Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
V ICTORIA STOOD IN Marcello’s pantry struggling to keep her jaw from dropping open. This was one part of his apartment she’d never been in before, and wow . She had never seen so much food. It was like stepping into a condensed supermarket. The pantry itself was twice the size of her parents’ kitchen.
‘You could feed the whole of Manhattan with what’s in here,’ she commented, awed.
‘Not quite,’ he murmured, standing beside her.
‘Close though. At least we won’t starve. Can you see the eggs?’
They’d found packets of bacon in the fridge and agreed any idiot could cook that, then agreed that if any idiot could cook bacon, they could cook eggs too. When she’d asked where in the fridge said eggs were, he’d looked at her as if she really was an idiot.
She’d grinned. ‘So you’re not fully Americanised then?’
‘I am afraid of my mother making a surprise visit,’ he’d quipped. ‘It is one of the few things of my childhood that has stuck with me. Coffee beans kept in the refrigerator, eggs kept at room temperature.’
Eggs and bread located, they went back into the kitchen. There was a lot of clattering and other noise as they searched the industrially equipped room equal in size to her full apartment for utensils and crockery.
Thirty minutes later and the immaculate kitchen looked like a chimpanzee’s party had been hosted in it.
Sitting at the sprawling kitchen island, both looked dubiously at their plates of burnt toast, blackened bacon and rubbery scrambled eggs.
Despite her stomach rumbling whilst they’d been cooking, Victoria’s appetite had disappeared and she could only manage half of hers. Marcello, though, ate every last scrap of his bar the pieces of cunningly hidden eggshell, then gazed longingly at her leftovers. She pushed her plate to him with a ‘be my guest’ gesture, and, feeling suddenly cold, rubbed her left arm for warmth. A mild pounding had formed in her head, and she drained her coffee hoping the caffeine would ease it.
When Marcello put his knife and fork together and slid off his stool, his body aimed at the door, Victoria folded her arms and glared at him. ‘Don’t even think about leaving me to clear this mess up.’
‘The staff will do it when they come in.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘There’s not going to be any staff, Marcello, not with the stay-at-home mandate.’
His forehead furrowed and he rubbed his fingers through his thick black hair.
‘It’s a suicide mission to walk out there,’ she added, reminding him of his own words.
She could see his clever brain thinking and was not in the least surprised when he said, ‘I will double your salary for the month if you do it.’
‘I’ve quit, remember?’
‘You still have to work the notice you haven’t given. Triple pay.’
‘No.’
If she was going to be stuck in this apartment with him for the next few days then she would not allow herself to be bribed and charmed—suckered—into taking on the domestic chores. She would not allow herself to fall into any kind of domesticity with him, and it wasn’t just because she hated housework. All five Cusack girls had been expected to muck in with household jobs. Victoria’s job had been to wipe the place mats and clean the table. As she was the second youngest, her designated job had been the second easiest of the lot and still she’d loathed doing it, but she’d had to do it because with a family as large as the Cusacks, everyone was expected to muck in. Having a family as large as theirs meant she could have slipped away unnoticed by everyone except sharp-eyed Kara, the middle sister who would have sat on her if she’d sloped off. If Victoria had wanted to be a domestic goddess she’d have done like her second oldest sister, Mags, and cheerfully offered help with all the undesignated chores too, not hidden in her room and pretended to be deaf on the very rare occasion her parents remembered her existence enough to call her name.
Her main reason, though, was that Marcello would absolutely take advantage if she gave so much as an inch. It would start with cleaning the kitchen and end with him expecting her to do his laundry and pour all his drinks. After all, he hadn’t started off as a total slave-driver when she’d first worked for him. He’d made unreasonable demands at all hours of the working week but initially her days off had been Marcello-free.
It had been over a year since she’d gone a whole day without at least talking to him. During her first Christmas in his employ, he’d called her twice during her week back in Ireland, and both calls had been necessary. The Christmas just gone, he’d called her every single day. In fairness, the call on Christmas Day itself had been to wish her a Merry Christmas from his family home in Rome.
It had been the strangest of calls, she remembered. There had been a melancholy in his voice, so faint that if she didn’t know him so well she would never have detected it. By the time she’d gone to bed she’d been cursing his name for making her spend her favourite day of the year worrying about what the cause of the melancholy could have been. Their next conversation, the melancholy had been absent and in the two weeks since their return to normal working life, she’d been unable to bring herself to ask about it.
Not liking the reminder of how sick she’d felt for him and the cause of his uncharacteristic melancholy, a reminder that increased the mild burning stabbing sensation in her head, Victoria pulled herself together and made an executive decision. ‘You load the dishwasher and I’ll clean the surfaces.’
He pulled his most unimpressed face.
She wasn’t in the least perturbed. ‘It’s either that or we let the mess fester. I’ll help but I’m not doing it on my own.’
‘Quadruple pay.’
She rubbed her forehead with her palm to try and ease the burny stab. ‘Quit the bribes and load the dishwasher.’
Marcello knew when he was beaten.
Giving a theatrical sigh, he picked up his plate. ‘How do I do it?’
With a roll of her eyes...ouch, that hurt...she shook her head. ‘You’re the smartest man I know. You can work it out.’
His ego inflating at the compliment, Marcello went in search of the dishwasher, then watched a video on how to load it and hoped the end result would be better than the video on grilling bacon.
He tried to remember when he’d last performed a domestic chore. Certainly before his short marriage with Livia ended. When they first married, they’d earned enough between them to employ a weekly cleaner. By the time grief drove them apart, Marcello had earned enough on his own for a full-time housekeeper. His mother had half-heartedly tried to domesticate him as an adolescent but he’d been excellent at feigning uselessness at it, so much so that she decided it was easier to just continue doing the chores herself.
Victoria, he thought, watching her lean over to wipe the marble island, would never put up with that. She’d insist the adolescent keep practising until they mastered the art of running a vacuum cleaner around a room...
She stretched right over the island to reach a spot in the middle. Her sweater had risen and suddenly he had a full display of curvy bottom clad in tight jeans in his eyeline.
Much practice meant he was able to immediately avert his gaze and give his attention back to trying to figure out how to turn the damned dishwasher on.
Experience had taught him the slightly weightier beats of his heart would soon lighten.
He’d headhunted Victoria as Denise’s replacement knowing intellectually that she was an attractive woman but never allowing himself to see her as such. There were occasions when he would observe her working on her computer or chatting on the phone or doing some other work-related task, and experience a wave of awareness. Other occasions, usually early mornings, when they shared the back of his car on the way to a meeting or an airport somewhere and she was still so fresh from the shower that he could smell her shampoo and the cleanliness of her skin, and have to block off his senses.
All those things were manageable. He made them manageable. Allowing himself to see her for the beautiful, curvaceously sexy woman she was would only lead to unwanted desires springing to life, which would then lead to a mess that would disrupt the efficiency of his life. And so he didn’t allow it. Victoria was his executive assistant, his right-hand woman. She’d become indispensable to him.
‘Here,’ she said, her musical lilt breaking into his thoughts and the curvaceously sexy body he was trying to tune out breaking into his space to stand beside him and place the grill pan in front of him. ‘You missed this.’
‘How is that supposed to fit in it?’
‘Let me check my guide to loading a dishwasher.’
He turned to face her.
She was staring at her opened palm. Shaking her head ruefully, she met his stare. ‘I’m so sorry. The guide’s not working. You’ll have to figure it out all by yourself like a big boy.’
Ignoring her jest, he leaned his face more closely to hers. Was he imagining that she’d lost colour in her cheeks? Victoria was so naturally pale that it was hard to tell but there was something about her colour that made him ask, ‘Are you feeling okay?’
She gave the slightest wince. ‘Your whining has given me a headache.’
With any other woman he’d immediately come back with the quip used by men for what was probably millennia. Instead, he said, ‘Do you need painkillers?’
‘No need for you to take such drastic action on my behalf.’
He grinned. ‘Go and sit down. I will finish up in here,’ he added magnanimously.
Her eyes widened in alarm. ‘Are you feeling okay?’
He only just restrained himself from giving her big, beautiful bottom an affectionate slap.
The snow was falling so thickly that Victoria could hardly make out any of Central Park. Manhattan was no longer blanketed in white. It was laden with it. Once the storm cleared, she’d get herself a sled and head to Pilgrim Hill.
One of her fondest childhood memories was of her family all trudging through foot-high snow to the nearest decent slope and sledging on bin bags for what had felt like hours. She’d sat on her mother’s lap, she remembered, a treat that had been as rare as having enough snow to sledge on. She remembered, too, how she’d cried when her mother, deciding they were all in danger of turning into popsicles, had made the unilateral decision to return home. The promise of hot chocolate had dried Victoria’s tears, and when they’d trooped through the front door and her mother had seen how blue the girls’ fingers were, she’d whipped the youngest two, Victoria and Sinead, upstairs and run them a bath, staying to lift them out and dry them, another treat as rare as the snow. Mags had usually supervised Victoria’s bath time.
It had been one of the best days of her life, and her already chilled body shivered in remembrance at how wonderfully cold it had been that day and yet how wonderfully warm she’d felt inside under the glow of her mother’s attention.
Her brain, though, was still burning, and she pressed her forehead to the cold window pane and dimly wondered if Marcello would like to go sledging with her. As quickly as she thought it, she discarded it. Sheena, her old roommate, would definitely be up for it. That was if she’d forgiven Victoria for abandoning her at the theatre for the sake of a missing Montblanc pen.
Her head was really hurting. And she was still shivering. Marcello’s usually tropically heated apartment felt like an igloo.
She was about to climb off the windowsill she’d sat herself on and go to find him for some of the painkillers he’d suggested just fifteen short minutes ago, when he finally came out of the kitchen. Even with her suddenly fuzzy vision, Victoria could see his top was soaked.
‘What happened?’ Her voice sounded as fuzzy to her ears as Marcello was to her eyes.
‘The dishwasher is faulty.’
‘How?’
‘It made banging noises after I turned it on so I opened it. The top thing that spins around and sprays water was hitting the grill thing.’
That explained why he was wet. From the look on his fuzzy face, Victoria was clearly at fault for not pointing out the danger of this happening.
She scrambled for a quip but nothing came to her. It wasn’t just her sight and hearing that had become fuzzy but the whole of her goosebump-flecked body. Her burning brain had become incapable of conjuring even a minor jest.
Marcello, anticipating a witty retort, was disconcerted when nothing came. Surely she must have a riposte for him? ‘Is your head still hurting?’
Her answering nod was small, as if it hurt to make too much movement.
Disconcertment turned into concern. Victoria had been his assistant for eighteen months. They worked so closely together that he’d learned to recognise the signs of her cycle, knew that when she spent a couple of days being a touch irritable, in another week she would silently suffer the stomach cramps that had her bring a hot-water bottle to the office and hold it to her abdomen whenever she thought he wasn’t paying attention. He wouldn’t dream of embarrassing her by asking if she needed anything in those times, but this was different. His brave, stoical executive assistant, who’d never taken a single day off sick, had pain etched on her face.
‘You should lie down.’
His concern deepened when, instead of arguing, she gave another small nod.
Concern turned to alarm when she slid off the windowsill and her knees buckled. He had no doubt that if she hadn’t gripped the armchair to the side of the sill, she would have collapsed onto the floor.
He strode straight to her.
‘I’m fine,’ Victoria whispered, holding a palm out to stop Marcello’s blurry figure getting any closer. ‘Just got a bit dizzy.’
She blinked rapidly to clear her vision but each blink hurt her eyes and hurtled sharp pins into her burning brain. In the deep recesses of her mind was the knowledge that she’d caught one of the viruses debilitating New York, likely the one that had incapacitated Patrick and Christina overnight. She needed to lie down. Needed to get warm.
All she could allow herself to focus on was the long sofa. It was four steps away at the most.
Aware—much too aware—of Marcello standing to her side watching her, aware of his apparent concern, she took the first step, silently begging her legs to keep the rest of her upright. Of all the people in all the world to fall ill in front of, Marcello was the absolute worst.
Fighting through the swimming sensation that had now added itself to the burn in her brain, using legs that seemed to have become detached from the rest of her body, she took the next step...
The room began to spin.
‘Victoria?’
She swayed.
The spinning sped up.
His next call of her name came like a distant echo in her ear as the whole world spun around her and then turned to grey.
Marcello caught her mid-fall. Hooking an arm around her waist, he tried to help her stand but Victoria’s legs weren’t cooperating. With his only other option being dragging her to the sofa, he lifted her into his arms like an injured child and cradled her to his chest.
Her eyes flew open. ‘What you doing?’ she mumbled.
‘Getting you to a bed,’ he decided firmly. That was where she needed to be. In bed. He knew because that was what the doctor had said when he’d called him out after Christina and Patrick had been struck down. Christina had deteriorated as quickly as Victoria. Sleep, the doctor had decreed, was the best medicine.
‘No,’ she protested weakly even as her cheek flopped against his neck. Dio , he could feel the elevated heat of her skin. She was burning up.
‘Do not argue,’ he scolded, heading for the stairs. ‘You are not well.’
‘Too heavy.’
Tuning out that her breath was hot against his skin and that her breasts were pressed against his chest, he lightly said, ‘What did I just say about not arguing?’
Perfectly buxom though Victoria was, she was by no means too heavy for him to carry up the open stairs like a superhero. Through his office he took her and into his sleeping quarters, where he made a split-second decision and carried her into the closest room, which just happened to be his own. It had the most comfortable mattress and, unlike the guest rooms, had a sofa long enough for his six-foot-two body to sprawl out on while watching over her.
The curtains were still drawn, the duvet still thrown back from when he’d got up that morning, his incapacitated staff being unable to open the curtains or provide him with the freshly laundered bedding he enjoyed daily. She made hardly any movement as he carefully laid her down, her only word, ‘Cold.’
‘You are cold?’ he clarified, gingerly resting his hand on her burning forehead. Now that she was lying down, there was no need for further physical contact.
‘Cold,’ she repeated, barely audible, slowly drawing her legs to her chest. Her eyes were closed.
He scratched the back of his head, unsure what to do. Did you put a duvet around someone with a fever? Reasoning she could always throw it off if she overheated, he covered her before stepping back to congratulate himself on a job well done. Superhero that he was, he’d saved his assistant from hurting herself in a faint and selflessly carried her into his own bed. He would remind her of this the next time she implied he was selfish.
‘I will get you painkillers,’ he said, keen to add more gold stars to his name on the off chance that she really was considering leaving him...quitting her job.
Her, ‘’K...’ came out like a sigh.
This, though, posed its own challenge as, for all his talk about painkillers, Marcello didn’t actually possess any. Not wanting to disturb his stricken housekeeper and butler, who must surely have a stash of the stuff, he put a call through to the concierge. It took ten whole minutes for a small tub of ordinary painkillers to be sent up to him in his elevator.
Armed with a glass of water and the means to ease Victoria’s temperature and pains, he returned to his bedroom.
She was huddled in the sheets on her side, only the top of her head poking through.
To wake her or not to wake her? That was the question. Crouching down, he lightly pressed his fingers to the inch of exposed forehead. He squeezed his eyes tight and breathed hard. Too hot. Much too hot.
‘Victoria?’ he whispered loudly. ‘You need to wake up and take some painkillers.’
Her eyes didn’t open. ‘Head hurts,’ she mumbled.
‘I know. This will make you feel better.’
‘Can’t.’
‘Can’t what?’
‘Move. Hurts.’
‘You want me to help you?’
She made the smallest nod even as she gave a nearly audible, ‘No.’
Chuckling softly, he removed two of the tablets from the tub, placed them by the glass, then sat himself beside Victoria and carefully slipped an arm beneath her. ‘I am just going to lift you a little so you can take your pills,’ he told her.
She gave no protest, verbal or otherwise.
It took only a little effort to raise her so she was semi-upright. Holding her securely to him with his right arm, he reached for the water and pills with his left.
‘Open your mouth,’ he commanded.
She obeyed. He placed a tablet on her tongue without making any direct contact, then held the glass to her lips. Her hair tickled his throat and chin as she took the water into her mouth and swallowed.
‘One more.’
Her lips parted again. This time his precision failed him and his finger brushed against soft, plump bottom lip then soft, plump, wet tongue.
Marcello’s chest and airwaves tightened. His grip on the glass when he held it to her mouth a second time was much firmer than his first, reflexively gripping harder still when her hand fluttered up and tentatively covered his in silent encouragement for him to feed her more water.
He didn’t know if it was her fever causing it but his own skin heated. The core temperature she’d teased him about only hours ago rose.
It felt like time stood still while he waited for the signal that she’d had enough, a passage of time where, in an effort to disassociate himself from the soft body leaning against his and the slender hand covering his own, he conjured images of dancing nuns and didn’t dare to breathe.
Her hand flopped away from his.
He expelled the breath he’d been holding. ‘Done?’
Another tickle of her hair as she nodded and whispered, ‘Thank you.’
Putting the glass back on the bedside table, he carefully extricated himself from his role of human support and, doing his utmost to touch her as little as humanly possible, helped her lie back down.
She turned her cheek onto the pillow and gave a tiny whimper.
It was a sound that pierced through him.
A second whimper had him closing his eyes and forcing air into his lungs as he was carried back to the darkest days of his life, a time of unbearable loss and a grief so debilitating he could hardly breathe through it.