Not Just the Boss's Plaything

by Caitlin Crews

  Monster, he thought again, the word on a bitter loop in his head. She thinks you are a monster.

  He didn’t know why it mattered to him. Why it interfered with his rest. But here he was, scowling out at a sleeping city in the dead of night.

  He couldn’t stop running through the events of the past days in his head, and he hardly recognized himself in his own recollections. Where was his famous control, which made titans of industry cower before him? Where was the cool head that had always guided him so unerringly and that had caused more than one competitor to accuse him of being more machine than man? Why did he care so much about one assistant’s resignation that he’d turned into...this creature who roared and threatened, and abducted her across the whole of Europe?

  It was just as his grandfather had predicted so long ago, he thought, the long-forgotten memory surfacing against his will, still filled with all of the misery and pain of his youth. He moved to the edge of the terrace and stood there, unmindful of the wet air, the cold, the city spread out before him. And then he found himself thrust back in time and into the place in the world he liked the very least: his home. Or more precisely, the place he’d been born, and had left eighteen years later. For good.

  The entire village had predicted he would come to nothing. He was born of sin and made of shame, they’d sneered, as often to his face as behind his back. Look at his mother! Look how she’d turned out! A whore abandoned and forced to spend the rest of her days locked away in a convent as penance. No one would have been at all surprised if his own life had followed the same path. No one would have thought twice if he’d ended up as disgraced and shunned as she had been before she’d disappeared behind the convent walls.

  No one had expected Cayo Vila to be anything more than the stain he already was on his family’s name.

  In fact, that was all they expected of him. That was, the whole of the small village and his grandfather agreed, his destiny. His fate. That was what became of children like him, made in disgrace and summarily discarded by both his parents.

  And yet, despite this, he had tried so hard. His lips curled now, remembering those empty, fruitless years. He’d wanted so badly to belong, since he’d first understood, as a small boy, that he did not. He’d obeyed his grandfather in all things. He’d excelled at school. He’d worked tirelessly in the family’s small cobbler’s shop, and he’d never complained, while other boys his age played fútbol and roamed about, carefree. He’d never fought with those who threw slurs and insults his way—at least, he’d never been caught. He’d tried his best to prove with his every breath and word and deed that he was not deserving of the scorn and contempt that had been his birthright. He’d tried to show that he was blameless. That he belonged to the village, to his family, despite how he’d come to be there.

  He’d really believed he could sway them. That old current of frustration moved through him then, as if it still had the power to hurt him. It didn’t, he told himself. Of course it didn’t. That would require a heart, for one thing, and he had done without his for more than twenty years. Deliberately.

  “I have done my duty,” his grandfather had said to him on the morning of his eighteenth birthday, almost before Cayo had been fully awake. As if he’d been unable to wait any longer, so great was the burden he’d carried all these years. “But you are now a man, and you must bear the weight of your mother’s shame on your own.”

  Cayo remembered the look on his grandfather’s stern face, so much like his own, the light in the dark eyes as they met his. It had been the first time in his life he’d ever seen the old man look anything close to happy.

  “But, abuelo—” he had begun, thinking he could argue his case.

  “You are not my grandson,” the old man had said, that terrible note of finality in his voice. His grizzled old chin had risen with some kind of awful pride. “I have done what I must for you, and now I wash my hands of it. Never call me abuelo again.”

  And Cayo never had. Not when he’d made his first million. Not when he’d bought every piece of property in that godforsaken village, every house and every field, every shop and every building, by the time he was twenty-seven. Not even when he’d stood over the old man’s bed in the hospital, and watched impassively as the man who had raised him—if that was what it could be called—breathed his last.

  There had been no reconciliation. There had been no hint of regret, no last-moment reversals before death had come to claim the old man three years ago. Cayo had been thirty-three then, and a millionaire several times over. He had owned more things than he could count. A small Spanish village tucked away in the hills of Andalusia hardly registered.

  He had not seen himself as any kind of stain on the village’s heralded white walls as he’d been driven through the streets in the back of a Lexus, and he very much doubted that any of the villagers mistook him for one. They’d hardly dare, would they, given that he’d held their lives and livelihoods in his hand. He had not seen himself as having anything to do with the place, with the Cadiz province, Andalusia, or even Spain itself, for that matter. He had hardly been able to recall that he had ever lived there, much less felt anything at all for the small-minded people who had so disdained him—and were now compelled to call him landlord.

  “Not you!” his grandfather had wheezed, surfacing from his final illness only briefly, only once, to stare at Cayo in horror. It had been some fifteen years. “Ay dios mio!”

  “Me,” Cayo had confirmed coldly, standing at the foot of the hospital bed.

  The old man had crossed himself, his hands knotted with arthritis, frail and shaking. Cayo had been unmoved.

  “The devil is in you,” this man who shared his blood had croaked out, his voice a faint thread of sound in the quiet room. “It has always been in you.”

  “My apologies,” Cayo had said. His voice had been dry. Almost careless. What could such a small, shriveled husk of a man do to him now? It had seemed almost like a dream that he had ever had the power to hurt Cayo. Much less that he had succeeded. “I was your duty then, and it seems I am now your curse.”

  As if he’d agreed entirely, the old man had not spoken another word. He’d only crossed himself again, and had soon thereafter slipped away.

  And Cayo had felt absolutely nothing.

  He hadn’t let himself feel much of anything since he’d walked out of that village on his eighteenth birthday. On that day, he’d looked back. He’d mourned what he’d believed he’d lost. He’d felt. Betrayed. Discarded. All the many things a weak man—a boy—felt. And when he’d finally pulled himself together and accepted the fact that he was alone, that he’d never been anything but alone and never would be again, he’d brushed himself off and shut down the pathetic part of him that still clung to all those counterproductive feelings. He’d left his heart in the hill town of his youth, and he’d never had cause to regret that. Or, for that matter, notice its lack.

  So he had felt nothing when he’d walked into the hall where Drusilla had waited, her expression carefully neutral as befitted a personal assistant well paid to have no reaction at all to anything in her boss’s life. He’d felt nothing on the long drive back to his hotel in Cadiz City, down from the mountains with their Moorish villages and out toward the Costa de la Luz, like a trip through his own memories. He’d felt nothing throughout the rest of that long night, though the manzanilla had first loosened his tongue and then, later, had him kissing Drusilla against a wall in a narrow walkway in the old city, lifting her high against him so her legs wrapped around his hips, drowning himself in the honeyed heat of her mouth, her kiss.

  Nothing at all.

  Her lips had enchanted him, full and slick against his. And that lithe body, those sensual curves, the spellbinding slide of her against him. He was hard again, remembering it, as if he was still on that dark city street three years ago instead of in a chilly Milan night, here, now.
And that treacherous heart he’d thought he’d trained to know better beat out a rhythm that made him question things he shouldn’t. Made him want so hard, so deep, it began to feel more like need. He bit out a blistering Spanish curse that had no discernible effect at all, and rubbed his hands over his face.

  Whatever this was, whatever terrible madness that was taking him over against his will and beyond his control, it had to stop.

  Madre de Dios, but it had to.

  * * *

  Dru shivered as the cold air hit her, pulling her wrap tighter around her and wishing she’d dressed for bed in something more substantial than the champagne-colored silk pajamas the presidential suite’s dedicated butler had produced along with the outfit she’d worn at the dinner. She’d been trying to sleep for hours. She’d been lying in her bedroom, glowering at all its opulence as if the gold-and-cream Empire-style chairs or gilt-edged scarlet chaise were to blame for her predicament.

  Why had she given in to him? Why had she agreed to work through the two weeks he’d demanded? It had been two days since she’d backed down and she still couldn’t answer herself. Not satisfactorily. Not in any way that didn’t make her hate herself more. Finally, she’d given up, and decided to take in some fresh air.

  Outside, the night was damp. The overcast sky made the darkness feel fuller, somehow, while the city lights twinkled softly all around. It was beautiful. Like everything Cayo touched, everything he did. Like Cayo himself. And as cold.

  She’d stayed because it was the quickest, easiest solution, or so she’d spent the past two days telling herself. Escape from Cayo meant subjecting herself to this and really, what was two more weeks? It had been five years. Two weeks would fly by, and that would be the end of it. Done and dusted.

  The problem was, she knew better. On some level, she was relieved. As if this was a reprieve. As if Cayo might come to his senses and redeem himself—

  She despaired of herself and this faith she had in him, so desperately misplaced. She truly did. How could she trust herself to be strong enough to walk away from him again when it had been so hard the first time? What made her think she could really do it in two weeks’ time when she’d failed so spectacularly now?

  “If you throw yourself from a height like this, I think you’ll find the Piazza della Repubblica will provide somewhat less of a cushion than the Adriatic,” he said from the shadows, making Dru jump. She clapped her hands to her chest as if she could force her heart to stop its panicked clamoring, whirling around to gape at him as he bore down upon her. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, and so on.”

  He looked dark and brooding, and, as if to taunt her, distractingly, impossibly sexy. He wore a luxurious-looking navy silk robe he hadn’t bothered to pull closed over the sort of male underclothes that clung black and tight to acres of his taut thighs, making him look like a heart-stopping combination of an underwear model and a king. Dru’s mouth went dry. It was one thing when he swanned about in his five-thousand-pound suits. It was another when he wore what passed for casual attire, all of which seemed to emphasize his athleticism, his masculine grace. But this... This was something else.

  This was a fantasy come to life. Her fantasy, in fact. Suddenly, she was acutely aware that she was hardly dressed, that the silk pajamas caressed her skin with every breath, that she felt more naked than if she’d actually been unclothed, somehow. She felt heat wash over her, then spread, the flush of it rolling all through her body, like his touch.

  And it didn’t matter how angry she was at him, how foolish she felt or how betrayed. In the middle of the night, on a terrace in Italy, Dru was forced to admit the fact that she had never truly got a handle on just how devastatingly attractive Cayo was, or how much it had always affected her. Even before that night in Cadiz City.

  “I didn’t know you were out here,” she said, and she could hear it in her voice, that slight quaver that gave her away. That all but shouted the things she didn’t want to admit to herself and certainly didn’t want him to know. How she melted for him, even now. How she ached in all the places she wished he would touch her with those capable hands, that difficult, addicting mouth. Her lips, her breasts. And that hunger between her thighs.

  It was as if the dark, or the late hour, made it impossible to lie to herself any longer.

  He tilted his head very slightly to the side as he drew close, studying her face. He’d been even colder and more distant than usual at dinner, prompting Dru to truly question her sanity and self-respect when she’d found herself worrying about him. What did that say about her, that even now, abducted and threatened and coerced, she took time out from her righteous indignation to worry about the man who’d done all of those things? To her?

  Nothing good, she knew. Nothing healthy. No wonder she couldn’t sleep.

  “Here we are again in the dark,” he said, a curious note in that deep voice of his. His face was even fiercer in the shadows, hardly lit up at all by the light spilling out from within, but still the dark amber of his eyes seemed to sear into her.

  She didn’t know what he meant. She felt his words resonate in her, and the exquisite ache that followed in their wake made her despair of ever really leaving this man, ever really surviving him.

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you, Mr. Vila.” But her voice was a jagged rasp of sound, and it gave her away. It told him everything, she was sure of it. Angry, exhausted tears flooded her eyes, shaming her as much as they infuriated her. She blinked them back, glad for the excuse to look away from him.

  He reached over and touched her, his hand hard and warm on her upper arm. Dru froze; afraid, suddenly, to meet his gaze. Afraid he would see all of the confusion and attraction and hurt she so desperately wanted to hide. Instead, she pretended to be vastly interested in her hair, of all things, in the ponytail she’d pulled it into and then drawn to the side and over her shoulder. She ran her hands over it, nervously. But he only moved his hand to wrap his fingers around the length of it himself, pulling gently on the silken length, tilting her head up to face him before letting go.

  Something sharp and near enough to sweet pierced through her then, taking her breath. Maybe this was only a dream. Maybe this was nothing but another one of those Cayo dreams she’d wake from in such a panic in her tiny bedsit, gasping out loud while her body ached, alone and frustrated and wild with so much emotion she could never release.

  But she knew better.

  “Tell me,” he said, his voice low and still so powerful, filling her up, making her resolve and determination feel far too flimsy, far too malleable. Making her wish she could simply be angry with him, and stay that way. “Why do you really want to leave me?”

  He didn’t throw it at her. He asked. That and the damp night surrounding them made it different, somehow. Made her look at him as if here, in the deepest part of the night, he might be close enough to the man she’d believed him to be that she could actually tell him a part of the truth.

  But she blinked again, and the heat in her eyes reminded her who he really was.

  “Why are you so determined I should stay?” she asked quietly. “You think so little of me. You believe I am good for nothing but a position as your assistant forever.”

  His hard mouth moved, though it was not a smile. “There are those who would kill for that privilege.”

  He was so close, the sheer masculine poetry of his beautiful torso right there and seemingly impervious to the chill, and it was astonishingly hard for Dru to keep her attention where it belonged.

  And the fact that she still couldn’t control her response to him—that it was as powerful now as it had been all along, as it had been three years ago—made her shiver, as if her body could no longer pretend it was unaffected. How else would she destroy herself, she wondered then in a kind of anguish, before this was done? How else would she sacrifice what mattered to her, her ve
ry self, on the altar of this man?

  “I assume it was a punishment?” She searched his face, her heart plummeting as she saw what she always saw and nothing more. That implacable ruthlessness of his, that fierce beauty. As unreachable as the stars above her, concealed tonight by the clouds.

  He frowned. “Why would I punish you?”

  She felt her brows rise in disbelief. “Cadiz. Of course.”

  He made an impatient noise.

  “Surely we have enough to discuss without beckoning in every last ghost,” he said, but there was that odd note in his voice again. As if he did not believe himself, either.

  “Just the one ghost.” Her eyes never left his. “It was one little kiss, didn’t we agree? And yet you punished me for it.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “You punished me,” she repeated, firmly, despite the scratchiness she could hear in her voice. “And you were the one who started it.”

  He had done more than start it. He had ignited them both, set them afire. He’d had his arm thrown around her, and she’d been pleasantly full of tortitas de camarones and calamares en su tinta, Spanish sherry, and the heady knowledge that after the two years she’d been working for him, Cayo had finally shown her that there was more to him than his ruthless demands, his take-no-prisoners style of doing business. She’d smelled the hint of his expensive scent, like leather and spice, felt the incredible, hard heat that emanated from his skin beneath his clothes, and the combination had made her light-headed. She’d felt for him, and that heartbreaking scene with his grandfather. She’d ached for what he’d been through, what it had done to him. He’d talked to her that night, really talked to her, as if they were both simply people. As if there was more to them than the roles they played, the duties they performed.