Emma moaned in her sleep as her lover's hands intimately roamed over her body. Since her arrival in Italy, she had experienced the most erotic dreams. She had attributed the experience to the history of romance the Italian city boasted but she still questioned the regular visits by the same ghostly visitor.
Each night, he would arrive as soon as she fell asleep. Although she never saw his face, she knew it was the same man every night. He would slide the sheet from her body and tenderly stroke his fingertips across her skin. Moving down her frame stroking her legs, he would gently tease the inside of her thighs until he reached the hem of her simple nightshirt.
Moving underneath the material, her lover's large, strong hands would gently touch the skin just above the waistband of her panties. She knew he had strong hands because, every night, when she would near the erotic bliss, a moment of reality or innocent would override her passion and she would attempt to fight against the surge of heat. As she would struggle, the strong hands would gently gather hers into one large grip and hold them over her head allowing no escape from him.
With his warm breath against her neck, he would kiss her racing pulse while caressing her body with his free hand. When he touched her panties, she blushed at the dampness he would certainly find as evidence of her arousal. Even in sleep she would remind herself that this experience was just a dream so she would cease her struggle and open her body, granting him access. When his touch made contact with her sensitive folds, she arched her body into his fingers seeking more from him.
"Patience little one," he would say. "You are as hungry for me as I am for you," his deep voice whispered into her ear.
His ministrations continued slowly driving her to the brink of an erotic madness. When her ghost lover finally took pity on her, he increased the tempo of his movements across the sensitive flesh of her sex. Moving his mouth over her breasts, he paused, savoring the hardened peaks until she was crying for mercy. Emma would surrender to passion's riptide, feeling the spark within her warmth burst into a current flowing through her body. Just when she thought she would die from pleasure, he would trace his tongue over her neck and she would then drown in a strange mixture of instant pain swallowed by a burst of sensual satisfaction.
Content and exhausted, Emma would then fall asleep happy that her dream lover had not abandoned her but also saddened that he was only that. He was only a dream.
Emma Livingston had arrived in Europe only one week earlier. Hoping for a chance to experience a little excitement in her life, she had splurged on a new wardrobe and hairstyle only to be quickly lost in the surplus of beautiful women gracing the city.
Completing the final semester of her MBA, Emma had taken an uncharacteristic leap of faith and registered for the international study course in hopes of finding some direction for her life. Unless she pursued a doctorate, school would be completed soon and she still had no idea what she "wanted to be when she grew up."
As an intern business analyst with an international finance company, she could use this experience to guarantee a resume that would place her above all other candidates. That promise was the sales pitch her advisor had given her. Since arriving, she had been redirected from a branch office to the corporate office in another country, shuffled into an office with no windows, and assigned the exciting task of reconciling accounts and mapping electronic transfers that were almost a decade old.
Tracing the misappropriation of funds in a children's hospital in the States was her grand assignment. To date, she had managed to snag, tear or stain most of her new clothes by lugging boxes of files from the storage vault to her office. Yeah, she was told that maintenance would help but they were never to be found when needed. Resorting to the convenient hair clip, she sacrificed her new hairstyle for the ease of removing the straying strands from her face.
Overall, Emma evaluated this decision as one of her worst to date and, if she had any family, she would have begged and borrowed the funds to return home. As it was, she had no one waiting for a phone call or a postcard from her, so there was no home to which she could return. The life of an orphan could be severely damaged by abuse or neglect but Emma had learned at a young age that she would prefer the results of neglect as opposed to the nightmares she had seen other girls in the system suffer. In order to protect herself, she dressed down, sat quietly and virtually became invisible to everyone around her.
By the time she was a teenager, her foster parents were reminded of her presence only when they received the governmental financial assistance for their generosity of allowing a motherless child to sleep under their roof. Emma had learned to wake on time for school, dress herself, fix breakfast, pack lunch and do her homework all by the time she was ten years old.
As long as she remained quiet and unseen, Emma's basic necessities were provided by the real estate broker and his wife who fostered her. When she graduated high school, she had no visitors to watch her receive her diploma. When she left the house for college, she never received a phone call or letter and therefore, reciprocated the gesture.
Unfortunately, Emma had perfected the art of appearing invisible so well for so long that she had no idea how to turn it off. As expected, she blended with the huge mass of freshmen that inundated the lecture halls and she was ignored by her roommate every day until the end of the year. Each subsequent year, she experienced the same treatment all the while craving the attention from one person who cared that she never went home for spring break, summer or Christmas.
Refusing to believe that her life would always continue as this, she had requested a meeting with the dean of her program and sought his permission to enroll in the international study course. Even now, she was mortified at the memory of how long it took her to explain to Dean Richards that she was indeed already enrolled in the MBA program and was preparing for her last semester. Being invisible was one thing, but was her name written on the roster in disappearing ink?
Now, she was here and her obscurity transcended across the Atlantic.
"Now that I've proven to be internationally invisible, I can pursue my lifelong dream of being a superhero," she said aloud to no one in her office and laughed at the absurdity.
Returning to the work on her desk, she once again questioned the value of the research. All she had been told was that fraud had been discovered with the financial transactions in a children's hospital. Although the executives had been fired, no one had questioned the trail of funds until recently. Emma sensed that her research was valuable and well received only by the increase in volume and questions that were sent in response to her reports.
And the questions were sent, never directly asked. Her only contact with her employer was through George, an older man who seemed either bored or inconvenienced by Emma's presence. He met her upon her arrival, escorted her to the office she affectionately called her cell, and gave her explicit instructions for the project including the preemptive warning of exactly how she would be punished if she breeched the company's confidentiality policy.
Emma had wisely refrained from her normal sarcastic replies but had always felt that she should have defended her integrity to the pompous little ass. Every day, she would report to work bustling through the building with hundreds of employees, never acknowledged until she walked into her cell to find George perusing through the work on her desk. Overcoming her initial annoyance, she quickly learned that he would obtain an abbreviated report of her findings, transfer the information to their boss and return with questions for clarification or instructions of new direction for the investigation.
Knowing that her work was reported every day to Antony Melchiorre inspired Emma to work hard and do her best, no matter how lame the project had originally appeared to be. Oh sure, using a children's hospital as a front for money laundering was despicable but the culprits had be caught. Who cared that the money funded clubs and other small businesses throughout Europe? Apparently, Signor Melchiorre did and therefore, she did.
In one week, she had walk, unnoticed, beside more than a million people but had made eye contact with only one person. Antony Melchiorre. Every day, she would see George at her desk but his eyes were always focused on the papers scattered across her work space never looking at her. He blindly acknowledged her presence when she walked into the room with a mumbled greeting and then commenced to discuss business. Other employees would actually walk into her, never seeing her, even when coffee would slosh from their cup onto her clothes.
But he had noticed. Much to her chagrin, Signor Melchiorre could be easily found, witnessing her neglect or abuse, from behind the expansive window in the executive office. As CEO of Kingdom Investments, he habitually stood in his penthouse office viewing the arrival and departure of his employees throughout the fifteen floors of the atrium in his view. On her first day, Emma walked through the door and looked straight up into his eyes. Impossible as it seemed, she felt compelled to lift her gaze to him and into the warmth of his golden brown eyes.
And each day, Emma's life continued in her new environment with her only pleasure secretly derived from the split second gaze into the eyes of her employer as she started and ended her day at the office.
On this morning, Emma struggled to carry a banker's box from the storage vault, shifting the weight of the burden from one hip to another unable to balance the load appropriately. Although the vault was clean and dry, the box must have been previously stored in damp conditions. The handgrips were shredding and would soon break while the bottom of the box seemed to buckle with each step Emma took.
Concentrating on her immediate task, Emma shrieked when she walked into a wall that suddenly appeared in her path and lost her precarious hold. Although she struggled to correct her grip, the weight of the contents shifted forcing excessive pressure on one side. Hearing the sound of cardboard ripping, she closed her eyes to avoid seeing the documents scatter over the floor.
"You are supposed to call someone in Maintenance to bring this to you," the angry voice said.
"Great," she murmured. "A wall that talks." Kneeling to gather the papers, Emma stuffed them in the pathetic cardboard remains that could now only be moved with the assistance of a strong man and a cart.
