His Virgin Acquisition Read Online Free PDF Page B

that was nearly unbearable. “But you and I have a date tomorrow night.”

Chapter Three
    T HE phone had been ringing all day. How reporters had gotten hold of the extension to access his office line, he didn’t know. Once the phone stopped ringing he would have to interrogate his staff.
    Granted, he wanted press. That was the point of the arrangement. But he certainly didn’t want the paps to have personal access to him. It was his PA’s job to field phone calls, and he paid her handsomely for it.
    The trip to Tiffany’s had done its job, just as he’d planned. The picture of Elaine and himself entering Tiffany’s together, and exiting holding the telltale robin’s-egg-blue bags, had spawned a host of articles in every news source from the New York Times to TMZ —the latter speculating that it was a Mafia arrangement. His Italian heritage was all he could credit for the creation of that rumor. But then, when did a tabloid need anything silly like facts to come up with a story?
    That, combined with strategically leaked information about his reservations at La Paz, a trendy restaurant in Manhattan, had the press engaged in a feeding frenzy to extract more information about Marco De Luca and his mystery woman.
    He answered the phone midway through the first ring. “I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve told everyone else. Ms. Chapman and I will comment when there is something to comment about.” Denial, in his experience, was the best way to fuel a rumor. The more he downplayed it, the more interest would be piqued.
    “That’s a shame. I thought you’d be a little more straightforward with your own brother.”
    “Rafael.” He was pleasantly surprised to hear his younger brother’s voice. Despite living less than half an hour from each other, with Marco being a workaholic and Rafael being a family man, it was hard for their schedules to coincide. “I take it you picked up the paper this morning?”
    “Actually, Sarah showed me. She loves all forms of gossip media. Though I doubt you’re getting married to this woman to save her father from a mob hit.”
    Marco laughed. “Not even close. The Mafia has recently quit asking my opinion on whose knees they should break.”
    “Why are you getting married, then?”
    Marco picked up a pen and started doodling on his day planner. “Oh, the usual reasons.”
    “Love?” Rafael asked, in what Marco thought was a hopeful tone. His brother had drunk the love Kool-aid a couple of years ago, and seemed to think that he should want to do the same.
    “No. Financial gain.” He explained how the arrangement had come about.
    “Well, that sounds typically you,” Rafael grumbled.
    “That’s because it is typically me, little brother. We can’t all be happy running a dinky little real estate office. Some of us have ambition.”
    “My ‘dinky little office’ is a multi-million-dollar operation. And anyway, I have a wife I like to go home to every night.”
    Marco cut him off. “Well, that’s fine for you. But I’ve raised one kid already, and I’m not planning on willingly doing anything like it again. Commitment of any kind is not on the agenda. This is for business.”
    Rafael cleared his throat. “I know that taking care of me wasn’t easy. But I’m grateful for it.”
    “I don’t need your gratitude, Rafael. You’re my brother and I did it gladly. But this marriage, if you want to call it that, is strictly a business arrangement. The length of the marriage isn’t indefinite. The longest it will last is a year. If neither of us has achieved our goal by then, we’ll go our separate ways—no harm, no foul.”
    “And the woman? She knows that you’re not madly in love with her?”
    Marco huffed out a laugh. “I’m a ruthless bastard, Rafael, but not even I’m that bad.”
    Rafael sighed. “You’re going to go ahead with this no matter what I say, aren’t you?”
    “Always. But you will agree to be my best man? It’s the only chance you’ll