The house was eerily silent when Stefano headed down the stairs the next morning wearing only his robe.
He found Anna at his desk in his office, his laptop open in front of her.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked with an easiness that belied the impulse to slam the lid shut.
‘Trying to hack into your laptop.’ She didn’t look at him, and nor did she look or sound the slightest bit penitent at what she was doing.
‘You can’t get into your own phone. What makes you think you can hack into this?’
‘Because you’re extremely predictable with what you use as your password.’
Stefano had always given her free access to his laptop when she worked for him and he’d trusted her with his often-changing passwords for it. Of course, he only used it for work purposes and it was for this reason he didn’t want her getting into it now. It would take her all of a minute to discover that he’d sacked her and then all his plans would come tumbling down. Everything would come out and the revenge he was working so carefully towards would be ruined.
He ignored the nagging feeling in his guts that it might just be a good thing for his plans to be ruined. ‘What do you want it for?’
‘To get onto the Internet.’
‘Why? To email Melissa?’
‘I agree with you that I shouldn’t speak to her yet but she must be worrying that she can’t get in touch with me.’
‘If she’s worried she’ll contact the office. They’ll tell her where we are.’ And then Melissa really would have something to worry about. She knew all about their vicious split.
All he had to do was stop Anna contacting her for four more days.
Her eyes lifted to meet his. She scowled but not before he read the hurt on her face.
He hid his satisfaction.
She was still smarting at his rejection of her the night before. Declining her open invitation had taken a huge amount of willpower and he’d had to keep himself rooted to the chair to resist following her inside and up to the bedroom. Dio, he had wanted her so badly it was a physical pain. Now, in the cold light of day, he could hardly believe he’d been so selfless. Being selfless was not on his list of attributes.
There was no hint of any vulnerability in those flashing hazel eyes now. And she was stone-cold sober.
‘Is something troubling you, bellissima?’
‘No.’
He sat on the edge of the desk beside her, taking in the tight shorts and the coral T-shirt that caressed her small, beautiful breasts.
Her jaw clenched and she stabbed at the keyboard and hit return.
Suddenly her face brightened and she cast him with a wicked grin. ‘I’m in!’
The grin fell when she saw what was on the screen.
It was a letter of termination he’d got Chloe to write for one of the men who worked in his development lab. He’d been reading through it before he’d remembered a meeting he was supposed to be at. Forgetting a meeting would never have happened when Anna was running the place alongside him. He’d left the laptop open and had just arrived at the meeting when a breathless member of staff had run up to inform him that his estranged wife had barged her way into his office.
He’d closed the laptop without shutting it down on his return from the hospital and hadn’t opened it since.
‘You’re sacking Peter?’ she said, reading it quickly.
‘He’s been selling patent application details to one of our rivals.’
‘You have proof of this?’
‘Enough for me not to give him the benefit of the doubt.’
‘Have you confronted him?’ she asked suspiciously.