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Jensen’s eyes widened. “Alessandra is not the right woman for him,” the housekeeper continued, in her patented, matter-of-fact tone. “She is selfish and focused on what he can give her. You are different. He seems happy when he is around you. Which,” she added, “he deserves to be.”
And how was he going to feel this morning with everything blowing up in his face? Jensen’s insides twisted into a ball. Because this wasn’t just another scandal. This one had him at the heart of it.
“It will blow over,piccolo mio,” Filomena said quietly. “Don’t fret.” She walked over to the cupboard and retrieved a bottle of painkillers and set them in front of Jensen.
Jensen had taken the painkillers and was stewing over her coffee when Cristiano walked into the kitchen a few minutes later, dressed in a crisp navy-blue suit, gingham-checked white-and-blue shirt and purple tie. Looking crisp and beautiful, in high-alert business mode, the lines of fatigue etched around his eyes and mouth were the only sign that anything was off-kilter.
His gaze moved from her to Filomena. “Give us a moment,per favore?”
Filomena nodded and vanished inside the massive pantry. Cristiano leaned a hip against the island. Surveyed her pallor. The bottle of painkillers in front of her. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. “Just a headache.”
He rubbed his palms against his eyes. “Mi dispiace. I was up half the night with my communications team, attempting to stop them from publishing the photos. But we couldn’t track them in time, given we didn’t know who it was who took them.”
Her stomach roiled. She didn’t want to tell him. Would rather do anything but. But she knew who it had been. Almost assuredly.
“It was my mother, Cristiano.”
He frowned. “How do you know? It could have been anyone.”
“Because it has her MO written all over it.” She drew in a breath. “I hadn’t talked to her in a while. I’d been ignoring her texts, because I needed to stay focused and she was pressuring me into doing a follow-up stunt to the Alexandre thing and I wanted nothing to do with it. Yesterday, I texted her and checked in. Told her the campaign was wrapped and I was looking forward to the party. She clearly saw an opportunity and took it.”
An incredulous look moved across his face. “She would do that to you? Hurt you in that way?”
She absorbed his disbelief. The shock written across his face. She didn’t expect him to understand the way her mother’s mind worked. How messed up her family was. It continued to astonish even her. Nor could she explain how desperate her mother was, because that would lead to her current addiction issues and mental health challenges and that was a place she couldn’t go.
She fidgeted with the handle on her cup. “She destroyed my sister Ava’s life when she convinced her to get married for the season finale of the show, when all of us knew Dimitrio was an unfaithful piece of dirt who wasn’t good enough to grace the ground she walked on. But Ava loved him, it generated the highest ratings of any network reality show in the history of television, so who cared?” She threw up a hand. “The show must go on.”
Cristiano stared at her, wide-eyed. Her shoulders slumped. “She thinks about it for about ten seconds, then decides we’ll forgive her. I’m so sorry, Cristiano. It was a gross miscalculation on my part to trust her. It was my fault.”
His gaze darkened. “It wasn’t your fault. My security should have caught them. Not to mention the fact that I was the one who came down there last night with the champagne, intent on pursuing things with you. If anyone offered them the opportunity, it was me.”
She scoured his face, attempting to figure out how he felt about it all, but his phone was buzzing, his attention diverted as he glanced down at it, then back up at her. “The communications team is advising we let this blow over. Let it run its course. There’s no point in chasing after a horse that’s already left the barn.”
She knew that to be the truth.
He glanced at his watch. “I have a meeting in forty-five minutes. A crisis brewing in LA with my supply chain. I have to go.”
She nodded, wishing desperately for some reassurance, for some indication of where they stood, but he merely bent his head and brushed a kiss to her cheek, then picked up his briefcase and left.
She stared down at her coffee. He had so much on his plate. So much pressure and stress, and she had only added to it with this. Done the one thing he’d asked her not to do in creating another scandal.
She knew that shuttered, aloof look. Daniel had worn it before he’d ended things between them. When he’d arrived home at their apartment, only to find a horde of paparazzi waiting, hot on another story. She couldn’t even remember what it had been. She only remembered the look of finality on Daniel’s face when he’d told her they were done. To pack her things and go.
She sank her teeth into her lip. Had she ruined any chance of a relationship with Cristiano? Of pursuing this fledgling connection between them, one that seemed so very monumental and different? Surely he wouldn’t want anything to do with her after this?
Cristiano got into his sports car and drove the winding highway to Milan. He was cutting it close for his meeting, traffic thick on the early-morning commute, and he had a full-on crisis to navigate in LA, one he thought he’d put to bed weeks ago. Not helped by the couple of hours’ sleep he was operating on, which had put him in a combustible mood. Exacerbated by the information Jensen had just given him.
Veronica Davis had sent that photographer to scale his defenses and take lurid, intimate photos of her daughter to satisfy the gossip mill of a television show she subsisted on. He was angry,furiousabout it.At Jensen’s mother for abusing her daughter’s confidence. For invading his privacy. At the Davis matriarch’s absolute refusal to acknowledge the damage she was inflicting on her daughter and her career.
He couldn’t believe she would do that to Jensen. But then again, she’d been doing it her entire life. Why stop now? It made him so angry he wanted to slap a restraining order on Veronica Davis and sue her for invading his privacy. But that wasn’t going to help the situation. Not aided by the fact that he had known exactly what he was doing when he’d taken that champagne down to the pool last night to seduce Jensen. He’d chosen to complicate things by getting involved with her. By giving in to the madness that consumed him every time he was within touching distance of her.
He was the one who had provided the fodder for her mother’s cameras, the photos of Jensen and the prince in the Trevi Fountain downright innocent compared to the intimate photos of them in the pool the night before.
He’d barely been awake, without even a cup of coffee in hand, when he’d received a tearful phone call from his ex-fiancée. Which shouldn’t have damn well been a thing, because he’d ended that relationship on as clear a note as he’d thought humanly possible. But Alessandra had been wrecked,distraught, which made him wonder if his family had been stepping in, massaging that relationship, planting the seed that he would come around eventually. Which had left him somewhere close to incendiary.
He knew the political value Alessandra brought to the company. The strategic asset she was. He’d spent his entire life devoting himself to FV and what the company needed. Alessandra would no doubt make someone the perfect wife. Just not him. Because after the passion he and Jensen had shared, he knew a marriage to Alessandra would never be enough. His head wanted her to be the one, but his heart did not. It was a truth he was finally willing to admit. His heart was in another place entirely. Which was a problem.
