Anna tilted her head to look at him and blinked a number of times to focus. Her vision had blurred terribly. ‘Don’t tease me,’ she begged. ‘I’m only twenty minutes late. My head feels…’
‘I can’t believe you would be so brazen to turn up here like this,’ he cut in.
Used to Stefano’s own brand of English, she assumed his ‘brazen’ meant ‘stupid’ or something along those lines. She had to admit, he had a point. Leaving the flat feeling as rotten as she did really did rank as stupid.
‘I know I’m not well.’ It was an effort to get the words out. ‘I feel like death warmed up, but I left my laptop behind and needed to get that report to you. You’ll have to get Chloe to sit in on the meeting.’
His jaw clenched and his lips twisted into something that could be either a snarl or a smirk. ‘Is this a new tactic?’
Was her hearing now playing up along with the rest of her? One of the things she liked about working for Stefano was that he was a straight talker, regularly taking his more earnest employees to task for their corporate speak. ‘I taught myself English,’ he would say to them with disdain, ‘but if I’d tried learning it from you I would be speaking self-indulgent codswallop.’
She always hid a grin when he said that. ‘Self-indulgent codswallop’ was a term she’d taught him in her first week working for him. His thick Italian accent made it sound even funnier. She’d taught him a whole heap of insults since; most of which she’d initially directed at him.
Which made his riddle all the more confusing.
‘What are you talking about?’
He stepped away from the closed door, nearer to her. ‘Have you been taking acting lessons, Mrs Moretti?’
‘Mrs…?’ She closed her eyes and gave her head a gentle shake, but even that made the hammers trapped in it pound harder. ‘Have I woken in the twilight zone?’ It didn’t sound completely mad when she said it. Quite credible in fact. She’d felt disjointed from the moment she’d woken, Melissa’s letter stating that she was flying to Australia only adding to the incoherence.
When she opened her eyes again, she found Stefano by her desk, his large frame swimming before her eyes.
‘You’re playing an excellent game. Tell me the rules so I know what my next move should be.’ His tone was gentle but the menace behind it was unmistakable, his smooth voice decreasing in volume but increasing in danger.
Anna’s pretty hazel eyes widened. She had clearly been practising her innocent face in the month since he’d last seen her, Stefano thought scathingly.
It had been a whole month since she’d humiliated him in his own boardroom and walked out of his life.
He placed his hands palm down on her desk and gazed at her, taking in the beautiful face that had captivated him from the start.
‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Anna got slowly to her feet. ‘I’m going home. One of us is confused about something and I don’t know which of us I hope it is.’
He laughed. Oh, she was something else.
‘You should go home too,’ she said, eying him in much the same manner as a person cornered by a dangerous dog. ‘If I didn’t know better I’d think you were drunk.’
For a moment he wondered if she’d been drinking. Her words had a slurred edge and she seemed unsteady.
But those luscious lips were taunting him. She was taunting him, playing a game he hadn’t been given the rules to, trying to catch him on the back foot. Well he wouldn’t fall for her games any more. He wrote the rules, not this witch who had spellbound him with lust.
She’d planned it all from the start. She’d deliberately held off his advances for eighteen months so he’d become so desperate to possess her he would agree to marry her just so he could sleep with her.
He’d admit it had been a bit more involved than that but that had been the crux of it. He’d thought he’d known her. He’d thought he could trust her—him, Stefano Moretti, the man who had learned at a young age not to trust anyone.
She’d set him up to marry her so she could divorce him for adultery, humiliating him in front of his staff for good measure, and gain herself a hefty slice of his fortune.
He couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to fall for it.
When he’d received the call from his lawyer telling him his estranged wife was going to sue him for a fortune, he’d quelled his instinct to race to her home and confront her. He’d forced himself to sit tight.
Sitting tight did not come easily to him. He was not a man to wait for a problem to be solved; he was a man to take a problem by the scruff of the neck and sort it. He reacted. He always had. It was what had got him into so much trouble when he’d been a kid, never knowing when to keep his mouth shut or his fists to himself.
He’d spent nearly two weeks biding his time, refusing to acknowledge her lawyer’s letter. In ten days they would have been married for a year and legally able to divorce. Then, and only then, would Anna learn what he was prepared to give her, which was nothing. And he was prepared to make her jump through hoops to reach that knowledge.
He would make her pay for all her lies and deceit. He would only stop when she experienced the equivalent humiliation that he’d been through at her hands.
One hundred million pounds and various assets for barely a year of marriage? Her nerve was beyond incredible.