Page 10 of The Maid Married To The Billionaire

‘What made it a bloody day?’ she asked quietly.

‘Redundancies, but if business goes the way I hope we’ll be hiring more people in the near future,’ he pointed out. ‘That’s how it goes.’

‘Is it Mackies, the packaging factory in the industrial estate that was bought out?’ Skye asked. ‘Mackies is the main employer around here.’

Enzo nodded as the doorbell chimed.

Skye went to answer the door and stepped back as a heated trolley was trundled in complete with waiter.

‘In here...’ Enzo instructed. ‘Sit down, Skye.’

Awkwardly she took a seat at the table when she had planned to take her plate through to the kitchen.

‘We’ll serve ourselves,’ Enzo decreed.

‘I’ll do it,’ Skye offered, registering that there was an entire three-course meal awaiting them and utterly taken aback by the lavish quality of the food.

The salad starter was set out first and the desserts laid on the sideboard.

‘This is lovely,’ Skye said warmly. ‘I wasn’t expecting such a spread.’

She shook out her napkin and began to eat with appetite.

Enzo told her that the company was to begin selling biodegradable packaging, which was currently much in demand. To enable that switch, new machinery would be installed in the factory and there was already a large contract in the pipeline. ‘I think mynonno...my grandfather tailored this job for my benefit.’

‘How?’

‘I own one of the largest companies that provide packaging of that kind in the world,’ he admitted with the utmost casualness. ‘My grandfather hoped that I would have a personal interest in setting up a new business in that field.’

The main course was served while Enzo talked. Although she had never thought about packaging much, she was a keen recycler. When the waiter departed with the trolley, leaving them to attend to the desserts, she was relieved not to have anyone else listening to their conversation, although she had noticed that that silent third presence had not inhibited Enzo in the slightest. Every minute in his company, she was learning something new about him. Seemingly, Lorenzo Durante was much richer than she had assumed. The largest company...in the world? She should have checked him out on the Internet, she thought wryly. Clearly, he was accustomed to having people wait on him.

‘Did you have an argument with your ex?’ Enzo intoned quietly, once they were alone. ‘Is that what started the assault?’

‘No, there was no argument. He came home from work in a foul mood,’ Skye explained heavily. ‘He had found out that he had failed the exam he needs to pass to go for promotion. It was the third time he’d failed and he blamed us for it.’

‘How?’

‘He blew up in a rage, shouting that it was impossible for him to study with the kids around,’ Skye proffered, her soft mouth compressing. ‘I made the mistake of trying to reason with him. I didn’t remind him that he had failed the exam twice before we moved in or that I only saw him trying to studyonce. I just said that the next time I would take the children out and that’s when he went over the edge because, apparently, he can’t sit the exam again until next year. He punched me and called me stuff and when I fell, he went for my throat. I honestly thought he was going to kill me...’

Enzo swore in Italian under his breath. ‘I’m sorry I brought it up again.’

‘It happened.’ Skye lifted and dropped a shoulder and then stood up to fetch the desserts from the sideboard. ‘But he’d never hit me before. I wouldn’t have stayed with him if he had.’

‘How long were you with him?’

For an instant, Skye focused on his eyes, amber gold in the low light, enhanced by spiky black lashes, and her mouth ran dry.

‘Skye?’

‘Oh, you asked me a question,’ she recalled belatedly, her face burning with discomfiture because she had zoned out just looking at his eyes. ‘We were together four months, not very long really. But it wasn’t working for me. He was controlling, possessive, suspicious of every move I made. He didn’t want me to have friends, he didn’t even like me seeing Alana. It’s a challenge to act normally with someone like that and, more and more, I felt like a cat on hot bricks around him. If it hadn’t been for the children and my reluctance to disrupt their lives again, I wouldn’t have stayed as long as I did with him.’

‘Will you go back into teaching?’

‘If I can find a job that doesn’t entail moving miles away from my sister, yes. Did you get any word about my car?’

‘Yes.’ Enzo sighed. ‘There’s so much wrong with it, you’d be wiser letting it go to the scrapyard.’

‘No!’ Skye cut in, her dismay obvious. ‘Mavis was my mum’s car and she’s irreplaceable.’

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