“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.
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