Page 1 of Resisting the Bossy Billionaire

CHAPTER ONE

‘THEIMPERIALMARCH’pierced Victoria Cusack’s consciousness.

Muttering a curse, she rolled over and flapped her hand on her bedside table, fingers groping for her phone.

Accepting the call, she stuck the phone to her ear and peered through bleary eyes at her bedside alarm clock. It was five a.m.

‘What’s wrong?’ she mumbled as she pulled her lovely warm duvet back up to her chin. It had better be an emergency. Nothing less than broken limbs would count.

‘Patrick and Christina are ill.’

She blinked the sleep away. ‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘A virus. They have to isolate and I can’t work the coffee machine.’

She groaned. Her boss lived in a loft apartment in one of Manhattan’s most exclusive buildings overlooking Central Park. She had no idea why he bothered paying the twenty-four-hour concierge service fees seeing as he never used it. ‘I’ll get coffee delivered to you.’

‘No, I need you to come and make it for me.’

She gritted her teeth tightly before relaxing her mouth into an irritated sigh. ‘It’s Sunday.’

‘You can still take the rest of the day off if you like.’

‘How kind.’

Sarcasm was wasted on Marcello Guardiola. ‘I’ll add a bonus to your salary.’

Victoria didn’t want a bonus. She wanted the lie-in she’d been looking forward to.

Friends and family back home in Ireland thought her job was glamorous? Ha!

‘I’ll throw some clothes on and come over.’

‘I’ve woken you up?’

She rolled her eyes and pulled a face. ‘Yes, Marcello, you’ve woken me up.’

She didn’t expect an apology and none was forthcoming. ‘More hours of the day to enjoy. See you in ten.’

The line went dead before she could correct him and say she’d be there in twenty minutes, not ten.

Muttering under her breath, she threw her thick duvet off then immediately pulled it back over herself. Good heavens, it wasfreezing.

Only by imagining personally maiming Marcello could she coax her protesting body out of bed and her feet onto the frigid floor. Storm Brigit was due to hit the East Coast that day, and a quick peek out of her curtains proved her suspicions that the expected snow had already started to fall.

A quick brush of her hair, a longer brush of her teeth and then, shivering, she stripped off her flannelette pyjamas and dressed in thick tights covered by fitted black jeans, thermal socks, and a black vest top that she covered with a grey cashmere jumper. Black snow boots, black woolly hat, thick knitted black scarf and then her padded, faux-fur-lined khaki winter coat and leather gloves all donned, phone shoved in coat pocket, and she was ready to go.

Down three flights of stairs and she stepped out into a snow-blanketed Manhattan. The sun hadn’t yet risen but everything from the sky to the ground was white. It would have been the most magical of sights if the wind hadn’t whipped the thickly falling snowflakes straight into her face.

Cursing her demanding boss, Victoria tightened her coat’s hood, hunched over, and set off on the three-block walk to Marcello’s. Hopefully a cab would pass any moment for her to hail.

It felt strange walking the streets virtually alone. New York was the city that never slept but this early morning, there was hardly any traffic on the roads and even fewer pedestrians. If she hadn’t been a lady on a mission to get to her boss’s apartment as quickly as possible, make his blasted coffee, and then get back to her own apartment before the storm really took hold, she’d be creeped out at the vulnerable state she, a young woman walking the streets with hardly anyone about, was in. At least there was plenty of light, and she took comfort too that any predators were likely to get one blast of the wind chill and slam their front door on it.

One block to go and a gust of wind nearly knocked her off her feet. The snow was now coming so thick and fast she could hardly see more than a few feet in front of her. Not that she could really see with the flakes all making a beeline for the exposed parts of her face.

To cheer herself up and make the final block bearable, she imagined maiming Marcello again. Nothing that would incapacitate him, she wasn’t evil, just a minor breakage of, say, both his hands, a minor injury that would prevent him using his phone. And while she was at it, maybe a nice dose of laryngitis for him too, so he’d be prevented from speaking until she’d caught up with all the sleep eighteen months working as his executive assistant had deprived her of.

By the time she reached the towering art deco building, Victoria could no longer feel her nose, toes or the tips of her fingers. She had a dreadful feeling the overenthusiastic forecasters predicting the storm of the century were going to be proved right. She should have known it would be so when they’d named the storm Brigit. Her grandmother was called Brigit and she was the most cantankerous woman to grace God’s earth.

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