“I’ll come with you.” Vito nodded at the man who’d been pontificating.
“But I want your advice!” the executive blurted.
Gwyn was so far into her own head, she completely misplaced where she was and who they were talking to. In that moment, a coworker was asking for guidance so she offered it. “Why don’t you use the UK model as a template? Tailor it to US regulations and plug in that bit about interstate transfers. The section on overseas rates should work almost word for word.”
The surprised pause and dumbfounded stares from both men were almost laughable, except Gwyn realized how badly she’d overstepped and instantly wanted to die of embarrassment. She never would have spoken to Oscar Fabrizio or any other higher-up that way. No, she would have done that work for him, she thought privately, and let him take the credit. Such was the life of lower-level administrators.
The executive was taken aback and glanced between her and Vito, as if to say, Are you going to let your porn star girlfriend talk to me like that?
“Excellent suggestion,” Vito said. “Why reinvent the wheel? I’ll expect to see the draft tomorrow,” he told his executive and walked her away.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“For what?”
“Interjecting like that.”
“Why? You were right. I would have thought of it myself eventually, but I wasn’t really listening. Too busy thinking of something else,” he said with a pointed look that shot sexual heat from her heart to her loins. “I’ve never gone without a condom before. That was exciting. Grazie, mia bella.”
Her hand tightened on his sleeve as her knees wobbled, making him smile like a shark.
The rest of the evening was a trial, but she got through it. And when they were leaving, he surprised her by taking her downstairs to a waiting car instead of back up to the penthouse he’d already paid for.
“What about the early morning meetings you have here tomorrow?” She tilted her head at the hotel. “I thought that’s why we were staying here.”
“I want you in my bed.”
Her skin tightened in reaction. “Okay.”
* * *
Vittorio was not a weak or needy man. He loved his family and would certainly be a lesser man without them, but he considered himself a supporter of them, not the other way around. He wasn’t a dependent personality, either. He drank a glass of wine most days because it was a cultural habit, not because he was addicted.
Gwyn was another story.
As he tied his tie, he glanced at her sleeping form reflected beyond his shoulder, brunette hair spilled across his pillow where she’d rolled to hug it when he’d risen, murmuring a sleepy and satisfied, “Thank you,” before falling back asleep.
Words she had promised him he would never hear, he thought edgily, still high on the powerful orgasm they’d shared from a very lazy missionary lock in the predawn hour, the paroxysm holding them gasping for long, exquisite moments.
It had been two weeks and, if anything, the chemistry between them was stronger. If he was in her presence, he wanted to touch her. If he touched her, he wanted to have sex with her.
His desire was becoming the sort of all-consuming hunger that he arranged the rest of his life around. If he had other thoughts, they tended to be of the reckoning kind: dark acts of retaliation against Jensen and his cohorts. He wanted justice for Gwyn, but not necessarily the legal kind that would put an end to their reason for being together.
“I’m jealous,” Gwyn said in a soft morning voice that lifted the hairs all over his body.
“Of whom?” he asked, reaching for his suit jacket, shrugging it on like armor.
He’d had these sorts of conversations before, but he had to admit to shock that Gwyn would have any reason to feel possessive. Had he even looked at another woman since meeting her? If he had, it was a comparison that Gwyn always won. Not just in looks, either. If he heard a woman laugh, he thought the sound too sharp or coarse, not the perfect joyful huskiness of Gwyn’s. None seemed to have her same intuitive ability with conversation either, steering seamlessly from business to small talk to current events. His lack of interest in other women might have worried him if his libido hadn’t been showing such vigor and health in bed with this one.
“You,” she answered ruefully, rolling onto her back and throwing her arm over her head. “Going to work.” She touched the headboard, looking up to the pattern her finger found and traced.
Her remark didn’t entirely surprise him. He might have had innumerable mistresses who expected to be supported, but his sisters and the bank’s abundance of female employees told him that many women enjoyed their careers as much as men did. Gwyn was bright and confident and had had clear goals before Jensen had derailed her. A life of leisure was not something she had aspired to—which was yet another side of her character that set her apart and shone a favorable light upon her in his eyes.