creamy cheeks and the ice-over-fear glazing her sea-green eyes. According to her personal records, Freya Jenson was so super-efficient it would take lies to make out she was incompetent. She was never late in, never sick and never left a minute earlier than she should do. She never moaned or complained about her frankly lousy working environment or the mindless job that she did. And she had never asked for more money, though she’d worked at Hannard’s for over two years and had never been given a single pay rise.
Why, Enrico asked himself, when it was perfectly obvious from the clothes she was wearing that she barely had enough money on which to exist? Why, when he could see even from here that that unflattering knot her hair was contained in needed a pair of scissors taken to it? And he liked her twisting, spiraling, glorious waist-length hair.
The boy had been dressed well. His head of black curls had been carefully cut and shaped into a fashionable style, and the shoes on his feet had not looked as if they’d seen better days in a scrap bin at a charity shop.
She had a good brain in her head, but she was working here as some nonentity filing clerk hidden away in the bowels of the building, while the boy lived it up on the second floor, in a nursery to beat all nurseries complete with a wide-open terrace and a veritable array of toys and care staff to entertain him.
The child was tough and unruly—loved his mamma to death and only responded to a scolding if it came from her. The nursery staff despaired of ever gaining control of him but adored him anyway because—apparently—he could make them fall about laughing just when they believed they were in danger of killing him.
He had a sense of humour, in other words. As Fredo had reminded him he used to have, when he drove everyone insane only to win them over at the last minute by some inner instinct that turned him from obnoxious brat to clown.
And Freya loved him, this boy they had made together. Everyone knew how much she loved him. Everyone knew she was the best mother in the entire world.
But she’d still kept her son from his father. Was that the move of a loving mother?
‘Come and sit down,’ he instructed coldly.
‘I prefer to stand,’ she refused.
‘Sit,’ he incised and felt his blood begin to race around his system while he waited for her to deny him once more.
She didn’t. It was almost a disappointment. At this precise moment he would have loved any excuse to tear her into shreds with his bare hands.
With eyes carefully lowered now she moved forwards, a reed-slender thing of five feet seven with hidden treasures lurking beneath the bad suit. Lounging there in his chair, Enrico let his eyelids sweep downwards over his eyes as he looked her over in a slow, cold study that did not reflect the burn of sexual anger taking place in his gut.
Wouldn’t she just love to know that his body had not forgotten her, even if his brain had done until a few short hours ago?
The dusky pink mouth was tense, he noted, though the way she was holding it like that did not hide the revealing little tremor which told him just how frightened she was.
Good, he thought as he watched her take the chair positioned on the other side of the desk, then sit down with a stiff spine and knees pressed modestly together.
Another joke, since she had proved she was perfectly happy to open those legs for anybody.
Including his cousin.
‘Do you think it is appropriate to hold a conversation with your employer via the telephone at the same time as you were relieving yourself in the lavatory?’ he asked.
That brought her eyes shooting upwards. Enrico received the full blast of her green stare. ‘I explained that,’ she said. ‘And I had finished relieving myself, for your information,’ she added. ‘But it is up to you to decide if you found my call offensive.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed without elaborating on the single comment.
She lowered her eyes again, those golden-tipped eyelashes fluttering down against her cheeks. Something else stung inside him, the desire to run his tongue across those satin-smooth cheekbones and feel those eyelashes quiver with pleasure as he did.
She was sexually receptive from her hairline to her toenails, built for the exclusive pleasures of the flesh. Yet she was sitting here like some prim spinster schoolmistress in her ugly, ill-fitting suit and with her pinned hair, tense mouth and frosted eyes.
Liar, he wanted to say as he let the silence grow between them until she shifted restively. You are just one big, in-my-face liar, Freya Jenson.
‘You demanded this meeting. So talk,’ he said.
‘Call Fredo off guard-watch,’ she responded instantly.
‘No.’
‘He’s worrying the children—’
A sleek dark eyebrow arched. ‘My son?’
Freya stiffened. ‘He is not your son.’
‘Luca’s, then?’
Her chin came up that bit higher, the pink mouth pushing into a stubborn pout, eyes steady when they linked with his, and she said—nothing.
Freya felt her silence spray like a million pinpricks down her front as she held his cold, narrowed stare. She hated him for asking that, but…
Dear heaven, he looked good, she found herself thinking helplessly. The silk black hair that didn’t dare to curl like Nicky’s did, unless it was early in the morning and he’d just woken up from a long night of loving and sleep; those dark eyes, half-lost beneath two sets of long eyelashes that gave him such a sexy, slumberous look when really he was as wide awake as a hunting shark. Then there was the mouth, hidden at the moment by the long, tanned finger he had resting along its slender width. That mouth could kill you with pleasure if you let it get close enough. It could make you lose touch with everything, but how it could make you feel!
And it could slice you into tiny pieces—or the white teeth that hid behind it could—and there was the tongue that could issue insults as effectively as it could devour you in other ways.
Her nipples pricked and she knew why they did. Just thinking about that mouth—angry or hell-bent on giving you pleasure—was enough to make her breasts respond in a greedy, tight leap of remembered bliss.
She pulled in some air. ‘I work here,’ she informed him. ‘What happened in the foyer this lunchtime has caused a big enough sensation in this building, without Fredo standing guard at the crèche and making the gossip ten times worse.’
‘He is guarding my son.’
‘He is not your son.’ She was going to go on repeating that until hell froze over.
‘White panties or grey to match the miserable suit?’ he said, making her eyes flicker in confusion. ‘I only ask because you left me with this…image after your very novel telephone call,’ he explained. ‘White or grey used to be the sum total colour in your underwear drawer when I first met you. Plain cotton, very practical things with no hint of silk or lace in sight.’
‘What I’m wearing is none of your business!’ Freya responded,
