Bought by Her Italian Boss Read Online Free Page A

hadn’t counted each glimpse as if they were days until Christmas. She looked for him all the time. It was a bit of a sickness, really. Why? What on earth had convinced her that she had anything in common with a man like him?
    Her heightened awareness of him picked up on the subtle stillness that overcame him.
    She refused to look at him, certain he was staring at his own image. He must be thinking she was a weird, stalker type now. By any small miracle, was he also noticing that she didn’t have those stupid nudes on there?
    “Today is full of surprises.” Vittorio clicked off her phone and tucked it into his shirt pocket, drawing her startled glance. His hammered-gold eyes held an extra glitter of male speculation, something dark and predatory, like he’d just noticed the plump bird that had landed nearby.
    Her stomach swooped.
    “Did you read the emails?” she asked shakily.
    “I glanced over them.”
    “And?”
    “They appear to support your claim that you weren’t involved.”
    “ Appear to support,” she repeated. “Like I wrote those emails as some kind of premeditated attempt to cover my butt?” Her translucent skin was growing pink with temper. “Look, you have to know it’s tricky to tell a client an outright ‘no.’ I’ve been trying to do it nicely while Mr. Jensen and Signor Fabrizio—”
    Her face blanked. She touched between her furrowed brow.
    “They’ve been setting me up this whole time, haven’t they? That’s why I got this promotion. They thought I was too inexperienced to see what they were up to. As soon as I proved I wasn’t, they turned me into their fall guy. They just pushed me off the roof!”
    She was very convincing, right down to the way her trembling hand moved to cover her mouth and her eyes glassed with anxious outrage.
    He tried to hang on to his cynicism, but he was entertaining similar thoughts. The very idea ignited a strange fury in him. He knew better than most what happened when a corrupt man took advantage of an ingenuous woman. His father had done it to his mother and she had wound up dead.
    His phone vibrated. He glanced at the text from his cousin. Fabrizio claims it was all her. Any progress on your end?
    Vito glanced at Gwyn, at the way her shaking fingers smoothed her hair behind her ear while her concubine mouth pouted with very credible fear.
    He wasn’t without concern himself. Even if Paolo managed to build a case against Fabrizio, Kevin Jensen had positioned himself very well to walk away along the high ground, leaving the bank wearing a cloak of muddied employees. An institution that staked its success on a reputation of trustworthiness would cease to appear so.
    Vito refused to let that happen. He protected his family at all costs. They would, and had, done the same for him.
    And this would cost him. Gwyn was dangerous. The fact that he was drawn to her, looking to see her as an innocent despite the very real fact she might be involved in crimes against the bank, was unnerving. Being close to her would be a serious test of his mettle.
    But his glimpse into her phone had revealed a move to him that even a master chess player like Kevin Jensen wouldn’t see coming, even though it was one of the basic rules of the game: if a pawn was pushed far enough into the field of play, she could be promoted to a formidable queen.

CHAPTER THREE
    V ITTORIO PLUCKED HIS handkerchief from his jacket pocket and moved to dampen it under the tap of the water cooler.
    Gwyn watched him, wondering what he was doing, then noticed her purse was over his shoulder, looking incongruous against his tailored charcoal suit.
    “Did you get my stuff from my desk?”
    Fabrizio seeing her naked was creepy. Vittorio touching her possessions was... intimate . Disturbing.
    “I did.” He came back to tilt up her chin and started to run a blessedly cool, damp, linen-wrapped fingertip beneath her eye.
    His touch sent an array of sensation outward through her jawline and down her