shock was still setting in hard on Poppy. Only when it was far too late to change things did she see her mistake. She should have toughed out Craig’s insinuations. Instead she had fallen right into his trap and confirmed his suspicions. He couldn’t have proved anything, yet she had virtually confessed by saying what she had and leaving the table.
Taunting, wounding images were now bombarding her mind, increasing her distress. She had left the party with all the cool of a baby elephant let loose in a drawing room. She saw Craig’s self-satisfied smile, Santino laughing, the stiff, disapproving faces of the other women. Craig might as well have stripped her naked in public. Her trembling hands braced on the edge of the washroom vanity unit and, letting her head hang for she couldn’t stand to look at herself in the mirror when she hated herself so much for her own stupidity, she began to sob.
Santino had never made it from the lift to his secretary’s office so fast. But then those heartbreaking sobs acted on him like a shriek alarm. He would usually have gone quite some distance to avoid a crying woman, but the curious automatic pilot now overruling his normal caution ensured that he strode right through the open door of the washroom and gathered Poppy straight into a comforting embrace.
The sheer shock value of a pair of masculine arms closing round her when she had believed that she was alone provoked a startled cry from Poppy. Then she looked up and focused on Santino and even more shock froze her from head to toe. Bronze-coloured eyes set below lush black lashes were trained to hers, the lean, dark contours of his handsome features taut with concern.
‘It’s OK,’ he soothed in his gorgeous accented drawl.
‘Is it?’ Poppy’s voice emerged on the back of a breathless sob, for she could not have got oxygen into her lungs at that instant had her life depended on it. What was happening should have felt unreal but, in actuality, being in the circle of Santino’s arms felt very real and very right. Furthermore, it was something she had been dreaming of for so long that no power on earth could have sent her into retreat.
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