Bought by Her Italian Boss (6 page)

“Mom met my stepfather while working as a janitor in his office. Travis was
not
impressed by his father’s choice in second wives. He was at university and I moved into his old room for my last year of high school. I guess it was weird for him to suddenly have this geeky girl underfoot whenever he visited his dad. Strangers living in his house.”

She had taken refuge in homework when Travis was around, only emerging to eat dinner where Henry had put her at ease and made her laugh.

“My mother genuinely loved his father,” she said, silently willing Vito to believe her. “She never would have brought me into any man’s home for any reason except to give me a father. I think of Henry that way.” She had to drop her gaze as she admitted, “But the day before their wedding, I overheard Travis warning Henry that we might be gold diggers. I thought his mind would change over time, as he saw that we were just trying to be a family, but a year into their marriage my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I was supposed to move out, go to college, but instead I stayed to help Henry nurse her. I took some online courses, but Mom felt like such a burden on us. Travis didn’t come around much. I know how it looked to him, like Henry was stuck with a pile of medical bills for someone he shouldn’t have to support.”

She stared into the harsh glare of sunlight on the water to sear back the tears gathering in her eyes.

“It was such a raw deal that she finally found a man who loved her, who wanted to take care of her, and she died before she could make a proper life with him. Make him happy.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Vito said, sounding sincere, covering her hand.

She removed her hand, forcing herself to shrug off the bleak sadness.

“I’m very conscious of the fact that Travis thinks I’m only maintaining a relationship with Henry because he has money and I don’t. I never take any when he offers, so letting you swan me in and out of Italian boutiques is not exactly the picture I want to paint so my stepbrother will let me continue visiting the only father I’ve ever had.”

She looked at him, blinking several times to bring her vision back from a wall of white to see his toughened yet brutally handsome expression.

“But I’m hardly in a position to demand the luxury of pride, am I?” she added caustically.

He was watching her with a gravity that made her feel naked all over again. “Would he really stop you from seeing him?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “He loves his father as much as I do and wants to protect him. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. I mean, you’d probably say the same thing to your own father in that situation, wouldn’t you?”

Vito’s stare was inscrutable. He held her gaze for a long time, like he had a million responses and was sifting for the best one. He settled on saying, “Eat,” and lowered his attention to his plate.

Well, that settled that, didn’t it, she thought facetiously, and forced herself to take a bite.

* * *

No matter how sincere Gwyn seemed, Vito couldn’t afford to let himself be swayed emotionally. While she finished getting ready, he reviewed her background more thoroughly.

She interrupted, emerging from the bathroom with a more natural look that was infinitely more beautiful than last night’s smoky eyes and sharp cheekbones and red, glossy lips painted by the stylist. Gwyn had frowned when he’d handed her the pots of color and paint, grumbling about not wanting to look like a ghost if she was going to be photographed. If not for that, she implied, she wouldn’t have accepted the makeup at all.

“What do we do with last night’s clothes?” She looked for them.

“I’ve made arrangements.”

She stared at him.

He lifted his brow in inquiry.

“I borrowed something. I want to be sure it’s returned in good condition,” she said.

“It will be.” He frowned, annoyed by what sounded like a lack of faith, but also seeing yet more evidence of the do-it-myself streak of independence she seemed to have. “I reviewed your file and some other details,” he told her as they left the room.

She looked over her shoulder at him, dismayed, but not fearful. “Like?”

Her financial situation. Her debt level was low, but she had a little, and hadn’t made any significant payments or purchases recently. There had been nothing to red flag her as possessing or spending a sum that might have been embezzled. Instead, he’d found more evidence that she was exactly as she portrayed herself.

“You’ve worked hard for the education and position you’ve attained,” he acknowledged once they were in the privacy of the elevator. “But Fabrizio signed off on your transfer despite there being two candidates with more experience. It supports what you said yesterday, that you might have been recruited because you were green and possibly more likely to let things slide out of ignorance.”

“So you’re willing to believe it based on your own assessment of hard evidence, but nothing I say has any bearing. My word means nothing to you. Isn’t that the story of every woman’s life.” She shrugged on the cloak of righteous anger she’d been wearing since he met her, but he could sense the hurt beneath.

He wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he expected, but he hadn’t expected that. His belief in her
meant
something to her. It made him realize exactly how much power he had over her and he wasn’t sure he was comfortable with it.

Since when did he not embrace power? He loved it!

But he was suddenly confronted with how vulnerable she was. To all the men in her life, but especially to him, right now. It slapped at his conscience, made him think again about her saying he would protect his father. The joke was on her. His real mother had been light-years ahead of his father in social status, belonging to the Donatelli banking clan. His father had been on the bottom of society’s spectrum. A criminal of the vilest order.

He had cold-bloodedly seduced her with an eye to his own gain.

What are
you
doing, Vito?
he chided himself.

He was protecting the bank, he reminded himself. And his blood was decidedly hot when Gwyn’s hand was in his own.

He strolled her through the late morning sun, ignoring the cameras, entering every boutique on the promenade and refusing to leave without making a purchase.

But for a woman who only needed to act enamored to get herself out of trouble, she did a lousy job of it. She wasn’t outright defiant. No, her resistance was subtle enough to give credence to what she had said earlier about not wanting to look like a gold digger. She needed cajoling to enter a change room, pulled a face at the prices and frowned at the growing number of bags he was having sent back to the yacht club.

It was beyond his experience. Every woman he knew enjoyed being spoiled this way, whether sisters, mother or lovers. He had been raised to be chivalrous, and not only owned a sizable number of shares in the bank, but investing was his living. He made more money in a day than he could spend in a week. This was pocket change.

He began taking special care, looking for items that were particularly flattering to her, complimenting her, trying to soften that spine and coax a smile of pleasure out of her. Why couldn’t she relax and see the fun in this?

A motorcycle jacket with a faux fur collar and narrow sleeves that capped the tops of her hands to her knuckles looked genuinely delightful on her. He stood behind her as she eyed it in the mirror.

“It suits you. Makes you look as tough as you are,” he said.

She met his gaze in the mirror. “You do this a lot, don’t you? I honestly didn’t see you as the kind of guy who had to buy his women.”

She might as well have butted that hard head of hers back into his lip and nose. He tightened his hands on her shoulders to freeze her in place.

Her gaze met his again and she saw the danger there, stilling, hand on the zipper of the jacket.

“Be very careful what you say to me,
cara
.”

“You want those vultures out there to believe this,” she said with a small toss of her head to the front of the store, where music was blaring so loudly they could barely hear each other even back here. “I don’t have to. Or does your ego demand that I fall for you for real?”

Once again she had him thinking about a powerful man exploiting a vulnerable young woman.

That wasn’t what this was.

She moved the zipper an inch then shrugged his hands off her shoulders. “Buy it if you think I should have it. I don’t care.”

The hell of it was, he believed her.

* * *

Gwyn watched cute sundresses and silk scarves, two hats and a designer bag that cost the earth all go into colorful boutique bags. Vito told her they’d buy evening gowns in Milan—for what?—but insisted she get trendy jeans, cocktail skirts and flirty tops, lingerie that she flatly refused to let him watch her try on and shoes. Dear Lord, the shoes.

Deep in her most covetous, most materialistic heart, she adored Italian-made shoes. She’d been saving up for a pair, browsing regularly as she debated whether to be practical and buy something she might wear often or ridiculously capricious and own something that would sit in a box in her closet, to be worn on only a few special occasions.

Vito bought her six pairs of very chic, very expensive day shoes and completely dismissed them as, “They’ll do for now.” More, he assured her, would be purchased with the gowns in the city.

She might have protested, but he was already angry with her. That moment at the mirror had made her tremble inside, he’d looked so lethal. At the same time, she knew he wouldn’t hurt her physically. It was her heart, her own ego and self-confidence that were in peril.

Especially because, despite her nastiness, he didn’t let up on his solicitude. They walked from store to store and paparazzi swarmed around them, clicking and flashing and capturing every murmur and expression. One called something particularly disgusting and she flinched.

“Ignore them,” Vito growled, drawing her closer to the shelter of his big body, brushing his lips against the tip of her ear as he spoke, then smoothed his fingers through the tails of her loose hair, caressing her waist, so attentive to her needs.

She imagined she looked deeply smitten every time he touched her like this. That’s why she’d had to insult him and drive a wedge between them. Her response to his pretend seduction was dangerously real. Her nipples tightened when all he did was touch the small of her back. She flushed with desire when she inhaled the scent of his neck.

How was she so comfortable under his touch? That’s what she wanted to know. Normally she was quite standoffish with men. If they so much as took her elbow while they walked her down the street, she found the presumptiveness of it annoying.

Not Vito. Her skin called out for each light graze of contact. She was in a perpetual state of readiness, skin sensitized and aching with anticipation, eager for his merest caress. She wanted him to smother her with his big body. Absorb her.

In some ways it was exhausting. She was incredibly relieved when he pointed to a car with a chauffeur in sunglasses leaning against it, reading his phone. “We’ll take a drive to some viewpoints, see if we can lose these cameras before we head back to the house.”

Their last two boutique bags went into the trunk where the myriad of other purchases were now arranged along with dry cleaner bags holding the clothing they’d worn last night. The man really was a demigod, taking care of the dreary details of life with what seemed like a magical snap of his finger and thumb. Forget the other conquests who fell for this routine. She was becoming one of them. How could any woman
not
find this level of provision seductive?

She settled with a sigh on the leather seat in the back, pretending she wasn’t aware of the scooters that kept buzzing up beside them for the next ten minutes as they drove into the hills. The windows were blacked out, however, so the followers soon fell away, accepting that their opportunity was over and they might as well go file the photos they had and collect their payments.

The car climbed high above the lake, the twists in the road taking them into stretches of quiet thoroughfare, where she finally let out her breath in a sigh.

Vito leaned forward to close the privacy window and poured both of them a water from the bottle in the door.

“Was it so bad?” he asked. “Spending my money?”

“No,” she said, adding a sarcastic, “How was it for you?”

She heard how suggestive that sounded and made a noise into her glass.

“Why does everything I say come out sounding dirty around you?” she muttered.

“Freudian slip?” he suggested.

She slid her thumb along the rim of her glass, blushing and saying nothing.

“Your silence speaks volumes,” he taunted.

“Am I the first woman to find you attractive? I doubt it,” she said caustically.

“You’re the first to be so annoyed by it,” he said with a hint of laughter in his voice. “Why? Because you’re so tempted?”

“I’ve never been a drug user and that’s what it would be,” she muttered. “You’re sitting there like a giant painkiller promising to keep me from feeling the bus that’s crushing me. So, yes, I’m tempted.” She couldn’t believe how honest she was being. It wasn’t like her to be this blunt, but what shred of dignity was left to lose? “But I’ve never gone to bed with a man purely for physical release. It makes me feel cheap to consider it.”

“You’re incredibly insulting when you want to be, aren’t you? The problem, I think, is that you don’t know how powerful this particular painkiller will be.” He leaned across and set her glass in her door. His was gone and his hands went to her waist. “Come here.”

“What—?”

He dragged her to straddle his thighs, making her stiffen in surprise at the sudden intimacy of having her legs open across him, her inner thighs lightly stretched by the press of his thick, hard ones.

She kept her arms stiff, holding herself off him, but she was intrigued despite her wariness. “There’s no one to see this performance,” she reminded tautly.

“Yes, I know,” he said smokily, and stroked his hands up and down her thighs, massaging in a way that sent ripples of anticipation into her pelvis. With a little shift, he slouched and they were sex to sex, her tingling loins firmly seated against the very hard ridge of his erection.