Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
T HE NEXT WEEK at work was a study in willpower. Luckily, Polly was in ample possession of willpower. But it was almost like Luca was going out of his way to be difficult. She would have thought that if it was anybody else. That he was doing his level best to make everything as unpleasant as possible to punish her for daring to leave him.
But Luca didn’t do things simply for the sake of them, and she could say that she’d never once witnessed him being petty . It just wasn’t him. He was a man who did things as and only when they were strictly necessary. At least, they had to be necessary in his mind.
The trouble for Luca was that what seemed necessary to him did not always seem necessary to other people.
Her included.
Hence the blowup over his midnight suit selection.
But where another person might have gone out of his way to be tirelessly accommodating to make her think that she had made a mistake, or would have gone out of their way to make the last week miserable, Luca was simply Luca. But in the lead-up to the summit, he was more of himself than he often was, which was a particular sort of difficult that really should almost be categorized as its own thing.
The Luca Salvatore Effect.
Perhaps she could get medical studies done on her brain after she finished with the job. Maybe it would become an officially recognized condition.
What happened to a person when they were subject to Luca over long periods of time.
If it became a recognized medical condition Luca might actually care about it, and learn about it. Perhaps that was the path to personal growth for him.
That made her smile. She suppressed it.
She was run ragged. She was absolutely resolved in her decision to leave.
She was fantasizing about the new job. About the freedom she would have there. The freedom to work normal hours. Or maybe just slightly extended hours rather than being on call twenty-four hours a day.
The freedom to leave her job and not think about her boss.
Constantly. Continually. Every moment of every day.
Even now, she wasn’t in the office, she was at her own apartment making phone calls and working on the details with the hotel in Singapore, and she was thinking about Luca.
About getting his room ready when they arrived in Singapore, about exactly what he would need. About how his mood would turn even more rigid upon arrival because he would be anticipating giving a speech, being out of his element, the necessary evil of stepping away from his research.
Of course, it was to talk about his research. So there was every chance he would glory in that.
Then, her thoughts turned to how he had looked the night she had quit. His bare chest. And the anger in his eyes.
It was a confusing combination of things, things that continued to occupy her brain space in spite of herself.
But that was the problem. This wasn’t just a job. There were too many things tied up in it. It had been a matter of survival. Realizing her dreams, and then eventually it had been...her attachment to Luca.
That was the problem. He was the worst . She acknowledged that. She knew it. She felt it. He was unreasonable. He did things that no normal person would ever do, and he expected her to do things that no sane human being would expect their employees to do. And yet, she found herself anticipating him. She found herself in some ways feeling even strangely protective of him and his eccentricities.
Then there was the fact that he was really effing hot. Which kept her from imprinting on any other man. So here she was, suspended between a raft of uncomfortable feelings, none of which she wanted.
He had been her whole life for these last five years.
Perhaps that was the problem. There was nothing and no one else. She had been far too focused on changing her life. On making something better for herself. And that had encouraged her to make her job all-encompassing. Really, the issue was her desperation. To escape what she had been. To never have to go back to the life that she had lived with her parents.
To maintain control.
In the strangest way, even though Luca was a tyrant, she was in control in this life. She managed all the particulars of his daily life. While she was often creating an environment that suited him, she knew everything about it.
She was the cruise director.
Perhaps that was her problem now. She was on the cusp of a change. Nobody wanted change. Change, even when it was change that you wanted, even when it was change that felt inevitable, was frightening.
She was going to move away from Rome. It had been her home these last five years.
Her first time out of the United States, and she simply didn’t miss it. She hadn’t gone back. She had spent these past years traveling, but she’d had this as her home base.
She had lived in the same apartment now for three years.
That was the problem.
She was leaving everything that she knew now. That was why it all felt unsettled.
It wasn’t Luca.
Because she didn’t want to believe that she had softer feelings for Luca.
When he was just the most unreasonable human being on the planet.
And yet.
He didn’t care about her. The fact that his activities hadn’t in any way changed in the past week indicated that. He was nothing in response to her leaving. He had been perturbed when he had first heard about it because it was a change he wasn’t in control of. And when it came to not liking change Luca was a champion.
But it had nothing to do with her. Nothing to do with actually wanting her around, or caring about her in any regard.
And the same went for her.
She didn’t care about him. She just felt attached to her life.
Understandable.
That was all.
When it was finally time for them to leave for the summit, she felt like there was a guillotine about to fall.
Because this was it. The end of the road.
Maybe she should have arranged to stay over in Singapore for a while after. A little bit of time between the end of one job and the beginning of another. Time to explore a part of the world she hadn’t seen before, and perhaps embrace new experiences.
For one fleeting moment she imagined what it would be like if she cut loose entirely. If she forgot herself. If she found a man—a man that wasn’t Luca—and had a wild fling.
Her whole being rejected that instantly.
That just wasn’t her.
She wasn’t a virgin out of any sense of principle.
It was only that...
You are preoccupied by him.
Was that really the only reason?
Because yes, he was sexy. Gorgeous in a way that no other man had ever been to her, but she didn’t have feelings for him. Surely impossible attraction wasn’t so strong that it could be the sole reason she had never taken a lover.
She pushed that out of her mind deliberately, because she knew that Luca was going to arrive any moment.
She was bustling around on the private plane making sure that everything was in order.
Making sure his favorite food and drink were available, and that everything was the exact right temperature.
“I don’t see three notebooks,” she said, digging around the space.
The stewardess frowned. “Aren’t there two?”
“Dr. Salvatore has requested there be three . That is standard for any flight exceeding three hours.”
“Can’t he bring his own?”
She felt her hackles rising. “Dr. Salvatore does not pay a staff to ready things for him so that he can spend precious thinking time pondering the quantity of his own notebooks.”
And there it was. As easy to find as ever. The umbrage that she felt on his behalf when things were not exactly as he had dictated they be.
The issue was...she hadn’t done this job all these years without undergoing a certain level of indoctrination where Luca was concerned.
The man was curing cancer. It sort of balanced out the whole being an asshole thing.
That didn’t mean she could or should work for him forever, but it wasn’t as if she could prove his eccentricities weren’t merited.
The woman looked askance at Polly and Polly felt... peeled . Like the flight attendant was seeing something other than Polly’s professionalism at work and Polly did not like it.
“You must be new,” Polly said, pinning the other woman beneath her most pointed gaze and clinging to her haughty PA front because it was better than being seen .
At that exact moment she heard heavy footsteps behind her, and she turned to see Luca standing there. She couldn’t explain the physical reaction she had to the sight of him.
She had seen him yesterday, after all. He ought to be commonplace in every way.
But then, hadn’t she just spent the past week trying to untangle why her feelings for him, her feelings about leaving, didn’t seem as straightforward as they should.
“There is an issue with the notebooks,” Polly said slowly. “But it will be remedied.”
His gaze never left her.
“Good,” he said.
Polly dialed the private airline concierge at the airport. “I need a notebook brought to Dr. Salvatore’s plane within the next fifteen minutes. Yes.” She gave the specifications, and then got off the phone. Because there were measurements, materials and page space requirements.
“Everything will be in place,” she said.
He nodded once, and then disappeared into the bedroom at the back of the plane, closing the door behind him.
She let out a breath, and the stewardess looked at her. “Are you afraid of him? Is that why you’re so concerned about his notebooks?”
Afraid? This woman thought...Polly was afraid?
She frowned. “I’m not afraid of him. But Dr. Salvatore is a genius. And there are certain things that he requires so that his brain is free to think about medical mysteries. I might be leaving my job but—”
“So, you don’t like it. Or him.”
This was now some weird battle of wills between her and this other woman. Like she was bound and determined to make Polly admit that Luca was unreasonable. And Polly thought he was in many respects, but she had context for him. And dammit she would not say it to this other woman.
“If you take issue with Dr. Salvatore and how he works, then perhaps this should be your first and last flight for him,” she bit out.
Luca chose that moment to come out of the bedroom. “There is no need to be defensive of me, Polly. Though it is appreciated. I didn’t realize you were so concerned with my image. Having said that, I don’t care if the attendant finds me unreasonable or not.” His focus was turned to the other woman. “All it requires is that she do her job. Is that possible?”
The flight attendant nodded, looking the kind of intimidated that Polly simply didn’t feel around him anymore.
After all that, the notebook finally arrived, and they were able to settle in to take off.
She tried to live that experience through the eyes of a woman who had never encountered Luca before.
She tried to dissect her own response to it.
It was unreasonable to feel like Luca needed three notebooks. Luca felt like he needed three notebooks, but she knew that it was... It was one of his particular habits.
One of his ways.
She wondered when she had become so understanding to those ways.
She would like to think that she wasn’t . She would like to think that this was just her, doing her job as well as she’d always done to the end. After all, she had just gotten angry with him about calling her to his apartment at midnight. But was that the ridiculousness of the request, the hour, or the way it had made her feel to look at him half-naked?
You don’t have to know. Because you’re getting a new job.
She felt relief. For the first time in a week. Maybe for the first time in five years. She didn’t have to know the answer to the question about Luca. Because she simply wasn’t going to be part of his life anymore.
You were never part of his life. You might as well be a paperweight.
A paperweight he really liked, but a paperweight all the same.
She had gotten very used to flying by private jet. She liked it. It was going to be hard to give up.
But she didn’t need luxury.
She wanted to be important. A main character in her own life. She had never been that growing up. She had been the supporting character to her parents, and she was simply tired of it. She’d been a prop. Used when convenient, ignored when not. They were the main cast, they were all that mattered.
It was the same with Luca.
Because he could see one perspective, one way of being, and it was his own. Everything else was one of those insignificant extras.
They didn’t speak, as was customary on a long flight. She had brought a book, and Luca filled each notebook. She wondered sometimes if he did it because he had asked for them, and he was trying to prove to himself and others that his eccentricities were a necessity. Or perhaps he simply knew that a long flight produced three notebooks’ worth of thoughts.
“You could digitize your notes,” she pointed out.
She didn’t know why she said it. She was only baiting him. And after hours of sitting across from him, having food, having a nap, it was like commentary was just begging to be made. Even though she knew better.
“I do not see the point in changing something that works,” he responded, without looking up at her.
“You have endless stacks of notebooks,” she said.
“Yes. I do. I also have the space to organize them.”
“If they were digitized they would be searchable.”
He looked up at her like she had sprouted a second head. “I remember what is in every notebook.”
There was something earnest in the way that he responded to that, and it reminded her why it was sometimes easy to defend him, to feel confusion about him. He wasn’t actually being difficult, or obstinate for the sake of it. He genuinely couldn’t understand why she would suggest such a thing because he couldn’t imagine having a hard time remembering where he’d written what.
She had to wonder what a childhood with a brain like that must’ve been like. Were people in awe of him even then?
“Have you always been like this?” she asked, saying it out loud in spite of herself.
But why not? She was leaving.
“Like what?”
“You’re so particular. About everything . And certain. Though, your certainty is usually founded.”
“You’ve worked with me for five years, you only now wonder?”
“I’m leaving. Maybe that’s what made me wonder.”
There was a clock ticking on this, she realized. She would never understand herself or what her life had been for the past five years if she couldn’t understand him. It suddenly felt imperative.
“I don’t know how to answer the question. I have always been myself. Have you always had your average capacity for memory?”
“Yes,” she said. “I have always been this way.”
“So have I. Though not always interested in medicine. My mother died when I was ten. That changed the course of my life.”
He said it matter-of-factly, but there was something underlying his tone. An intensity that she recognized. It came up with certain medical discoveries. Certain things.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She had never really thought about Luca’s parents. She had always thought he had sprung fully formed from the ground a full-grown man.
It was impossible to imagine him as a child.
And now she was imagining him as a child in pain.
“I decided that I wanted to find out what could be done. To prevent other people dying in the way that she did. I wanted to fix it. Of course, you cannot fix something like that. Not with all the medical discoveries in the world. I might be able to prevent other people from dying, but I cannot bring her back. It is an obvious thing. But one I did not fully think of as a child. I was driven, I think to try and restore what I’d lost.” He lifted a shoulder. “Now I’m simply driven.”
She knew many of his other employees thought of him as emotionless. But she’d always known that wasn’t true. He had a great many emotions surrounding what he wanted and needed in his environment. He could be exacting, short-tempered and ill-humored. All of which were emotions.
What she hadn’t witnessed were...softer emotions.
But now she was forced to imagine him as a small boy. Missing his mother. Believing, on some level, that he could use his incredible brain to bring her back.
“What did you...think about before then?” she asked.
“Toy cars,” he said.
“Toy cars?”
“ All cars. But I had a large collection of toys.”
“Did your parents buy them for you?”
“My mother did. My father thought it was strange. To collect something so obsessively and know all of the details about it.” His lips curved upward. Almost a smile and yet somehow not. “It is strange. He was correct.”
She felt bound up by the sympathy blooming inside of her. Looking at his stark, handsome face as he recounted loss, pain.
The feeling of being different. An outsider.
She knew that all too well. She’d always felt outside. She hadn’t been able to invite friends to her house because her parents had been so volatile and unpredictable. She’d made a mask of ease that she wore with the outside world. She’d learned to fashion herself into a very nice facsimile of someone who was having a normal experience of life and growing up. She’d learned to close herself off, to protect herself from her mother’s fractious insults and her father’s explosions of verbal rage where he’d been willing to say anything, no matter how cruel, to get a response.
Like reducing the people around him to tears was the ultimate source of power.
She’d become a placid shell. Watching, always taking in information from the scene around her, never ever giving the deep, real parts of herself away because that would mean exposing herself to pain.
She’d thought it would arm her against Luca, she supposed. But the problem was, he wasn’t manipulative.
Luca could only ever be Luca.
It was...him. And perhaps it was that lack of veneer that had finally gotten beneath her protections.
“I don’t think it’s so strange,” she said softly. “And anyway, why would you make your child feel like they were strange?”
“He didn’t want me to be. He was quite a successful man, my father. Relatively, I mean. He wanted me to be like him. But in order to do that, he felt that I would need to behave differently. He was a salesman. Everything he did was about connections. I was bad at them. But, I found success my own way. I don’t need to learn the things that he thought were so important. I simply need to lean into my own strengths.” He looked down at his notebooks, and then back at her. “That does mean filling in three physical notebooks on a long-haul flight.”
She sighed. “I suppose I can’t argue with you.”
“You could,” he pointed out.
She could, but it would be like flailing at a brick wall.
“I don’t need to,” she said.
She decided to take another nap. And by the time they landed, she was well-rested.
A car met them at the jet and whisked them away, and she did her best not to marinate on the conversation they’d had earlier. Did her best to not sink into sentimentality.
Why had she ever asked him these things about his life before? She could imagine him, a small boy, left with the one parent that didn’t understand him, and it made her chest get tight.
Of course, now Luca was a genius billionaire, so when people didn’t understand him they mostly said nothing.
But it was still a function of his life. A feature of who he was.
It was still a thing he had to cope with.
He was a terrible boss. He was inflexible, and completely one-track-minded. And yet, he was nothing like her parents. And perhaps that was why, in spite of herself, she felt affection for him. Or something adjacent to affection.
The realization made her heart jump, and she began to catalog the details around them. The beautiful buildings, the pristine cleanliness that was normally absent in major cities.
It was genuinely one of the most spectacular places she had ever seen in her life, natural splendor colliding with man-made innovations.
She could see why he had chosen this place as the site where they would learn about new advancements in medicine.
This place felt like the future. Luca was brilliant when it came to anything that had to do with his work.
And something else entirely when it came to other details about life.
But he was honest. And there were no guessing games with him.
Maybe that was why she wasn’t afraid of him. Maybe it was why she didn’t find him intimidating in the way that many people did.
Because she would rather know where she stood. Even if the ground was precarious.
When they arrived at the hotel she was momentarily distracted by the glory of it. Traveling with Luca meant she had been exposed to a heavy amount of luxury over the past few years, but this was beyond her expectations.
The hotel was a square column with great open sections that spanned several floors, held up by lit pillars covered in twining vines. A resplendent representation of nature in the middle of the city.
The lobby was modern and sleek, with a great glass pillar at the center, almost like a greenhouse, containing a veritable jungle while all around them were modern amenities and clean lines.
Luca barely gave their surroundings a second glance. Instead he went directly to his room and left Polly to see to the details. Both of the summit itself and their star.
She didn’t mind. This would help her get out of her own head.
Because there was no time to think. Everything was moving at a rapid pace. She had to ensure that all of the details were in order.
These sorts of events were the part of her job she loved the most.
There was a certain amount of smoothing over his interpersonal relations that she did, and she enjoyed that.
She realized that she was Luca’s marketer in many ways.
She sold the man, because he refused to do it.
His work sold itself, but he... He was another matter.
When she checked the clock she realized it was nearly time for the opening speech of the summit.
Of course, Luca would be giving it.
He was a very compelling public speaker. For all that he lacked when he was trying to make connections around the room, he compensated for it beautifully when he was on the stage. He was such a magnetic man. So brilliantly handsome. So absolutely enthralling.
Maybe she was biased.
She didn’t think she was.
Until this past week she had been convinced she didn’t much care for him at all, but faced with the prospect of leaving him, her thoughts were turning in an entirely different direction.
She used her key card—because she always had a key to his room—and let herself in.
And was stunned when he walked out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel slung low around his hips. Water droplets were sliding down his broad, well-muscled chest, and she felt desire strike her like an arrow straight between her thighs.
Why was she doomed to encounter him half-dressed so many times in a row? It wasn’t like it had never happened before, but it hadn’t happened quite so frequently.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
She felt her face betraying her. It was so hot she knew it had to be bright red. Surely he wouldn’t miss that.
“It is no matter,” he said, as if he’d missed it entirely.
For all he seemed obsessed wholly with his work, she knew he had lovers. His lovers were part of what she dealt with on occasion when he was too busy to manage them. Once he was done with them, he was done.
And yet, he always seemed so dispassionate to her.
It was impossible to imagine what it would be like when he was with a woman. When he...
Perhaps, virgins should not attempt to fantasize about how their bosses made love.
Made love.
There was no question that Luca did not make love.
He would probably be the first to say it. In wholly blunt terms.
She couldn’t even hate him for that.
He was honest. And maybe that deserved some level of appreciation.
It wasn’t his honesty she was appreciative of at the moment, however.
“It isn’t professional,” she said.
“Right,” he said.
For a moment he looked apologetic. And she realized he had thought that she meant him, and not her.
“I meant me ,” she said. “I should have knocked.”
“You have a key to my room for a reason. You are supposed to assist without interruption.”
“Still. It would have perhaps been a good idea for me to make sure that you were not in a state of undress.”
“I am not a maiden,” he said.
She looked at him. “Was that a joke, Luca?”
“Yes and no. It’s true. But also, I was being funny.”
She laughed, in spite of herself. Because every moment of the last five years hadn’t been terrible. And this one certainly wasn’t.
“Well. It was amusing.”
She felt a sudden tension rise between them, and she turned away from him. “I am going to get ready. And I will meet you in the ballroom.”
“As you wish.”