She was very, undeniably pregnant.
With Marcos’s baby.
There could be no more solid proof of her naïveté. She’d walked into his penthouse one evening with little in the way of emotional shields, without protection and without standing a chance. She might as well have torn out her heart and offered it in her hand. What had she expected would come out of it? Of all those pretend kisses, the laughter, the moments she could not forget?
Did she think he would say, “Step into my life, Virginia, I want you in it forever?”
Did she think he would say, “Marry me, amor, where have you been all my life?”
Oh, God. Covering her face with her hands, she considered what he would do when he found out about this.
A vision of him suggesting something bleak made the bile hitch up in her throat. She choked it back and shook her head, wrapping her arms around her stomach, speaking to herself at first, then below at the tiny little being growing inside her.
“I have to tell him.” And when a wealth of maternal love surged through her, she ran a hand across her stomach and determinedly whispered, “I have to tell him.”
Maybe she was more of a gambler than she’d thought. He might be furious, and he could turn her away, but still she found herself righting her hair and her clothes in front of the mirror, preparing for battle. Gathering up all the tests in the plastic bag from the drugstore and stuffing it in her purse, she once again headed back to Marcos’s office.
She knocked three times. “Mr. Allende?”
His friend Jack seemed to have left already, and now, as she entered, Marcos pulled up a file from a stack on his desk, studied it, set it back down, rubbed his chin then finally stared at her.
“Close the door,” he said, all somber.
She couldn’t read that expression. She tried for flippant and saucy. “I’m under orders to spend a lot of money on anything I fancy.”
“Are you now.” He frowned. “Who is this man who orders you around? Seems to me you should run far and fast away from him, Miss Hollis.”
The unexpected smile he shot her made her grin. “Did I mistakenly put whiskey in your coffee?” she asked, nearly laughing.
His eyes sparkled. “You might want to sit on my lap while you investigate.”
She approached his desk, thinking about the baby, his baby, growing inside her body. “I was wondering if you were busy tonight. I’d like for us to talk.”
“Virginia.” He leaned forward and gently lowered her to his lap. “You have me. I’m at your disposal every night.”
“Marcos…” The words I want more faltered in her throat.
He must have misinterpreted her concern, for Marcos dropped his hands to his sides and sighed. “Nobody knows about us, Virginia, please don’t fret. I’m trying to keep things running smoothly. My office won’t be abuzz with gossip, I won’t allow it.”
Gossip. Could everyone be gossiping? Whispering? Her stomach clenched in dread. “But you keep stealing touches and people are noticing.” That much was true. And soon…how would she hide a pregnant belly?
Marcos boldly raked her figure with his gaze, reclined in his seat and said, “Then I should give these people something more to do.”
She blinked, then realized he was teasing her, and she forced her lips into a smile. But it wasn’t funny. Soon they’d notice she was pregnant. Soon she’d be waddling around.
He scraped two fingers across his chin as he studied her. “You look worried.”
She couldn’t do this here—she felt as emotionally stable as a compass gone berserk. “Maybe the Fintech dinner isn’t such a good idea,” she suggested.
“It was part of our arrangement, Miss Hollis.”
She swallowed and snatched up his files, deciding to postpone this for…tonight. Tomorrow. Never. “The projection room is ready.”
“You have your notes?”
“Of course. And yours.”
He stormed down the long hallway with her, and as people smiled at her in a “Yay, you” kind of way, her unease grew tenfold.
During the meeting, Virginia tried to concentrate on the images flicking on the projection screen. Sales charts with numbers. But Marcos sat unbearably close.
“Is it the dinner?”
She stiffened. “What?”
“Why you’re worried. Is it?”
“I… No.”
“The outfit? You’re afraid you won’t find one you like?”
She shook her head. “No.”
He leaned forward. He tapped her pad. “Reading your notes here. ‘Colorful charts.’ Very observant, Miss Hollis. Now why are you worried? Tell me.”
She attempted to take more notes but her mind was elsewhere.
“Now, you see the hedge fund study we just passed?” he said when she, apparently, was not going to talk. “We lost a little, but the fund was heavily invested in metals, as well, and the gold price has been rising, so we closed with a positive number nonetheless.”
“Yes, I understand. You lose some and win some. Like…gambling.”
He chuckled. “Indeed. It’s all a game of risk, Miss Hollis. You weigh the benefits against the risk. And decide how to move forward. You may lose, but at least you played the game. Or you may win…and the prize is exquisite.”
She did the exercise in her mind. Risk—her job, her self-respect, her body to a pregnancy, her heart…no, it was too much to bear to even think it. Benefit—save her father, who didn’t deserve saving, and share a wonderful week with the most wonderful, wonderful man.
She would have liked to think that if she remained cool and aloof, she would not be risking anything. If she behaved like her usual self, there was no reason the office would speculate. If she ignored his scent, his lips and his eyes, and the fact that she’d fallen in love with him, then she could settle for the benefits. Eventually.
Except already, there was a child.
Their child.
And she wouldn’t be able to hide his growing presence much longer.
Eleven
“That’s supposed to be a dress?”
She sensed Marcos at the doorway, actually heard a whoosh of air as though the sight of her had stunned him, and she continued tugging the fabric down her hips, her legs, carefully avoiding his gaze as she stepped into it.
“Hello? Fintech dinner? You said buy something to dazzle them. Splurge. Buy the dress of your dreams.” Before I blow up like a balloon and have your bastard baby.
“The key word was something,” Marcos growled, “That is nothing.”
In the middle of his spacious, carpeted closet, standing before a mirror in a satiny green dress that was making her smile and Marcos frown, Virginia flicked her hair and scoffed at his words.
His glare deepened. “I’m not taking you looking like this.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m serious.”
“This is all I have, I spent a fortune on it. You told me—”
“I don’t care what I said. I am saying right now, I’m not taking you…into a party with half the city…in that…that scrap.”
“Don’t be absurd, it’s perfect.”
A muscle ticked in the back of his jaw. He grabbed her arm and pulled her close. “Do you have any idea what a man thinks of…at the sight of you in that dress?”
“I thought it was elegant, but seductive, if I’d thought it was—”
He grabbed her by the waist and pressed her to him, and the shock of feeling every lean, hard inch of him against her made her gasp. “He thinks of peeling it off with his teeth. He imagines your breasts without the satin over them, and he imagines you, wrapped all around him, with your hair all across his bed.”
Her bones melted inside of her.
Marcos, in a tuxedo, was easily the sexiest thing she’d ever seen. She wanted to beg him to peel the dress off her fevered body with his teeth and to wrap her limbs around him with his weight crushing her on the bed.
She tipped her face back, r
emembering an entire month of making love to Marcos.
In the morning. At midnight. Evenings when he got home. Coupled with those memories, she had others of him with the morning paper spread across the table, coffee cup in hand. Him shaving. Him taking a shower. With her.
She could not remember a thought that didn’t make her tummy constrict.
Feeling her thighs go mushy, she stroked her fingers up his cleanly shaven jaw. “You’re so handsome,” she whispered.
His eyes roved her face, cataloging her flushed cheeks, the telling glaze in her heavy-lidded eyes. “I want you.” His hands tightened, and she became excruciatingly aware of his erection biting into her pelvis. His eyes were so hot they were like flames. “I want you every minute of every godforsaken day and it’s making me grumpy.”
When she gasped, he let her go. A muscle flexed in the back of his jaw as he clenched hard. He shook his head. “Damn.”
It took an effort to stand on her own two feet while quietly nursing the sting of his rejection, but she thrust her chin up with a little dignity. “This is all I have to wear.”
God, she had turned into a wanton. She only wanted to touch and touch and touch him. To be kissed until her breath left her.
Flushing, she pulled open the carved-wood closet doors and began to rummage through the shoe rack.
Marcos paced the area and raked a hand through his hair. “The pearls have to go.”
She straightened, a hand coming to stroke a smooth pebble at her throat. Her father had stripped out every material memory of her childhood, of her mother, the life they’d once had. He’d pawned her mother’s engagement ring. The pearl earrings to match the necklace she always wore. He’d sold off the nice clothes, even the locket they’d given Virginia as a little girl.
“Are they too old-fashioned?”
“They’re not you.”
He pulled out a box from a drawer, and she blinked. The box was sky-blue in color, with a silken white bow on top. As his long, tanned fingers tugged the edges of the bow and the shimmering ribbon unfurled in his hand, the unmistakable words Tiffany & Co. appeared.
Within seconds, he’d opened a velvet box and held up the largest, most dazzling diamond necklace Virginia had ever seen. Its sparkle was blinding. Its sheer magnificence just made her breath, her brain, her everything scatter.
The piece was worthy of old Hollywood, when the women would wear their finest evening dresses and most impressive jewels for the night. A large, oval-shaped green pendant hung from rows and rows of large, brilliant diamonds that fell like curtains and lace in the most exquisite workmanship Virginia had ever set eyes on.
“I… It’s lovely.”
“It’s yours.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
But he stepped behind her and began to fasten it around her neck. His lips grazed the back of her ear as his fingers worked on the clasp. When he was done, he turned her around to face him. “You’re mine to spoil. It’s yours. Tomorrow. Next week, next month, next year. It’s yours.”
This was him, announcing, in a way, that he was sleeping with her. No one who saw her would have any doubt. Why would he do this tonight? Why would she allow it?
She experienced a horrible urge to touch him, an even more intense one to ask him to hold her, but that would only bring the tears gathering in the back of her eyes to the forefront. She didn’t understand these tears, or the desperate sensation of having lost before she’d even fought for him.
Her eyes dropped to his chest as she felt a blush creep up her cheeks. His cross lay over his chest, glinting bright gold against the bronzed skin. His breath stirred the hair at the top of her head. The warmth of his body enveloped her.
His hands framed her jaw, lifting her face to his. “I bought you earrings and a bracelet, too.”
As he seized her wrist with his long, tanned fingers, she watched the thick cuff bracelet close around her. Oh, God, no wonder mistresses were always so sexy and smiling, when all their men treated them just like this!
“I can’t,” she still said. Because it felt so wrong. So intimate. So personal. It made her mind race with thoughts she did not—should not—think of. She was lying to him, or at least, withholding something important.
And it felt so odd, the weight of the diamonds and the forest-green emerald on her. It felt like a chain around her neck—Marcos’s chain on her. And her baby. And her future.
You’re mine to spoil…
“I insist, Virginia,” he sternly said, and drew her at arm’s length to take in the visual.
Self-conscious, Virginia dropped her gaze and tugged at a loose curl on her shoulder. The dress hugged her body like a lover’s embrace, the jewels refracted thousands of little lights and for the first time in her life Virginia felt like a fraud. A woman desperate to be anyone, anyone, that the man she loved could love.
“I don’t know what to say.”
His chuckle was full of arrogance, but it made her melt all the same. “Then get over here.”
When he drew her close and kissed her with a passion that buckled her knees and had her clinging to his shoulders, she didn’t say anything at all. But her mind screamed, “We’re having a baby!”
“Marcos, I’d like to talk to you, tonight.”
He fixed his powerful eyes on her, his face unreadable. He seemed to have forgotten about the dress, and she wondered if he’d been jealous. Marcos wasn’t surrounded by the aura of relaxation of a man who’d spent an entire night feasting on his lover, but with the tension of one who wanted more. The air felt dense between them. “I have other plans for tonight,” he admitted.
She could not even smile at that. “Still, I’d like for us to talk.”
He cradled her face, forced her to meet his gaze. “What is it?”
The concern in his eyes, the gentleness in his voice, only made her crave his love with more intensity. She did not want to crave it with such intensity, did not want to feel the emptiness growing inside her, realizing she lacked his love at the same time as their baby grew bigger.
Their agreement was over once she accompanied him to the Fintech dinner. And maybe they would be over, too.
She drew in a tremulous breath. “After the party.”
“All right,” he said, smiling. “In fact, there’s something I’d like to speak to you about, too.”
Inside the lavishly decorated lobby of the glass-and-steel skyscraper smack in the center in Michigan Avenue, Marcos guided Virginia through the throng of people, nodding to a few. “That’s Gage Keller, he’s a developer. His company, Syntax, owns half of Las Vegas now. The young woman with him is his wife.”
“Second, I presume?”
He grinned. “More like sixth.”
He brought her around to where a group of men and women stood by a spectacular ten-foot-tall wine fountain. “The woman drowning in jewels over there is Irene Hillsborough; she owns the most extensive collection of Impressionist art in the States. Old money, very polite.”
“Very snotty?” Virginia added when the woman lifted her head to stare at her then promptly glanced away.
An appreciative gleam lit up his eyes as he smiled down at her and patted her hand. “How perceptive.”
“Allende.” A bearded middle-aged man Marcos had presented her to just moments ago—Samuel…something—came back to slap his back. “Haven’t seen much of Santos lately. What is that troublemaker up to?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Marcos said with a rather bored intonation, then uncharacteristically offered, “You can ask him later if he shows.” He steered Virginia away, and an immediate image of Santos—surely gorgeous and bad, so bad—made her ask, “Santos is coming?”
“If only to be a pain in the ass, yes.” He said it so decidedly, so automatically, her eyes widened in surprise.
He then urged her around, and a woman with silvering hair and an ecstatic look on her face was fast winding her way toward them.
“That would be Phyllis Dyer,” he c
ontinued, “the director of donations and—”
“Marcos,” the woman said, lightly laying her hand on his shoulder as she kissed one cheek, then the other. Her voice quivered with excitement. “Marcos, I can’t thank you enough for your generosity. I heard from the Watkinson Center for Children today and they were all wondering why the early Christmas. It was so kind of you, as usual.”
Marcos gave her a curt nod. He then brought Virginia forward. “May I present Virginia.”
The woman’s soft gray eyes went huge. “Oh, well, how lovely to meet you. I believe this is the first time I have had the pleasure of meeting one of Marcos’s girls.” To her, she leaned forward to whisper, “This one’s a keeper, darling, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I’m not his… I’m actually his—”
After a bit more small talk, Phyllis left with an encouraging pat on Virginia’s shoulder, and Virginia ventured a glance at him. “Why didn’t you tell her I was your assistant?”
Tucking her hand into the crook of his arm, he guided her toward the sweeping arched doors that led out into the terrace. He didn’t answer her.
Stepping past an elegant trellis, he led her across the terrace, illuminated with flickering gas lanterns that lined the perimeter.
When he loosened his hold on her, Virginia stepped forward and leaned on a cement banister and gazed out at the fountain. A breeze stirred the miniature trees in the nearby planters, the chilly air making her flesh pebble with goose bumps.
Unconsciously, she rubbed her arms up and down, listening to the soft piano music audible through the speakers. Somehow, the notes couldn’t completely mute the faint rustle of water.
She drew in a steadying breath. “Aren’t you up for a speech soon?”
Through the corner of her eye, she followed his movements as he set his wineglass on the flat surface of a stone bench. “Yes.”
She gasped at the feel of his hand, warm and strong, curling around hers, tugging her forward. In a haze, she found herself slowly but surely gravitating toward him, captivated by the play of moonlight on his features and the gentle, insistent pull of his hand.