Page 51 of The Boss's Forbidden Assistant

It was what he’d wanted. What he’d known was necessary.

A wave pummelled him and Salvador was glad. After all he’d been through, all he’d lost, it was in that moment he truly felt he’d hit rock bottom.

Salvador took an extra interest in Harper’s department after that. It was an obsession that he fully recognised was a little sick. After all, she’d offered to stay here with him, where he could have had his fill of her, held her, laughed with her, watched her working and walked with her. But he’d sent her away, unequivocally shutting down any prospect of a relationship, of a future, of anything beyond what they’d shared.

It was sex.

He shuddered, remembering the way Harper had recoiled and the light in her eyes had dimmed, the pain of his brutal appraisal rocking her to her core.

He’d sent her away when she would have stayed, so it made no sense that now he pored over reports from her department, looking for signs of her handiwork and seeing very little. Frustration twisted through him. Why was she being so under-utilised within the company? She’d gone toe to toe with Salvador, working at his pace, totally his equal in every way. There was so much more she could be doing than juggling someone’s diary.

Okay, he knew her job was more complicated than that, but it was obvious that she’d settled for a job she could do standing on her head because it paid well.

Her financial needs had him sitting up straighter. When she’d spoken of her mother, he’d felt the fierceness of her love. But, apart from a mother who lay in a nursing home, who did Harper have?

Salvador had been so focussed on his own solitary life that he hadn’t stopped to think about Harper. About how she’d also lost the people she loved.

And now Salvador had added to that burden. He was someone else who’d hurt her and left her. Someone else who’d done the wrong thing by her, taking what he wanted while it had suited him then pushing her away because he didn’t want to fight for something that might end up destroying him.

He swore, standing, dragging frantic hands through his hair, needing to escape Harper properly but knowing he couldn’t. In the three weeks since she’d left, he’d travelled widely and she’d followed him. She was a fixture in his mind all the time.

How could he ever escape her? And did he really want to?

Harper had it down pat now. At first, she’d struggled big time. But after three weeks she knew how to go through the motions adequately enough to fool everyone into thinking she was okay. The trick was to perfectly emulate how she’d been before.

She caught the same train, she wore the same clothes, packed the same lunch, made the same meaningless conversations, walked the same way, called or went to see her mum at the same time as usual. She held the act together just until she walked in her front door each night and could finally give into her state of grief.

It wasn’t that her heart was broken. That was too simple. Her heart was in a permanent state of breakage, each breath hurting it more and more, each memory like a fresh blade to her flesh, so she was in literal pain all day, all night—all the time. She couldn’t exist without thinking of Salvador, without missing him, and that had become a part of her, stitched into her being. But after three weeks she’d learned to fake it adequately enough so that she could walk through her day without anyone else knowing that she’d gone to Ilha do Sonhos and come back into a living nightmare.

It was the middle of the night when he woke, disturbed by fragments of dreams that shook him up and threw him into a strange, warped past so he couldn’t quite piece together what was real and what was a memory.

His mother was there, in a white linen dress, her long, dark hair coiled in a bun at her nape, a caipirinha in her hand and a smile on her face as the sun dipped towards the blanket of the ocean, dragging night in its wake.

‘Ilha do Sonhos—Isle of Dreams. Don’t you think it’s appropriate,mei filho?’

Salvador was a twenty-year-old again, arrogant and full of determination to make his mark, to prove to his father, who he never intended to meet, what a mistake he’d made in not wanting Salvador.

‘It’s a beautiful place.’

‘But the dreams.’ Her smile was mystical. ‘Here, on this island, I feel like anything is possible. Don’t you see it? Don’t you feel it?’

‘I feel warm.’ He shrugged.

‘No, Salvador. You’re not doing it properly. Close your eyes.’

He refused at first, but his mother insisted.

‘See?’ she asked, her voice lyrical and light.

‘No.’

‘There’s magic here. It’s in the air as you breathe, it’s in the forest and the waves. And it’s in the setting of the sun and the stirring of the new day. This island is a gift. Never forget that.’

‘It’s an island.’ He laughed.

‘But here, it’s a reminder that all things are possible. Look around us now. Look at this. How can you see this beauty and doubt the truth of that?’

Back in his bedroom now, sheets tangled as evidence of a disrupted night’s sleep, his heart was racing. That had just been one fragment of his dream, though. Anna-Maria had been there too, as she’d been towards the end, on the last visit they’d made to Sofia’s grave. She’d been so beautiful and ethereal, as though she’d been halfway to assuming an angel’s form.

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