The Billionaire's Conquest

He noted her hesitation on the last word, as if home for her were a somewhat tentative state. Another clue that she really was only visiting here. Nevertheless, she’d assured Marcus that no one would miss her—at least not until today. Both thoughts bothered him a lot more than they should. For one thing, it shouldn’t matter if Della was tied to another man, since Marcus didn’t want to stake a claim on her anyway. For another thing, they’d both only wanted and promised one night, that should have been more than enough to satisfy their desire to enjoy each other for a little while. The fact that she was only in Chicago temporarily or might be involved with someone else should be of no consequence. In fact, it should reassure him that there would indeed be no strings attached.

For some reason, though, Marcus didn’t like the idea of her being only a visitor to Chicago. He liked even less that she might be involved with someone else.

Too much thinking, he told himself, and way too early in the day for it. It was the weekend. He was snowbound with a gorgeous, incredibly sexy woman. Why was he thinking at all?

“No one is going anywhere today,” he said before sipping his coffee. “Not even the snowplows will be able to get out until this lets up.”

Della turned to look at him, and that strange, panicked look he’d seen for a few moments last night was back in her eyes. “But I can’t stay here all day,” she told him, the panic present in her voice now, too. “I have to get … home.”

Again the hesitation before the final word, he noted. Again, he didn’t like it.

“Is there someplace you absolutely have to be today?” When she didn’t reply right away, only arrowed her eyebrows in even more concern, he amended, “Or should I ask, is there someone who’s expecting you to be someplace today?”

She dropped her gaze at that. Pretty much the only reaction he needed. So there was indeed someone else in her life. Someone she’d have to answer to for any kind of prolonged absence.

“Is it a husband?” he asked, amazed at how casual the question sounded, when he was suddenly feeling anything but.

Her gaze snapped up to his, flashing with anger. Good. Anger was better than panic. Anger stemmed from passion, not fear. “I wouldn’t be here with you if I had a husband waiting for me.”

Marcus had no idea why he liked that answer so much.

“What about you?” she countered. “Is there a wife somewhere waiting for you? Or has she come to expect this kind of behavior from you? ”

He chuckled at that. “The day I have a wife waiting for me somewhere is the day they put me in a padded cell.” When she still didn’t seem satisfied by the answer—he couldn’t imagine why not—he told her bluntly, “I’m not married, Della.” Not sure why he bothered to add it, he said, “There’s no one waiting anywhere for me.” Then, after only a small hesitation, he added, “But there is someone who will be worried about you if you don’t come … home … today, isn’t there?” He deliberately paused before the word home, too, to let her know he’d noticed her own hesitation.

She inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly, then dropped the curtain and curled both hands around the white china coffee cup. She gazed into its depths instead of at Marcus when she spoke. “Home is something of a fluid concept for me at the moment.”

Fluid. Interesting word choice. “And by that you mean …?”

Still staring at her coffee, she said, “I can’t really explain it to you.” “Can’t or won’t?”

Now she did meet his gaze. But her expression was void of anything. No panic, no anger, nothing.

“Both.”

“Why?”

She only shook her head. She brought the cup to her mouth, blew softly on its surface and enjoyed a careful sip. Then she strode to the breakfast cart to inspect its choices. But he couldn’t help noting how she looked at the clock as she went, or how her eyes went wide in surprise when she saw the time. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. On a Sunday, no less. It seemed too early for anyone to have missed her if she had been able to surrender an entire night.

“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 pina 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 pina coladas or getting caught in the rain, either.”

By the time he finished, Della’s irritation at him was an almost palpable thing. He’d sensed it growing as he’d spoken, until he’d halfway expected her to cover her ears with her hands and start humming, then say something like, “La la la la la. I can’t hear you. I have my fingers in my ears and I’m humming. La la la la la.”

Instead, she’d spent the time nervously breaking her pastry into little pieces and dropping them onto her plate. Now that he was finished, she shifted her gaze from his to those little broken pieces and said, “I really wish you hadn’t told me those things.”

“Why not?”

“Because every time I discover something else about you, it makes you that much more difficult to forget.”

Something stirred to life inside him at her words, but he couldn’t say exactly what that something was. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, but neither was it exactly agreeable. It was just … different. Something he’d never felt before. Something it would take some time to explore.

“That’s interesting,” he told her. “Because I don’t know one tenth that much about you, and I know you’re going to be impossible to forget.”

Still studying the broken pastry, she made a face, as if she hadn’t realized what a mess she’d made of it. She placed the plate on the mattress on top of the pad of paper with the information he’d written down, though he was pretty sure she’d given it a quick glance before covering it. With any luck, she had a photographic memory. With even more luck, he’d notice later that the slip of paper had moved from the bed into her purse.

Her purse, he thought. Women’s purses were notorious for storing information—probably more than a computer’s hard drive. Not that Marcus could vouch for such a thing. He’d never had the inclination to search a woman’s purse before. It was actually a pretty despicable thing for a man to even consider doing.

He couldn’t wait to get into Della’s.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you a few things about myself.”

Finally, they were getting somewhere. Just where, exactly, he wasn’t sure he could say. But it was farther down the road than they’d been a few minutes ago. He wished he could see farther still, to find out if the road was a long and winding one with hills and valleys and magnificent vistas, or if it ended abruptly in a dead end where a bridge had washed out, and where there were burning flares and warning sirens and pylons strung with yellow tape that read Caution!

Then again, did he really care? It wasn’t as if anything as minor as cataclysmic disaster had ever stopped him from going after what he wanted before. And he did want Della. He wanted her a lot.

Five

Della tried not to notice how Marcus seemed to have moved closer to her during their exchange. She couldn’t help noting other things, however. Such as how love-tousled his dark hair was and how the shadow of beard covered the lower half of his face, both qualities evoking an air of danger about him. Or maybe it was just that she realized now how very dangerous he was. How dangerous her behavior last night had been. How dangerous it was to still be with him this morning with no way to get home. Not only because she was at greater risk of Geoffrey discovering her absence, but also because she was beginning to feel things for Marcus that she had no business feeling. Things that would make it more difficult to leave him when the time came.

She never, ever, should have allowed herself to succumb to her desires last night. Hadn’t she learned the hard way how doing that led to trouble? The last time she’d yielded so easily to a man, her life had been left in a shambles. And Egan had been nowhere near as compelling or unforgettable as Marcus.

“I’m originally from the East Coast,” she said, hoping that small snippet of information—even if it was a hugely broad one that could mean anything—would appease him.

She should have known better.

“Where on the east coast?” he asked.

She frowned at him and repeated stubbornly, “The east coast.”

“North or south?”

“That’s all I’m giving you, Marcus. Don’t push or that’s the only thing you’ll learn about me.”

He opened his mouth to say more, then shut it again. He was probably recalling how she’d told him she came from someplace hot, and he was assuming it was the latter. But he was clearly not happy about having to acquiesce to her demand.

She wasn’t sure whether or not to confess anything about her family, mostly because she hadn’t seen any of them for years. Even when they’d all lived under one roof, they hadn’t really been much of a family. It was a sad thing to admit, but Della really didn’t have feelings for any of them one way or another. Still, if Marcus wanted information, maybe that would be the kind to give him because it wouldn’t cost her anything emotionally. It would also potentially be misleading, since most people stayed in touch with their blood relations, so he might think she hadn’t traveled too far from her own.

“I have an older brother,” she admitted. “And a younger brother, as well.” The first had taken off when he was sixteen and Della was fourteen, and she hadn’t seen him since. The other, last time she’d heard—which had been about ten years ago—had joined a gang. At the tender age of fifteen. No telling where he was now, either.

On the few occasions when Della thought about her brothers, she tried to convince herself that they’d been motivated by the same things she had, and in the same way. She told herself they’d gotten out of the old neighborhood and found better lives, just as she had. Sometimes she even believed herself. But more often, she feared they had screwed up everything in their lives, too, the same way she had.

“Nieces and nephews?” Marcus asked.