The Bride Fonseca Needs

‘I need you to help me close this deal with Montgomery. I can’t afford the upheaval a new PA will bring at the moment.’

Max saw Darcy bite her lip, small white teeth sinking into soft pink flesh. For a wild second he almost changed his mind and blurted out that maybe she was right—they’d crossed a line and she should leave—but something stopped him. He told himself it was the importance of the deal.

She turned around and paced over to the window and looked out, her back to him. Max found his gaze travelling down over that tiny waist. Her shirt was untucked, dishevelled. He’d done that. He could remember how badly he’d wanted to touch her skin, see if it was as silky as he imagined it would be.

The knowledge hit him starkly: the most beautiful women in the world had treated him to personal erotic strip shows and yet Max was more turned on right now by an untucked piece of faux silk chainstore shirt.

And then Darcy turned around. Her voice was low. ‘I know how important this deal is to you.’

The way she said it made Max feel exposed. She couldn’t know the real extent of why it was so important—that it would bring him to a place of acceptance, both internally and externally, where he would finally be able to move on from the sense of exposure and humiliation that had dogged him his whole life. And, worse, the sense of being abandoned.

Yet he couldn’t deny it. ‘Yes. It’s important to me.’

She fixed her wide blue gaze on him but he could see how pinched her face was. Reluctance oozed from her every pore.

‘I’ll stay on—but only until the deal is done and only if what happened tonight doesn’t happen again.’

She looked at him, waiting for a response. The truth was that if Max wanted something he got it. And he wanted Darcy. But for the first time in his life he had to recognise that perhaps he couldn’t always get what he wanted. That some things were more important than others. And this deal with Montgomery was more important than having Darcy in his bed, sating his clawing sense of frustration.

Also, he didn’t want her to see that it was a struggle for him to back off. That would be far too exposing.

So he said, with an easiness that belied every bone in his body that wanted to throw her onto the nearest flat surface, ‘It won’t happen again, Darcy. Go home. We’ve got another long day and evening ahead of us tomorrow. Don’t forget to bring a change of clothes for dinner tomorrow night. We’ll be going straight from the office.’

Darcy didn’t say anything. She just turned and walked out of the room and the door closed with incongruous softness behind her.

Max walked over to the window. After a few minutes’ delay he saw her emerge from the building in her coat, walking briskly away from the building, merging with Rome’s late-night pedestrian traffic.

Something in his body eased slightly now that she was no longer in front of him, with those wide blue eyes looking so directly at him that he felt as if he were under a spotlight.

No woman was worth messing up this deal and certainly not little Darcy Lennox, with her provocative curves. Max finally turned around again and sighed deeply when he saw the slew of papers strewn across his desk and floor.

Instead of leaving himself, he went back to the bar, refilled his glass with whisky and then sat down and pulled the nearest sheaf of papers towards him. He put Darcy firmly out of his head.

* * *

Darcy tossed and turned in bed a little later, too wired to sleep. It was as if her body had been plugged into an electrical socket and she now had an excess of energy fizzing in her system.

She’d been plugged into Max.

Even though she was lying down, her limbs took on a jelly-like sensation when she recalled that moment of suspended tension just before he’d kissed her and everything had gone hazy and hot. She could still feel the imprint of his body against hers and between her legs she tingled. She clamped her thighs together.

They’d taken a quantum leap away from boss/PA, and it had happened so fast it still felt unreal. Had she really threatened to leave her job? And had he more or less threatened her future employment prospects if she did? She shivered slightly. She could well imagine Max doing just that—she’d witnessed his ruthlessness when it came to business associates first-hand.

The deal with Montgomery meant more to him than the potential awkwardness of having shared an intimate and highly inappropriate moment with his PA.

No matter what Max said, Darcy had no doubts that what had happened had been borne out of insanity brought on by fatigue and the moment of intimacy that had sprung up when he’d told her about his past.

She hadn’t expected to hear him reveal that he’d been homeless. Any other student from Boissy wouldn’t have lasted two days on the streets. But Max had lasted two years, and crawled his way out of it spectacularly.

He’d mentioned a brother, and his father. His parents’ divorce. Questions resounded in Darcy’s head as the enigmatic figure of Maximiliano Fonseca Roselli suddenly took on a much deeper aspect.

Unable to help herself, she leaned over and switched on the bedside light, picked up her tablet. She searched the internet for ‘Max Fonseca Roselli family’ and a clutch of pictures sprang up.

Darcy’s breath was suspended as she scrolled through them. There was a picture of a very tall and darkly handsome man: Luca Fonseca, Brazilian industrialist and philanthropist. Max’s brother. His name rang a bell. And then more pictures popped up of the same man with a stunningly beautiful blonde woman. They were wedding photos. Darcy recalled that she’d read about the wedding between Luca Fonseca and the infamous Italian socialite Serena DePiero recently.

Had Max gone to the wedding? Darcy was about to search for more information on his parents when she realised what she was doing and closed the cover of her tablet with force.

She flipped off the light and lay down, angry with herself for giving in to curiosity about a man with whom she’d shared a very brief and ill-advised moment of pure unprofessional madness. A man she should have no further interest in beyond helping him to get this deal so that she could get the hell out of his orbit and get on with her life.

CHAPTER THREE (#u631f4c7f-92c8-5c94-83c2-5740668fd2c7)

DARCY LOOKED AT HERSELF critically in the mirror of the ladies’ toilet next to her office, but she didn’t really see her own reflection. She was on edge after a long day in which Max had been overly polite and solicitous, with not so much as a sly look or hint that they’d almost made love on his desk the previous night.

At one stage she’d nearly snapped at him to please go back to normal and snarl at her the way he usually did.

The fact that she’d allowed a level of exposure and intimacy with Max she’d never allowed before was something she was resolutely ignoring. Her previous sexual experiences with men had come only after a lengthy dating period. And in each case once the final intimacy had been breached she’d backed off, because she’d realised she had no desire to deepen the commitment.

She snorted at herself now. As if she would have to worry about something like that with Max Fonseca Roselli. He was the kind of man who would leave so fast your head would be spinning for a week.

She forced her mind away from Max and took a deep breath. Her dress was black and had been bought for exactly this purpose—to go from work to a social event. And, as far as Darcy had been concerned when she’d bought it, it was modest.

Yet now it felt all wrong. It was a dress that suited her diminutive hourglass shape perfectly, but suddenly the scooped neckline was too low and the waist too cinched in. The clingy fabric was a little too clingy around her bottom and thighs, making her want to pluck it away from her body. The capped sleeves felt dressy, and when she moved the discreet slit up one side seemed to shout out, I’m trying to be sexy!

All at once she felt pressured and frazzled, aware of time ticking on. She’d already been in the bathroom for twenty minutes. She imagined Max pacing up and down outside, looking at his watch impatiently, waiting for her. Well, too late to change now. Darcy refreshed her make-up and spritzed on some perfume, and slid her feet into slightly higher heels than normal.

She’d left her hair down and at the last moment felt a lurch of panic when she looked at herself again. It looked way too undone. She twisted it up into a quick knot and secured it with a pin.

Her cheeks were hot and beads of sweat rolled down between her breasts. Cursing Max, and herself, she finally let herself out, her work clothes folded into a bag. It was with some relief that she noted that Max wasn’t pacing up and down outside.

Stowing her bag in a cupboard, making a mental note to take it home after the weekend, Darcy took a deep breath and knocked once briefly on Max’s office door before going in.

When she did, though, she nearly took a step back. Max was standing with a remote control in his hand, watching a financial news channel on the flat screen TV set into his wall. His hair was typically messy, but otherwise any resemblance to the Max she’d expected to see dissolved into a haze of heat.

His jaw was clean-shaven, drawing the eye to strong, masculine lines. He was wearing a classic three-piece suit in dark grey, with a snowy-white shirt and grey silk tie. Darcy swallowed as Max turned and his gaze fell on her. She couldn’t breathe. Literally couldn’t draw breath. She’d never seen anyone so arrestingly gorgeous in her life. And the memory of how that lean body had felt when it was pressed against hers, between her legs, was vivid enough to make her sway slightly.

There was a long, taut silence between them until Max clicked a button on the remote and the faint hum of chatter from the TV stopped.

He arched a brow. ‘Ready?’

Darcy found her voice. ‘Yes.’

He moved towards her and she backed out of his office, almost tripping over her own feet to pick up her evening bag and a light jacket matching the dress. As she struggled into it inelegantly she felt it being held out for her and muttered embarrassed thanks as Max settled it onto her shoulders.

She cursed the imagination that made her think his fingers had brushed suggestively against the back of her neck, and strode out of the office ahead of Max before she could start thinking anything else. Like how damn clingy her dress felt right then, and what rogue devil had prompted her not to wear stockings. The slide of her bare thighs against one another felt sensual in a way she’d never even noticed before. She’d never been given to erotic flights of fancy. Far too pragmatic.

Darcy didn’t look at Max as they waited for his private lift, but once they were inside his scent dominated the small space.

He asked, ‘You have the documents?’