HIRED BY THE DEVIL

Chapter Twenty-One: The Villa Pt 3

The dining room was warm and bright and Martha had set the table with the comfortable efficiency of someone who had been doing this for decades and found genuine satisfaction in every part of it.

Bam settled beside Rosalina’s chair before she had fully sat down.

She looked at him. He looked at her. She gave him a small piece of her toast.

Around the table two members of the household staff moved quietly — collecting things, refilling things — and both of them, within thirty seconds of watching Bam plant himself beside the new guest and accept food from her hand with complete devotion, had found reasons to glance over. Their expressions ranged from mild surprise to something considerably more interested than that.

Enzo ate across from her in the comfortable silence of a man in his own home with nowhere to be for exactly this long. He drank his coffee — black, no sugar, the same as always — and read something on his phone with his usual focused attention.

Rosalina ate her toast and fed Bam and did not look at the staff looking at her.

It was a very strange Tuesday morning.

It was also — she filed this away carefully and did not examine it — not entirely unpleasant.

The home office was on the ground floor at the end of the east corridor.

It was large and dark-walled and organised with the same precision as his office on the sixtieth floor — documents in their place, nothing unnecessary, a desk positioned so that the grounds were always visible through the window. Different from the office but unmistakably his. The same quality of deliberate order. The same sense of a man who knew exactly where everything was and why.

They worked well.

That was the thing she had learned about working with Enzo Salvatore — once the rhythm was established it moved with almost effortless efficiency. She anticipated, he directed, documents passed between them with the clean ease of two people who had learned each other’s pace without either of them deciding to.

An hour in he looked up from the contract in front of him.

“The projection breakdown on page nine,” he said. “Show me on your screen.”

She turned her laptop toward him.

He leaned in to look.

This was the moment she had not entirely prepared for — not because it was remarkable, objectively it was two professionals looking at a screen together — but because the home office was smaller than his office on the sixtieth floor, and the desk was smaller than his desk at work, and when he leaned in the distance between them became —

Closer than necessary.

She could see the tattoos along his forearm properly from here. Dark and precise, disappearing beneath the pushed-up sleeve of his sweatshirt. His hair this close had that same blue-black quality it had in candlelight. He smelled like coffee and something clean and entirely his own and she was absolutely looking at the screen.

“The Q4 variance,” she said. Her voice came out steady. She was quietly proud of that.

“Here.” He reached across and pointed at a figure. His hand was close to hers on the keyboard. Not touching. Just — close. The way things became close when space ran out and neither person moved away from it.

She looked at the figure.

“The eleven percent drop,” she said. “It’s seasonal. It corrects itself every Q1 without any intervention.”

He was quiet for a moment.

She was very aware of how quiet it was.

“You pulled the historical data,” he said.

“Last night,” she said. “I thought it might come up.”

Another pause. The specific kind. Occupied.

She could feel the moment his attention shifted — from the screen to her — without looking at him directly. She had learned to feel that. It was a particular quality of stillness that happened when Enzo Salvatore stopped thinking about the work and started thinking about something else entirely.

“It’s consistent,” he said finally. “Across four years.”

“Five,” she said. “I went back five.”

He looked at her.

At close range. Those green eyes doing what they always did at close range — layered and still and entirely too much to look at directly for more than a moment without something happening in her chest that she had no intention of documenting.

She looked at the screen.

He straightened.

The room exhaled.

His phone rang.

He looked at the screen, said excuse me in the low even voice of a man who meant it as an actual apology — which was new, she noted, filed it immediately — and stepped out into the corridor.

Rosalina sat for exactly three seconds in the quiet of the home office.

Then she took a long slow breath and looked out of the window at the grounds.

Professional, she told herself firmly. Entirely and completely professional.

She was going to need just a moment.

He came back in seven minutes.

She had used them well — composure fully restored, documents reorganised, a note added to the projection file that had everything to do with being useful and nothing whatsoever to do with recovering herself.

He stood in the doorway for a moment before crossing back to the desk.

“Miss Evans.”

She looked up.

“I have to travel to Spain tomorrow.” He said it with his usual directness, no buildup. “A conference meeting. Two days.” He looked at her steadily. “You’ll be attending as my PA. Jeremy will collect you first thing tomorrow morning and bring you to the hangar.”

She looked at him.

“The hangar,” she said.

“My jet.” Stated simply. The way you stated facts that required no further explanation.

She held that for one second.

“Understood,” she said.

“Pack for two nights. Bring the full Ferrara breakdown — there’s a dinner with the Barcelona team on the second evening and I’ll need everything prepared.”

“I’ll have it all ready tonight.”

He nodded once and looked back at his documents.

Rosalina turned back to her screen.

Spain, she thought.

His jet.

Two days.

She typed a note into the Ferrara file with the focused composure of a woman who was absolutely not thinking about any of that.

The rest of the day passed the way productive days passed — quickly and without incident, if you didn’t count the moment at three fifteen when Bam abandoned his position by the fireplace and came to sit directly on her feet under the desk. She didn’t count that. She had decided not to.

At five thirty she closed her laptop and gathered her things.

Enzo was still working. He was always still working.

She straightened her papers and was reaching for her bag when Martha appeared in the home office doorway with the warm persistence of a woman who had been planning this moment since approximately lunchtime.

“Rosa dear,” she said gently. “You haven’t had dinner. Stay — I’ve made more than enough and it would make me so happy to—”

“Martha.” Enzo looked up from his desk.

Martha looked at him calmly.

“Don’t force it,” he said. Not unkindly. Simply final, the way he was final about things. “She has to get home.”

Martha considered this. Then she looked at Rosalina with warm eyes that were filing something away rather than letting anything go.

“Alright,” she said quietly. Then she crossed to Rosalina and took both her hands warmly in hers. “Rosa dear. Goodnight. You take care of yourself on your way home.” A gentle squeeze. “I hope to see you more often.”

Something warm moved through Rosalina’s chest.

“Thank you Martha,” she said quietly. “You’ve been so kind.”

Martha smiled — the full deep smile of a woman who had made her assessment and was entirely happy with it — and went back toward the kitchen.

Rosalina picked up her laptop bag.

Bam padded after her all the way to the entrance hall and sat beside her feet while she put on her coat — steady and certain and completely unbothered about what anyone thought of his loyalties.

She heard footsteps behind her.

She turned.

Enzo stood in the entrance hall with his hands in the pockets of his dark joggers — unhurried, as though seeing her to the door was simply the next thing that happened and needed no explanation.

“Goodnight Miss Evans,” he said. “Jeremy will drop you home and collect you tomorrow morning.” A pause — small, deliberate. “Pack some sweaters. It’s cold in Spain at the moment.”

She looked at him.

At the easy stillness of him in his own home. At the green eyes that gave nothing away and had somehow, across two months, started giving just enough that she noticed.

“Alright sir,” she said. “Goodnight.”

She walked out into the cool evening air.

Jeremy was exactly where he always was.