possible, getting worse.
Out of the cubicle, after she’d washed her hands and swirled cold water in her mouth, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror.
She looked awful. Her face was white as a sheet, her dark hair lank around her shoulders...
She did a double take. Had her hair grown?
After popping a mint in her mouth, she inched her way around the walls to the elevator. Two men and a woman she vaguely recognised were getting into it, chatting amiably. She slid in with them before the doors closed.
She punched the button for the thirtieth floor and held onto the railing as it began the smooth ride up.
All talk had stopped. She could feel their eyes on her. Did she really look so bad that she’d become a conversation stopper? It was a relief when they got out on the floor below her.
A gaggle of secretaries and administrators worked in the open space in front of the office Anna shared with Stefano. They all turned their heads to stare at her. A couple were open-mouthed.
Did they have to make it so obvious that she looked this awful? All the same, she managed to get her mouth working enough to smile a greeting. Not one of them responded.
She looked around for Chloe, her newly appointed fresh-faced PA who cowered in terror every time Stefano made an appearance. Poor Chloe would not be happy to know she’d have to take on Anna’s duties for the day.
Anna hadn’t wanted a PA of her own. She was a PA! But Stefano had thrown so many responsibilities her way in the year and a half since he’d poached her from Levon Brothers that when he’d caught her working at nine in the evening, he’d put his foot down and insisted on hiring someone for her.
‘Do I get a new job title?’ she’d cheekily asked, and been rewarded with a promotion to Executive PA and a hefty pay rise.
Maybe 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,
