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scoffed, meeting his gaze long enough for his own to slice through her like a blade, as if he could see all the way inside her to where she squirmed.
    And where she held a hot ember of yearning for his good opinion.
    “He’s not worried,” she dismissed, feeling hollow as she said it. “We’re not close like that. He just wants to know what’s going on.” So he could perform damage control on his side.
    She had worked so hard to keep Travis from seeing her as a hanger-on, so he wouldn’t think she was only spending time with his elderly father in hopes of getting money out of him and possibly cut her off. She was vigilant about paying her own way, refusing to take money unless it was a little birthday cash which she invariably spent on groceries, cooking a big enough dinner to fill her stepfather’s freezer with single-serve leftovers. She always invited Travis to join them if she was planning to see Henry, never wanting him to think she was going behind his back.
    Now whatever progress she’d made in earning Travis’s respect would be up in smoke. But what did that matter when apparently no one else would have any for her after this?
    “Do you have other family you should contact?” Vittorio asked.
    “No,” she murmured. Her mother, a woman without any formal training of any kind, had married an American and wound up losing her husband two years into her emigration to his country. He’d been in the service, an only child with elderly parents already living in a retirement home. They had died before Gwyn had been old enough to ask about them.
    With no home or family to go back to in Wales, her mother, Winnifred, had struggled along as a single mom, often working in retail or housekeeping at hotels, occasionally serving for catering companies. She’d taken anything to make ends meet, never deliberately making Gwyn feel like an encumbrance, but Gwyn was smart enough to know that she had been.
    That’s why Gwyn was so determined to prove to Travis her attachment to Henry was purely emotional. It was deeply emotional. Henry was the only family she had.
    “You do make an easy target, don’t you? A single woman of no resources or support,” Vittorio commented. Perhaps even desperate, she could hear him speculating.
    “You must think so, offering an affair when I’m at my lowest,” she said. “You might as well hang around bus stations looking for teenaged runaways.”
    Something flashed in his gaze, ugly and hard and dangerous, but he leaned forward onto the table between them and smiled without humor.
    “It’s not an offer. Until I say otherwise, you’re my lover. I’m a very powerful man, Gwyn. One who is livid on your behalf and willing to go on the offensive to reinstate your honor.”
    His words, the intense way he looked at her, snagged inside her heart and pulled, yanking her toward a desire to believe what he was saying.
    “You mean the bank’s behalf. To reinstate the bank’s honor,” she said, as much to remind herself as to mock him. Her prison-cell analogy had been wrong. This was the lion’s cage she was trapped in with the king of beasts flicking his tail as he watched her.
    “You understand me,” he said with a nod of approval. “We’ve been very discreet about our relationship, given that you work for us,” he continued in a casual tone, sitting back and taking his ease. “But I assure you, I’m intensely possessive. And very influential. This crime against you—” the bank “—won’t go unpunished.”
    He was talking like it was real. Like they were actually going forward with this pretense. Like they were really having an affair.
    She choked on a disbelieving laugh, pointing out, “That just switches out one scandal for another. It doesn’t change anything. I still look like a slut.”
    She might have thought he didn’t care, he remained so unmoving. But sparks flew in the hammered bronze of his irises, as if he waged a knife fight on the inside.
    He still sounded