The Secretary's Bossman Bargain

He wanted to pay her credit card bills and he wanted her with a baby in her arms. His baby. His woman. His wife.

Mia. Mia. Mia.

He’d been alone his entire lifetime, pursuing meaningless affairs, convincing himself that was enough. It had all changed. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, but surely, ever since the day he’d hired Virginia Hollis.

Now he had broken her heart before she’d truly admitted to having lost it to him. He should’ve treasured it. Tucked it into his own and never let it go.

Sighing, he pushed his chair around and stared across his office. A dozen plasma TV screens hung on the wall to the right. They usually enlivened the place with noise and light, but were currently off. They lent a gloom to the area that Marcos found quite the match to his mood.

In fact, a morgue was quite the match to his mood.

He stalked outside, and made his way to a sleek wooden desk. Her items were still on it. He scanned the surface—polished to a gleam, all orderly, all her, and he groaned and let his weight drop into her chair.

Her rejection felt excruciatingly painful. Not even the day Marissa Galvez had stared up at him from his father’s bed had he felt such helplessness.

What in the devil did she want from him?

As he stroked a hand along the wood, he knew. Deep in the closed, festering pit of his emotions, he knew what she wanted. Damn her, she’d been playing him for it! Seducing him, delighting and enchanting him, making him love and need and cherish her.

And now he couldn’t even remember why he had thought she didn’t deserve everything she wanted. Because she was a woman, like Marissa? Why had he thought his bed would be enough for everything she would lack? Had he grown so heartless that he would rob her of a family?

He began opening and closing the desk drawers, looking for some sign of her. Something—anything—she might have left behind.

For the first time in his life, someone else’s needs seemed more important than his, and he loathed the overwhelming sense of loss sweeping through him like an avalanche.

If he had an ounce of decency in him, if he was not the unfeeling monster she thought him to be at this moment, Marcos would let her go.

And just when he was certain it was the right thing to do, just when he was determined to forget about her and all the days they’d pretended and all the ways they’d been both wrong and right for each other, he spotted the boxes crowded into the back of her bottom drawer.

And the three test strips. All of them had the same result.

“Nurse, is my father out in the hall?”

Virginia had been transferred to a small private room in the west hospital wing, where she’d slept for the night hooked up to an IV drip, and this morning the one person she longed to see hadn’t yet made an appearance. She wanted to go home already—she felt tired, cranky, lonely—and still the nurse kept delaying her departure.

The balmy-voiced nurse fidgeted around the bare room, organizing the trays. “I believe he’s outside. I’m sure he’ll come in shortly.”

Virginia sighed, the sensation of having been run over by an elephant especially painful in her abdomen and breast area. She cupped her stomach. Amazing, that the baby already had its heartbeat. Amazing that just as she left its father, the baby had tried to leave her body, too.

“Virginia?”

She went completely immobile when she heard that.

There, wearing a severe black turtleneck and slacks, stood Marcos Allende in the doorway. Her heart dropped to her toes. She felt the urge to snatch the sleek red carnation her father had set on the side table and hide her pale, teary face behind it, but she was too mesmerized to pull her eyes away. Large, hard, beautiful—Marcos’s presence seemed to empower the entire room, and she suspected—no, knew—everyone in this hospital must be feeling his presence.

He stood with his feet braced apart, his arms at his sides, his fingers curled into his palms. And something hummed. Inside her. In her blood, coursing through her veins.

“An acquaintance, miss?”

The nurse’s tone gave a hint of her preoccupation. Did she feel the charge in the air? Was the world twirling faster? The floor falling?

Virginia nodded, still shocked and overwhelmed by this visit, but as she stared at the sleek-faced, long-nosed young woman, she hated her mind’s eye for gifting her with another, more riveting image of Marcos’s dark, cacao gaze. His silken mass of sable hair. Long, tanned fingers. Accent. Oh, God, the accent, that thick baritone, softly saying Miss Hollis…

“I’ll leave you two for a moment, then.”

Oddly close to being devastated, Virginia watched the nurse’s careful departure, and then she could find no excuse to stare at the plain white walls, no spot to stare at but Marcos.

If she had just been torpedoed, the impact would have been less than what she felt when he leveled his hot coal eyes on her. He stood as still as a statue.