against Jensen early next week.

The tide was turning.

The need for their affair was almost over.

* * *

Gwyn was in a type of shock as they returned to Vito’s penthouse less than a week later, mind still caught up in all that had just been said at the press conference and after it.
Be careful what you wish for
, she thought bleakly. She had been anxious to embark on her future and here it was.

“I wish to say a special thank-you to Miss Ellis for her patience and unwavering integrity during this entire process,” Paolo had said. “Due to the sensitive nature of the investigation, we asked her not to make any public comments during a time that has obviously been very distressing for her.”

The cameras’ lenses had shifted to where she had stood next to Vito, trying to capture her reaction, which she had fought to keep noncommittal. Inside, she’d been screaming in agony and still was. This was it.
The End.

Paolo’s private words to her afterward were what had really done her in. Handlers had moved them into an anteroom and scattered. Vito had stepped away to call his assistant with some instructions.

“Grazie,”
Paolo had said to Gwyn, not showing any reaction when he shook her hand and found it clammy. “We will pursue defamation charges on your behalf and that could result in prison time for Jensen, but I realize that does nothing to compensate you for all you’ve lost. Vito promised you a settlement,
sì
? Hire a good lawyer and begin those negotiations immediately. I want a number so I can add it to our list of damages when Jensen is tried.”

“Of course,” Gwyn had murmured, as if she had the first idea how to hire any kind of lawyer, let alone a “good” one. Her mind had started buzzing the minute Vito had called her to say he was sending a car and was bursting with a bigger swarm of bees over how abruptly this press conference ended the need for their affair.

She was devastated. Her very nascent and juvenile crush had become something real and deep and heart-wrenching.

She had started to think of his beautiful apartment as her home.

Vittorio had modern tastes and liked space around him. The penthouse had high white ceilings and three bedrooms, one that he used as an office, off a tiled upper hallway that he called a loft. It was nothing so modest as that. It was a second story. The main bathroom had His and Hers powder rooms on opposite ends of a tub that they easily, and frequently, shared. This flat was wall-to-wall understated luxury, from the designer furniture to the kitchen that sparkled with stainless steel functionality, positioned to allow the cook to visit with guests while stirring and chopping.