It took him a minute to realize I was teasing him, but then he pounced on me and began kissing me everywhere again.
We didn’t go to sleep for hours and hours.
When we woke up, there was no time to talk about the night we’d spent naked in each other’s arms. It was all business, and Luca’s cousin Curtis wasn’t a nice man.
He was out for Luca’s millions. And he played hardball.
7
Luca
In addition to enjoying each other’s bodies all night, Marcel and I also talked until he finally fell asleep midsentence. I learned about his family’s origins in Cameroon and his parents’ relocation to the United States with his father’s job for a large hotel chain. Of course, I perked right up when he mentioned his father working in the hotel industry, and then I loved every minute of Marcel’s knowing laugh.
“You’re so predictable. But I love how passionate you are about it,” he said, peppering my face with kisses and making my chest flood with warmth.
I’d accepted a long time ago that I was borderline obsessive about my work, and I never minded when people like Jillian teased me good-naturedly about it. But having someone understand and even appreciate that passion was something I hadn’t ever expected.
I told him how I’d gotten into the hotel business through one of my professors in graduate school and how I’d lucked into an inheritance that had helped me invest in my first property. We shared stories of some of the things we found most strange about moving through life with this level of wealth. He wasn’t obscenely wealthy himself, but he was the right-hand man of a multibillionaire venture capitalist.
He told me more about his job and Grey Blackwood’s never-ending pursuit of success to the detriment of his personal life. Then Marcel had lifted a knowing brow at me, and I’d explained it wasn’t easy to have a personal life when your work was so all-consuming.
“True. For Grey, though… I don’t know. He’s a great boss—the best—but he doesn’t trust easily, and it’s like he needs success to make up for something in his past. I worry that he’ll never really let himself have a personal life. You, on the other hand, have potential,” he’d said in his teasing, flirty way. “Maybe I’ll have to force you to relax.”
And god, did I want him to.
But first, we had to get through the day of business meetings. The first one was a breakfast meeting to prepare for the on-site tour later in the afternoon.
Marcel leaned over as we waited to be shown into the breakfast room. “Why did they schedule the site tour for the hottest part of the day? Are they intending to roast our bodies until our brains ooze out of our heads and you can no longer read what you’re signing?”
“Surely it won’t be that bad,” I whispered back.
It was. It was that bad.
“I have a better investment idea,” Marcel murmured to me once we stepped out of the limo into the desert heat and began slowly dying. “It’s like a drive-thru car wash but for applying sunscreen.” He looked me up and down. “Gotta be honest, I have some concerns.”
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “Italians were born to tan.”
“Mpfh.”
My cousin beamed and gestured to the sprawling resort located twenty minutes outside the city on a plot of dusty-brown wasteland. “Isn’t it something?”
I squinted at the sun glaring off the blue mirrored glass of the hotel tower. Every thirty seconds or so, a flashing sun image appeared in the lower-right corner of the building and danced its way to the upper-right corner, mimicking a comical sunrise. In the photos, it had appeared as a static image rather than the special effect it was in real life.
In the static image, the sun hadn’t also had a flashing ad graphic on it for all-you-can-eat prime rib.
“It’s something alright,” Marcel murmured.
“We are reserving judgment, remember?” I murmured back.
Last night, between bouts of sex, Marcel had insisted on prepping for the day’s meetings. When he’d pulled up the prospectus for the Sunnies resort concept, he’d lifted a judging eyebrow at me. “Are you for real with this? Why are you even taking this meeting?”
I’d repeated Curtis’s pitch about how the standalone resort had done well enough to consider their plea for help turning it into a global franchise but that, of course, I had plenty of reservations.
“At least someone has reservations,” he’d said. “Because this hotel couldn’t possibly have many itself…”
Now that we were standing here looking at the garish monstrosity, I was beginning to realize Marcel had gotten it right.
“You have to see the water feature in the lobby,” Curtis continued, leading us through the automatic glass doors and into the much cooler reception area.
“Oh goodie,” Marcel said with a genuine smile. “Alcohol.”
Sure enough, a woman in a bikini made up of a Sunnies cartoon sun over each breast approached us with a tray of fruity umbrella drinks.
“Sunnie punch?” she offered with a big smile.
“No, thank you,” I said as politely as possible.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Curtis said, returning the woman’s smile with a cheesy grin. “Thanks, doll.”
Marcel met my eyes as I winced and silently tried telling him Curtis wasn’t a blood relation. As if that would mitigate the cheese factor.
Marcel politely declined a drink as well since our sole purpose in coming here was to make an intelligent business assessment.
The water feature wasn’t much more than an aboveground pool with a plastic waterslide attached to it and fiberglass rocks artfully displayed around the edges. Two more young women in Sunnies bikinis splashed and tossed a beach ball back and forth in the pool, trying to keep up a level of enthusiasm that must not have been easy during such a slow time of day.
Marcel grabbed my arm and tilted his head to the left. Another woman in a bikini with a tray of umbrella drinks made her way across the lobby on roller skates, sticking to a “boardwalk” path painted on the floor and waving with her free hand at all the nearby beachgoers who didn’t exist in the air-conditioned lobby.
This was a train wreck.
I glanced at Marcel and hissed, “Fake sick, I beg you.”
“Oh, hayel no. Now that we’re here, I need the whole picture for my memoirs.” He pursed his lips and continued looking around. “You aren’t paying me enough for this, FYI.”
“I’m not paying you at all,” I reminded him.
“Exactly.”
“Let me show you the pool,” Curtis said, moving forward toward the glass doors on the opposite side of the lobby. “It’s the best part.”
We followed him back out into the relentless sunshine.
Marcel handed me an icy-cold bottle of water he’d magicked out of nowhere. “Stay hydrated,” he warned. “I have plans for you later.”
I was relieved to hear him say it. Even though we’d spent an incredible night together, I hadn’t truly known if he’d want another night together. But his words, combined with a look that was both fond and hotter than the sun beating down on us, made me feel giddy.