“I know about your father, Miss Hollis.”
Dread sunk like a bowling ball in her stomach. “You do?”
She spun around, and when he stepped into the room, Marcos achieved the impossible: he made it shrink in size.
“You do not exist in the world I do without being cautious about everyone who comes into your inner circle. I have a dossier on everyone who works in close proximity with me, and I know every detail of their lives. Yes, I know about his problem.”
“Oh.”
What else did he know?
He passed her as he crossed the room, and she stifled a tremor as if he’d been a cool hurricane wind. “Why didn’t you come to me before?” he asked, matter of fact.
“I’m here now,” she whispered.
Halting behind his desk, he shoved the leather chair aside and leaned over the surface. His shirt stretched taut over his bunched shoulders and his eyebrows pulled low. “How bad is it?”
“It… The gambling comes and goes.” Flushing at his scrutiny, she turned to busy herself with the books on the shelves, and then said, as if he’d expertly unlatched a closed door which had been near bursting with secrets, “He’s out of control. He keeps betting more than what he has and more than I could possibly earn.”
“Is that the only reason you’re here?”
His voice grew so textured, a jolt of feminine heat rippled through her. She spun around—shocked by the question. Shocked by the answering flutter in her womb.
Her breath stopped.
His gaze. It was open. Raw. Revealed a galvanizing wildness, a primitive hunger lurking—lurking there—in the depths of his eyes, like a prowling beast.
Pent-up desire rushed through her bloodstream as he continued to stare. Stare at her in a way no man, ever, should look at a woman and expect her to survive. “Is that the only reason you’re here tonight? Virginia?”
As if in a trance, she moved forward on shaky legs, closer to his desk. “Y-yes.”
“You want nothing else? Just the money?”
How to talk? How to think? Breathe? Her heart felt ready to pop from the pressure of answering. “N-nothing.”
In the back of her mind, she vaguely realized how simple and unassuming her needs sounded as she voiced them. When they were not. They were tangled. They had grown fierce with his proximity. Out of reason, out of context, out of control.
“Will you help me,” she murmured as she reached the desk, and somehow the plea sounded as intimate as if she’d asked for a kiss.
“I will.” Deep and rough, the determination in his answer flooded her with relief.
He was going to help her.
In her soaring mind, Marcos was mounted on a white charger holding up a flag that read “Virginia.”
And she…well, hers might be a banner. A neon sign. A brand on every inch of her body and possibly her heart. Marcos Allende. God, she was a fool.
“I don’t expect something for nothing,” she said. Her voice throbbed even as a tide of relief flooded her.
It was as if some unnatural force drew her to him, pulled her to get closer and closer. Did the force come from him? From her? If it weren’t for the desk—always the desk between them—where would she be?
No. The obstacle wasn’t a desk. It was everything. Everything. Nothing she could ever arrange or fix or clean.
Marcos raked one hand through his hair, then seized a runaway pen and thrust it into an empty leather holder. “I’ll give you the money. But I have a few requests of my own.”
“Anything,” she said.
His gaze was positively lethal. His hands—they made fists. “There’s something I want. Something that belongs to me. Something I must have or I’ll lose my mind with wanting it.”
A shiver ran hot and cold down her spine.
He wasn’t speaking of her—of course he wasn’t—but nonetheless, she felt something grip inside her as though he were. What would it feel like for Marcos to want her so fiercely? “I…understand.”
“Do you?”
He smiled bleakly at her, then continued around his desk.
He swept up a gemstone globe from the edge and spun it around, a lapis lazuli ocean going round and round. “Here.” His finger stopped the motion, marking a country encrusted in granite for her eyes. “What I want is here.” He tapped.
Tap tap tap.
She stepped closer, longingly lifting a fingertip to stroke the length of the country he signaled. Travel had seemed so far down the line of her priorities she hardly gave any thought to it now.
“Mexico,” she whispered.
His finger slid. It touched hers. He watched. And she watched. And neither of them moved. His finger was blunt and tan, hers slim and milky. Both over Mexico. It wasn’t even a touch, not even half a touch. And she felt the contact in every fiber of her lonely, quivering being.