Her stomach roiled. She thought she might be hyperventilating because she could hear a distant hiss. She wanted to throw up, pass out, die. Please God, take me now.
“Mademoiselle?” Nadine badgered.
“Yes,” she stammered. “It’s me.” Then, as the sheer mortification of the whole thing struck, she added a strident, “Can you close that, please?”
She glanced at Signor Fabrizio, her supervisor. He sat next to her with a supercilious expression on his middle-aged face.
“Why are you showing those like that? With him in here?” Gwyn asked. “Couldn’t we have done this privately?”
“They’re available to anyone with an online connection. I’ve seen them,” Fabrizio said pithily. “I brought them to Nadine’s attention.”
He’d already taken a long look? Gross.
Tears hit her eyes like the cut of a hard, biting wind. An equally brutal blow seemed to land in her stomach, pushing nausea higher into the back of her throat.
“Surely you knew this could happen when you took those photos and sent them to Mr. Jensen?” Nadine said.
Nadine had kept her snooty nose high in the air from the moment Gwyn had followed Fabrizio into her office. Fabrizio kept giving her darkly smug looks, like he was staring right through her perfectly respectable blue pencil skirt and matching jacket.
He made her skin crawl.
And worry for her job. Her palms were sweating.
“I didn’t take those photos,” she said as strongly as her tight throat would allow. “And you think I would send something like that to a client? They’re—oh, for the love of God.” She heard the door opening behind her and shot to her feet, reaching to push the lid of Nadine’s laptop down herself, wishing the images could be quashed that easily.
Deep in the back of her psyche, she knew she was going to cry. Soon. Pressure was building behind her collarbone, compressing her lungs, pushing behind her eyes. But for the moment she was in a type of shock. Like she’d been shot and still had the strength to run before the true depth of her injuries debilitated her.
“Signor Donatelli.” Nadine rose. “Thank you for coming.”
“You notified him?” Signor Fabrizio jerked to his feet, sounding dismayed.
Whatever remained of Gwyn’s composure went into free fall. The owner of the bank was here? She tried to gather herself to face yet another denigrating expression.
“It’s protocol with something this dangerous to the bank’s reputation,” Nadine said stiffly, adding to the weight on Gwyn’s heart.
“She’s being dismissed,” Fabrizio hurried to assure Signor Donatelli. “I was about to tell her to collect her things.”
Time stopped as Gwyn processed that she was being fired. Stupid her, she had thought she was being called in to talk about a client’s possible misappropriation of funds, not to be disgraced in front of the entire world.
Literally the entire world. This was what online bullying felt like. This was persecution. A witch hunt. Stoning. She couldn’t take in how monumentally unjust this was.
The only experience she could liken it to was when her mother had been diagnosed. Words were being said, facts stated that couldn’t be denied, but she had no real grasp of how the next minute or week or the rest of her life would play out from this moment forward.
She didn’t want to face it, but she had no choice.
And the silence around her told her they were all waiting for her to do so.
Very slowly, she turned to the man who’d just entered, but it wasn’t Paolo Donatelli, president and head of the family that owned Donatelli International. No, it was far worse.
Vittorio Donatelli. Paolo’s cousin, second-in-command as VP of operations. A man of, arguably, even more stunningly good looks, at least in her estimation. His features were as refined and handsome as his Italian heritage demanded. He was clean-shaven, excruciatingly well dressed in a tailored suit and wore an air of arrogance that came as much from his lean height as his aloof expression. His ability to dominate any situation was obvious in the way they all stood in silence, waiting for him to speak.
He didn’t know her from Adam, she knew that. She’d smiled brightly at him not long after arriving here in Milan, forgetting that secret crushes didn’t know they were the object of such yearnings. He’d looked right through her and it had stung. Quite badly, illogically.
“Nadine. Oscar,” Vittorio said with a brief flick of his gaze to the other occupants of the room before coming back to give Gwyn a piercing stare from his bronze eyes.
Her heart gave a skip between pounds, reacting to him even when she was verging on hysteria. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t make it stretch into a smile. She doubted she would ever smile again. The strange buzz inside her intensified.
“Miss Ellis,” he said with a hostile nod of acknowledgment.
He knew her name from Nadine’s report, she supposed. The furious accusation in his eyes told her he’d seen the photos. Of course he’d seen them. That’s why he had stooped from the lofty heights of the top floor to the midlevel of the Donatelli Tower.
Gwyn’s shallow breaths halted and her knees quivered. She was weirdly shocked by how defenseless the idea of his seeing her naked made her feel, but the effect this very perfect stranger had had on her from the start was unprecedented. She’d seen him stride through the offices in Charleston once and that simple glimpse of an incredibly handsome and dynamic man had made her view the postings at the head office in Milan that much more favorably than any other branch in the organization. She had wanted to advance, would have taken whatever promotions she could land, but this was her dream location.
Because it gave her the chance to see him.
Be careful what you wish for. She mashed her lips together into a hard, steady line, heart scored, then turned her face away, trying to recover.
He was, quite obviously, nothing like the man she’d constructed in her mind. Italian men were warm and gregarious and adored women, she had thought, expecting he’d flirt with her if they ever actually spoke. She had expected him to give her a chance to intrigue him, despite the fact that she worked for him.
But the man she had been obsessing over had not only glimpsed her naked, he was completely unmoved by what he’d seen. He was repelled. Blamed her. Was privately calling her a whore and worse—
She stopped herself from spiraling. The pieces of her shattered world were being kicked around enough. She had to keep a grip.
But she wasn’t used to being rejected out of hand, seeing no interest whatsoever from a man. The reaction was usually the opposite. Her body had always pulled a certain amount of male attention. She didn’t encourage it and was pretty boring personality-wise. She worked in banking, for heaven’s sake. Her hair was the most common brown you could find and she wasn’t terribly pretty. Her face was only elevated from plain to pleasant by her mother’s exceptionally good skin and a cheery nature that usually kept a smile on her mouth. So she shouldn’t
