Eleven
“That’s supposed to be a dress?”
She sensed Marcos at the doorway, actually heard a whoosh of air as though the sight of her had stunned him, and she continued tugging the fabric down her hips, her legs, carefully avoiding his gaze as she stepped into it.
“Hello? Fintech dinner? You said buy something to dazzle them. Splurge. Buy the dress of your dreams.” Before I blow up like a balloon and have your bastard baby.
“The key word was something,” Marcos growled, “That is nothing.”
In the middle of his spacious, carpeted closet, standing before a mirror in a satiny green dress that was making her smile and Marcos frown, Virginia flicked her hair and scoffed at his words.
His glare deepened. “I’m not taking you looking like this.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m serious.”
“This is all I have, I spent a fortune on it. You told me—”
“I don’t care what I said. I am saying right now, I’m not taking you…into a party with half the city…in that…that scrap.”
“Don’t be absurd, it’s perfect.”
A muscle ticked in the back of his jaw. He grabbed her arm and pulled her close. “Do you have any idea what a man thinks of…at the sight of you in that dress?”
“I thought it was elegant, but seductive, if I’d thought it was—”
He grabbed her by the waist and pressed her to him, and the shock of feeling every lean, hard inch of him against her made her gasp. “He thinks of peeling it off with his teeth. He imagines your breasts without the satin over them, and he imagines you, wrapped all around him, with your hair all across his bed.”
Her bones melted inside of her.
Marcos, in a tuxedo, was easily the sexiest thing she’d ever seen. She wanted to beg him to peel the dress off her fevered body with his teeth and to wrap her limbs around him with his weight crushing her on the bed.
She tipped her face back, r
emembering an entire month of making love to Marcos.
In the morning. At midnight. Evenings when he got home. Coupled with those memories, she had others of him with the morning paper spread across the table, coffee cup in hand. Him shaving. Him taking a shower. With her.
She could not remember a thought that didn’t make her tummy constrict.
Feeling her thighs go mushy, she stroked her fingers up his cleanly shaven jaw. “You’re so handsome,” she whispered.
His eyes roved her face, cataloging her flushed cheeks, the telling glaze in her heavy-lidded eyes. “I want you.” His hands tightened, and she became excruciatingly aware of his erection biting into her pelvis. His eyes were so hot they were like flames. “I want you every minute of every godforsaken day and it’s making me grumpy.”
When she gasped, he let her go. A muscle flexed in the back of his jaw as he clenched hard. He shook his head. “Damn.”
It took an effort to stand on her own two feet while quietly nursing the sting of his rejection, but she thrust her chin up with a little dignity. “This is all I have to wear.”
God, she had turned into a wanton. She only wanted to touch and touch and touch him. To be kissed until her breath left her.
Flushing, she pulled open the carved-wood closet doors and began to rummage through the shoe rack.
Marcos paced the area and raked a hand through his hair. “The pearls have to go.”
She straightened, a hand coming to stroke a smooth pebble at her throat. Her father had stripped out every material memory of her childhood, of her mother, the life they’d once had. He’d pawned her mother’s engagement ring. The pearl earrings to match the necklace she always wore. He’d sold off the nice clothes, even the locket they’d given Virginia as a little girl.
“Are they too old-fashioned?”