Once A Moretti Wife. Michelle Smart

Chloe was cowering in the stationery cupboard, waiting for her arrival so she could hide behind her. The girl would get used to Stefano soon enough. Anna had seen it with most other employees. It was that mixture of awe and fear he inspired that curdled the stomach, but eventually the curdling settled and one could hold a coherent conversation with him.

      Anna had skipped all these stages herself but had seen the effect Stefano had on others too many times not to sympathise with it. He inspired terror and hero-worship in equal measure.

      She let the office door shut behind her and came to an abrupt halt. For a moment she forgot all about her pounding head and nauseous stomach.

      When Stefano had offered her the job and she’d learned it entailed sharing an office with him, she’d said on a whim that she would only do it if he decorated her side in shades of plum. Her memories of her first day working for him were ones of laughter, when she’d walked into the sprawling office and found one half painted a functional cream, the other varying shades of plum.

      Today the whole office was cream.

      She’d just reached her desk when the door flew open, and Stefano stood there, as dark and menacing as she’d ever seen him.

      Before she could ask if he’d had an army of decorators in overnight, he slammed the door shut and folded his arms across his broad chest.

      ‘What are you doing here?’

      ‘Not you too,’ she groaned, half in exasperation and half in pain. ‘I think I had a fall. I know I look awful but can’t you pretend I look like my usual supermodel self?’

      It had become one of those long-running jokes between them. Every time Stefano tried to cajole her into coming on a date with him, Anna would make some cutting remark, usually followed by a reminder that his preferred dates were the gorgeous supermodel type, whereas she barely topped five foot.

      ‘You’ll get neck-ache if you try to kiss me,’ she’d once flippantly told him.

      To which he’d immediately replied, ‘Shall we find out now?’

      She’d never dared mention kissing to him again. Imagining it was more than enough, and wasn’t something she allowed herself to do, not since the one time she’d succumbed to the daydream and then had spent a good week pretending not to have palpitations whenever she got close to him.

      There was no denying it, her boss was utterly gorgeous, even when her eyes were struggling to focus as they were now. There was not a single physical aspect of him that didn’t make her want to swoon. Well over a foot taller than her, he had hair so dark it looked black, a strong roman nose, generous lips and a chiselled jaw covered in just the right amount of black stubble. He also had eyes capable of arresting a person with one glance; a green colour that could turn from light to dark in a heartbeat. She’d learned to read his eyes well—they corresponded exactly with his mood. Today, they were as dark as they could be.

      She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to dissect what that meant. The paracetamol she’d taken hadn’t made a dent in her headache, which was continuing to get worse by the second. She grabbed the edge of her desk and sat down. Straight away she saw something else that was wrong, even with her double vision. She strained to peer more closely at the clutter on her desk. She never left clutter. It drove her crazy. Everything needed to be in its correct place. And...

      ‘Why are there photos of cats on my desk?’ She was a dog person, not a cat person. Dogs were loyal. Dogs didn’t leave you.

      ‘Chloe’s desk,’ he said in a voice as hard as steel.

      Anna tilted her head to look at him and blinked a number of times to focus. Her vision had blurred terribly. ‘Don’t tease me,’ she begged. ‘I’m only twenty minutes late. My head feels...’

      ‘I can’t believe you would be so brazen to turn up here like this,’ he cut in.

      Used to Stefano’s own brand of English, she assumed his ‘brazen’ meant ‘stupid’ or something along those lines. She had to admit, he had a point. Leaving the flat feeling as rotten as she did really did rank as stupid.

      ‘I know I’m not well.’ It was an effort to get the words out. ‘I feel like death warmed up, but I left my laptop behind and needed to get that report to you. You’ll have to get Chloe to sit in on the meeting.’

      His jaw clenched and his lips twisted into something that could be either a snarl or a smirk. ‘Is this a new tactic?’

      Was her hearing now playing up along with the rest of her? One of the things she liked about working for Stefano was that he was a straight talker, regularly taking his more earnest employees to task for their corporate speak. ‘I taught myself English,’ he would say to them with disdain, ‘but if I’d tried learning it from you I would be speaking self-indulgent codswallop.’

      She always hid a grin when he said that. ‘Self-indulgent codswallop’ was a term she’d taught him in her first week working for him. His thick Italian accent made it sound even funnier. She’d taught him a whole heap of insults since; most of which she’d initially directed at him.

      Which made his riddle all the more confusing.

      ‘What are you talking about?’

      He stepped away from the closed door, nearer to her. ‘Have you been taking acting lessons, Mrs Moretti?’

      ‘Mrs...?’ She closed her eyes and gave her head a gentle shake, but even that made the hammers trapped in it pound harder. ‘Have I woken in the twilight zone?’ It didn’t sound completely mad when she said it. Quite credible in fact. She’d felt disjointed from the moment she’d woken, Melissa’s letter stating that she was flying to Australia only adding to the incoherence.

      When she opened her eyes again, she found Stefano by her desk, his large frame swimming before her eyes.

      ‘You’re playing an excellent game. Tell me the rules so I know what my next move should be.’ His tone was gentle but the menace behind it was unmistakable, his smooth voice decreasing in volume but increasing in danger.

      Anna’s pretty hazel eyes widened. She had clearly been practising her innocent face in the month since he’d last seen her, Stefano thought scathingly.

      It had been a whole month since she’d humiliated him in his own boardroom and walked out of his life.

      He placed his hands palm down on her desk and gazed at her, taking in the beautiful face that had captivated him from the start.

      ‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Anna got slowly to her feet. ‘I’m going home. One of us is confused about something and I don’t know which of us I hope it is.’

      He laughed. Oh, she was something else.

      ‘You should go home too,’ she said, eying him in much the same manner as a person cornered by a dangerous dog. ‘If I didn’t know better I’d think you were drunk.’

      For a moment he wondered if she’d been drinking. Her words had a slurred edge and she seemed unsteady.

      But those luscious lips were taunting him. She was taunting him, playing a game he hadn’t been given the rules to, trying to catch him on the back foot. Well, he wouldn’t fall for her games any more. He wrote the rules, not this witch who had spellbound him with lust.

      She’d planned it all from the start. She’d deliberately held off his advances for eighteen months so he’d become so desperate to possess her he would agree to marry her just so he could sleep with her.

      He’d admit it had been a bit more involved than that but that had been the crux of it. He’d thought he’d known her. He’d thought he could trust her—him, Stefano Moretti, the man who had learned at a young age not to trust anyone.

      She’d set him up to marry her so she could divorce him for adultery, humiliating him in front of his staff for good measure, and gain herself a hefty slice of his fortune.

      He