‘I know,’ Dimitri said, his eyes shining with understanding. ‘But, Antonio, you can’t just stumble across a woman you’ve never met before, make her an offer to be your fake fiancée, expect her to have little or no ulterior expectations, and present her to Bartlett wrapped in a bow.’
Antonio bit back a curse. Dimitri was right. Urgency and necessity had made his usually quick and clever mind sluggish and slow. He saw the many flaws in his plan immediately.
What had he been thinking? He needed the deal, he needed to bring Steele to his knees, and he needed a fiancée who would understand and support him in it.
His eyes caught Emma, laughing with a member of the hotel’s staff before stepping away through the glass doors to the balcony that wrapped around the outside of the hotel. She had done so much. He was impressed with how she’d multi-tasked, clearly making an unprecedented success of the event whilst never missing a beat in her day-to-day role. She was conscientious, bright and articulate. And above all she was professional. In short, she was perfect.
* * *
‘Mum, it’s...’ Emma paused, pulling her mobile briefly away from her ear to check the screen for the time ‘...one a.m. in London. What are you doing up?’
‘Oh, I got stuck into a painting and the next thing I knew it was midnight.’
As Emma looked out onto the famous New York skyline she imagined her mother in the brightly lit, airy loft of her home in Hampstead Heath. When her parents had divorced her father had
been the one to leave, moving into a flat nearer to the school where he worked, but only round the corner from the home they had all once shared.
The divorce had signalled the end of the nightly fights that had become a regular feature of Emma’s life—desperate and painful arguments her parents had thought she hadn’t heard. The heart-wrenching accusations, the arguments over how differently to handle their sick daughter, and her father’s confusion as to why Louise Guilham had changed beyond his recognition.
Emma had initially felt relief when they’d separated, and then guilt, knowing that her father still desperately loved her mother. His painful bewilderment at the transformation in his wife and child had cut Emma deeply, and prompted the awful thought that had it not been for her illness her mother might have somehow stayed with her husband, and she might have somehow found a way to keep them all together.
‘Where’s Mark?’
Emma liked her mum’s partner. He made her happy, and he also gave her the space she needed to be creative at unsociable times. Emma knew better than most that when her mum ‘got stuck into a painting’ she could be gone for days. She loved her mum’s paintings—her favourite one hung on the wall of her little Brooklyn flat—and still felt bad that her mother’s work had been put on hold during her illness at a critical time in her mother’s career.
‘Asleep. I just wanted to know how the gala went.’
‘It’s still going, but it’s going well. Antonio has offered to double the event’s donations.’
‘That’s wonderful, darling.’
But even through her mother’s happiness for her Emma could sense her distraction. She was probably staring at the painting critically right at that very moment.
Emma was about to ask when they might come over to visit her. Her mother and Mark hadn’t made it out there yet, but that was okay, because she’d hardly had a spare moment since working for Antonio. But as if the very thought of him had conjured him from thin air, she felt rather than heard his presence behind her.
‘Love you lots, but I’d better go.’
Emma hung up the call and put her mobile back in her purse. She gathered herself, knowing that her emotions were a little too close to the surface for her to face her boss just yet.
Adjusting her mind’s eye back from her home in Hampstead to the beautiful night-time vista of famous skyscrapers silhouetted against the stars, she felt a cool breeze pass over her skin—and that was why she had goosebumps, Emma assured herself. Not because Antonio had come out here to find her.
He should be with the other guests sitting down for the meal. Perhaps he’d come to tell her that he’d found his perfect fiancée, she thought, uncharacteristically bitter.
She needed to pull herself together. Surely she could handle Antonio Arcuri’s fiancée as well as she could handle him. But the thought of handling her boss gave rise to some very explicit images, and she had to push them aside as firmly as she placed a smile on her face and finally turned to see him.
He stood half in shadow, peering at her through bitter-chocolate-coloured eyes. There was something about the way he held himself. As if his body was restraining some kind of pressing energy. Energy she felt all the way on the other side of the balcony.
‘Who was that?’
‘What?’
‘Who was on the phone that you love?’ he asked, his Italian accent thick on the words.
Emma frowned at the personal nature of this conversation. She and Antonio didn’t do personal. It was one of the things she liked and respected about him, and in her deepest heart she was thankful for it.
‘My mother.’
‘So there’s no one at home waiting up for you? No boyfriend or otherwise?’