CHAPTER 1

         She couldn’t believe her eyes… Those photos were… She closed her eyes and felt like she was about to throw up. Norah Wilde opened her mouth and took a deep breath. Her heart had begun slamming inside her rib cage the moment she had recognized herself.  

“Oh, God… How is this possible?” she murmured, feeling her entire world crashing down around her.

          Norah looked from the screen to Ivana Rossi, the public relations manager for ‘Gritti International Bank’, then back to the screen.

“‘Questa è lei, non è così?’ (This is you, isn’t it?)” Ivana prodded in Italian.

          ‘What the hell is going on here? And she’s talking in Italian… Why?’  

          Her brain was having a hard time understanding… finding the right words to create a phrase… to give these people a logical explanation of what she was seeing on that damn screen. Cold sweat coated her skin. Air wouldn’t squeeze past her locked throat, let alone words.

          Yes, that woman in those photos was her.

          And she was naked... right there, on that computer, the line of her bare bottom clear as the crack of dawn, neatly framed by her hot pink thong.

          Everyone had a backside that looked more or less like that, but she was extremely selective about showing hers to anyone. She certainly didn’t email shots like this to men she barely knew. Or post them online… she wasn’t that stupid.

          Her whole body felt like a frozen electrical current was vibrating through her, paralyzing all her senses, muscles, bones... every single part of her. The photo changed and that bare chest with the sheet rumpled across her upper thighs was all her, too.

“I’m going to die… right here…” she whispered and closed her eyes for a second, trying not to faint.

          The way her breasts lifted as she arched her back and ran fingers through her hair bordered on deliberately erotic, coupled with that blissful, a bit confused expression.

          Dear God!

          She looked like she’d been having hot sex all day… as if she even knew what that felt like!

          Then, the final one came up. She was adjusting the band of her hot pink undies across her cocked hip, looking like she was teasingly deciding whether to keep them on or remove them, eyes still lazily drooped and soft satisfaction painted across her lips.

          The lighting was golden and her skin faintly gleamed… with oil…

“It can’t be…” she said slowly

          Her brain began to function past the shock… Finally! These photos had been taken at the spa where she’d had a massage, trying to fix the ache between her shoulder blades that had been torturing her for weeks.

          Those photos weren’t… sexual… not even close…

          She was just sitting up and dressing after her appointment, relaxed and comfortable in what she had perceived as complete privacy.

          But the massage table had been cropped from the images, leaving muted sage-green walls and indistinct, blurred flowers in the background. From what one could see, it could have been a hotel room, a bedroom… whatever the viewer wanted to imagine.

          Her stomach roiled. Norah thought she might be having a heart attack because her pulse was speeding like a train on a track. She wanted to throw up, pass out, or die. Or, even better, all of the above…

          ‘Please God, take me now!’

“‘Signorina Wilde…’ (Miss Wilde…)”

“Given my mental state right now, if you have questions for me, could you formulate them in English, please?”

“Very well… Could you confirm it is you in these photos?” Ivana badgered.

“Yes, Miss Rossi,” Norah stammered. “The woman in the photos is me.”

          Then, as the sheer mortification of the whole thing struck, she pointed at the screen.

“Could you close that, please?” she added in a very strident tone. “I think we already saw enough…”

          Norah then glanced at ‘signor’ (Mr.) Fabio Sensi, her supervisor. He sat next to her with a contemptuous expression on his middle-aged face.

“And, may I know, why are you showing those photos like that? With him in here?” Norah asked in a hurt voice. “Couldn’t we have done this privately? Am I not allowed that courtesy?”

“Miss Wilde, they’re available to anyone with an online connection. I’ve seen them,” signor Sensi said pithily. “It was me who brought them to Ivana’s attention.”

          He’d already taken a long look?

          Ew… Gross!

          Tears hit her eyes like the cut of a hard, biting wind. An equally brutal blow seemed to land in her stomach, pushing nausea higher into the back of her throat.

“Surely you knew this could happen when you took those photos and sent them to Mr. Weldon?” Ivana asked.

          The woman had kept her snooty nose high in the air from the moment Norah had followed her supervisor into her office. Signor Sensi kept giving her darkly smug looks, like he was staring right through her perfectly respectable blue pencil skirt and matching jacket.

          Norah hated working with that old man from day one… But working for ‘Gritti International Bank’, such a well-known and respected company in the business world, was a huge honor and a privilege, so, she kept her head down, worked hard, and kept her mouth shut.

          She was innocent and still, that man made her skin crawl. And worry for her job. Her palms were sweating.

“I didn’t take those photos,” Norah replied as strongly as her tight throat would allow. “It is not a thing I do, never did… And even if I did, do you think I would send something like that to a client? How stupid do you think I am? They’re… oh, for the love of God…”

          Norah heard the door opening behind her and shot to her feet, reaching to push the lid of Ivana’s laptop down herself, wishing the images could be quashed that easily.

          Deep in the back of her psyche, Norah knew she was going to cry.

          Soon…

          The pressure was building behind her collarbone, compressing her lungs, pushing behind her eyes. But for the moment she was in a type of shock. Like she’d been shot and still had the strength to run before the true depth of her injuries debilitated her.

“Signor Gritti…” Ivana whispered and rose instantly. “Thank you for coming, sir.”

“You notified him?”

          Signor Sensi jerked to his feet, sounding dismayed. Norah closed her eyes and prayed to get stuck by lightning or something. Whatever remained of her composure went into free fall.

          Dammit… The owner of the bank was here!

          She tried to gather herself to face yet another denigrating expression.

“Fabio, it’s protocol… We must do so with something this dangerous to the bank’s reputation,” Ivana said stiffly, adding to the weight on Norah’s heart.

“I understand that. But Norah Wilde is being dismissed,” Sensi hurried to assure Ivana and Signor Gritti. “I was about to tell her to collect her things and leave immediately.”

          ‘What? Dismissed? On what grounds?’

          Time stopped as Norah processed that she was being fired.

          Not even a trial, not even a jury… Fired on the spot for something she had nothing to do with…

          Oh, God… She had been so stupid… She thought she was being called in to talk about a client’s possible misappropriation of funds, not to be disgraced in front of the entire world… Literally, THE ENTIRE WORLD.

          So, this was what online bullying felt like…

          This was persecution…

          Norah couldn’t take in how monumentally unjust this was. The only experience she could liken it to was when her mother had been diagnosed.

          Words were being said, facts stated that couldn’t be denied, but she had no real grasp of how the next minute or week or the rest of her life would play out from this moment forward.

          She didn’t want to face it, but Norah knew she had no choice. And the silence around her told her that every single person inside that office was waiting for her to do so.

          After taking a deep breath, Norah turned very slowly to face the man who’d just entered, only to find that it wasn’t Yari Gritti, the President and head of the family that owned ‘Gritti International Bank’.

          Oh, no… it was far worse.

          In front of her, there was Leone Gritti, Yari’s cousin, second-in-command as VP of operations. A man of, arguably, even more stunningly good looks, at least in her estimation. His features were as refined and handsome as his Italian heritage demanded.

          He was clean-shaven, excruciatingly well-dressed in a tailored suit, and wore an air of arrogance that came as much from his lean height as his aloof expression. His ability to dominate any situation was obvious in the way they all stood in silence, waiting for him to speak.

          The man didn’t know who she really was, Norah was sure about it… She wasn’t the kind of woman who can stop a man in his tracks with just one smile or a glance. She already tried it.

          Norah had smiled brightly at him not long after arriving here, in Italy, forgetting that secret crushes didn’t know they were the object of such yearnings. Leone had looked right through her like she wasn’t even there and it had stung.

          Quite badly, illogically.

“Ivana. Fabio,” Leone Gritti said with a brief flick of his gaze to the other occupants of the room before coming back to give Norah a piercing stare from his extremely blue eyes.

          Her heart gave a skip between pounds, reacting to him even when she was verging on hysteria. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t make it stretch into a smile. Norah doubted she would ever smile again.

“Miss Wilde,” he said with a hostile nod of acknowledgment.