“There’s more to me than opera, you know.” He met her gaze levelly. “A lot more.”
The blush blossomed in her cheeks again, making him chuckle more softly. She was saved from having to respond to his comment, however, when Stu arrived with their champagne and a tray of fruit and cheese. The bartender went a little overboard with the presentation and opening of the bottle, but it was probably because he, too, recognized that Della—yes, Marcus did like that name—wasn’t a usual customer. In fact, there was nothing usual about her. She was, in a word, extraordinary.
After receiving approval for the champagne, Stu poured a glass for each of them. As he did, Marcus told Della, “I am notorious in this town. Ask anyone.”
She turned to the bartender, who was nestling the champagne in a silver bucket of ice. “Is he really notorious?” she asked.
The bartender glanced first at Marcus, who nodded imperceptibly to let Stu know his tip wouldn’t be compromised by his honesty, then at Della. “Oh, yes, ma’am. And not just in Chicago. He makes the society pages all over the country, wherever he goes, and he’s a regular feature on a lot of those celebrity websites. If you’re seen with him, it’s a good bet you’ll wind up there yourself. He’s infamous.”
Della turned to Marcus, her eyes no longer full of laughter, but now brimming with something akin to … fear? Oh, surely not. What would she have to be afraid of?
“Is that true?” she asked.
Still puzzled by her reaction, but not wanting to lie to her—especially since it would be easy enough for her to find out with a simple internet search—he told her, “I’m afraid so.”
Her lips parted fractionally, and her expression became almost panicked. Deciding she must be feigning fear as a joke, he played along, telling her, “Don’t worry. They never let riffraff like the paparazzi into the club.
You’re perfectly safe with me here. No one will see you with me.”
It occurred to him as he said it that that was exactly what she feared—being seen with him. Not just by the paparazzi, but by some individual in particular. An individual who might not like seeing her out with Marcus. Or anyone else, for that matter.
She did have that look about her, he decided as he considered her again. Pampered, well tended to, cared for—at least on the surface. The kind of woman who made her way in the world by making herself available to men who could afford her. There were still a surprising number of such women in society, even in this day and age when a woman shouldn’t have to rely on her sexuality to make her way in the world. Beautiful, elegant, reserved, they tended to be. At least on the surface.
Not that he’d ever seen Della among such women in the level of society in which he traveled. That only fueled his suspicion that she was merely visiting the city. Dammit.
It took a moment for her expression to clear, but she finally emitted a single—albeit a tad humorless—chuckle. “Of course,” she said. “I mean … I knew that. I was only kidding.”
He nodded, but there was a part of him that wasn’t quite convinced. Maybe she really was attached to someone else. Maybe she even belonged to that someone. Maybe that someone wouldn’t be too happy about her being here tonight alone. Or anywhere alone. Maybe that someone would be even more unhappy to find her with another man. Maybe she really was afraid her photo would show up somewhere with Marcus at her side, and she’d be in big, big trouble with that someone.
Just who was she, this mysterious lady in red? And why did Marcus want so badly to find out?
In an effort to dispel the odd tension that had erupted between them, he lifted his glass of champagne and said, softly, “Cheers.”
There was another small hesitation on her part before, she, too, lifted her glass. “Cheers,” she echoed even more softly.
The toast didn’t put an end to the frisson of uneasiness that still hovered over the table, but it did put a bit of the bloom back in her cheeks. It was enough, he decided. For now.
But certainly not forever.
Della gazed at the man seated across the table from her as she sipped her champagne, and she wondered exactly when the evening had jumped the track and started screeching headlong into a dark, scary tunnel. One minute, she’d been about to embark on the last leg of her evening by enjoying a final glass of champagne at Chicago’s celebrated Windsor Club—which she’d gotten into only by bribing the doorman with another small fortune—and the next minute, she’d found herself gazing once again into the gold-flecked, chocolate-brown eyes that had so intrigued her at the opera.
Marcus. His name fit him. Stoic and classic, commanding and uncompromising. How strange that she should run into him at every destination she’d visited tonight. Then again, she’d gone out of her way to choose destinations that were magnets for the rich and powerful, and he certainly fit that bill. Of course, now she was learning he was part of that other adjective that went along with rich—famous—and that was a condition she most definitely had to avoid.
So what was she afraid of? He was right. There was no one in the club who didn’t belong here. Other than herself, she meant. Nobody had even seemed to notice the two of them. Not to mention it was late and, even if it was Saturday, ninety percent of the city’s population had gone home. There was snow in the forecast for later, even if it wasn’t anything a city like Chicago couldn’t handle. Most people were probably hunkered down in their living rooms and bedrooms, having stocked up on provisions earlier, and were looking forward to a Sunday being snowed in with nothing to do.
Della wished she could enjoy something like that, but she felt as though she’d been snowed in with nothing to do for the past eleven months. At least when she wasn’t at Geoffrey’s beck and call.
But tonight that wasn’t the case. Tonight she was having fun. She should look at the opportunity to share the last couple of hours of her celebration with a man like Marcus as the icing on her birthday cake.
“So …” she began, trying to recapture the flirtatiousness of their earlier exchange. Still trying to figure out when, exactly, she’d decided to return his flirtations. “What kinds of things have you done to make yourself so notorious?”
He savored another sip of his champagne, then placed the glass on the table between them. But instead of releasing it, he dragged his fingers up over the stem and along the bowl of the flute, then up farther along the elegant line of its sides. Della found herself mesmerized by the voyage of those fingers, especially when he began to idly trace the rim with the pad of his middle finger. Around and around it went, slowly, slowly … oh, so slowly … until a coil of heat began to unwrap in her belly and purl into parts beyond.
She found herself wondering what it would be like to have him drawing idle circles like that elsewhere, someplace like, oh … she didn’t know. Herself maybe. Along her shoulder, perhaps. Or down her thigh. Touching her in other places, too—places where such caresses might drive her to the brink of madness.
Her eyes fluttered closed as the thought formed in her brain, as if by not watching what he was doing, she might better dispel the visions dancing around in her head. But closing her eyes only made those images more vivid. More earthy. More erotic. More … oh. So much more more. She snapped her eyes open again in an effort to squash the visions completely. But that left her looking at Marcus, who was gazing at her with faint amusement, as if he’d seen where her attention had settled and knew exactly what she was thinking about.
As he studied her, he stilled his finger on the rim of the glass and settled his index finger beside it. Della watched helplessly as he scissored them along the rim, first opening, then closing, then opening again. With great deliberation, he curled them into the glass until they touched the top of the champagne, then he dampened each finger with the effervescent wine. Then he carefully pulled them out and lifted them to her lips, brushing lightly