Читать книгу The Boss's Valentine - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 6

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN Poppy emerged from the function room at full tilt, several women were entering the cloakroom across the foyer and she wheeled away in the opposite direction.

Finding herself by the lifts, she stabbed the call button with a frantic hand and gulped back a sob. She had to find a quiet corner to pull herself back together again. Selecting the marketing floor, she slumped back against the lift’s cold steel wall as the doors closed. Wrapping her arms round herself, she hugged herself tight. But it was no help, no comfort, because all she could think about was what a fool she had made of herself.

When she saw the dark reception area on the marketing floor, it looked eerie and she hit the door button again in a hurry and tried another floor. Her eyes flooded with burning tears. Of course, Santino Aragone would have laughed when he was told who had sent that card. Everybody would be laughing! After all, she was just a junior member of staff, the plump little redhead Craig had nastily labelled, ‘Tinkerbell’ and hardly competition for the gorgeous women Santino specialised in. Why on earth hadn’t common sense intervened before she’d posted that stupid card to Santino at the office? Didn’t she have sense like other people? Her throat aching, she could no longer hold back the tears and a sob escaped her. How could she have exposed herself to that extent?

In the foyer below, Santino was watching the lights that indicated which floor the lift was at. The light flicked through the levels in descent again, made several brief stops and then sank as low as the floor above before beginning to ascend again. When the lift finally reached the executive level, he waited in taut suspense to see if it moved on again.

When the doors opened on the top floor, Poppy blinked in confusion for she had lost track. But low lights were burning and the floor was not in darkness like the others. Dimly recalling that Santino’s secretary had a private washroom, Poppy stumbled out. She needed to tidy herself up and fix her face before she could go home.

But shock was still setting in hard on Poppy. Only when it was far too late to change things did she see her mistake. She should have toughed out Craig’s insinuations. Instead she had fallen right into his trap and confirmed his suspicions. He couldn’t have proved anything, yet she had virtually confessed by saying what she had and leaving the table.

Taunting, wounding images were now bombarding her mind, increasing her distress. She had left the party with all the cool of a baby elephant let loose in a drawing room. She saw Craig’s self-satisfied smile, Santino laughing, the stiff, disapproving faces of the other women. Craig might as well have stripped her naked in public. Her trembling hands braced on the edge of the washroom vanity unit and, letting her head hang for she couldn’t stand to look at herself in the mirror when she hated herself so much for her own stupidity, she began to sob.

Santino had never made it from the lift to his secretary’s office so fast. But then those heartbreaking sobs acted on him like a shriek alarm. He would usually have gone quite some distance to avoid a crying woman, but the curious automatic pilot now overruling his normal caution ensured that he strode right through the open door of the washroom and gathered Poppy straight into a comforting embrace.

The sheer shock value of a pair of masculine arms closing round her when she had believed that she was alone provoked a startled cry from Poppy. Then she looked up and focused on Santino and even more shock froze her from head to toe. Bronze-coloured eyes set below lush black lashes were trained to hers, the lean, dark contours of his handsome features taut with concern.

‘It’s OK,’ he soothed in his gorgeous accented drawl.

‘Is it?’ Poppy’s voice emerged on the back of a breathless sob, for she could not have got oxygen into her lungs at that instant had her life depended on it. What was happening should have felt unreal but, in actuality, being in the circle of Santino’s arms felt very real and very right. Furthermore, it was something she had been dreaming of for so long that no power on earth could have sent her into retreat.