Page 211 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

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.

When the rest of Victoria’s family had reacted with stunned silence at her getting into Columbia in New York to study business, Grandma Brigit’s immediate response had been to predict that Victoria would ‘get shot because they all have guns there’, and then demanded to know what was wrong with Ireland’s universities. When the rest of Victoria’s family had reacted with the same stunned silence at her being personally headhunted by a billionaire Italian businessman and investor, whose penchant for glamorous girlfriends saw him written about in the press’s gossip columns with the same frequency as the business pages, Grandma Brigit’s sharp nose had risen. ‘Just you wait, girl,’ she’d warned. ‘He’ll have you running rings for him. You’ll be nothing but a glorified dogsbody.’

Victoria frequently thought that Grandma Brigit hadn’t been wrong.

Still, for all Grandma Brigit’s cantankerousness, she was the only member of Victoria’s family who’d not been surprised at either Columbia or the headhunting, mainly because she was the only family member for whom Victoria wasn’t a blurred face in the background.

Someone had gritted the building’s main entry steps, and when she entered the lobby, its warmth was so welcome that she took a moment to savour it.

The on-duty concierge, who had a slightly frazzled demeanour that early morning, called Marcello’s private elevator down while Victoria stamped snow off her boots. Inside the elevator, she pulled her gloves off and used her thumbprint to get it moving. No thumbprint or passcode, no entry into Marcello’s private domain. The passcode was changed daily. Christina and Patrick, the currently incapacitated live-in staff, were the only people other than Victoria to have unquestioning access to the Manhattan apartment. Victoria was the only one to have unquestioning access to all Marcello’s homes. Even his girlfriends had to make do with the ever-changing passcodes.

She remembered her pride when her thumbprint had been taken. The novelty had worn off by the end of the first month, when he’d woken her to request she arrange the immediate delivery of a crate of champagne. Not just arrange the delivery but supervise its unloading in the apartment. It had been one a.m. Delivery unloaded, she’d politely declined his offer to join the raucous party he’d been hosting. Five hours after she’d left his apartment, she’d arrived at the Guardiola Group’s offices and found Marcello at his desk, looking as fresh as a daisy and in his usual upbeat, positive mood.

She stepped out of the elevator leaving a puddle of melted snow on its carpet.

It came as no surprise to find Marcello waiting for her in his reception room—he’d probably watched her through the elevator’s security camera—or that he greeted her with, ‘Did you get lost?’ The only surprise was the stubble on his face. It was rare to see her immaculately groomed boss anything less than immaculately groomed. Sunday morning and he was half dressed for the office. All he needed was to shave, don his tie, waistcoat and suit jacket and he’d be good to step into any board meeting.

She arched an unimpressed eyebrow. ‘Have you seen the weather?’

His expression was that of someone who didn’t know whatweatherwas. ‘I have been waiting for you.’

‘Well, I’m here now. I’ll hang this lot up and then get your coffee made.’

‘I need food too.’

Of course he did. Christina or Patrick usually fixed whatever he wanted for breakfast or arranged delivery. In the office, it was Victoria’s job to ensure he never went hungry.

‘What do you want?’

‘Bagels.’

Wet clothes hung in the drying room by the reception, phone secure in the back pocket of her jeans, Victoria entered the vast loft space Marcello considered his home. Of all his properties, this was her favourite. It was just so quirky and interesting.

The main central room was the huge rectangular open-plan living space he hosted his sought-after parties in. Its exposed red brick was cut through with floor-to-ceiling leaded windows that let in an abundance of light and gave a panoramic view of Central Park. High ceilings accommodated galleried overhangs at each end. The overhang above the bottom end was the dining area used for dinner parties, a door off it leading to store rooms and the staff quarters where Christina and Patrick lived. The overhang above the other end was Marcello’s home office. A door off the office led to the bedrooms, including his own, the only room Victoria didn’t like going into. It wasn’t that he’d ever made her feel unsafe or anything—on the contrary, she often got the impression he assumed she was an artificially constructed robot dressed in a woman’s skin rather than an actual woman—it was more the feelings evoked when entering his most private domain, the strange queasiness at catching sight of the bed he slept in.

Long used to the magnificence of this most breathtaking bachelor pad, Victoria was too busy ordering bagels via the app of his preferred deli to pay it the slightest bit of attention. At the door under the dining room overhang, she turned her head and found her boss perched on the L-shaped sofa, dark brown leather like the rest of the plentiful seating, now engrossed in his phone.

‘I’ll show you how to fix the coffee in case Christina and Patrick are laid up for any length of time.’

He didn’t look up from his phone. ‘I am sure they will be better by tomorrow. Dr Jeffers said sleep is the best medicine for them.’

‘You’ve had your doctor out?’

‘He left just before I called you—he didn’t know how to work the coffee machine.’

Only Marcello would have the nerve to call his private doctor out in the middle of the night and then expect him to prepare a pot of coffee for him.

---