The Secretary's Bossman Bargain

“You’re eager to get back and have your way with me,” she quipped.

He threw his head back and gave out a bark of laughter, his expression so beautiful her heart soared in her chest. “So we understand each other, then.”

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.

She was the same woman he’d wanted for so long, and yet she had become someone else. A sexy woman who was comfortable in his presence, smiling, laughing, open to speaking her mind.

Eyes sparkling as the helicopter touched the ground, Virginia pulled his headphones down to his neck. “That’s Allende?” she yelled through the rotor noise.

He glanced out the window, squeezing her fingers with his. Impossible, but her excitement was rubbing off on him. “That’s it, yes.”

Once they climbed out of the helicopter, Marcos surveyed the vast industrial building that sat on two hundred acres of land. It was smaller than he remembered it—but then he’d been so much younger.

The sun blazed atop their heads. Virginia’s raven mane gleamed. And in that moment Marcos didn’t see how aged the building appeared, or notice the grease on all the trucks and carriers that were parked in endless rows across the parking lot. He saw his father and himself, discussing the delivery schedule. A strange heaviness settled in his chest, weighing him down.

“Are we going in?”

Pulled from his thoughts, he looked at his assistant. How she managed to stand there—sexy and innocent—while he felt so unsettled was beyond him.

Bracing himself for whatever greeted him inside, he led her toward the double glass doors beneath a metal sign that read Transportes Allende.

Within minutes the two guards unlocked the door and ushered them in. Marcos and Virginia were free to roam the old wide halls. An attractive blush tinted her cheeks as she eagerly drank in her surroundings.

There was nothing to say about the structure, except that it was bare bones, obsolete and old. Horrible.

New installations were a must. A more recent fleet of carriers to strengthen their position as a link to the U.S. market. New—

“This is terribly spacious,” she said, leaning a hand on a red brick wall that served as a room division.

Marcos reined himself back. What in the hell had he been thinking?

He didn’t want to restore the company to its former glory; he wanted it gone.

He frowned darkly while Virginia swayed her hips and went peeking from room to room. All were vacated for the morning under Marcos’s instructions. An encounter with Marissa was the last thing he’d wanted today—and thankfully she was smart enough to have obliged.

Virginia tucked her hair behind her ear, her forehead creasing as she peered up at the rafters on the ceiling.

Rather than notice the paint was peeling off the walls and making a list of fixing that—Miss Hollis was probably already cataloguing that for him, in any case—Marcos focused on her reactions.

Something warm and fuzzy stirred in him. Virginia would be a pitiful poker player. Her expressions were too untrained for intrigue—and her father’s past had given her a loathing for the game.

“My first office,” he said then, without tone.

She spun around in the doorway as he spoke, wide-eyed. “This one? With the view of the front gate?”

He followed her into the small space and tried to see it through her eyes, old and dirty and cluttered, but then it just appeared like what it was: a promising place in need of some attention.

Marcos could’ve kicked himself for mentally volunteering to give it some TLC. No. Hell, no.

He wouldn’t.

All he wanted was to eliminate it, like wiping out his past in one fell swoop. Swoosh. Gone. Presto!

But judging by the interest that swam in Virginia’s eyes, she approved of the place, too. “It fits you somehow,” she said. “Rough around the edges.”

They shared a smile.

The fuzzy feeling inside him grew to incredible proportions.