Rival Attractions & Innocent Secretary

‘I asked where you’d been,’ Luca said. ‘I’ve been ringing your mobile.’

‘At lunch,’ Emma said, ‘and I forgot to charge my phone.’

‘You went to lunch two hours ago.’

‘And I stayed here till eleven p.m. last night,’ Emma retorted, her head too full of the sudden news to feel threatened by Luca’s tone.

Maybe she should just tell him now. Oh, I just took a pregnancy test and was building up to giving you the happy news!

God, men had it easy at times.

She looked up at him, at a face that had once appeared to adore her, at the stern lips that had kissed her, at the hands that had soothed her, and wondered how he could have changed so. How she could possibly ever work up the courage to tell him.

She couldn’t.

So, instead of explaining herself, she peeled off her jacket and then made her way to the desk, not that her lack of response deterred him. Luca rattled off a list of orders that had even Evelyn frowning at the impossibility of it all.

But Emma just set to work, dealing with the most pressing emails and telephone calls, as Evelyn dealt with Luca.

His temper was palpable, she could hear it in the impatient buzz of her intercom, could feel it from behind the thick oak door, could see it when she knocked and entered and gave him the most recent list of figures he had demanded that she pull from thin air and that though deemed urgent were given nothing more than a cursory glance.

‘And remember the midday meeting tonight,’ he called to her departing back. ‘Make sure I’ve got all the documentation I need.’

‘Midday meeting tonight?’

‘With the Los Angeles office.’ He bared his teeth in a sarcastic smile. ‘Evelyn has to leave at six tonight, so if you want your break, could you take it before then?’

‘I’ve got plans tonight.’ She did have plans, important plans—like seeing a doctor and trying to work out what the hell she was going to do. ‘I really need to leave.’

‘Would you excuse us a moment, please, Evelyn?’ His voice was dark and Emma was grateful for the sympathetic smile Evelyn gave her on the way out.

‘When you were offered the position…’ Each word came in clipped tones, his eyes never leaving her face as he spoke, but Emma wasn’t going to take this.

‘I know what you’re doing!’

‘When you were offered the position,’ Luca said again, his voice icily calm, ‘it was clearly stipulated there would be extensive travel and late nights.’

‘You’re trying to push me into resigning.’ With every interruption, with every rise in her voice, Luca leant back further in his chair, a cruel glimmer of a smile on his lips as he calmly spoke over her.

‘It was clearly outlined that the reason you were being hired,’ Luca smoothly continued, ‘was to lighten Evelyn’s workload. I value Evelyn—’

‘Unlike me,’ Emma spat.

‘I value all my staff,’ Luca responded, ‘but Evelyn is vital—that is why I have been so accommodating with her doctor’s appointments and schedules. That is why you are here—to lighten her load so that she doesn’t hand in her notice.’

‘Which is what you want me to do?’

‘Why would I want you to leave?’ He was smiling now—utterly boxing her into a corner. ‘If Evelyn gets good news tomorrow, we’ll need you on board even more. It might even mean a promotion for you!’

He kept her at the office till ten p.m., and exhausted she fell into bed, but sleep evaded her. Her mind was a whir of scattered thoughts—that she was carrying his child was just too big and too scary to contemplate. Imagining telling him, dealing with him—telling the man who so clearly didn’t want her in his life that she would be in it now for ever. Whether that meant monthly maintenance payments or access visits, there was a link now that couldn’t be severed.

She lay there and wondered.

He had changed, yet so had she.

It had been like a beautiful seamless dance, and somehow she had tripped—had forgotten the rules, had tipped the scales from trusting to wary almost imperceptibly.

So she lay there, trying to pinpoint the moment it had ended, when, for Luca, the light had gone out on their relationship.

Trying not to ponder what she had done wrong.

Because she had done nothing wrong, Emma knew that.

It wasn’t about wrong or right, or trying to please, or bending to fit—she had known from the start it would be short-lived, that Luca, by his own clear admission, would never loan his heart to anyone for long.

She had accepted the rules of the game, had gone into it utterly prepared—and had come out of it utterly broken.