She smelled of a soft, powdery fragrance, her hair scented with his travel shampoo. The combination flew up to his head like an aphrodisiac.
He’d never imagined the days they spent together would be like this. Lust and desire constantly had him on edge, true, but there was also the delightful peace and pleasure of her company.
Gently, he guided her around to face him. “As soon as we land in Chicago, I will have the funds transferred to your personal account. I want those men out of your and your father’s lives so you can be at peace. Agreed?”
A shadow descended, veiling her eyes. Inch by inch, her smile disappeared.
He cupped her face between his palms. “Something wrong with that?”
Clearly something was. She averted her gaze and gnawed on her lower lip. “Thank you, no, it’s all fine. That’s our arrangement, right?”
Pretend, she didn’t say. But his mind supplied it.
When Marcos did not deny this, Virginia lowered her face and drew away, suddenly looking very young and very vulnerable. She hugged herself tight. “I’d forgotten I’m being paid for this, that my father’s bad habits brought me here.”
Marcos knew that a woman like her didn’t easily fall into a man’s bed. Was she regretting that she had? Or only the circumstances that had brought her there?
A host of male instincts assailed him, urging him to embrace her, take her, appease her, seize the instinctive role of a man and protect her.
With a surge of dominant power, he grasped her shoulders and gave a gentle clench. “You’re worried he won’t stop gambling—that this will only be a temporary relief from your problem.”
She nodded. “I am.”
Virginia had been calling her father every day. His insides wrenched in protest at the knowledge of her suffering because of a reckless old man on a suicide mission. “How long since your father had a real job?” They strolled back into the hall, side by side.
“Since Mother died. Several years ago.”
They came into the last office—his father’s old office. Virginia probably didn’t know it had been his because of its ample size, or maybe she suspected, Marcos didn’t know. All he knew was that he couldn’t bear to look around but at the same time couldn’t leave it.
He crossed the wood floor, now covered with a shaggy white rug, and touched the window as he gazed outside. “He’s been like this ever since? Your father?”
“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.