crushed to a low burn. His small clutch of assistants just stood there staring at him as if he’d lost his sanity. Others—complete strangers to him—were staring at him with fascination that was tinged with recognition and also understanding as to what his presence here had to mean.
Trouble—big trouble.
Enrico Ranieri was known throughout Europe as an acquirer of struggling businesses, a troubleshooter notorious for taking no prisoners as he worked to turn ailing companies’ fortunes around.
And he always struck without warning—a tactic that gave him the quick upper hand. So when Enrico turned up in your foyer, you didn’t only stop and stare, you felt your own vulnerability right through to your shoes.
When he was confronting one of your own, because she happened to have her child with her, you could see his reputation for ruthless throat-cutting acted out before your horrified eyes.
They think I dislike children, Enrico realised. They think they are seeing Hannard’s crèche being wiped out with a swift, decisive flick of my hand. And maybe I will do it, he thought brutally, as his cold eyes dismissed every one of them and he strode across the foyer and into one of the lifts.
He stabbed a button then turned to watch his now wary entourage rush to get into the carriage before the doors closed. No one spoke. They had the sense not to. He felt as if he’d been turned to a pillar of stone. Nothing was going on inside him now—nothing other than—
Freya had given birth to his son.
The lift stopped and the doors slid open at the executive top floor, where he was met by yet another sea of faces forming an anxious wall of greeting in front of him.
Enrico did not want it. He did not want anything to do with damned business right now. He wanted…
As he stepped out of the lift, the icy shards glinting in his eyes had the wall of suits parting in front of him, welcoming smiles withering, the hands half lifted to shake his hand dropping nervously away.
‘This way, Mr Ranieri,’ some brave soul prompted.
He nodded, flat lipped, and followed while everyone else fell into silent step behind. He was shown into a large office filled with light spilling in from wall-to-wall windows. Enrico stood for a couple of seconds taking in nothing—nothing, until the silent tension behind him finally got to him and he turned.
Ignoring each wary face but for that of Carlo, his PA, he instructed, ‘I want the personal profiles of every employee sent to my laptop within the next ten minutes.’
The Hannard suits shifted on a tidal wave of discomfort. His personal staff were wise enough to keep their body language under control.
‘Postpone the board meeting until tomorrow. And I will want to meet anyone with decision-making powers before it begins.’ He continued his instruction like a shark circling its next meal. ‘That is all.’
It was a dismissal. He turned his back on the lot of them before he strode over to the carefully cleared and freshly polished desk that used to belong to Josh Hannard but now was his. Behind him the shuffle of a mass exit began to take place.
‘But we thought we were going to have a working lunch so we could introduce everybody,’ he heard someone mutter in hushed bewilderment.
‘If I were you, I would skip lunch and start boning up on what it is you do here to earn your salary,’ one of his own people advised.
‘But Mr Hannard—’
‘Mr Hannard is no longer in charge here, Mr Ranieri is. And he has a nasty habit of chewing on spare flesh and spitting out the bones.’
Enrico smiled as he heard that. Quite a character reference, he mused thinly. Then he lifted his eyes to the rooftop view of London he could see through the window and the smile died.
His son—his son!
‘Cagna,’ he muttered. She was going to pay for this!
He, Enrico Ranieri, was going to chew on Freya Jenson’s delectable flesh and spit out her deceiving, lying, cheating bones!
Freya sat on the grass in the park surrounded by ducks while her son fed them the remains of her uneaten sandwiches—and she shivered despite the heat of the summer sun.
Icy cold was how she always felt when she let herself think about Enrico. Hurt, hatred and contempt could turn a warm-blooded woman to a block of ice.
So could fear.
Of the unknown.
Of what Enrico was going to do next.
She shifted, blinking her green eyes as a hungry beak pecked at her fingers. Relinquishing the small crust to the greedy duck, she turned to Nicky, who was sitting there in his element, smiling—and looking so much more like his father than she’d ever let herself see before, that it came as a shock each time she gazed at him now.
Now that she had seen his father in the flesh again.
Now that she had seen the grown-up version of her son’s handsome face, those black eyes, the stubborn mouth and determined chin.
The fact that Enrico had been so quick to recognise himself in Nicky had shaken her to her very roots. How dared he—how dared he do that after all he’d said and done to disown responsibility?
She’d come to hate him for doing that.
‘Get out of my life,’ he’d ripped at her three years ago. ‘You are a cheat and a slut and I never want to see you again so long as I live.’
Bitter, cold, heartless. Arrogant, superior, judgemental; deaf…
She ran out of adjectives and made do with a sigh instead.
Maybe he’d had second thoughts about Nicky by now, she thought hopefully. He might have seen a miniature mirror image of himself in her little boy, but there again his cousin Luca was yet another reflection of those disgustingly handsome Ranieri features. A sly, mean, nasty mirror of Enrico, but the likeness was there, and Enrico would have remembered that by now and dismissed her and Nicky out of his nasty suspicious—
Then it hit her—the one thing she had been trying very hard not to think about.
What had he been doing in Hannard’s foyer, anyway?
He hadn’t bought Hannard’s—had he? He wasn’t about to become her boss again?
Her spine tensed up as nerve ends crashed together, her cold fingers twisting tightly on her lap. No, she thought—no! Don’t look for the worst-case scenario. He could have just been passing through. Maybe he was a friend of Josh Hannard and was only meeting him for lunch.
And maybe pigs can fly, she was then forced to tell herself. When Enrico Ranieri appeared in a company’s foyer with his faithful entourage stacking up behind him, then he was there for only one purpose.
It was a buy-out and, with his usual tactics, he was making a surprise hit on a new acquisition like a lethal bolt of lightning striking out of the blue.
A shiver ran down
