Reclining in his seat with a grimace, he opened his cuff buttons and rolled up his sleeves.
He was actually considering, perhaps he was even past considering and had already made up his mind, giving them both what they’d wanted for months.
He was a man, flesh and blood like all the others. There was only so much he could stand. And Virginia…no matter how energetically she tried to conceal her reactions to him, she responded. Viscerally, primitively—a woman underneath the tidy assistant after all. A sweet, lovely woman who knew instinctively when a man wanted her. No, not wanted—Marcos burned for her.
And now he’d asked—practically demanded—she spend a week with him. Pretending to be his lover. At a time when all his energies, all his attention, needed to be on the one prize he’d sought to gain for so long.
Allende.
He hadn’t been certain whether to ask her as escort. She was too much a temptation to play lovers with, and in order to successfully achieve his goals, focus was key.
But tonight the lovely Virginia—alone and financially abandoned by her family, something Marcos could identify with—had turned to him for help.
Tonight, as he’d gazed into her bright, fierce eyes, he couldn’t deny himself any longer.
He wanted her.
He’d offered her a position for a week, true, but that was merely a guise for what he really wanted to do.
Her powerful effect would linger with him long after he left his office at night. He thought of her continually, every hour. He relived their encounters in his mind sometimes, enjoyed hearing her laugh at Lindsay’s antics when his office doors were parted. He could not push her image away at night and loathed to see her in trouble when she seemed to seek so little of it for herself.
He’d made a mental list long ago with plenty of valid reasons to leave her alone.
She was an innocent, he was not. She was vulnerable, he could hurt her. She was his employee, he was her boss. There were dozens of reasons to stay the hell away from Virginia.
The ways she’d looked at him tonight pulverized them all.
“Here. I have just the thing to cheer you up.” Jack stepped outside and returned rummaging through his leather briefcase. He yanked out a manila folder and held it out. “There you go, big man. Your wish is my command.”
Marcos plucked the file from his hand and immediately honed in on the name printed across the tab. Marissa Galvez.
He smiled darkly. “Ah, my rainmaker. Everything here, I assume?”
“Everything on Marissa and her sleazy little deals. She’s quite a busy little bee. You’ll find it to be riveting reading. Took me a while, as you can see—but I did give you my word to have it ready by tonight.”
Marcos skimmed through the pages, not surprised that the file was as thick as the woman was scheming.
Marissa Galvez. A shaft of anger sliced through him. The lady had hopes of a reconciliation before discussing numbers?
Of course she did. She read Forbes. Was smart enough to realize the son was worth more than the father she’d left him for, not thousands or millions, but billions. She knew the company, which should have rightfully been his, was prime for takeover and it wouldn’t take much but a few savvy connections to learn it had been Marcos who’d been buying the outstanding stock.
Unfortunately, insulting Marissa’s renewed interest in him wouldn’t do to accomplish his goals. But a beautiful, smiling lover would slowly and surely take care of her dreams of reconciliation—and let them get down to the real business at hand.
Allende. My company.
“Mind telling me how you’re going to convince the delectable woman to sell? Without succumbing to her request for some personal attention before discussing numbers?” Jack queried.
Marcos lunged to his feet, waving the evidence in the Texan’s face. “With this. It’s my game now, my rules.” He met his friend’s sharp, blue-eyed stare and his lips flattened to a grim, strained line. “Allende is in a vulnerable position. Sooner or later, she’ll have to sell.”
“Not to you, she doesn’t.”
Marcos shrugged disinterestedly. “She knows she’s game for a hostile takeover. And she knows I’m the shark after her. She wouldn’t have called if she didn’t want to get on my good side.”
And I’ve got my pretty, green-eyed “lover.”
“Will she?”
And her pretty little mouth. “What?”
“Get on your good side?”
“When you start wearing a tutu, Jack. Of course not.”
Distaste filled him as he recalled her phone call. Dangling Allende up to him like bait, proposing they discuss it in her bed. She’d played with him as a naive, noble, seventeen-year-old boy, but it would be an ice age in hell before she played with the man.