The Secretary's Bossman Bargain (6 page)

Her lashes fluttered upward, revealing her eyes. Pale green, ethereal. Distrustful. “What are you doing?”

His gut tightened. What does it look like I’m doing? He wanted to yank her onto his lap, feel his way up her little skirt, and kiss her mouth until her lips turned bright red. Her face blurred with his vision. With his need. He had to force himself to leave her hair alone.

She exhaled a string of broken air, then relaxed somewhat, shifting sideways on the leather seat. Facing him. Her smile faded. “Who are we fooling, Marcos, with this charade?”

“Marissa Galvez, Allende Transport’s owner.”

And maybe you. Definitely me.

He retrieved her hand from where it had gone to wring the hem of her dress and secured her wrist in his grip as he raised it. He turned it over and set a soft, lingering kiss at the center of her palm. A tiny, breathless gasp came from her.

“We must practice,” he murmured, gazing into those deep, bottomless eyes.

“Oh.” She shivered. Not moving away, and not moving closer, she allowed him to drag his lips along her open palm. She watched him through her lashes, her lips shuddering on each uneven breath.

“And why must we fool her?” Her question was a silky wisp.

“Because she wants me,” he huskily answered. She tasted divine. Her skin was smooth and satiny under his lips, and he predicted every inch of her body would feel just like it. Perfect. “It wouldn’t do to insult her.” Against his mouth and lips, he felt the vibrant tremor that danced up her arm. Emboldened by her response, thirsting for more, he opened his mouth and gently grazed his teeth at the heel of her palm. “I happen to want someone else.”

“I’m sure—” she began, swallowing audibly. “I’m sure you can have anyone you want.”

“If I want her bad enough and put myself to task, yes.” His lips closed and opened against her hand. Before he could restrain himself, he gave a lick at her palm. Pleasure pummeled through him. “And I’ve grown to want her…bad,” he strained out, swallowing back a growl.

“Oh, that was…” Her hand wiggled as she tried prying it free. “I don’t think…”

“Shh.”

He held her wrist in a gentle grip and raised his head. He watched her expression soften, melt, as he whisked the pad of his thumb across her dampened palm, getting it wet. He lifted the glistening pad of his thumb to her lips, his timbre coated with arousal. “Pretend you like it when I do this.”

A sound welled in the back of her throat as he stroked. She nodded wildly, her lips gleaming at each pass of his thumb. “Yes, yes, I’m pretending,” she breathed.

He’d never seen a more erotic sight, felt a more erotic sensation, than playing with Virginia Hollis’s quivering pink lips in the back of a moving car. “Umm. Me, too. I will pretend…you’re her.”

“Aha.”

“And I very much want her.” God, he enjoyed her unease, enjoyed seeing her pupils dilate, her breath shallow out.

“O-okay.”

His thumb continued glancing, whisking, rubbing, right where his mouth wanted to be. He bent to whisper, to conspire together, just him and her. “Let’s pretend…we’re lovers, Virginia.” His voice broke with the force of his desire, came out rough with wanting. “Pretend every night we touch each other…and kiss…and our bodies rock together. And when we find release—”

“Stop!” She pushed herself back with surprising force, sucking great gulps of air. “God, stop. Enough. Enough pretending tonight.”

He tugged her closer. They were breathing hard and loud.

“You should kiss me,” he said gruffly.

“Kiss you.” She absently fingered his cross where it peeked through the top opening of his shirt. He went utterly still—the gesture too sweet, too unexpected, too painful.

Her fingers reached his throat, then traced the links of the thick chain.

Too aware of this now, he dropped her hair and squeezed her elbow meaningfully. “Virginia. Your mouth. On mine.”

They’d had foreplay for a year—with every glance, every flick of her hair, every smile.

She drew back and laughed, a choked, strained sound. “Now?” She couldn’t seem to believe her eyes and ears, seemed stumped for words to deny him.

The car halted at a stoplight. A few cars drove up beside them. Marcos went still, glancing at her quietly until their car continued.

He had never wanted to feel a body as much as he wanted to feel hers.

And her mouth—he’d give anything to taste that mouth, was being for the first time in his life reckless, selfish, for that very mouth. A mouth that promised all the innocence he’d never had, trust, beauty, affection he’d never had.

Without any further thought, he pulled her close. “One kiss. Right now.”

“But you’re my boss,” she breathed, clutching his shirt collar with a death grip. But her bright, luminous green eyes gazed up at him. And those eyes said yes.

Her lips were plush, parted, eager for his. He brought his thumb back to scrape them. “Just pretend I’m not him.”

“But you are him—”

“I don’t want to be him, I want to be…just Marcos.” Their relationship had been wrapped in rules, limited by their roles. What if Virginia had been just a woman? And he just a man? She would have been his, might still be his. “Only Marcos.”

The passing city lights caused slanted shadows to shift across her face—she looked splendid, wary, wanting.

“A kiss is harmless, Virginia.” His vision blurred with desire as he stretched his arm out on the seat behind her and dipped his head. Their breaths mingled, their mouths opened. “People kiss their pets. They kiss their enemies on the cheeks. They kiss a letter. They even blow kisses into the air. You can kiss me.”

“This is a little unexpected.”

“God, I’d hate to be predictable.” His arm slid from the back of the seat and went around her shoulders, loosely holding her to him. His fingers played with the soft, bouncy curls at her nape. His accent got unbearably thick—like his blood, a terse string of lust flooding his veins. It took concentration to give her a smile meant to disarm. “Stop thinking about it and kiss me.”

Her curls bounced at the shake of her head. “We don’t have to kiss to pretend to be…together. I can pretend convincingly without kissing.”

No kissing? Christ, no. He had a fascination with her mouth, the delicate bow at her upper lip, the ripe flesh of the bottom one. He’d been kissing that mouth for days, weeks, months, in his mind. “You’re wrong, amor.” He bussed her temple with his lips, aware of his muscles flexing heatedly under his clothes, his skin feverish with pent-up desire as she continued clinging to his shirt. “We must kiss. And we must kiss convincingly.”

“I—You didn’t mention this before.”

He caressed her cheekbone with the back of one finger and noted the frantic pulse fluttering at the base of her throat. Christ, once again she was fixated with his mouth, and he wanted to give it to her. Now. Right now. Slam it over hers, push into her, taste all of her. “Kiss me, Virginia. Kiss me senseless.” He barely held himself in check with his ruthless self-discipline.

She hesitated. Then, in a burdened breath, “Only a kiss.”

His heart rammed into his ribs at the realization that she had agreed. To kiss him. Ay, Dios.

He urged himself to ease back on the seat and stifled the impulse to take matters into his own hands. He was a second away from losing his mind. A second away from tearing off her clothes, the necklace at her throat, his shirt, everything that separated them. Still, he wanted to be sure, sure she wanted this. Him. Them.

He groaned and said, “Kiss me until we can’t breathe.”

“I… The driver could see us.” She sounded as excited as he, and the breathless anticipation in her voice plunged him even deeper into wild, mad desire.

“Look at me, not him.”

“You’re all I’m looking at, Marcos.”

He didn’t know who breathed harder, who was seducing whom here. She laid her hands over his abdomen. He hissed. The muscles under her palms clenched. His erection strained painfully.

Her hands slid up his chest, a barely there touch. Fever. She cradled his jaw with two cool, dry palms…and waited. Hesitant, inexperienced. In a ragged plea, she croaked, “Close your eyes.”

He did. Not because she asked, but because her fingers lovingly stroked his temple, down his jaw. Her hands drifted lower and curled around his shoulders, rubbing along the muscles so sensually he gritted his teeth. This was murder.

She had to stop. She had to go on.

“Do it. Do it now.” The helpless urgency in his voice startled him as much as the other emotions coursing through him. Arousal ripped through him like a living beast.

Then he felt the warm mist of her breath on his face, sensed the nearness of her parting lips, heard through the roaring in his ears her tremulous whisper. “I’m a bit out of practice—”

He didn’t let her finish. He reached out and slipped a hand beneath the fall of hair at her nape and hauled her to him. “Virginia,” he rasped, and slammed her mouth with his.

Virginia had meant for a quick kiss. Only a taste. A taste to satisfy her curiosity. Her need. A taste because she could not, could never, deny this man. But when he pulled her down and his mouth, so strong and fierce and hungry, touched hers, there was no stopping what came over her.

They’d been panting, laughing; he’d been teasing her, had pulled her onto his lap. Pretending had been so easy, but now…now this mouth, this man, the hands gripping the back of her head, were too real. Rough. Raw. Devastating.

She moaned helplessly as he slanted his head, murmuring something indiscernible to her, and his warm, hot tongue came at hers, and his hard need grew larger and stronger under her bottom, and the realization that he really wanted her barraged through her.

He began to take little nips, and those lush, sure lips moving against hers set off the flutters in her stomach, the fireworks in her head. “Sabes a miel.”

He spoke in an aroused rasp against her lips. She clung to his neck and tried not to moan as his warm breath slid across her skin, heating her like a fever.

“Te quiero hacer el amor,” he murmured, running his hands down the sides of her body, his fingers brushing the curves of her breasts, his chest heaving with exerted restraint. “Toda la noche, te quiero hacer el amor.”

She had no idea what he said, but the words pulsed through her in a wave of erotic pleasure. Her breasts swelled heavy, her nipples in such pain she pressed them deeper into his chest and she opened her mouth wide, moving instinctively against him, and she knew this was wrong, so wrong, would not happen again, which surely must be why she incited it. “What are you saying to me…” she murmured into him.

His breath was hot and rapid against her. “I’m saying I want to make love to you. All evening, all night.” He groaned and twisted his tongue around hers as their lips locked, the attachment intense, driven, absolute.

She sucked in a breath as his palms engulfed her straining nipples, felt his desire in every coiled muscle, in the rough way his palms kneaded, the thrusts of his tongue as his mouth turned ravenous on hers.

He groaned, appearing decidedly out of control for the first time since she’d known him. He stroked the undersides of her breasts with his thumbs and whisked his lips along the curve of her jaw, and she cocked her ear to his nibbling lips, shuddered when he murmured to her. “Your gasps tear me to pieces.”

“Marcos…”

She was hot and burning inside.

He made a grinding motion with his hips, and her thighs splayed open as he desperately rubbed his erection against her.

His tongue plunged into her ear, wet, hot, sloppy. “Stop me, Virginia.” One determined hand unerringly slipped through the V of her dress and enveloped her breast. “Virginia. Stop me, Virginia.”

He squeezed her flesh possessively, and when his palm rubbed into her nipple, her eyes flew open in shock. The feel was so delicious, so wrong, so right, she hid her heated face against his neck and almost choked on the sounds welling at the back of her throat. Sensations overpowered her body, her mind struggling to comprehend that this was really happening with Marcos Allende.

“That’s your hotel up ahead, sir.”

Swearing under his breath, Marcos gathered her closer. His ragged breaths blasted her temple. He squeezed her. “We’ll finish this upstairs.”

Virginia pushed back her rumpled hair. Upstairs? God, what were they even doing?

Chuckling at the look on her face, Marcos bussed her forehead with his lips as his gentle hand stroked down her nape, trembling slightly. “I should’ve known we’d be combustible,” he murmured.

The Mercedes pulled into a wide, palm tree–lined hotel driveway and Virginia fumbled for her purse while Marcos stepped out and strolled to her side, reaching into the car and helping her to her feet.

His glimmering, dark gaze didn’t stray from her face, not for a second. We kissed, his dark eyes said. I touched you. I know you want me.

And for an insane second, all she wanted was to forget why she was here and who she was and be swept away by this one man, this one night, in this one city.

As though discerning her thoughts, Marcos cupped half of her face in his warm palm, and his eyes held something so wild and bright it almost blinded her. “Upstairs,” he said again.

The promise plunged into her like a knife as he moved away to discuss something with the chauffeur, and Virginia stood there like someone in a hypnotized state, watching his big, tanned hands at his sides. Hands she’d felt on her.

She gritted her teeth, fighting the lingering arousal tickling through her. He was playing with her. He was pretending. He was a man who’d do anything to win—and he wanted Allende.

Marcos seemed oblivious to her frustration when he returned, slowly reaching behind her, his fingers splaying over the small of her back as he led her up the steps.

She followed him and no, she wasn’t imagining him naked, touching her, kissing her in the exact way he’d just done—no, no, no. She studied the beautiful hotel and the potted palms leading to the glass doors with the intensity of a scientist with his microscope.

The lobby and its domed ceiling made her lightheaded. It was so…so… God, the way he’d touched her. With those hands. As if that breast were his to touch and his hand belonged there. How could he pretend so well? He’d been so hard he could’ve broken cement with his…his…

“Do you like it, Virginia?” he asked, smiling, and signaled around.

She gazed at the elegant but rustic decor. “The hotel? It’s beautiful.”

His eyes twinkled, but underneath it all, he wore the starved look of a man who’d hungered for a very long time and intended to feast soon. He looked like a man who could do things to her she didn’t even imagine in fantasies, like a man who would not want to be denied.

And he would be. He had to be.

“It’s very…charming,” she continued, anything to steer her mind away from his lips, his mouth, his gaze.

They wound deeper into the marbled hotel lobby. A colorful flower arrangement boasting the most enormous sunflowers she’d ever seen sat on a massive round table near the reception area.

Virginia could still not account, could not even fathom, that she’d just kissed him. Her!—woefully inexperienced, with her last boyfriend dating back to college—kissing Marcos Allende. But he’d been cuddling her, whispering words so naughty she could hardly stand the wanton warmth they elicited. No matter how much resistance she’d tried to put up, he was the sexiest thing on the continent, playing some sort of grown-up game she had yet to put a name to, and Virginia had been close to a meltdown.

It had all been pretend, anyway. Right?

Right.

Trying to compose herself, she admired his broad back as he strolled away, the shoulders straining under his black shirt as he reached the reception desk and leaned over with confidence, acting for the world as if he were the majority stockholder of the hotel. The two women shuffling behind the granite top treated him as if they agreed.

Virginia quietly drew up to his side, her lips feeling raw and sensitive. She licked them once, twice.

A lock of ebony hair fell over Marcos’s forehead as he signed the slip and slid it over the counter. “I requested a two-bedroom suite—it would appease me to know you’re safe. Will this be a problem?” Facing her, he plunged his Montblanc pen into his shirt pocket, watching her through calm, assessing eyes.

She saw protectiveness there, concern, and though her nerves protested by twisting, she said, “Not at all.” Damn. What hell to keep pretending for a week.

“Good.”

In the elevator, as they rode up to the ninth floor—the top floor of the low, sprawling building—his body big and commanding in the constricted space, the silence whispered, we kissed.

In her mind, her heart, the choir of her reason, everything said, kiss kiss kiss.

Not good, any of it. Not the blender her emotions were in, not her tilting world, not the fact that she was already thinking, anticipating, wondering, what it would feel like to kiss again.

Freely. Wildly. Without restraint.

She would have to stall. Abstain. Ignore him. God. If she did something to compromise her job, she would never forgive herself. And nothing compromised a job like sex did. And if she compromised her heart? She stiffened, firmly putting a lid on the thought.

Mom had loved Dad with all her heart—through his flaws, through his odd humors, through his drunken nights, through all the good and bad of which there was more of the latter, her mother had loved with such steadfast, blinded devotion Virginia had secretly felt…pity.

Because her mother had wept more tears for a man than a human should be allowed to weep. Appalling, that one man could have such power over a woman, could take her heart and her future and trample them without thought or conscience.

Even on her deathbed, sweet, beautiful, dedicated Mother had clutched Virginia’s hand, and it seemed she’d been hanging on to her life only to continue trying to save her husband. “Take care of Dad, Virginia, he needs someone to look out for him. Promise me, baby? Promise me you will?”

Virginia had promised, determinedly telling herself that if she ever, ever gave away her heart, it would be to someone who would be reliable, and who loved her more than his cards, his games and himself.

No matter her physical, shockingly visceral responses to Marcos, he was still everything she should be wary of. Worldly, sophisticated, ruthless, a man enamored of a challenge, of risks and of his job. The last thing she pictured Marcos Allende being was a family man, no matter how generous he’d proven to be as a boss.

Down the hall, the bellhop emerged from the service elevator, but Marcos was already trying his key, allowing her inside. He flicked on the light switch and the suite glowed in welcome. Golden-tapestried walls, plush taupe-colored carpet, a large sitting area opening up to a room on each side. “Gracias,” he said, tipping the bellhop at the door and personally hauling both suitcases inside.

Virginia surveyed the mouthwatering array of food atop the coffee table: trays of chocolate-dipped strawberries, sliced fruit, imported cheeses.

A newspaper sat next to the silver trays and the word muerte popped out in the headline. A color picture of a tower of mutilated people stared back at her.

Marcos deadbolted the door. The sound almost made her wince. And she realized how alone they were. Just him. And her.

And their plan.

Suddenly and with all her might, Virginia wished to know what he was thinking. Did he think they’d kiss again? What if he wanted more than a kiss? What if he didn’t?

Feeling her skin pebble, she shied away from his gaze, navigated around a set of chairs and pulled the sheer drapes aside. The city flickered with lights. Outside her window the hotel pool was eerily still, the mountains were still, the moon still. She noted the slow, rough curves and the sharper turns at the peaks, lifted her hand to trace them on the glass. “Do you come here frequently?” she asked quietly—her insides were not still.

“No.” She heard the sunken fall of his footsteps on the carpet as he approached—she felt, rather than saw, him draw up behind her. “There wasn’t reason to.”

He could be uttering something else for the way he spoke so intimately. Inside, a rope of wanting stretched taut around her stomach and she thought she would faint. The proximity of his broad, unyielding hardness sent a flood of warmth across her body, and the muscles of her tummy clenched with yearning. His body wasn’t touching hers; there was just the threat of the touch, the presence that created a wanting of it.

In the darkness of her bedroom, very late at night, she’d wondered if Marcos was as ruthless when he loved as when he did business. And if his kiss…was as dark and devastating as his eyes had promised it would be.

It was. Oh, God, it was.

The air seemed to scream at her to turn to him and kiss.

The close contours of his chest against her back, the scent of him, were an assault to her senses. He laid his hand on her shoulder, and the touch was fire on his fingertips. “This is a safe neighborhood—I won’t lose sight of you, Virginia.”

But outside the danger didn’t lurk. It was in her. It was him. She locked her muscles in place, afraid of leaning, moving, afraid of the magnetic force of him, how it felt impossible not to turn, touch. “What was it like for you when you were young,” she said, softly.

His hand stroked. Fire streaked across her skin as he drew lazy figures along the back of her arm. “It wasn’t as dangerous back then. I grew up in the streets—I kept running away with my father’s workers, looking for adventure.”

Did he move? She thought he’d grown bigger, harder, nearer. She sensed his arousal, the thundering in his chest almost touching her back. Or was it her heart she heard?

He lowered his lips and briefly, only a whisper, set his mouth on her neck. A sharp shudder rushed through her. “Now even bodyguards aren’t safe to hire,” he whispered on her skin. “Wealthy people have armored cars and weapons instead.”

She closed her eyes, the sensations pouring through her. “No-man’s-land?” Just a croak. A peep from a little bird who couldn’t fly, would willingly be lured in by the feline.

He made a pained sound and stilled his movements on her. “Were you pretending just now when you kissed me?”