Кэтти Уильямс – Out of Hours...Cinderella Secretary: The Italian Billionaire's Secretary Mistress / The Secretary's Scandalous Secret / The Boss's Inexperienced Secretary (страница 2)

‘Are you?’ questioned Alicia enviously.

‘Yes. He’s on his way from the airport.’ Angie knew his schedule down to the last second. The dark limousine would be speeding its way towards central London and Riccardo would be stretching his long legs out in the back. He would have loosened his tie and he might be flicking through some paperwork. Or talking on the phone in one of the three languages he spoke. He might even be exchanging a few desultory comments with his Italian-speaking driver, Marco—who doubled as a bodyguard when the need arose.

‘In fact…’ Angie glanced at her watch ‘…if the roads are clear, then he might be—’ Her beeper began emitting a high-pitched little squeal and she could do absolutely nothing about the rapid acceleration of her heart. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, with a brisk little smile which hid her instinctive excitement, ‘but he’s in the building.’

On her low-heeled, perfectly polished navy shoes, she sped along to her office which adjoined Riccardo’s—a breath of pleasure escaping her lips as she walked into the light and spacious room. Because it didn’t matter how many times she saw it, she could never get over the fact that she worked in a place as beautiful as this. It was, Angie reflected, like a picture postcard come to life.

The Castellari headquarters looked out over the vast and impressive space of Trafalgar Square and the world-famous landmark always looked beautiful with its pluming fountain and tall statue, but never more so than at Christmas time. The iconic fir tree sent over each year by the King of Norway twinkled brightly and every single window as far as the eye could see was alive with brightly coloured Christmas lights. Angie stared out of the window. It looked…magical.

But then she heard the sound of a familiar footfall ringing along the corridor. A footfall she would have recognised even if it were treading in thick snow and she quickly moved into his office to greet him, wiping all traces of wistfulness from her face and replacing it with the calm and efficient expression which Riccardo had learned to expect from his right-hand woman. But nothing could stop the sudden acceleration of her heart as the door opened and she looked into his dark, heartbreakingly handsome face.

‘Ah, Angie. You are here. Good.’ His deep, accented voice washed over her skin like raw silk as he dropped his briefcase and coat onto one of the squashy leather sofas. His black hair was tousled as if he had been running his fingers through it and he had loosened his tie as she’d known he would. A brief smile was slanted in her direction and then he picked up a sheaf of papers and began flicking through them. ‘Get me the paperwork on the Posara takeover bid, would you?’

‘Certainly, Riccardo,’ she replied smoothly as she automatically scooped up the beautiful cashmere coat and hung it up.

Did her features betray her probably unreasonable hurt—that the man she had not seen for a fortnight should barely deign to greet her? Not a hello or a how are you? If she had been substituted by one of the other secretaries, would he even have noticed? But good secretaries didn’t obsess about the fact that they might as well have been invisible for all the notice that was taken of them. And she prided herself on being a good secretary.

‘Good trip?’ she asked politely as she deposited the file he wanted onto the centre of his desk.

He shrugged. ‘New York is New York. You know. Busy, buzzy, beautiful.’

Angie didn’t know, as it happened—because she’d never been there. ‘I suppose it must be,’ she observed politely, biting down the question she longed to ask. About whether or not he’d seen Paula Prentice—the woman all the papers had been linking him to a year ago. Paula with her blonde and tanned beauty, her amazingly white teeth and a body which had been voted Most Lusted After by a leading men’s magazine.

When Riccardo had been dating the Californian lovely, he had spent many weekends in the Big Apple—and Angie would anxiously study his face on his return, wondering if he was going to announce that he was planning to make the stunning Paula his bride. But he hadn’t. To Angie’s enormous relief, they’d split—again, according to the papers, since Riccardo certainly didn’t discuss his private life with his secretary.

‘And how about the de Camilla account?’ she questioned, because that, after all, was the deal he’d gone out there to oversee.

‘Frustrante! Frustrating,’ he translated, tugging his silk tie off completely as he glanced up at her.

‘I could just about work that out for myself, Riccardo.’

‘Oh?’ Jet dark brows were elevated. Did his sensible, reliable mouse of a secretary have frustrations in her own life? he wondered. He doubted it. The only frustrations he could imagine her having were being unable to find a new knitting pattern. Or her television breaking down, perhaps. He glittered her an ebony glance. ‘You have been taking the crash course in Italian, perhaps?’

‘Hardly! My Italian may be poor but I have a comprehensive knowledge of exclamations and profanities which I’ve managed to acquire after working for you for so long!’ she said crisply. ‘Now, would you like some coffee?’

Riccardo gave the ghost of a smile. ‘I would love some coffee—could you tell?’

Hopelessly, she noted the way his voice dipped when he said love like that. ‘Of course I could, because—’

‘Because?’

‘You’re entirely predictable.’

‘Am I?’

‘As the sun which rises in the morning sky. And in a minute you’ll start moaning about the fact that tonight’s the office party—’

‘It’s tonight?’ Riccardo raked long olive fingers through already tousled black hair. ‘Madonna mia!’

‘You see?’ she murmured as she walked over to the machine which had been exported here at great expense from his native Italy. ‘Entirely predictable.’

Ignoring the file in front of him, Riccardo sat back and watched her for a moment, thinking that she was the only woman whom he would allow occasionally to tease him. She was certainly a lot less timid than when he had first employed her—though her dress sense hadn’t improved one little bit. Disparagingly, he flicked a glance over her neat skirt and the pristine blouse which accompanied it and he suppressed a very Italian shudder. How dull she looked! But perhaps he was ill-advised to criticise her appearance under the circumstances. After all—hadn’t her plainness been one of the reasons he’d employed her?

He’d been looking for someone to replace the motherly figure who had guarded his office since his arrival in London but who was leaving to spend time with her grandchildren, no matter how much he’d tried to persuade her otherwise.

It had been a gruelling day of interview after interview—when it had seemed that every would-be glamour model in the universe had tried to convince him that she wanted nothing more but to type his letters and answer the phone. He hadn’t believed one of them—not when their accompanying actions had belied the sincerity of their words.

Riccardo knew what he wanted, and he did not want distractions in the office—women crossing and uncrossing their legs to show him peeps of stocking tops, or leaning forward to accentuate their cleavage. In fact, he regarded his time at work as a break from the constant attentions of women which had plagued him since his early teens.

The afternoon interviewing session which had fielded a clutch of admirably qualified graduates had proved no more fruitful in his search to find someone prepared to work for him on his terms. Not one of them had flinched when he had flicked a cool, challenging gaze and stated that what he wanted was an old-fashioned secretary. Not an assistant—and certainly not an equal. He was not interested in teaching them anything and there would be no fast-track promotion through the business.

His outrageous assertion had not put off a single candidate and yet Riccardo had moodily rejected every one of them—mainly on the illogical grounds that there wasn’t one he couldn’t have bedded before the evening was out. And he wanted a secretary, not a lover.

But then he had been on his way home and had passed the open door of the typing pool—to see some mouse of a thing bent over the filing cabinet. To a man with the Italian sensibilities of Riccardo, her appearance was appalling—a functional skirt which did her no favours and hair scraped back into an unflatteringly tight bun.

He remembered glancing at his watch, thinking how late it was and admiring her dedication to duty before deciding that she probably didn’t have much to rush home to; this mouse was unlikely to have a line of men beating their way to her door. Maybe she was one of those women who lived at the office, he thought wryly.

She must have been alerted to his presence for she had whirled round, fingers flying to her bare lips—her cheeks colouring a rosy-pink when she saw him standing there. It was a long time since a woman had blushed in his presence and for a moment a faint smile had played around Riccardo’s lips.

‘Can I…can I help you, sir?’ she had questioned with the kind of deference which told him that she knew exactly who he was.