Buch lesen: «Once A Moretti Wife»

CHAPTER ONE

HOW MUCH HAD she drunk?

Anna Robson clutched her head, which pounded as if the force of a hundred hammers were battering it.

There was a lump there. She prodded it cautiously and winced. Had she hit her head?

She racked her aching, confused brain, trying hard to remember. She’d gone out for a drink with Melissa, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she?

Yes. She had. She’d gone for a drink with her sister after their Spinning class, as they did every Thursday evening.

She peered at her bedside clock and gave a start—her phone’s alarm should have gone off an hour ago. Where had she put it?

Still holding her head, she looked around but saw no sight of it, then forgot all about it as her stomach rebelled. She only just made it to the bathroom in time to vomit.

Done, she sat loose-limbed like a puppet on the floor, desperately trying to remember what she’d drunk. She wasn’t a heavy drinker at the best of times and on a work night she would stick to a small glass of white wine. But right then, she felt as if she’d drunk a dozen bottles.

There was no way she could go into the office... But then she remembered she and Stefano had a meeting with a young tech company he was interested in buying. Stefano had tasked Anna, as he always did, with going through the company’s accounts, reports and claims and producing her own summary. He trusted her judgement. If it concurred with his then he would invest in the company. If her judgement differed he would rethink his strategy. Stefano wanted her report first thing so he could digest it before the meeting.

She’d have to email it and beg illness.

But, after staggering cautiously around the flat she shared with Melissa, holding onto the walls for support, she realised she must have left her laptop at the office. She’d have to phone Stefano. He could open it himself. She’d give him the password, although she was ninety-nine per cent certain he’d hacked it at least once already.

All she had to do was find her phone. Walking carefully to the kitchen, she found a pretty handbag on the counter. Next to it was an envelope addressed with her name.

She blinked hard to keep her eyes focused and pulled the letter out. She attempted to read it a couple of times but none of it made any sense. It was from Melissa asking for Anna’s forgiveness for her trip to Australia and promising to call when she got there.

Australia? Melissa must be having a joke at her expense, although her sister saying she was going to visit the mother who’d abandoned them a decade ago wasn’t the slightest bit funny to Anna’s mind. The letter’s postscript did explain one thing though—Melissa said she’d gritted the outside step of the front door so Anna wouldn’t slip on it again, and asked her to see a doctor if her head hurt where she’d banged it.

Anna put her hand to the lump on the side of her head. She had no recollection whatsoever of slipping. And no recollection of any ice. The early November weather had been mild but now, as she looked through the kitchen window, she saw a thick layer of frost.

Her head hurting too much for her to make sense of anything, she put the letter to one side and had a look in the handbag. The purse she’d used for a decade, threadbare but clinging to life, was in it. It had been the last gift from her father before he’d died. Had she swapped handbags with Melissa? That wouldn’t be unusual; Anna and Melissa were always lending each other things. What was unusual was that Anna didn’t remember. But they must have swapped because in the bottom of the pretty bag also sat Anna’s phone. That was another mystery solved.

She pulled it out and saw she had five missed calls. Struggling to focus, she tapped in the pin code to unlock it.

Wrong pin. She tried again. Wrong pin.

Sighing, she shoved it back in the bag. It took enough effort to stay on her feet, never mind remembering a code with a head that felt like fog. It was times like this that she cursed their decision to disconnect the landline.

Fine. She’d flag a cab and go to the office, explain that she was dying and then come home again.

Before getting dressed, she took some headache tablets and prayed her tender belly could keep them down.

She always put the next day’s clothes on her bedroom chair and now she hugged them to her chest and gingerly sat back on her bed. Where had this dress come from? Melissa must have muddled their clothes up again. Not having the energy to hunt for something else, Anna decided to wear it. It was a black long-sleeved, knee-length jersey dress with a nice amount of swish at the hem but it took her an age to get it on, her limbs feeling as if they’d had lead injected into them.

Damn, her head.

She didn’t have the energy to put on any make-up either, so she made do with running a brush gently through her hair and then she staggered to the front door.

On the rack in the entrance porch was a pair of funky black boots with thick soles she hadn’t seen before. Surely Melissa wouldn’t mind her borrowing them. That was the best thing about living with her sister; they were the same dress and shoe size.

She locked the front door and treaded carefully down the steps. Finally luck was on her side—a vacant black cab drove up her street within a minute.

She got the driver to drop her off across the road from the futuristic skyscraper near Tower Bridge from where Stefano ran his European operations. As Anna waited at the pedestrian crossing next to the road heaving with traffic, a shiny stretched black Mercedes pulled up outside the front of the building. A doorman opened the back door, and out came Stefano.

The green light flashed and, working on autopilot, she crossed the road, her eyes focused on Stefano rather than where she was walking.

A tall blonde woman got out of the car behind him. Anna didn’t recognise her but there was something familiar about her face that made it feel as if nails clawed into Anna’s already tender stomach.

A briefcase whacked her in the back and, startled, Anna realised she’d come to a stop in the middle of the road, dozens of other pedestrians jostling around her, some swearing.

Clutching a hand to her stomach to stem the surging rise of nausea, she forced her leaden legs to work and managed to make it to the pavement without being knocked over.

She went through the revolving doors of the building itself, put her bag on the scanner, waited for it to be cleared, then went straight to the bathroom, into the first empty cubicle, and vomited.

Cold perspiration breaking out all over, she knew she was an idiot to have come in. Her hangover—was it a hangover? She’d never felt anything like this—was, if that was possible, getting worse.

Out of the cubicle, after she’d washed her hands and swirled cold water in her mouth, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror.

She looked awful. Her face was white as a sheet, her dark hair lank around her shoulders...

She did a double take. Had her hair grown?

After popping a mint in her mouth, she inched her way around the walls to the elevator. Two men and a woman she vaguely recognised were getting into it, chatting amiably. She slid in with them before the doors closed.

She punched the button for the thirtieth floor and held onto the railing as it began the smooth ride up.

All talk had stopped. She could feel their eyes on her. Did she really look so bad that she’d become a conversation stopper? It was a relief when they got out on the floor below her.

A gaggle of secretaries and administrators worked in the open space in front of the office Anna shared with Stefano. They all turned their heads to stare at her. A couple were open-mouthed.

Did they have to make it so obvious that she looked this awful? All the same, she managed to get her mouth working enough to smile a greeting. Not one of them responded.

She looked around for Chloe, her newly appointed fresh-faced PA who cowered in terror every time Stefano made an appearance. Poor Chloe would not be happy to know she’d have to take on Anna’s duties for the day.

Anna hadn’t wanted a PA of her own. She was a PA! But Stefano had thrown so many responsibilities her way in the year and a half since he’d poached her from Levon Brothers that when he’d caught her working at nine in the evening, he’d put his foot down and insisted on hiring someone for her.

‘Do I get a new job title?’ she’d cheekily asked, and been rewarded with a promotion to Executive PA and a hefty pay rise.

Maybe Chloe was cowering in the stationery cupboard, waiting for her arrival so she could hide behind her. The girl would get used to Stefano soon enough. Anna had seen it with most other employees. It was that mixture of awe and fear he inspired that curdled the stomach, but eventually the curdling settled and one could hold a coherent conversation with him.

Anna had skipped all these stages herself but had seen the effect Stefano had on others too many times not to sympathise with it. He inspired terror and hero-worship in equal measure.

She let the office door shut behind her and came to an abrupt halt. For a moment she forgot all about her pounding head and nauseous stomach.

When Stefano had offered her the job and she’d learned it entailed sharing an office with him, she’d said on a whim that she would only do it if he decorated her side in shades of plum. Her memories of her first day working for him were ones of laughter, when she’d walked into the sprawling office and found one half painted a functional cream, the other varying shades of plum.

Today the whole office was cream.

She’d just reached her desk when the door flew open, and Stefano stood there, as dark and menacing as she’d ever seen him.

Before she could ask if he’d had an army of decorators in overnight, he slammed the door shut and folded his arms across his broad chest.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Not you too,’ she groaned, half in exasperation and half in pain. ‘I think I had a fall. I know I look awful but can’t you pretend I look like my usual supermodel self?’

It had become one of those long-running jokes between them. Every time Stefano tried to cajole her into coming on a date with him, Anna would make some cutting remark, usually followed by a reminder that his preferred dates were the gorgeous supermodel type, whereas she barely topped five foot.

‘You’ll get neck-ache if you try to kiss me,’ she’d once flippantly told him.

To which he’d immediately replied, ‘Shall we find out now?’

She’d never dared mention kissing to him again. Imagining it was more than enough, and wasn’t something she allowed herself to do, not since the one time she’d succumbed to the daydream and then had spent a good week pretending not to have palpitations whenever she got close to him.

There was no denying it, her boss was utterly gorgeous, even when her eyes were struggling to focus as they were now. There was not a single physical aspect of him that didn’t make her want to swoon. Well over a foot taller than her, he had hair so dark it looked black, a strong roman nose, generous lips and a chiselled jaw covered in just the right amount of black stubble. He also had eyes capable of arresting a person with one glance; a green colour that could turn from light to dark in a heartbeat. She’d learned to read his eyes well—they corresponded exactly with his mood. Today, they were as dark as they could be.

She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to dissect what that meant. The paracetamol she’d taken hadn’t made a dent in her headache, which was continuing to get worse by the second. She grabbed the edge of her desk and sat down. Straight away she saw something else that was wrong, even with her double vision. She strained to peer more closely at the clutter on her desk. She never left clutter. It drove her crazy. Everything needed to be in its correct place. And...

‘Why are there photos of cats on my desk?’ She was a dog person, not a cat person. Dogs were loyal. Dogs didn’t leave you.

‘Chloe’s desk,’ he said in a voice as hard as steel.

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.

But despite everything she’d done, seeing her now, his desire for her remained undiminished. Anna was still the sexiest woman in the world. Classically beautiful, she had shoulder-length silky dark chestnut hair that framed high cheekbones, bee-stung lips that could sting of their own accord and skin as creamy to the touch as to the eye. She should be as narcissistic as an old-fashioned film star but she was disdainful of her looks. That wasn’t to say she didn’t make an effort with her appearance—she loved clothes, for example—but rarely did anything to enhance what she’d already been blessed with.

Anna Moretti née Robson, the woman with the face and body of a goddess and the tongue of a viper. Clever and conniving, sweet and lovable; an enigma wrapped in a layer of mystery.

He despised her.

He missed having her in his bed.

Since his release from prison all those long years ago he’d become an expert at masking the worst of his temper and channelling it into other areas, but Anna could tap into him like no one else and make him want to punch walls while also making him ache with need to touch her.

She wasn’t a meek woman. He’d understood that at their very first meeting. All the same, he’d never have believed she would have the audacity to walk back into this building after the stunt she’d pulled.

‘I’m not drunk.’ He leaned closer and inhaled. There it was, that scent that had lingered on his bed sheets even after copious washes, enough so that he’d thrown out all his linen and bought new sets. ‘But if you’re having memory problems, I know something that will help refresh it.’

Alarm flashed in her widened eyes. He didn’t give her the chance to reply, sliding an arm around her waist and pulling her to him so he could crush her mouth with his own.

He felt her go rigid with shock and smiled as he moulded his lips to hers. If Anna wanted to play games she had to understand that he was the rule maker, not her. He could make them and break them, just as he intended to eventually break her.

The feel of her lips against his, her breasts pressed against his chest, her scent... Heat coiled in his veins, punishment turning into desire as quickly as the flick of a switch...

All at once, she jerked her face to the side, breaking the kiss, and at the same moment her open hand smacked him across the cheek.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her tone half shocked, half furious. ‘You’re...’ Her voice tailed off.

‘I’m what?’ he drawled, fighting to control his own tone. The potency of the chemistry between them had become diluted in his memories. He’d forgotten how a single kiss could drive him as wild as an inexperienced teenager.

She blinked and when she looked at him again the fury had gone. Fear now resonated from her gaze. The little colour she’d had in her cheeks had gone too. ‘Stef...’

She swayed, her fingers extending as if reaching for him.

‘Anna?’

Then, right before his eyes, she crumpled. He only just caught her before she fell onto the floor.