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‘Possibly you should have remembered that fact before you opted for brutal honesty.’ He pressed the intercom on his desk. ‘Rowena, call Security and have them escort Miss Raven and her belongings from the building.’
Tilda lifted her chin.So maybe not the best time to ask for a reference.
There was a long silence and then, ‘You can’t sack someone because they are late.’
The unexpected support from the disembodied voice belonging to her shy, nervous assistant brought an emotional lump to Tilda’s throat.
‘Oh, it’s OK, I want to go, Rowena,’ she said, resisting the impulse to applaud her assistant. The last thing she needed was anything else on her conscience and she certainly did not want to be responsible for the brave young woman losing her job.
Ezio threw up his hands. ‘What is this, “bring your protest placard to work” day?’ he wondered, incensed, dragging a hand through his dark hair.
‘It’s fine,’ Tilda inserted, not fooled by Ezio’s languid tone. She could take his moods but poor Rowena got flustered every time he spoke to her. ‘Don’t worry, Rowena, call them. I could do with some help to carry my things.’
Her face was filled with haughty contempt when she turned back to Ezio. ‘Actually, I am quite capable of leaving under my own steam, thank you.’ Mid-stiff-backed turn, she caught sight of the discarded tabloid on the periphery of her vision and made a detour to pick it up. ‘If you want to kill the story dead, you could always marry someone else—another of the rejects you treat like rubbish, maybe?’
The words hung there... Another time, the look of sheer disbelief on Ezio’s handsome face would have made her laugh, but instead she felt a stinging tightness in her throat and a burning heat beneath her eyelids.
She would not cry.
Teeth clenched, she turned her defiant gaze back to Ezio and flung the paper back down on the desk, not realising that the jerky action had dislodged the plastic hospital identity bracelet she had shoved in her jeans pocket after Sam had torn it off in the taxi. It nose-dived an inch in front of her feet and, before she could retrieve it, Ezio came round from behind his desk and picked the tag up.
‘What is this...?’ Ezio’s dark eyes went to her pale face...he realised for the first time just how pale. ‘You have been in hospital?’ The tightness in his chest stemmed from a surge of emotion that he felt no desire to examine. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ he growled out. In light of this information, a quick review confirmed he had acted badly, but how the hell was he to know if she didn’t tell him?
‘Why didn’t you ask?’ she countered, totally abandoning the polite office voice he was used to as she yelled, ‘Not me, my... Samuel!’ She stopped, clearly just one quivering syllable short of a sob, and bit her lip hard.
She held out her hand for the bracelet but, instead of handing it back, Ezio read the name on it.
‘Who isSamuel...?’
She had a boyfriend?
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOURBOYFRIEND?’
‘My brother.’ She wasn’t against the idea of a boyfriend but she wasn’t actively looking for one. According to Rowena—who would have chatted constantly about her own boyfriend if Tilda didn’t stop her—that was a mistake, because they didn’t come knocking on your door. Also Tilda, apparently—again, according to Rowena—didn’t put outsignals, or at least not the right ones for men to know she was interested.
Maybe she set the bar too high.Her assistant had tentatively suggested this before dissolving into confusion as she’d hastily assured Tilda that she was really very pretty, and a very nice person, which was what counted. She probably wasn’t so nice, because she had been amused to watch the younger girl tie herself in knots, offering reassurance that Tilda did not need.
The fact was, she honestly didn’t care. Romance was the last thing on her mind and, as for sex, what you’d never had you never missed. The celibacy had been a conscious choice. She had decided early on in her guardianship that she wasn’t going to disrupt her brother’s life by having a stream of random men drift in and out of his life.
Love might be different, but for the life of her Tilda couldn’t figure out how you were meant to know that attraction was something deeper. It made total sense that you had to kiss a lot of frogs.
She had a brother?Ezio felt some of the unaccountable antagonism that had climbed its way into his shoulders lessen.
Had he known she had a brother...?
Did he want to?
Annoyed at the scratch on his conscience, he handed her the plastic identity tag.
Tilda sniffed as she shoved it into one of her jacket’s many pockets. ‘I need to get home.’
‘Your par—’
Big eyes behind her lenses flew to his face, and the memory of scanning her HR file in the past surfaced in his head. She had lost both her parents in a motorway smash; he must have read about the brother.
Wasthatwhy she had hadn’t come to the job through the usual university route?
