As chivalrous as a fairy-tale paladin …
He slipped off his tuxedo jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
“You don’t have to do that,” Della protested. The garment fairly swallowed her, but it was redolent with both his scent and his warmth, and she was helpless not to pull it more closely around herself.
“Now you’ll get cold,” she told him.
Marcus shook his head. “I haven’t been cold since the moment I laid eyes on you. A little thing like snow and a subfreezing temperature isn’t going to change that.”
Della wasn’t feeling cold, either. Not that that would make her return his jacket to him. It felt too nice being enveloped in it. Almost as if she were being enveloped by Marcus himself.
Almost.
CAUGHT IN THE BILLIONAIRE’S EMBRACE
BY
ELIZABETH BEVARLY
AND
THE TYCOON’S TEMPORARY BABY
BY
Emily McKay
CAUGHT IN THE BILLIONAIRE’S EMBRACE
BY
ELIZABETH BEVARLY
Dear Reader,
It’s time for another visit to Talk of the Town, Chicago’s most famous haute couture rental boutique. (All right, my most famous haute couture rental boutique. In fact, my only haute couture rental boutique.) This time around, it’s Della Hannan who’s looking to spiff herself up, and for a very special occasion. See, Della made a promise to herself when she was a kid that, for her thirtieth birthday, she’d celebrate in major style. She also promised herself as a kid that she’d be a millionaire by the time she turned thirty, but we can’t have everything, can we?
So even if the millionaire thing will be pretend, the style will be quite real—even if it is rented.
The only problem is, Della can’t afford to be noticed out and about because she has a little secret. Okay, okay, a huge secret. But it’s hard to go unnoticed when one is arrayed from head to toe in the likes of Carolina Herrera and Dolce&Gabbana. And notice her Marcus Fallon does. Big-time. The last thing that guy wants to do, however, is be kept a secret. Go big or go home, that’s Marcus. But when he and Della get snowed in for a weekend, he doesn’t want her to go anywhere …
I hope you have as much fun reading about Della and Marcus as I had writing them. And may all your dreams be stylish ones.
Happy reading!
Elizabeth Bevarly
About the Author
Elizabeth Bevarly is the RITA® Award-nominated, nationally bestselling author of more than five dozen books. When she’s not writing, she’s watching Project Runway and What Not to Wear, but only for research purposes. She’s also confident that she’ll someday find a story in House Hunters International, so she watches that religiously, too. In the meantime, she makes do with her real life of ready-to-wear from Macy’s and college exploratory trips around the Midwest with her husband and soon-to-be-a-senior son.
Dedication
For everyone who’s ever worked in women’s fashion,
especially employees of The Limited stores
in Cherry Hill and Echelon Malls,
where I got my start in writing by penning pages
in the stockroom during lunch.
I miss you guys. A lot.
One
There was only one thing that could make Della Hannan’s thirtieth birthday better than she’d already planned for it to be, and it was a thing she hadn’t even planned. That was saying something, since she’d been fine-tuning the details for the celebration since she was a little girl growing up in the kind of neighborhood where birthdays were pretty much unaffordable and therefore pretty much ignored. Where a lot of things were unaffordable and therefore ignored. Things like, well … Della, for instance. But that was why she had promised herself such a festive event. Because, even as a little girl, she’d known she had only herself to count on.
Of course, the past eleven months had rather thrown a wrench in that line of thinking, because since meeting Geoffrey, she’d had no choice but to count on him. Geoffrey wasn’t here tonight, though, and she wasn’t going to let herself think about him or anything else from that world. Tonight was special. Tonight was for her. And it would be everything an underprivileged kid from one of New York’s roughest neighborhoods could have imagined.
Back then, Della had sworn that by the time she turned thirty, she would have escaped the mean streets of her borough and become a self-made millionaire living park-side uptown. And she’d vowed to mark the big three-oh in the style of the rich and famous, that she had imagined she’d become accustomed as this point in life. She wasn’t about to renege on that promise, even if she was celebrating in Chicago instead of New York. She would begin with dinner at a five-star restaurant, follow that with a box seat at the opera and top it off with a nightcap at the sort of club that allowed entrée to only the crème de la crème of society. She was outfitted in thousands of dollars worth of haute couture, dripping in rubies and diamonds, and she had been coiffed and manicured at the city’s finest salon.
She sighed with much contentment as she enjoyed the first part of her evening. Palumbo’s on State Street was the sort of restaurant where prices rivaled the budgets of some sovereign nations. She had, it went without saying, ordered the most expensive items on the menu—four courses, all of which bore European names she’d had to practice all week to pronounce correctly. (Thank goodness the menu had been posted online so she could check in advance and not appear as some kind of philistine when she ordered. And how lovely to have the opportunity to use the word philistine, even if it was only in her head.) Because ordering the most expensive items on one’s birthday was what anyone who was sophisticated and chic and rich would do, right?
The thought made her surreptitiously survey her surroundings, to make sure the other diners—sophisticated, chic and rich, every last one of them—were also enjoying the most expensive bounty. And, okay, okay, to also make sure Geoffrey hadn’t somehow followed her, even though she’d done an excellent job sneaking out—she always did—and even though she wasn’t scheduled to check in with him until her daily call tomorrow. He couldn’t know where she was going, anyway, even if he did discover she’d slipped out when she wasn’t supposed to. She’d planned tonight’s escape even more meticulously than she’d planned her thirtieth birthday
