Enemies Until After Hours (Enemy Tycoons #1)

Chapter One

MIA SIMONINI GLIDED along the polished wooden floors of the gleaming office, humming her favourite song.

First to arrive, last to leave; that was her mantra and she was killing it.

Admittedly, for most of the ten days she’d been working here, the office had been more than half-empty so maybe that wasn’t that much of a claim, but she had a plan to tempt the creative and coding geniuses to come and work in person for at least a few more hours each week.

Small things could have big impacts—not that Mia herself was small.

Nor quiet. But as she was alone right now, the latter didn’t matter and the former never had.

She bit into her cannoncino, savouring the silky rich cream and the light, flaky pastry, and her hum became a guttural moan of gastronomic delight.

The thing was sheer buttery joy. She’d discovered the best pastry shop in Rome, and calling in her order on her way to work was her reward for these early starts and diligence.

She set her coffee on her desk but as she took another bite of pastry, a dollop of cream plopped onto her shirt.

‘Damn.’

Not quite killing it. But if it weren’t for her boobs the cream would have landed on her keyboard, so there was a marginal silver lining to the snafu.

Mia never had mastered the art of sitting down to eat tiny portions slowly—‘like a lady’—as her jerk of a father had frequently harangued her to.

He’d not liked her appetite. Nor her enthusiasm.

Honestly, not anything much about her. But he was no longer around and Mia didn’t know why she allowed his judgy words to echo within her still.

Get it together.

Mia was used to jobs where having some food on her clothing was an occupational hazard and thus if not quite acceptable, then at least understandable, but this gig wasn’t one of them.

She was temporary office manager for a tech start-up incubator that clearly had too much money to throw about, given the luxury refurbishment of the historic building in central Rome where it was housed—and the fact that half the staff never bothered to show up to use it.

Including the boss. She’d had doubts about taking on this contract for her dear friend Adele; tech was not her sector—truth be told, she barely understood what some of those apps did—but she hoped that managing a bunch of genius programmers wasn’t unlike managing any other bunch of strong-minded individuals.

Because Adele had been desperate. She’d needed immediate cover so she could care for her husband, who’d suffered a serious medical event, and as luck would have it, Mia had opted to pass on her next cruise ship contract and so was able to step in.

It was a weird set-up, though—gleaming and new and clearly successful…

just run by ghosts. Though at this moment, the staff all being absent was a good thing.

Mia snatched her spare top—it was hardly the first time she’d spilled food on herself so she kept one at work—and nipped into the private bathroom in the CEO’s suite as it was nearest. Of all the AWOL staff, he was the one who was never there.

But she needed to move because the stalwarts who did show up daily—company lawyer Paolo and his property team, plus the chief financial officer Carla and her two investment analysts—would arrive any second.

With her fresh shirt wedged in the crook of her arm and the remaining pastry held between her teeth, Mia unbuttoned her blouse, still humming her tune of the day as she walked through the empty office to the bathroom and turned to the mirror.

‘Who are you?’

She whirled, the two halves of her cream-smeared blouse splaying wide with the speed of her spin. She stared, utterly unable to answer and not because of the pastry hanging from her mouth like an oversize cigar. Sweet mother of mercy. There was a man already in the bathroom.

Not just any man. He was about as bare chested as she—while his shirt was on his arms and shoulders he was still in the process of buttoning it up, which meant she saw flexing pecs and washboard abs and a seemingly endless expanse of lean, bronzed skin and a light smattering of dark hair that arrowed down into tailored dark grey suit trousers that emphasised his narrow hips and long legs and—

‘Who are you?’ he repeated in rapid Italian.

Who was she? Who was he? Mia froze on the outside and melted on the inside.

He was tall, dark and very much looking like he’d just stepped out of the shower.

The scent of soap tantalised her suddenly suffocating lungs.

The single trickle of water slipping its way down his finely muscled torso was too fascinating and she snapped her attention up to his face.

Oh. Oh my. He’d freshly shaved and that simply highlighted his sculpted cheekbones and square jawline that screamed to be touched while his hair was slightly too long and too unruly for the pristine carved perfection of the rest of him.

Good Lord, the man was gorgeous.

Her brain refused to compute. At all. But there was something familiar about those bottomless, dreamy brown eyes. Was it possible that she knew him? Was it possible her brain would ever work again?

She removed the end of the cannoncino from her mouth and quickly licked her lip, certain there’d be an errant flake of pastry; there always was. Too late, she realised her struggle to breathe was because of the lingering steam in the air. He’d definitely showered in here. And that meant—

‘You’re the boss,’ she muttered.

The guy who’d been absent for over a week. The one her friend Adele adored and wanted Mia to protect and do everything for without question.

‘Who are you and why are you here?’ He switched to English immediately.

So much for thinking her Italian had improved. She’d lost most of her first language when her mother had died and she’d had to go live with her father in England, but she’d been working on it and—

‘Are you the cleaner?’ he prompted, his gaze grazing down her body.

She grabbed her blouse with her spare hand, but there was a lot of Mia to cover.

A polite man would avert his eyes. This man was not polite.

This man took his time to scrutinise every inch of her exposed skin, and given his forbidding expression he was not impressed.

He could not stand more ramrod straight. Or still. Or look more grumpy.

‘Did one of the coders hire you as some kind of inappropriate entertainment?’ he growled.

OMG—had he just mistaken her for an exotic dancer? At seven o’clock on a Monday morning?

Mia straightened as best she could given the gaping blouse issues, determined to recover some dignity. ‘I was hired by Adele.’

‘What?’ He cocked his head and stepped closer. ‘Why? When?’ His bottomless soulful gaze turned icy. ‘To do what?’

Mia didn’t answer. He still looked disturbingly familiar and if only she could get her brain to work, she might rake up why. But surely, she would remember if she’d ever met a man this ridiculously hot?

‘Who are you?’ He took another step closer and his voice dropped to sub-zero temperatures—perfectly matching his frigid glare.

Mia was used to far worse than disapproving looks and quelling glances and being told to be quiet because once again she was being too much.

This jerk’s supercilious ability to look down his nose at her was nothing on the acid that streamed from her father’s tongue.

This ass and his not-so-silent distaste could take a hike.

She stared back at him. Hard. And shoved the remainder of the pastry into her mouth. It wasn’t the first time she’d stuffed in food to stop herself saying something she shouldn’t, but it was the most stupid.

Because suddenly she placed his face. More precisely, his eyes. She finally remembered those meltingly deep brown eyes. And now she didn’t want to answer any of his questions. Now she needed a moment to recover.

Adele had referred to her boss only as Santo—Saint. Mia had figured it was some kind of inside joke given Santo Antonio was the name of the software company. Mia had gotten full access to Adele’s email, and her boss had only his first initial on the email address and he signed off with simply an S.

She’d had only a day and a half with Adele in a frantic handover before the older woman had needed to get back to the hospital.

Mia had listened and not questioned anything unless it had been essential because Adele was already struggling and Mia hadn’t wanted to stress her more.

So Mia had simply assumed—wrongly—that the ‘S’ in all those emails stood for Santo.

It didn’t. It was Sante with an ‘e.’ She knew exactly who he was and she was no longer warring between melting and freezing; she was numb.

He stood more rigid than ever, glaring at her with that outrageously square jaw while she chewed.

It took a while before she could swallow because it had been a good third of the pastry that she’d shoved in there.

The tragedy was she’d couldn’t even taste it anymore.

It could’ve been cardboard for all the pleasure it brought.

Of course she shouldn’t have done it, but she’d needed to buy time to work out how on earth she was going to deal with the devil before her.

* * *

Sante Trovato couldn’t decide if he was hallucinating or this was real because apparently Venus herself had materialised in his bathroom. Bountiful was a word. Magnificent another. Half-dressed and luscious and looking him up and down with hungry, wide blue eyes as if he…

His mouth dried. He’d visually drowned in acres of creamy skin and ample curves, in the tempting richness of the long chocolate-brown hair cascading over her shoulder. As for her consumption of that custard pastry—she’d inhaled the remainder like some sex goddess. She was all goddess and—

He could not be thinking these thoughts.