The Italian's Passionate Return by Elizabeth Lennox Page B

“buffness” everyone drooled on and on about? Who knew? He was wearing an expensive suit that looked nice enough, but she had no clue if the man underneath the clothes was muscular or just thin and well built.
    He looked impressive. He had charm and humor, he answered all the reporters’ questions with intelligence and was able to control the room with ease. No one left offended and everyone seemed to think they “knew” Rocco Antoniv.
    But she’d seen something in his eyes, something hard and unyielding. Even from a distance. As he answered questions about his latest project, she’d watched him carefully. He was hiding something. She just knew it!
    There was more to this man than he was revealing and she was going to be the one to break it to the world.
    She’d seen it in his eyes while he was talking to the others. There was something more to the reason he was here in Washington, D.C. Something he wasn’t telling the other reporters that they weren’t seeing because he had them all convinced he was just in town for a tedious museum opening.
    Okay, so it was his museum! And it was possibly the most impressive museum she’d ever seen besides the Smithsonian. The extraordinary pieces he’d donated were astonishing. How a man only in his mid-thirties could have acquired so much wealth and so many significant historical pieces was not really much a mystery since the man was a financial genius. She’d researched his path to billionaire status and it was quite breathtaking. The man was ruthless in business, merciless about buying up one company after another and incorporating their products or intellectual knowledge into his empire. Everything served a purpose, everything was another piece of the puzzle that was quickly growing to an enormous picture.
    But she just knew that there was more, that something big was happening. She could tell by the look in his strange, golden eyes, he was up to something. The museum opening was just a front.
    She suspected that he was out to buy yet another company. And if that were the case, she was going to warn all the workers as quickly as possible about his eventual takeover. The man had come from nothing, being an orphan from Voronezh, Russia. He’d started buying up companies there, multiplying his wealth exponentially every year. No one could stop him. He came in, bought up a company that was hurting, fired half the staff and pulled all the others into his massive corporation.
    If she could warn just a few of those people, then they wouldn’t be floundering to pay their mortgage next month. She had a duty as a reporter to not just report the news, but to help others with the information on which she was reporting. She’d seen firsthand what horrors could be wrought when someone didn’t have anything to live for. Her father hadn’t been able to handle life after her mother died of cancer and he’d lost his job. She’d only been five years old when he’d decided to take his own life versus….she stopped her mind from going down that path. She couldn’t think about her father tonight.
    To that end, she found herself here, in this crazy nightclub where the women were showing more skin than they were covering, men and women were writhing to the obnoxious music and drinking alcohol at a rate that would put her in the hospital if she were ever to try it.
    As she looked around, her entire body was tense, feeling abnormally insecure and self-conscious. She desperately wanted her friends here. Just someone to talk to or, at a minimum, help her feel less conspicuous. She looked around and felt like she was wearing too much clothing even while she was painfully aware of how short her dress was and how much it revealed. She never would be caught wearing something like this if she thought she would run into anyone she might know.
    “Can I buy you a drink?” a man said, leaning close and blocking out some of the irritating neon lights.
    Brianna jumped slightly and moved away from