“It’s gotten out of control recently.”
Circling around the desk, he stroked the blunt edge with his fingers—he used to sit there and listen to his father talk on the phone. Thoughtfully, he asked, “Has he tried to even get a job?”
“He did. He’s tried, but of course he’s found nothing. At least that’s what he says, but I suspect his pride won’t let him accept the kinds of jobs that have been offered to him.”
He frowned. “Sometimes you have to take what you can get.”
“I agree.” She toed the plush ends of the rug with the tip of her high heels. “I just feel he was hoping for someone to give him a chance at what he used to do. He was a good manager except he spoiled his chance.”
Second chances, Marcos thought. People spoke of them all the time, but in reality nobody offered them.
His father hadn’t offered it to him.
Nor had he offered one to his father.
Gradually, he allowed his surroundings to filter into his mind. A snapshot of Marissa beside the dormant computer. Frilly female things atop the desk. And he realized with a sinking heart that Marissa had taken possession of his father’s office.
There was no picture of the old man who’d raised him. The soccer posters—vintage ones that his old man had collected—were no longer on the walls. She’d taken everything, that heartless witch. Everything!
“This is your father’s office?” Virginia watched him, and the pity in her eyes made him desperate to eliminate it.
“Not anymore.” He smiled tightly, snatching up her hand. “Come on, let’s go. The office staff is coming in later.”
He escorted her outside. Thinking of how it was too late for his father and him—but maybe not for hers. Marcos’s old man had not been a gambler, but his quest for a woman had trampled his own son.
It seemed unfair a child should sacrifice their happiness for a parent. Marcos had not been willing. He’d never accept as a stepmother a woman who’d months before been his lover, never accept as a stepmother a woman who was so obviously playing his father for a fool. After numerous heated arguments where Carlos Allende refused to admit his son’s view as true, Marcos had packed his bags and left. But Virginia?
When her father fell into that dark gambling pit once more, what was this generous, loyal creature going to do? And what would he be willing to do to help her?
She loved Mexico.
There was something deliciously decadent about the time they spent during the following days poking around little shops, eating in restaurants, walking the city.
This afternoon, as Virginia’s heels hit the marbled floors of the awe-inspiring MARCO museum, she drew in a deep, reverent breath. This was a luxury she’d never allowed herself before. She’d rarely allowed herself outings to relax or to stimulate the mind; she’d always been so consumed by worry.
Now she wove through the paintings on exhibit, feeling Marcos’s presence next to her, and felt like she’d stepped into an alternate reality.
Every painting that caught her eye, every sculpture she viewed with the eyes of a woman who had suddenly acquired sight. And hearing. And touch. The colors were vibrant, and the themes were all passionate. Even death seemed passionate.
At night, Marcos took her out to eat in a small café just blocks away from the city plaza. After salad, tacos and fries, they walked arm-in-arm through the throng of people.
She’d never felt so safe.
She was in a dangerous city, surrounded by a language she did not understand and among unique, intriguing people, and she felt utterly safe. Her world felt so distant. Her father’s debts, the threats, the fact that things could get worse. Nothing mattered when these long, sinewy, rock-hard arms were around her.
She felt, for the first time in her life, protected. Secure.
During their ride back to the hotel, she caught Marcos watching her with those eyes and that knowing smile, and a sneaky little voice whispered to her. It accompanied them to their rooms, nestling somewhere deep inside her.
This is as real as real gets, Virginia Hollis. Can you make him see it?
No, she doubted that she could. He viewed the world with the eyes of a man. While she, with those of a woman.
As she struggled to tame her welling emotions, Marcos grasped her chin between his thumb and forefinger and tipped her head back. “Who does he gamble with? Do you know?”
It took a moment for her to grasp his train of thought. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Marcos hadn’t dropped the subject of her father for days. It was as though he were intent on avoiding the topic of his own parent and was focusing instead on fixing the troubles of hers.
Shrugging off his shirt, his eyes held hers in the lamplight, his voice a mellow rumble. “You said his gambling put you in this position. In that bed right behind you. My bed. Did you mean it?”
She considered the question at length, and though she’d needed to save her father no matter what, she also softly admitted, as she pulled off her short-sleeved sweater, “I think I brought myself here.”
She tossed her sweater aside, then her bra. Even in the flickering shadows, she caught the tightening flex of his jaw and throat. That her nakedness affected him made her smile and move close to him. Her palms hit the smooth velvet of his chest and her fingers rubbed upward. “What do you say about that, Mr. Allende?” she whispered.
With slow deliberation, he turned his head toward hers. As his fingers ventured in a languorous caress up her back, his mouth grazed her cheek and his sweet, hot breath coasted across her skin. “I say you’re the sexiest little thing I’ve ever seen. Miss Hollis. And I want you to promise me—whatever happens between us, you’re coming to me if your father’s ever again in trouble.”
“No, Marcos.”
“Yes. You are. I’d make you give me your word you’ll not pay debts that aren’t yours, but I know that’d be unfair to ask of you. You feel responsible for him, I respect that. Now please understand I feel responsible for you.”
Her toes curled at the proprietary gleam in his eyes. “But you’re not.”
“You’re my employee.”
“You have thousands of employees.”
His knuckles caressed her nipples, and her body flared to life at the touch. “But only one who’s been my lover.”
The words lingered in the air for a heated moment. She was ready to give up. Just wanted to kiss. Could almost hear the seconds ticking as their time together ran out.
“No contest?” he queried then, sensing his victory.
She yielded, shaking her head, wrapping her arms around him. “None.”
By the time their lips touched, she was holding her breath, parting her lips for his smiling mouth to take. He seized them softly and began to entice and torment her with nips and nibbles and gentle little suckles she felt down to the soles of her feet.
When he lowered her to the bed, his mouth became more demanding, spreading fire through her veins. And as his tongue forayed hard and hot inside her, one hand traveled up her ribcage to knead one waiting, throbbing breast with long, skillful fingers. “Chiquita.”
He scraped his whiskers across her chin, and she sighed.
She was his lover for a week.
She was nothing more and she would never be more.
Braced up on one arm, he used his free hand to unbuckle her slacks. He pulled the zipper low and pulled them off her. His thumb touched the elastic of her panties and made slow, sinuous circles before he eased it down.
Lover for a week. That’s all.
Discarding her panties, he urged her down on the bed and rained haphazard, unexpected kisses across her torso. On her shoulder, her tummy, then feasted on the tip of one breast. Virginia dropped her hand and absently caressed the back of his satiny black head as it moved, imagining what it would be like to suckle a baby. Their baby.
She’d always wanted a family.
Virginia, lover for a week!
As he kissed a
path down her belly, it struck her with a sweet wrenching pain that she had never sensed her dream of a family so far out of reach. At first the desire had been tucked aside to help her father resurface from his grief. Now it had come to the forefront of her mind and it mocked her.
Because she had become lover to this man.
This enthralling black-haired Spaniard.
And every man in her future would always be compared in her mind to Marcos Allende. Every bed she slept in would not be this one. And she dreaded, doubted there would be a man in this world to kiss her the way he did. Touch her like this, just like this.
Realizing his mouth was approaching somewhere dangerous, she squirmed under him. “If you knew what I was thinking,” she spoke up at the ceiling, “you’d leave the room.”
He lifted his head and met her gaze, his voice frighteningly solemn. “Don’t give me your heart, Virginia.”
Oh, God. She squeezed her eyes shut. Don’t fall in love with him, don’t fall in love with him, don’t fall in love with him. She scoffed, yanked her arm free as she sat up. “What? You think you’re all that and then some? That I cannot resist you? I’ll have you know…my heart…was not part of our bargain. You’re the boss and I’m the…employee and this is…an arrangement.”
One callused palm ran up and down the side of her leg. “And yet it’s easy to forget who we are here, isn’t it? Easy to get confused.”
She frowned over the concern in his voice and grabbed his head, defiantly pulling his lips to hers.
Lovers. That was all.
This is as real as real gets, Virginia Hollis. Can you make him see it?
They came to understand each other. Too well, maybe. They talked, but not of the future. They talked, but not of themselves.
They pretended, as they’d agreed to do.
“Did you enjoy yourself this week?”
Riding to the airport in the back of the Mercedes, Virginia sat curled up against Marcos’s side and laid her cheek on his shoulder. It was strange—how instinctively she sought this place, and how instinctively Marcos wrapped his arm around her shoulder to offer it to her.
She didn’t care if she shouldn’t do this, only knew within hours she wouldn’t dare. So she did it now.
“It’s been wonderful,” she admitted and trailed off when he brushed his mouth across her temple and placed a soft, almost imperceptible kiss there. “Unexpected and…surreal and wonderful.”
He held her so tight, so intimately, and whispered against her hair, “We should’ve done this before.”
Going pensive at the note of lingering lust in his voice, Virginia played with the buttons on his shirt while Marcos checked his phone and made a call to the office. As he spoke into the receiver, she stole a glance at him.
His voice rumbled in her ear, and his arm around her was absently moving up and down her bare arm. She’d been unable to keep from staring at him all week, and had been secretly delighted that most times he’d been checking up on her, too.
When he hung up, he gazed out the window at the passing car lights and said, “You’ll wire yourself the money from my account and take care of your problem straight away. Promptly, tomorrow morning.”
A command. As an authoritative man and, also, her boss.
“Understand?”
She hadn’t noticed she’d flattened her hand on his chest until his own big one came to cover hers. She watched their fingers entwine. Lovers’ fingers.
God, she’d done the most reckless thing. Look at her—draped all over her boss. Imagine if this ever got out? If people knew? Worse of all, her tummy was in a twist because she loathed for it to stop. And it had to—tonight. “Yes, I’ll take care of it right away,” she murmured, and on impulse took a good long whiff of his familiar scent.
“I’ve been thinking.” Marcos turned her hand around for his inspection and his thumb began to slowly circle the center of her palm. “I’d like to offer your father a job.”
“A job?”
“I figure if he realized he could be useful, he’d break the cycle of vice he seems to be stuck in.”
She thought about it, still resting her cheek against his chest, feeling utterly contented and yet dreading tomorrow when that feeling could be replaced with unease. “Why?” she asked then.
He quirked an eyebrow, then narrowed his eyes. “Why what?”
She fingered the heavy cross at his throat. “Why…him?”
“Why not?”
She shrugged, but her heart began to flutter at the prospect. “Maybe he’s just hopeless.” As hopeless as she was. How would she bear Monday at the office? She was terribly in lust with the man. He was an extraordinary lover, made her feel so sexy and wild she wanted to take all kinds of risks with him, and now he offered her father this incredible lifeline?
“Maybe he is hopeless,” Marcos agreed, chuckling.
But no, he was not hopeless, no one was. A smile appeared on her face. “Or maybe he will want one more chance.” And maybe she could handle Monday after all.
She’d survived so far, had feigned not to want Marcos for days and weeks and months. Now she’d act as though nothing had happened. As though when he looked at her, her insides didn’t leap with joy, and when he smiled at her, her stomach didn’t quiver.
He smiled at her then, causing all kinds of happenings in her body, and stroked her cheek with his warm hand. “I’ve looked into him. He was a smart, dedicated man, and he could be one again.”
Virginia contemplated his words, pleased that Marcos was smart enough to look past her father’s mistakes and see the hardworking man underneath. And a plan formed in her mind. Her father had managed a large chain store so successfully that, if everything hadn’t gone downhill after her mother’s death, he’d be CEO by now.
“You know, Marcos,” she said quietly, straightening on a burst of inspiration, “I think he might enjoy coming to Mexico.”
Silence fell. The car swerved to the left and into the small airport driveway. Virginia remembered the look of grim solemnity in Marcos’s face during their tour of Allende and she plunged on.
“He might even enjoy working at Allende,” she said. She tossed the bait lightly, hoping to plant some kernel of doubt in him so he’d reconsider his decision regarding the company’s future. But he went so still, she almost regretted it.
He stared at her with a calculating expression, then gazed out at the waiting jet. “Maybe.”
Neither said another word, but when he pulled her close, ducked his head and kissed her, she fought not to feel a painful pang.
This was where they’d first kissed.
It only made sense it would be where they had their last.
Eight
She was tidying up his office the next morning when Marcos halted at the doorway. The sight of Virginia fiddling with the coffeemaker froze him, then heated up his blood.
As she poured a cup—black, as he liked it—the plain buttoned-up shirt she wore stretched across her breasts in a way that made watching feel like purgatory.
“Good morning.”
She glanced up with a soft gasp. “Marcos—Mr. Allende.” And there went her breasts again, swelling, pert and lovely as she took a little breath.
His heart thudded as they stared at each other, the words lingering in the air. Mr. Allende.
A word meant to erase everything that had happened in Monterrey, Mexico.
Having never expected she would make it this easy, he stepped inside and pulled the doors shut behind him. “Good morning, Miss Hollis.”
He really could do this.
They’d pretended to be lovers before.
Now they would pretend they never had been.
Black coffee mug cradled against her chest, Virginia stared at him with the glazed wariness of a woman who feared that a man knew her secrets. “Can I get you anything, Mr. Allende?”
You.
He bit off the word, pulled off his jacket and tossed it onto the L-shaped sofa before he started
for his desk. His head buzzed with thoughts of her. Her, smiling up at him from her place on his lap. She had an obsession with tidiness, and it showed. His office was pristine. She was a tidy little box, his Miss Hollis. Who would’ve known she’d be such a wanton in bed? So uninhibited? So sexy? So addictive?
“I hear you arrived home safely,” he said, his groin stirring at the memory of their lovemaking. Dammit, don’t go there, man.
“Yes, thank you.” She flashed him one of those smiles that made his thoughts scramble. “And I caught up on my sleep a little.”
“Excellent. Excellent.”
His body clenched at her admission, for he hadn’t had a wink of sleep since their return. He kept remembering her, innocent, cuddled up against him.
Diablos, he had never imagined he’d once again look at Monterrey with longing. Now he did.
He longed to be there with his assistant for another week where he knew exactly what to do with her.
Lips thinning in disgust at his own erotic thoughts, he took the coffee cup from her hands when she passed it to him and dismissed her with a wave. No use in delaying their parting. “That will be all. Thank you, Miss Hollis.”
And with a painful wrench of mental muscle, he tore his eyes away and pushed her from his mind.
He had a business to take over.
Chicago felt different. The wind was the same, the noise, the traffic, and yet, it felt so different. She’d had to face Marcos at the office again today. Yesterday, their nonchalance toward each other had been so borderline pathetic she’d felt nauseated by the time she got home.
This morning, unable to stomach coffee, she made her way down the hall. The door to the extra bedroom where her father had been sleeping for the past couple of months was shut, and Virginia pressed her palm against it for a long moment, wondering if she should wake him. Let him know she was leaving for work. That everything had been taken care of and his debt absolved.
She decided she would call later instead and carried her small black duffel bag outside where the taxi waited, remembering Marcos’s offer to give her father a job.