Page 22 of One Week To Claim It All
“You’ve been in that mentoring program since college.”
He dipped his head again. “Yeah, I actually started an initiative at Sambrano for people interested in being mentors. In the beginning it was just the New York offices, but it went so well we expanded it to Miami and LA, too. Altogether we have like two hundred mentors.”
“That’s wonderful, Rodrigo.” Her mother had always been Rodrigo’s number-one fan. The rest of the tías chimed in and soon he was asking each of them questions about their interests and jobs. He had them practically eating out of his hand. But that wasn’t fair, either. This wasn’t manipulative or fake. He cared about these women. He’d grown up around them. Because they had a history together. A history she’d forced herself to never think about—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
And Esmeralda wished it felt like history, like something that was part of her past. But in just a matter of days Rodrigo had become a presence in her life she couldn’t ignore, and worse—one she didn’t know how to walk away from. Even when she was furious with him, she couldn’t deny how right it felt to have him in her life. He was at home here. In her world, with her mother, with her aunts. Because he had always been a part of all of it.
“Where are all the Juanes and Keanu Reeves posters?” Rodrigo asked, eliciting a wry smile and nudge on his shoulder.
“I am a grown woman, Rodrigo. My teenage crushes are ancient history,” she said, waving him over to the standing desk near the window. In reality her bedroom was sexy as hell. Dark blues and golds, a big inviting bed, and lots of art on the wall. Yeah, this was not a kid’s room and the things he wanted to do to her on that bed were definitely for adults only.
“Come, let me show you something.” For once Rodrigo was grateful for the diminutive spaces in New York City apartments. It gave him an excuse to get closer to her again. She’d thawed in the hour since they’d gotten to her apartment. And he couldn’t deny that it had been nice to spend some time with Ivelisse and her sisters. He had to hold himself so tightly all the time at work that he forgot who he had been. Before everything had gone wrong with his parents, with Esmeralda, his life had not been only about garnering power at Sambrano. His life had been this, la familia.
Esmeralda had been the place where he always felt grounded in that, but since they’d parted, he’d changed. He’d closed himself off; he’d told himself all he needed was the job. And now in less than three days her presence had started chiseling at that barrier he’d created between himself and the world. He could feel the walls of control crumbling with every kiss. And instead of retreating, of trying to find a way to get himself back to the safety of aloofness, all he wanted was to get closer. He had no idea how he’d do it, how he would manage to keep her and the job, but with every passing second he grew more certain that finding a way was the key to everything.
He tentatively moved closer, his front only inches from her back, and instead of pulling away from him she leaned in. Almost instinctively he wrapped an arm around her waist. He pressed his lips to her neck, flicking his tongue at the warm skin there.
“I’m supposed to be showing you something,” she protested as her hand skittered off the keyboard. Within seconds she’d turned around in his arms.
He trailed kisses from her mouth all the way down to the top of her breasts, lapping at her skin as she gasped with pleasure. “I have no self-control at all with you,” she moaned, and despite her mother and aunts being just down the hall, his hunger for her was too fierce to stop.
“Let me see you, Joya,” he urged and she quickly obliged, revealing those gorgeous breasts for him. “Mmm, tweak them for me, show me where you want my hands, sweetheart.” His hands itched to touch her, but this game of her pleasuring herself while he watched had always been a favorite of theirs.
She took his hand and guided it to an engorged peak. He worried the nipple between his thumb and index finger, and watched her gasp with pleasure. “I love seeing you like this.”I don’t think I can live without it, he almost said, but instead focused on what he had now. He moved in to kiss her and she responded with the same hunger he felt. Her tongue sliding with his, tasting and nipping until he almost regretted having started something he could not finish.
He pulled back, gasping “I need to have you again.”
She nodded frantically, going in for another kiss. “I can’t disappear on my mom tonight,” she said regretfully. “But maybe tomorrow,” she promised and a sound of pure pleasure rumbled in his chest.
“I would like that.” He was about to go in for another kiss, to show her just how much he wanted her, when his phone went off. It was the ringtone he’d set for friends and family—which now were only a precious few. For it to be a call and not just a text meant it had to be urgent.
He pressed a soft kiss to her jaw and pulled back regretfully. “I’m sorry, I have to take this.”
She nodded in understanding as she fixed her top. “We should stop anyway, my mother is already going to ask me a thousand questions, and I don’t need to walk out there looking like you just had your way with me.”
“Which I did,” he teased, inciting a glare from her. A smile tugged at his lips as he tapped to accept a call from...Jimena?
“What’s up?” he asked into the phone as Esmeralda gestured she was going back outside to rejoin her mother and aunts. She had barely closed the door behind her when Jimena launched into a frantic story about Carmelina.
“Slow down. I don’t understand a single thing you’re saying.”
“Sorry,” she said, sucking in a breath as if she’d just come up from being underwater. “I’m just freaking out.”
He sighed, heart already galloping in his chest from whatever she was about to tell him. Jimena was the single most coolheaded person he knew. Hearing her admit she was freaking out surely meant something really bad was happening.
“Tell me.”
“I just got an interesting call from one of my friends who works in the legal counsel office at Global Networks. Word is that Carmelina and her kids have a meeting with Burt Deringer tomorrow.”
Rodrigo’s hackles went up at the mention of the CEO of the company that had made a previous aggressive attempt to buy Sambrano. He knew Carmelina was callous, but selling out to Deringer was downright evil.
“She’s selling him her shares,” Jimena said, ominously. Damn the woman and her unstoppable greed. “Apparently Onyx and Perla’s, too.” He felt the surge of anger rise in him like a fireball. Deringer’s previous bid to buy Sambrano was six years earlier, right after Rodrigo had taken over as chief content officer. The money they’d offered had been excessive, but when they presented their plans for the network, Patricio had backed out. They’d intended to gut the programming and take out all cultural nuance. They had no interest in preserving Sambrano’s brand, they just wanted to own everything they could. And now, barely a year after her husband’s death, Carmelina was looking to sell out to the absolute last people Patricio would have wanted in control. “How could she do this?”
“Because she’s a money-hungry witch?”
“No, it’s more than that. She’d rather see this place in ruins than let Esmeralda be the face of Sambrano. She hasn’t wasted the chance to remind Esmeralda of that in the past few days. I really thought even if only to save face, she wouldn’t sink to this, but I was wrong.” He shook his head as he paced the small space between Esme’s bed and her desk. The warm and easy feeling from just minutes earlier now transformed into sick dread.
Jimena sighed again, tongue clicking. “I can’t believe Perla’s going for this.”
