The Secretary's Bossman Bargain

His knuckles caressed her nipples, and her body flared to life at the touch. “But only one who’s been my lover.”

The words lingered in the air for a heated moment. She was ready to give up. Just wanted to kiss. Could almost hear the seconds ticking as their time together ran out.

“No contest?” he queried then, sensing his victory.

She yielded, shaking her head, wrapping her arms around him. “None.”

By the time their lips touched, she was holding her breath, parting her lips for his smiling mouth to take. He seized them softly and began to entice and torment her with nips and nibbles and gentle little suckles she felt down to the soles of her feet.

When he lowered her to the bed, his mouth became more demanding, spreading fire through her veins. And as his tongue forayed hard and hot inside her, one hand traveled up her ribcage to knead one waiting, throbbing breast with long, skillful fingers. “Chiquita.”

He scraped his whiskers across her chin, and she sighed.

She was his lover for a week.

She was nothing more and she would never be more.

Braced up on one arm, he used his free hand to unbuckle her slacks. He pulled the zipper low and pulled them off her. His thumb touched the elastic of her panties and made slow, sinuous circles before he eased it down.

Lover for a week. That’s all.

Discarding her panties, he urged her down on the bed and rained haphazard, unexpected kisses across her torso. On her shoulder, her tummy, then feasted on the tip of one breast. Virginia dropped her hand and absently caressed the back of his satiny black head as it moved, imagining what it would be like to suckle a baby. Their baby.

She’d always wanted a family.

Virginia, lover for a week!

As he kissed a

path down her belly, it struck her with a sweet wrenching pain that she had never sensed her dream of a family so far out of reach. At first the desire had been tucked aside to help her father resurface from his grief. Now it had come to the forefront of her mind and it mocked her.

Because she had become lover to this man.

This enthralling black-haired Spaniard.

And every man in her future would always be compared in her mind to Marcos Allende. Every bed she slept in would not be this one. And she dreaded, doubted there would be a man in this world to kiss her the way he did. Touch her like this, just like this.

Realizing his mouth was approaching somewhere dangerous, she squirmed under him. “If you knew what I was thinking,” she spoke up at the ceiling, “you’d leave the room.”

He lifted his head and met her gaze, his voice frighteningly solemn. “Don’t give me your heart, Virginia.”

Oh, God. She squeezed her eyes shut. Don’t fall in love with him, don’t fall in love with him, don’t fall in love with him. She scoffed, yanked her arm free as she sat up. “What? You think you’re all that and then some? That I cannot resist you? I’ll have you know…my heart…was not part of our bargain. You’re the boss and I’m the…employee and this is…an arrangement.”

One callused palm ran up and down the side of her leg. “And yet it’s easy to forget who we are here, isn’t it? Easy to get confused.”

She frowned over the concern in his voice and grabbed his head, defiantly pulling his lips to hers.

Lovers. That was all.

This is as real as real gets, Virginia Hollis. Can you make him see it?

They came to understand each other. Too well, maybe. They talked, but not of the future. They talked, but not of themselves.

They pretended, as they’d agreed to do.

“Did you enjoy yourself this week?”

Riding to the airport in the back of the Mercedes, Virginia sat curled up against Marcos’s side and laid her cheek on his shoulder. It was strange—how instinctively she sought this place, and how instinctively Marcos wrapped his arm around her shoulder to offer it to her.