The Billionaire's Conquest: Caught in the Billionaire's Embrace / Billionaire, M.D. / Her Tycoon to Tame

Stu cleared his throat a little too obviously beside them, and she gave a soft tug to free her fingers. Reluctantly, he let them go. She lowered her hand to the table near his, however, resting it palm down on the white linen. So he did likewise, flattening his hand until his fingers almost—almost—touched hers.

“Will there be anything else, Mr.—?” Stu stopped before revealing Marcus’s last name, obviously having overheard the exchange. Quickly, he amended, “Will there be anything else, sir?”

Marcus waved a hand airily in his direction, muttering that Stu should bring some kind of appetizer, too, but didn’t specify what. He honestly didn’t care about anything, other than the intriguing woman who sat across from him.

“Well,” he began, trying to jump-start the conversation again. “If you’re sitting here in the Windsor Club, you can’t be too new to Chicago. They have a waiting list to get in, and last I heard, it was two years, at least, before anyone added to it could even expect an application. Unless you’re here as a guest of another member?” That would be just his luck. That he’d meet a woman like this, and she’d be involved with someone else.

“I’m on my own,” she told him. Then, after a small hesitation, she added, “Tonight.”

Suggesting she wasn’t on her own on other nights, Marcus thought. For the first time, it occurred to him to glance down at her left hand. Not that a wedding ring had ever stopped him from seducing a woman before. But she sported only one ring, and it was on her right hand. The left bore no sign of ever having had one. So she wasn’t even engaged. At least not to a man who had the decency to buy her a ring.

“Or maybe,” he continued thoughtfully, “you’re a member of one of the Windsor’s original charter families who earn and keep their membership by a simple accident of birth.” He grinned. “Like me. As many times as they’ve tried to throw me out of this place, they can’t.”

She grinned back. “And why on earth would they throw out a paragon of formality and decency like you?”

His eyebrows shot up at that. “You really are new in town if no one’s warned you about me yet. That’s usually the first thing they tell beautiful young socialites. In fact, ninety percent of the tourist brochures for the city say something like, ‘Welcome to Chicago. While you’re here, be sure to visit Navy Pier, the Hancock Tower, the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium. And whatever you do, stay away from Marcus—” Again he halted before saying his last name. “Well, stay away from Marcus-Whose-Last-Name-You-Don’t-Want-To-Know. That guy’s nothing but trouble.'”

She laughed at that. She had a really great laugh. Uninhibited, unrestrained, genuinely happy. “And what do the other ten percent of the travel brochures say?”

“Well, those would be the ones they give out to conventioneers looking for a good time while they’re away from the ball and chain. Those are the ones that list all the, ah, less seemly places in town.” He smiled again. “I’m actually featured very prominently in those. Not by name, mind you, but …” He shrugged. “Those damned photographers don’t care who they take pictures of.”

She laughed again, stirring something warm and fizzy inside Marcus unlike anything he’d ever felt before. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I find it hard to jibe The Bartered Bride with bump and grind.”

“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 over her mouth with the dew of champagne.

Heat swamped her, making her stomach simmer, her breasts tingle and her heart rate quadruple, and dampening her between her legs. Without even thinking about what she was doing, she parted her lips enough to allow him to tuck one finger inside. She tasted the champagne then, along with the faint essence of Marcus. And Marcus was, by far, the most intoxicating.

Quickly, she drew her head back and licked the remnants of his touch from her lips. Not that that did anything to quell her arousal. What had come over her? How could she be this attracted to a man this quickly? She knew almost nothing about him, save his name and the fact that he loved opera and good champagne and had bought a rose for someone earlier in the evening who—

The rose. How could she have forgotten about that? She might very well be sitting here enjoying the advances of a married man! Or, at the very least, one who belonged to someone else. And the last thing she wanted to be was part of a triangle.

Where was the rose now? Had he thrown it resentfully into the trash or pressed it between the pages of the neglected opera program as a keepsake? Involuntarily, she scanned the other tables in the club until she saw an empty one not far away with a rose and opera program lying atop it. And another martini glass—though this time it was empty. Had the woman he was expecting finally caught up with him? Had he only moments ago been sharing a moment like this with someone else? Could he really be that big a heel?

“Who were you expecting tonight?”

The question was out of her mouth before Della even realized it had formed in her brain. It obviously surprised Marcus as much as it had her, because his dark eyebrows shot up again.

“No one,” he told her. And then, almost as if he couldn’t stop himself, he added, “Not even you. I could never have anticipated someone like you.”

“But the rose … The pink drink …”