The Christmas He Claimed the Secretary by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2022-08-31T19:04:12+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANNIE DID HER best to put kissing out of her mind.

Because concentrating on it, she was certain, would only drive her mad.

And the last thing she needed was to be...more unhinged where Tiziano Accardi was concerned.

The day after the night of the kissing she wasn’t thinking about and the art gallery talk of who could change and who couldn’t that she couldn’t stop remembering, Annie swam until she was exhausted. Lap after lap, until the motion of her arms against the water made her feel real again.

Made her feel like herself again.

Because she wasn’t truly Tiziano’s mistress. She needed to remind herself, apparently, that it was a role, nothing more. She could have been anyone. If he hadn’t happened upon her in that stairwell, he would have chosen someone else for this and he would be behaving the exact same way. She would be looking at the very same pictures in the very same magazines. There was no point getting herself wound up about all those dark glances and what they might mean.

They meant nothing. Just because she sometimes thought she could see something in them didn’t mean it was there. Or that it mattered if it was there, somewhere. Nothing could come of it.

And meanwhile, she had a job to do. That was the price of the life she’d have any day now, debt-free and provided for, at last.

Now that it was December, Tiziano seemed to have nothing but holiday events. Every charity threw a ball. Every group he’d even smiled at one time apparently required a celebration at the end of the year, and his presence was demanded.

And at every single event, Tiziano went out of his way to appear even more besotted than he had at the art gallery. There were the longing stares. The absent toying with her hair, a bracelet she might wear, the edge of her gown. If there was dancing he would draw her out onto the floor, then ignore the steps to every dance as he held her close—as if he could not wait to hold her the very same way in a bedroom.

Very often, Ago Accardi himself stood nearby, glowering. Sometimes the mean-looking older man she knew was Everard Cameron stood with him, clearly sharing his displeasure. But even if they weren’t there, the tabloids were, and all the papers overflowed with speculation and photographic evidence of Tiziano Accardi’s new passion.

She really ought to have been congratulating herself at a game well played. But the longer this went on, the more there was another aspect to her masquerade that she hadn’t been prepared for.

Maybe it was because a world filled with mistresses and tabloids was so far outside the scope of her regular life. Maybe she was naive. But it hadn’t really crossed her mind that people she actually knew would read the tabloids she appeared in and come to the same conclusions about the show she and Tiziano were putting on. It was her fault. All she’d been able to think about was getting out from under all of that debt.

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