Caught in the Billionaire's Embrace (6 page)

“You really did order a little of everything,” she said as she began lifting lids. “Pastries, bacon, sausage, eggs, fruit…”

He thought about saying something about how they both needed to regain their strength after last night, but for some reason, it felt crass to make a comment like that. Another strange turn of events, since Marcus had never worried about being crass before. Besides, what else was there for the two of them to talk about after the kind of night they'd had? Their response to each other had been sexual from the get-go. They'd barely exchanged a dozen words between the time they left the club and awoke this morning—save the earthy, arousing ones they'd uttered about what they wanted done and were going to do to each other. Ninety percent of their time together had been spent copulating. Nine percent had been spent flirting and making known the fact that they wanted to copulate. What were they supposed to say to each other that didn't involve sex? Other than, how do you take your coffee or what did you think of
La Bohème?
And they'd already covered both.

She plucked a sticky pastry from the pile and set it on one of the empty plates. Then, after a small pause, she added another. Then a third. Then she added some strawberries and a couple of slices of cantaloupe. Guess she, too, thought they needed to rebuild their strength after the night they'd had. But, like him, she didn't want to say it out loud.

“Sweet tooth, huh?” he asked as she licked a bit of frosting from the pad of her thumb.

“Just a little,” she agreed. Balancing both the plate and cup, she moved to the bed and set them on the nightstand beside it. Then she climbed into bed.

Well, that was certainly promising.

Marcus filled the other plate with eggs, bacon and a bagel, then retrieved his coffee and joined her, placing his breakfast on the opposite nightstand. Where she had seated herself with her legs crossed pretzel-fashion facing him, he leaned against the headboard with his legs extended before him. Noting the way her robe gaped open enough to reveal the upper swells of her breasts, it occurred to him that neither of them had a stitch of clothing to wear except for last night's evening attire, that wasn't exactly the kind of thing a person wanted to wear during the day when a person was trying to make him-or herself comfortable.

Oh, well.

He watched her nibble a strawberry and wondered how he could find such an innocent action so arousing. Then he wondered why he was even asking himself that. Della could make changing a tire arousing.

“Well, since you won't tell me why home is so fluid,” he said, “will you at least tell me where you're making it at the moment?”

“No,” she replied immediately.

He thought about pressing her on the matter, then decided to try a different tack. “Then will you tell me what brings you to Chicago?”

“No,” she responded as quickly.

He tried again. “Will you tell me where you're from originally?”

“No.”

“How long you're going to be here?”

“No.”

“Where you're going next?”

“No.”

“How old you are?”

“Certainly not.”

“Do you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain?”

He wasn't sure, but he thought she may have smiled at that. “Not particularly.”

“How about fuzzy gray kittens, volunteering for public television, long walks on the beach, cuddling by firelight and the novels of Philip Roth?”

At that, she only arrowed her eyebrows down in confusion.

“Oh, right. Sorry. That was Miss November. My bad.”

Her expression cleared, but she said nothing.

“What's your sign?” Marcus tried again.

That, finally, did make her smile. It wasn't a big smile, but it wasn't bad. It was something they could work on.

“Sagittarius,” she told him.

Now that said a lot about her, Marcus thought. Or, at least, it would. If he knew a damned thing about astrology. Still, it was something. Sagittariuses were born in June, weren't they? Or was it October? March?

All right, all right. So he knew as much about her now as he had when he started his interrogation. Which was nothing. Hell, he didn't even know if she was telling the truth about being a Sagittarius or not liking piña coladas and getting caught in the rain.

Immediately, however, he knew she was telling the truth about those things. He had no idea why, but he was confident Della wasn't a liar. She was just a woman who wouldn't reveal anything meaningful about herself and who was sneaking around on a lover. Had she been a liar, she would have had a phony answer for every question he asked, and she would have painted herself
as someone she wasn't. Instead, he was left with a blank slate of a woman who could be anyone.

But that, too, wasn't right, he thought. There were a lot of things he knew about Della. He knew she loved an esoteric art form that most people her age had never even tried to expose themselves to. He knew she cried at all the sad parts of an opera, and that she was awed by the intricacies of the music. He'd seen all those reactions on her face when he'd watched her last night instead of
La Bohème.
He knew she liked champagne. He knew she was enchanted by a snowfall. He knew she laughed easily. He knew she was comfortable in red, red, red. All of those things spoke volumes about a person.

And he knew she came from a moneyed background, even if she was currently making her way by having someone else pay for it. It hadn't taken an inspection of her jewelry or a look at the labels in her clothing—even though he had as he'd picked up their things from the floor while she slept—to know that. She was smart, confident and articulate, and had clearly been educated at excellent schools. She carried herself with sophistication and elegance, obviously having been raised by parents for whom such things were important. She'd been perfectly at ease last night in every venue he'd encountered her. If she wasn't the product of wealth and refinement, Marcus was a bloated yak.

Not that wealth and refinement necessarily manufactured a product that was all the things Della was. He need only point to himself to prove that. He'd been kicked out of every tony private school his parents had enrolled him in, until his father finally bought off the director of the last one with a massive contribution for the construction of a new multimedia center. The same contribution had bought Marcus's diploma, since
his grades hadn't come close to winning him that. Not because he hadn't been smart, but because he hadn't given a damn. As for sophistication and elegance, he had gone out of his way as a teenager to be neither and had embarrassed his family at every society function he'd attended. He'd raided liquor cabinets, ransacked cars and ruined debutantes—often in the same evening—and he'd earned an arrest record before he even turned sixteen. If it hadn't had been for Charlotte…

He pushed the memories away and instead focused on Della. If it hadn't had been for Charlotte, Marcus wouldn't be sitting here with her right now. And not only because Charlotte's absence last night had allowed him to strike up a conversation with Della, not once, but three times. But because if it hadn't had been for Charlotte, Marcus would now either be in a minimum security prison for wreaking havoc and general mischief past the age of eighteen, or he'd be lolling about on skid row, having been finally disowned by his family.

“What are you thinking about?”

Della's question brought him completely to the present. But it wasn't a question he wanted to answer. Hey, why should he, when she wouldn't answer any of his?

At his silence, she added, “You looked so far away there for a minute.”

“I was far away.”

“Where?”

He sipped his coffee and met her gaze levelly. “I'm not telling.”

“Why not?”

“You won't tell me anything about you, so I'm not telling you anything about me.”

For a minute, he thought maybe she'd backpedal and
offer up some answers to his questions in order to get answers to some of her own. Instead, she nodded and said, “It's for the best that way.”

Damn. So much for reverse psychology.

“For you or for me?” he asked.

“For both of us.”

The more she said, the more puzzled and curious Marcus grew. Just who the hell was she? Where had she come from? Where was she going? Why wouldn't she tell him anything about herself? And why, dammit, did he want so desperately to know everything there was to know about her?

“All right, if you really want to know, I was thinking about something at work,” he lied.

She said nothing in response, only picked up one of the pastries and enjoyed a healthy bite.

“Don't you want to at least know what I do for a living?”

“No.”

There was that word again. He was really beginning to hate it.

“I work for a brokerage house,” he told her, deliberately being vague about his position there, since he still wasn't sure how much to say. Actually, that wasn't quite true. He wanted to say a lot about himself. But not for the usual reasons. Usually, he only opened up to a woman by saying things designed to impress her, in order to get her more quickly into bed. But he'd already gotten Della into bed and still wanted to impress her. That was strange enough in itself. Even stranger was how he suspected that the best way to impress her was to
not
brag about himself. Well, not just yet, anyway.

She was swallowing when he told her about his job,
but it must have gone down the wrong way, because she immediately began to cough. A lot. Marcus was about to reach over to pat her on the back—or administer the Heimlich if necessary—but she held up a hand to stop him and reached for her coffee instead. After a couple of sips, she was okay. Though her face still looked a little pale.

“I'm fine,” she said before he could ask. “That swallow went down the wrong way.”

He nodded. And once he knew she really was fine, he picked up the conversation where he'd left off. “I work at—”

“Stop,” she said, holding up a hand as if trying to physically stop the information from coming. “Don't tell me what you do or where you work. Please, Marcus. We agreed. No background information. No last names. No strings. No past, no present, no future.”

“We also agreed only one night,” he reminded her, “but that's obviously not going to be the case. We're stuck here for at least another twenty-four hours. There's no harm in getting to know each other a little better. Unless you can tell me one.”

He could see by her expression she could think of at least one. Maybe two. Maybe ten. Never in his life had he met a woman whose face was such an open book. Forget mind reading. A man could discover a lot about Della just by looking at her face. And what Marcus discovered now was that there was no way she was going to open up about herself to him.

Still, that didn't mean he couldn't open himself up to her.

“I work at Fallon Brothers,” he said before she could stop him. He didn't add that the Fallons in the name of the multibillion-dollar company that employed him were
his great-great grandfather and great-great uncle or that he was the fourth generation of the Fallon empire that would someday be running the company, along with his cousin Jonathan. Except that Marcus was the one who would become CEO upon his father's retirement next year, that meant he would be doing even less work than he was now as a VP, and then the partying would
really
begin. If Marcus was a fixture of the tabloid rags and websites now, he intended to be a permanent, cemented, superglued fixture once he didn't have to answer to his father anymore.

“Marcus, please,” Della said again, her voice laced with warning. “Don't say another—”

“My permanent residence is on Lakeshore Drive,” he continued, ignoring her. He picked up the pad and pen labeled with the hotel's logo that lay on the nightstand near his breakfast. “Here. I'll write it down for you,” he continued, and proceeded to do just that. “But I also have places in London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Aruba. All the big financial capitals, in fact.”

When he looked up after finishing the last digit of his cell number—he'd given her the numbers of the office and his penthouse, too—she was gazing at him with much consternation.

Damn, she was cute when she was consternated.

“Since when is Aruba a big financial capital?” she asked.

“Since I spent a fortune on a house there and spend another fortune on rum every time I go down there.”

“I see.”

“I'm thirty-eight years old and a Chicago native,” he added as he dropped the pad with his address and phone numbers onto the mattress between them. Not that Della even glanced at them. “As an undergrad, I majored in
business at Stanford, then got my MBA from Harvard. Yes, I am that clichéd businessman you always hear about, except that I didn't graduate anywhere near the top of my class either time. Doesn't mean I'm not good at what I do,” he hastened to add, “it just means I'm not an overachiever—that's where the cliché ends—and that I make time for more than work.” He threw her his most lascivious look, just in case she didn't get that part. Which he was pretty sure she did, because she blushed that becoming shade of pink she had last night.

“Marcus, I really wish you wouldn't—”

“Let's see, what else is worth mentioning?” he interrupted, ignoring her. “I broke my arm in a skiing accident when I was eight and broke my ankle in a riding accident when I was ten. I have two sisters—both older and married to men my parents chose for them…not that either of them would ever admit that—along with two nieces and three nephews. My favorite color is red.” He hoped she got the significance of that, too, and was more than a little delighted when color bloomed on her cheeks again. “My favorite food is Mediterranean in general and Greek in particular. I usually drive a black Bentley, but I also have a vintage Jaguar roadster—it goes without saying that it's British racing green—and a red Maserati. You already know about the opera thing, but my second greatest passion is port wine. My sign is Leo. And,” he finally concluded, “I don't like piña coladas or getting caught in the rain, either.”