Page 249 of Mario
I take her hand. “Show gratitude by doing the work well.”
Her grip tightens slightly. “I intend to.”
“Good,” I say, releasing her. “Then welcome to Conti Enterprises.”
Julia steps past Ricardo with a smile, and Ricardo moves aside to let her pass, careful not to make contact.
Neither Dante nor Julia notice.
Ricardo watches them go, his expression unreadable.
Only when they disappear around the corner does he look back at me.
“Well,” he says. “That should be interesting.”
Yes. Interesting.
Very interesting.
Chapter Twenty Five
Victoria
By Monday morning, I have convinced myself of nothing.
Which is inconvenient, because I sit at my desk in my office in his building, dressed, pretending to be a competent professional woman with a calendar full of meetings and not a woman who spent most of Sunday spiraling into an internet hole about the man she slept with two nights ago.
The man I let take me to his house.
The man whose bed I slept in.
The man whose bag of lingerie is still sitting in my bedroom because I cannot bring myself to unpack it, return it, hide it, or look directly at it for more than three seconds at a time.
Mario Conti.
I stare at my computer screen without reading a word of whatever report is in front of me.
On Saturday night, I had been shaken.
For a while, badly shaken.
Then, by late Saturday evening, I had talked myself down.
Because I am a rational person. A rational person who had been exhausted, overstimulated, underfed, oversexed, and then stupid enough to read an old article from what was basically an Italian gossip rag.
Of course I had panicked.
Of course my brain had taken one ugly suggestion and sprinted with it straight into catastrophe.
By the time I went to bed Saturday night, I had dismissed it.
By Sunday morning, I was laughing at myself.
How could I even think something like that about him?
Mario?
No. Absolutely not.
