“You were being—” As though offended by her own thoughts, she bolted upright in the chair, spine straight. “Something of a jerk.”
He choked. “Jerk! This spoken by an opinionated little brat I’ve spoiled rotten?”
The blow registered in her face first, crumpling her tight expression. Marcos raked his fingers through his hair and shot up to pace his office.
He felt like celebrating with her, like marking this momentous day in his career with something even equally outstanding for him personally. But somehow he sensed he had to make amends with her first.
Virginia had wanted him last night. First, he’d been occupied with Marissa. Who’d deceived and lied to him. And who had become so insignificant in his life, he’d forgiven her. After he got what he wanted from her.
All this, thanks to Virginia.
Suddenly, Marcos felt a grieving need to explain, to placate her, to restore the sparkle in her pretty green eyes. Staring around his office, at the papers scattered across the desk, he quietly admitted, “Virginia, I want to make you a proposition.”
Her slow and deep intake of breath was followed by a dignified silence. This was not the way he’d intended to ask her and yet suddenly he had to. Here. Now. Had to know she would belong to him, only him.
They were fighting, the air between them felt electric, charged with anger and lust and something else he couldn’t quite place. Something fuzzy and warm that made him feel close to her even when she annoyed him.
He strode over to her chair and bent, put his palm on her bare knee, and said, with fervor, “Would you be my mistress, Virginia?”
The way she automatically breathed the word no, he’d have thought he’d slapped her. Her eyes shone with hurt and her mouth parted as though she wanted to say something else but couldn’t. “No,” she said again, on another breath, this one made of steel.
“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” he said gently, stroking her knee and moving his hand up to clasp hers where it rested on her lap.
“Don’t!” She said it in such a fierce voice that he halted. Even his heart stopped beating. She shook her curls side to side, her face stricken. “Don’t touch me.”
What was this? What was this?
He caught her face in one hand, his heartbeat a loud, deafening roar in his ears. “Darling, I realize you might have misinterpreted my interests in speaking to Marissa, which I assure you were only business. It’s you I want, only you. And I’m very prepared to give you—”
“What? What will you give me?” She stood up, her eyes shooting daggers at him. “Do you even realize that the only thing I’ve been pretending all this time is that I don’t love you?”
His heart vaulted, but his voice sounded dead as he stepped back. The confession felt like a bomb dropped into his stomach. “Love.”
She chose to look out the window. And at last handed him the file. “Here’s my resignation.”
She set it atop his stacks and started for the door, and Marcos tore across the room like a man being chased by the devil. He caught her and squeezed her arms as his paralyzed brain made sense of her words.
“If you’re telling me you love me,” he said through gritted teeth, “look at me when you say it!”
She wrenched free. “Let go of me.”
He caught her elbow and spun her around, and she screamed, “I said don’t touch me!”
Worried the entire floor may have heard that, he let go of her. His chest heaved with the cyclone of feelings inside of him. He curled his fingers into his hands and his fingers dug into his palms, his knuckles jutting out.
“You want me,” he growled.
“No.” She backed away, glaring at him.
“You tremble for me, Virginia.”
“Stop it.”
“You want me so much you sob from the pleasure when I’m inside you.”
“Because I’m pretending to enjoy your disgusting tumbles!” she shot. She was flushed and trembling against the wall, her nipples balled into little pearls that begged for his mouth. But in her voice there was nothing but pain.
“Pretend? When the hell have we pretended?” He crushed her against him, squeezed her tight even as she squirmed. “We’re fire, Virginia. You and I. Combustion. Don’t you understand English? I’m asking you to stay. With me. And be my mistress,” he ground out.
Did she even realize he’d never in his life said this to a woman before? When her lashes rose and her gaze met his, the damaged look in her eyes knocked the air out of him. He didn’t expect the slicing agony lashing through him at her next words.
“I’m not interested in being your mistress.”
When she disengaged from him and pulled the doors open, he cursed under his breath, raked a hand through his hair. All noise across the floor silenced, and he immediately grabbed his jacket, shoved his arms into it as he followed her to the elevator.
He pushed inside before the doors closed, and she turned her face toward the mirror when he demanded, “Do I get two weeks to convince you to stay? I want you here. And I want you in my bed.”
“You want. You need.” Her voice quivered with anger, and its tentacles curled around him so hard he could’ve sworn it would kill him. “Is that what you wanted to speak to me about? Becoming your…mistress?”
His heart had never galloped this way. His plans had never veered off so unexpectedly, so decidedly. Their gazes met. Hers furious. His…his burned like flames. He grabbed her shoulders. The need inside him was so consuming he saw red. “Say yes. Christ, say yes now.”
But the way she looked at him wasn’t the same way she always did. “Do you think that’s what I want?” she asked, so softly he barely heard through the background elevator music. “Did I ever give you the impression I would…settle for…such an offer?”
Stunned that she would look at him like he was a monster, he took a step away from her, and another. His body burned with the want to show her he meant not to punish but to love her with every graze of his lips and every lick of his tongue.
And he said, out of desperation, impulse, the exact second the elevator halted at the lobby floor, “I love you.”
And the words, magic words, ones he’d never, ever said before, didn’t have the effect he’d predicted.
Her laugh was cynical. “See, you’re so good at pretending, I don’t believe you.”
And she spun around and walked away, out of the elevator, away from him, away from it all.
Stunned, he braced a hand on the mirror, shut his eyes as he fought to make sense of the rampaging turmoil inside him.
What in the hell?
Alone in his Fintech offices, motionless in his chair, Marcos stared out the window.
The nineteenth floor was empty. It was 3 a.m. But there was no power on this earth, no way in hell, that he’d go back alone to his apartment. His penthouse had never felt so cold now that Virginia Hollis was gone. The sheets smelled of her. He’d found a lipstick under the bathroom sink and he’d never, ever felt such misery. The sweeping loneliness that had accompanied that unexpected find was staggering.
He’d stormed out of his home and now here he was, inside his sanctuary. The place where he evaluated his losses and plotted his comebacks. Where he’d conquered the unconquerable and ruthlessly pursued new targets. Where, for the last month, he’d spent countless hours staring off into space with the single thought of a raven-haired temptress with pale, jade-green eyes.
And now he stared out the window, blinded to the city below, and he told himself he did not care.
He told himself that a month from now, he would forget Virginia Hollis.
He told himself this was an obsession and nothing more. He told himself the gut-wrenching, staggering throb inside him was nothing. And for the hundredth time, until the words rang true and his insides didn’t wince in protest every time he thought them, he told himself he did not love her.
But it was a bluff. A farce. A lie.
Virginia had her money. Their arrangement had culminated at the Fintech party and had left him with an overwhelming sense of loss he couldn’t quite shake. She’d left him wanting. Wanting more.
Marcos, I love you.
She hadn’t said it in exactly those words—but in his mind, she did. And he’d never heard sweeter words. More devastating words. Because suddenly, and with all his might, he wanted to be a man who could love her like she deserved.
The pain in her eyes—he’d been the one to put it there. Touch of gold? He scoffed at the thought, thinking he destroyed anything he touched that had life. He’d put that misery in Virginia’s eyes and he loathed himself for it.
His proposal, what he’d offered her, not even half of what he’d truly wanted from her, sickened him.
All along, he’d wanted her. He was a man accustomed to following his gut, and he did it without a conscience. He knew when he saw land and wanted it. He knew what he looked for when he bought stocks. He knew, had known from the start, he wanted Virginia in his bed, under his starved, burning body. But now, clear as the glass before him, he knew what else he wanted from her.
He wanted it all.
He wanted a million dances and double that amount of her smiles.
He wanted her in his bed, to see her when he woke up, to find her snuggled against him.
He wanted to pay her credit card bills and he wanted her with a baby in her arms. His baby. His woman. His wife.
Mia. Mia. Mia.
He’d been alone his entire lifetime, pursuing meaningless affairs, convincing himself that was enough. It had all changed. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, but surely, ever since the day he’d hired Virginia Hollis.
Now he had broken her heart before she’d truly admitted to having lost it to him. He should’ve treasured it. Tucked it into his own and never let it go.
Sighing, he pushed his chair around and stared across his office. A dozen plasma TV screens hung on the wall to the right. They usually enlivened the place with noise and light, but were currently off. They lent a gloom to the area that Marcos found quite the match to his mood.
In fact, a morgue was quite the match to his mood.
He stalked outside, and made his way to a sleek wooden desk. Her items were still on it. He scanned the surface—polished to a gleam, all orderly, all her, and he groaned and let his weight drop into her chair.
Her rejection felt excruciatingly painful. Not even the day Marissa Galvez had stared up at him from his father’s bed had he felt such helplessness.
What in the devil did she want from him?
As he stroked a hand along the wood, he knew. Deep in the closed, festering pit of his emotions, he knew what she wanted. Damn her, she’d been playing him for it! Seducing him, delighting and enchanting him, making him love and need and cherish her.
And now he couldn’t even remember why he had thought she didn’t deserve everything she wanted. Because she was a woman, like Marissa? Why had he thought his bed would be enough for everything she would lack? Had he grown so heartless that he would rob her of a family?
He began opening and closing the desk drawers, looking for some sign of her. Something—anything—she might have left behind.
For the first time in his life, someone else’s needs seemed more important than his, and he loathed the overwhelming sense of loss sweeping through him like an avalanche.
If he had an ounce of decency in him, if he was not the unfeeling monster she thought him to be at this moment, Marcos would let her go.
And just when he was certain it was the right thing to do, just when he was determined to forget about her and all the days they’d pretended and all the ways they’d been both wrong and right for each other, he spotted the boxes crowded into the back of her bottom drawer.
And the three test strips. All of them had the same result.
“Nurse, is my father out in the hall?”
Virginia had been transferred to a small private room in the west hospital wing, where she’d slept for the night hooked up to an IV drip, and this morning the one person she longed to see hadn’t yet made an appearance. She wanted to go home already—she felt tired, cranky, lonely—and still the nurse kept delaying her departure.
The balmy-voiced nurse fidgeted around the bare room, organizing the trays. “I believe he’s outside. I’m sure he’ll come in shortly.”
Virginia sighed, the sensation of having been run over by an elephant especially painful in her abdomen and breast area. She cupped her stomach. Amazing, that the baby already had its heartbeat. Amazing that just as she left its father, the baby had tried to leave her body, too.
“Virginia?”
She went completely immobile when she heard that.
There, wearing a severe black turtleneck and slacks, stood Marcos Allende in the doorway. Her heart dropped to her toes. She felt the urge to snatch the sleek red carnation her father had set on the side table and hide her pale, teary face behind it, but she was too mesmerized to pull her eyes away. Large, hard, beautiful—Marcos’s presence seemed to empower the entire room, and she suspected—no, knew—everyone in this hospital must be feeling his presence.
He stood with his feet braced apart, his arms at his sides, his fingers curled into his palms. And something hummed. Inside her. In her blood, coursing through her veins.
“An acquaintance, miss?”
The nurse’s tone gave a hint of her preoccupation. Did she feel the charge in the air? Was the world twirling faster? The floor falling?
Virginia nodded, still shocked and overwhelmed by this visit, but as she stared at the sleek-faced, long-nosed young woman, she hated her mind’s eye for gifting her with another, more riveting image of Marcos’s dark, cacao gaze. His silken mass of sable hair. Long, tanned fingers. Accent. Oh, God, the accent, that thick baritone, softly saying Miss Hollis…
“I’ll leave you two for a moment, then.”
Oddly close to being devastated, Virginia watched the nurse’s careful departure, and then she could find no excuse to stare at the plain white walls, no spot to stare at but Marcos.
If she had just been torpedoed, the impact would have been less than what she felt when he leveled his hot coal eyes on her. He stood as still as a statue.
Why didn’t he move? Was he just going to stand there? Why didn’t he hold her? Why was he here? He was angry she quit? Angry she hadn’t collected her items? Did he miss her just a little bit?
She sucked in a breath when he spoke.
“I’m afraid this won’t do.”
The deep, quiet, accented voice washed over her like a waterfall. Cleansing. Clear. Beautiful.
Oh, God. Would she ever not love this man?
She pushed up on her hands, glad her vitals were no longer on display or else Marcos would know exactly how hard her heart was beating. “Marcos, what are you doing here—”
He looked directly at her as he advanced, overpowering the room. “I had to see you.”
She sucked in breath after breath, watching him move with that catlike grace, his expression somber. Her body quaked from head to toe. The unfairness of it all; he was so gorgeous, so elegant, so tempting. So unreachable. And she! She was so…so beat-up, tired, drained. Hospitalized. Oh, God.
Her lips trembled. As if she weighed next to nothing, he bent and gently scooped her up against him, and Virginia liquefied.
I almost lost our baby, she thought as she wound her arms around him and buried her face in his neck.
He inhaled deeply, as though scenting her. Then, into her ear, his voice ringing so low and true it tolled inside of her, “Are you all right?”
Only Marcos could render such impact with such softly spoken words. Her entire being, down to her bones, trembled at his concern. And then came more. It was just a breath, whispered in her ear, and he whispered it with fervor.
“I love you.”
Her muscles clenched in protest, and her head swiveled to her father’s when she spotted him at the open doorway. The weathered man’s face was inscrutable and his suit was perfectly in place; only the ravaged look in his eyes spoke of what he’d done.
He’d told Marcos about the baby?
“You lied to me, you left me, and yet I love you,” Marcos continued, his voice so thick and gruff, as though he were choking.
After the fear, the cramps and the possibility of losing her baby, Virginia had no energy. She just wanted him to speak. The sturdiness of his hard chest against hers gave her the most dizzying sensation on this earth. She’d thought she’d never feel his arms again and to feel them around her, holding her so tight, was bliss.
She didn’t realize she was almost nuzzling his neck, breathing in his musky, familiar scent, until her lungs felt ready to explode.
“Do you think we could pretend,” he whispered into the top of her bent head, “the past two days never happened, and we can start again?”
More pretending? God, no! No more pretending.
But she refused to wake up from this little fantasy, this one last moment, refused to lift her face, so instead she rubbed her nose against the side of his corded neck. A strange sensation flitted through her, like the soaring she felt when she played on the swings as a child.
His voice was terse but tender as he wiped her brow with one hand and smoothed her hair back. “And our baby?”
Shock didn’t come close to what she experienced. Her nerves twisted like wires. “P-pardon?”
“You lost our child?”
For the first time since Marcos had come through that door, Virginia noticed the red rimming his eyes, the strain in his expression. Even his voice seemed to throb in a way she’d never heard before.
She moved not an inch, breathed no breath, as her mind raced to make sense of his question. Then she glanced out the small window, not at what lay beyond, just at a spot where Marcos’s face would not distract her. “What makes you say that?” she asked quietly, her fingers tugging on themselves as she scanned the room for the possible culprit behind this misunderstanding. Her father.
“Look at me.” Marcos’s massive shoulders blocked her view as he leaned over the bed rails. His breath stirred the top of her head as he scraped his jaw against her hair with absolutely no restraint, and then he spoke so passionately her middle tingled. “Look at me. We’ll have another baby. I’ve always wanted one—and I want one with you.” He seized her shoulders in a stronghold, his face pained and tortured as he drew away and forced her to meet his gaze. “Marry me. Today. Tomorrow. Marry me.”
“I— What do you mean another baby?” After many moments, she pinned Hank Hollis with her stare. “Father?”
Wide-eyed, her father hovered by the opposite wall, shifting his feet like an uncertain little boy. He opened his mouth, then snapped it shut, then opened it again, as if he were holding on to great words. “I told him you’d lost the baby.”
She gasped. What a horrible thing to say! “W-why? Father! Why would you do that?”
The man rubbed the back of his neck, pacing the little room. “So he’d leave. You said you didn’t want any visitors.”
While the honest words registered in her foggy mind—the first protective thing her father had done for her in ages—Virginia stared at the aging man. Her heart unwound like an old, twisted shred of paper.
For years, she had been so angry at this man. Maybe if she hadn’t changed, become pregnant, fallen in love, she’d still be. But now—she didn’t want resentment or anger. She wanted a family, and she’d take even one that had been broken.
Virginia leveled her eyes on the beautiful, thick-lashed cocoa ones she’d been seeing in her dreams and straightened up on the bed, clinging to that fine, strong hand. “Marcos, I’m not sure what he told you, but I’d like to assure you I’m all right. And so is the baby.”
When she pictured telling Marcos about a child, she hadn’t expected an audience, nor having to do it in a hospital room.