They’d both been terminated by the ruthless, heartless seducer of weak-willed, easy females. The man with—
A knock sounded at the door. Freya had this sudden, wildly hysterical image of Security arriving to escort her out.
Enrico straightened abruptly, tossing her bag onto the desktop—the same desktop where she’d—
‘Wait,’ he called out in terse command to whoever was on the other side of the door. He picked up his jacket and shrugged it back on.
Six-feet-three, dark and too good-looking for his own good, recently ravished, yet he didn’t have a hair out of place or a single crease in his clothes, Freya noticed. Did his legs feel hollow the way hers did? Was he suffocating beneath the same thick, clammy blanket of shame?
He turned then to look at her—no, not to look exactly, but to flick a pair of grimly half-hooded eyes over her ashen face, then her limp and dishevelled suit. In all her life Freya had never fought back her tears as fiercely as she had to do at this precise moment.
Her mobile phone began to ring. Forcing her unsteady legs to move, she went towards Enrico, hoping to goodness he moved out of her way so that she could get at her bag without her having to brush against him.
‘Leave it,’ he said in a sandpaper rasp that scored across her skin.
She stepped between him and the chair. ‘I can’t,’ she shook out.
Her phone only rang in emergencies.
‘Now, don’t go into one of your panics,’ Cindy, the crèche manager, warned quickly, ‘but Nicky’s had a fall. He was showing off for the gorilla and…’
The rest was said to fresh air. Freya just dropped the phone and ran.
‘What, for Dio’s sake?’ Enrico called after her.
But she was already pulling open the door. Enrico’s PA stood on the other side of it holding a cardboard box and blocking her way. Freya vaguely recognised her own things stacked inside the box and, on a whimper that had nothing to do with the physical reminder that she’d been sacked, but with a need to get past the cold-eyed young man, she shoved him inelegantly out of the way and raced for the lifts with her hair flying out behind her and no shoes on her feet.
No damn shoes! Enrico saw as he went after her. Where the hell were her shoes?
‘Move, Carlo,’ he gritted as his PA was only just recovering from Freya’s rude push.
This time Carlo managed to step to one side before the more heavily built Enrico threatened to knock him over, staring after him as his boss took off at a run.
Enrico didn’t run; Enrico strode through with arrogant elegance. He did not chase after women; women chased after him.
But Enrico was not an idiot. He’d worked it out that if Freya was running it had to have something to do with their son.
Their son!
It hit him for the first time what those words truly meant to him. Something hard like iron congealed in his gut. He reached the lifts just as the doors were closing with Freya on the other side of them.
Cursing beneath his breath, he stabbed the call button for another ride. It arrived within seconds and he strode out onto the second floor in time to follow the stream of wild, red-silk hair and found himself striding into a large, brightly coloured room.
Freya scanned the room at the speed of lightning, passing over the paint corner, the rest corner, the small sea of children busy doing the things that small children do, until she found her son in the climbing corner.
Of course the climbing corner, she thought with a barely stifled choke. Where else would Nicky be showing off for Fredo?
And who else would be squatting there, holding her son firmly in his big arms? Nicky was curled there as if it was his only source of comfort, his dark head tucked into Fredo’s shoulder, his little arms wrapped tightly round the big man’s neck.
Fredo looked up as she approached them. For a tough bruiser he looked very pale. Cindy was squatting down beside them and trying to get Nicky to let her see his face.
‘He’s fine—honestly,’ she said quickly to Freya. ‘He took a tumble off the climbing blocks and would have landed safely on the cushion floor, only he managed to bump his cheek on the way. But, as usual, he won’t let me lo
ok at the damage.’
Oh, the indignity of it, Freya thought helplessly as she came down beside Fredo. ‘Come on, big boy,’ she encouraged with only a tiny shake to her voice. ‘Let Mummy take a look.’
‘No.’ Nicky’s arms tightened around Fredo.