It had been magical.
And then Cayo had swung her around, backing her up against the nearest wall. She’d seemed to explode into him, as if she’d been waiting for exactly that moment. He’d muttered words she didn’t understand and then his mouth had been on hers, as uncompromising as anything else he did. All of that fire, all of that need, had rolled through her like a tempest, and she’d lost herself. She’d lost her head. It had been slick and dizzy and terrifyingly right and she’d found herself wrapped around him, her legs around his hips as he pressed that marvelous body of his against hers, his mouth plundering hers, taking and taking and taking—
It kept her up at night. Still.
“There was no punishment.” Cayo’s low voice snapped Dru back into the present.
His clever eyes probed hers in the dark, as if he could see straight into her memory, as if he knew exactly what it did to her even at three years’ distance. As if he felt the same heat, the same longing.
As if he, too, wished they hadn’t been interrupted three years ago.
The laughing group of strangers further down the walkway had drawn near. He’d set her down on her feet, gently. Almost too gently. They’d stared at each other, both breathing hard, both dazed, before continuing on to their hotel, where they’d parted in the hall outside their rooms without a word.
And they’d never discussed it again.
“Then why...?”
He raked a hand through his hair. “I didn’t want you to leave,” he said, his voice gruff. “There was no hidden agenda. I told you, I don’t like to share.” He blew out a breath, and when he spoke again, it was with an edge. “You are an integral part of what I do. Surely you know it.”
She shook her head, unable to process that. The layers of it. What she knew he meant and, harder to bear, what she so desperately wanted him to mean instead. He was talking about work, she reminded herself fiercely, even as he looked at her with that fire in his dark amber eyes. He was always talking about work. For Cayo, there was nothing else. Why couldn’t she accept it?
It was too much. It hurt.
“What are you so afraid of?” she asked before she could think better of it. Before she could question whether she wanted to hear the answer. “Why can’t you just admit what you did?”
He scowled at her, and she thought he might snap something back at her, but he didn’t. For a moment he looked torn, almost tortured, however little sense that made. The city was so quiet around them, as if they were the only people alive in the world, and Dru found herself biting down on her lower lip as if that smallest hint of pain could keep her anchored—and keep her from saying the things she knew she shouldn’t.
This time, when he reached for her, he used the back of his hand and brushed it with aching gentleness over her cheek, soft and impossibly light, sending the hint of fire searing through her like the faintest kiss, until Dru’s next breath felt like a sob.
“You’re cold,” he said, again in that gruff voice. That stranger’s voice that nevertheless made her feel weak.
And she was chilly, it was true. She was trembling slightly. Uncontrollably.
If he wanted to think that was the cold, she wouldn’t argue.
“Get some sleep,” he ordered her, his eyes too dark, his mouth too grim.
And when he left her there, shaky and on the verge of more tears she hardly understood, her mind spinning as wildly as it had so long ago in Cadiz, it almost felt as if she’d dreamed it, after all.
Almost.
CHAPTER FIVE
CAYO WAS IN A FOUL temper. He sipped his espresso, as harsh and black as his current mood, and eyed Drusilla over the top of it when she appeared at breakfast the next morning.
He had spent what was left of the night chasing the ghosts of his past out of his head, and failing miserably. Now, in the bright morning light, the opulence of the suite’s great room like a halo all around her, Drusilla looked her usual, sleekly professional self—and he found it profoundly irritating. Gone was the woman he’d been unable to keep from touching on the terrace in the dark, her hair out of that ubiquitous twist she favored and so soft across her shoulder, wrapped up like a sweet-smelling gift in silk and soft cashmere. Gone as if she had been no more than a particularly haunting dream.
And still, he wanted her. Then. Now. In whatever incarnation she happened to present him with.
“We are going to Bora Bora,” Cayo announced without preamble. “Have the butler order you the appropriate wardrobe.”
He might have panicked, he thought with something like black humor, if he knew how. If he’d ever experienced something this confounding before. As it was, he only watched her walk toward him, and told himself that the pounding desire that poured through him was nothing more than resentment. Lack of sleep. Anything but what he knew it was.
She paused before dropping gracefully into the seat opposite him at the small table near the windows where he’d taken his breakfast, and he saw a host of emotions he couldn’t quite identify chase across her face in a single instant before she smoothed it out into her customary neutrality.
That annoyed him, too.
“Has something happened with the Vila Resort there which requires your personal attention?” she asked, her voice as calm and unruffled as the rest of her—as if last night she hadn’t sounded so uneven, so breakable. As if she hadn’t spoken to him the way she would to the architect of her despair. As if he hadn’t touched her like that, as though she were fragile. Precious, even.
What are you so afraid of? he heard her ask again, and it made something inside him seem to tear itself in half.
“It is a part of the Vila Group,” he replied, in a voice far short of civility. “It all requires my personal attention.”
Her too-knowing gray eyes met his, held for a moment, then dropped to the tablet she’d placed on the table before her. She smiled when the hovering staff placed a large silver pot of tea before her, and waved away the offer of food. And for some reason, her silence felt like a rebuke.
“We leave tonight,” he said, his tone still clipped, though markedly more polite than it had been. He didn’t know why he was responding meekly instead of as he’d prefer, which involved hauling her up and into his arms and dealing with all of this sexual tension once and for all. No matter what she thought of him—or what he thought of himself, for that matter. “Consider it my gift to you for your years of service, if you must.”
Something flared in her gaze again, then disappeared behind that smooth, calm wall of hers he found he liked less and less the longer he looked at it. He wondered if it was as hard for her to maintain that courteous, professional veneer as it was becoming for him to keep his hands off her.
He rather doubted it.
“Will this ‘gift’ count as part of my final two weeks?” she asked lightly, though when her gaze met his, it hinted of steel. “Because that’s all the time you have left, Mr. Vila. No matter what you choose to do with it.”
“You said it was where you wanted to go,” he reminded her, furious—at her for not accepting what he was reluctant to admit was an olive branch, and at himself for offering it in the first place. But something in the way she’d looked at him last night had burrowed deep beneath his skin. He could feel it now, like an impossible itch.
“Yes,” she agreed softly. “I want to go to Bora Bora.” She raised one delicate shoulder and then let it fall. “I never said I wanted to go with you.”
That sat there between them.
There was no reason at all, Cayo reasoned, that it should feel like a slap when he could see clearly that she was only being frank. He already knew what she thought of him. Hadn’t she been at such great pains to make sure of it? No matter how different it might have appeared in the dark last night? He shouldn’t be surprised, if that was what this odd feeling was
. He wasn’t.
“Life,” he said after a moment, his accent thicker than it should have been, almost as if his temper was high, which wasn’t in the least bit rational, “is all about compromise.”
“Really?” she asked. Her eyes searched his, and she looked somewhere between amused and genuinely baffled, which somehow made it worse. “How would you know?”
Cayo tossed back the rest of his espresso and decided he was tired, that was all. There was no deeper reason for any of this. How could there be? He hadn’t slept. That was why his head was so muddled. Why he could not seem to sort through his own thoughts, his own motivations. Nor even his own reactions.
“I am finding it difficult to track all of your accusations,” he said after a moment, his tone dry. Almost conversational. “You believe I am a sociopath, yet last night you told me I am also afraid. Today I am unfamiliar with compromise. Before, I was Godzilla, was I not?” He was fascinated by the color that rose in her cheeks, and then equally intrigued by the way she squared her shoulders, as if withstanding an attack. “I believe I take your meaning, Miss Bennett. I am a monster without equal.”
Monster. It was only a word, he told himself then, as it seemed to echo hard in him, recalling that whitewashed village high in the Spanish mountains, his grandfather’s harsh pleasure on his eighteenth birthday. It is just a word. It means nothing.
“You are a man who assumes that his will is sufficient permission to do anything he likes,” Drusilla said slowly, as if she were considering each word carefully. “There are no consequences for the things you do.” She reached for her tea, and poured a stream of the hot liquid into the delicate cup before her. Her gaze flicked to his, then away. “It would never occur to you to care.”
He wanted to touch her with a new kind of fury, so intense was his desire to feel her skin against his. To take that mouth of hers and learn it, own it, make it his. To follow her down onto the nearest flat surface and lose himself inside her, at last.
But he did nothing of the kind. He held on to his control by the faintest, thinnest thread. Again.
“Of course not,” he said coldly, as if there was nothing steaming up the air between them, as if there were no tension at all, no desire, no need. He reached for the Financial Times folded beside his plate and told himself he was dismissing her as he’d always done before, without thought. Without a single care, as accused. “That’s what I pay you for.”
* * *
It was a remarkably long trip.
I didn’t want you to leave, he’d said.
Dru couldn’t stop replaying it in her head, again and again. She handled the packing, the delivery of appropriate clothes for Cayo from the Milan ateliers he preferred and her own hurried selections from La Rinascente, the city’s premier department store hardly a stone’s throw from the Duomo. She sent out a flurry of emails, made the day’s series of phone calls, and carried out the usual duties of her job, accustomed as she was to performing it wherever she happened to find herself.
But she couldn’t seem to get last night out of her mind. The chill of the air, the inky dark and his hand so soft against her cheek. That storm in his midnight gaze that had crashed through her, too. That still did. Why should a few quiet words and a couple of touches affect her so? Why should she feel as if everything was different, when nothing seemed to have changed at all?
They boarded one of Cayo’s jets in Milan late that evening, and Dru made her way to her usual bedchamber. She stretched out on the bed and dared not let herself succumb to the turmoil inside herself, not when there was still the rest of her two weeks to live through. She couldn’t let herself crack so soon. She’d never survive.
When she woke hours later, they simply went to work as if they were in the Vila Group’s London headquarters rather than on a plane headed across the planet. She sat right there at his side in the area set apart for business. She queued up his calls, handling the many details of each, presenting him with the necessary documents and background materials he needed, and reminding him of anything he might have forgot or overlooked as the calls wore on. She prepped the various people who rang in, alerting them to Cayo’s shifting moods and often suggesting ways to combat them. Between calls, they discussed various strategies to employ or different approaches to take to tackle each new issue or person.
“I’m tired of his games,” Cayo said of one mutinous board member at one point, raking his hands through his hair in agitation. “I want to end him.”
“That’s one approach.” Dru removed a stack of documents from in front of him and replaced them with another, larger stack. “Another might be to simply work around him the way you did with the Argentina project last year. Isolate him. Who will he play his games with then?”
Cayo eyed her for a moment, an approving gleam in his dark gaze that should not have given her so much pleasure.
“Who indeed?” he asked softly.
Dru made sure his coffee was always hot and fixed to his taste, and insisted that he eat something substantial after a certain span of time, simply serving him a meal if he refused to step away from the work at hand. When his voice took on that particularly icy edge that boded only ill, she calmly suggested he repair to the master suite to either rest or work out his temper on the exercise equipment that flew with him everywhere. She was on top of their travel plans, too; making certain that there was not the smallest chance that Cayo Vila should find himself inconvenienced in any small way, no matter where he was in the world or what he had to do. All of which she’d done a million times before.
But it wasn’t the same.
Something really had changed last night, and it permeated even their most simple exchanges. The very air between them seemed electric, charged. Her hand brushed his and they both froze. She looked up from her tablet to find him watching her, a brooding sort of expression in those dark eyes of his, the gold in them gleaming in a way she didn’t recognize. But she felt it. In her breasts, deep in her belly. In her limbs that were too heavy today, her breath that she couldn’t quite catch.
It made her wonder. It made her too hot, too shivery, too aware. It made her want—again, anew—what she could never have.
Some seventeen hours into the almost twenty-four-hour trip, plus refueling stops, and they had worked roughly nine of them. Hardly half a day’s work in Cayo’s book, Dru knew. They took a break, sitting in the common area of the plane. Dru sipped at her water and knew better than to ask why Cayo was watching her with that new, disconcerting light in his eyes. Dark and considering, as if he had never seen her before. As if that strange, dream-like conversation on the terrace in Milan really had shifted something fundamental between them. That, she was sure, was why she felt almost watery, insubstantial. Needy and breathless. Unable to think about anything but Cayo, in all the ways she shouldn’t.
“Why Bora Bora?” he asked. “When I suggested you take a holiday, I assumed you’d go to Spain. Portugal, perhaps. This seems like something of a reach.”
Dru rolled the water bottle between her palms, letting the cold glass soothe her, letting the sound of the engines wash over her like white noise.
“Why not Bora Bora?” she asked lightly. “If working for you has taught me nothing else, it’s to demand the best in all things.”
“Indeed.” Some fire flared there, in that golden topaz gaze, and for a moment she couldn’t look away. Then his lips quirked into a hard sort of smile, sardonic and faintly amused. “I’m delighted to discover you take indolence as seriously as you take everything else.”
“Perhaps all I want from life is to sit under a palm tree and stare at the sea,” she said, though the very thought was faintly unnerving, somehow.
“And be waited upon hand and foot?” he asked, a note in his voice she couldn’t decipher.
She thought of Dominic’s ashes, packed away in the tin that functioned as an urn
and sat in the center of her bookshelf back in London. And of the promises she’d made, to him and to herself. That she would let him go into the wind, the water. The least she could do was honor the man he might have been, had he made different choices, or been stronger against his own demons. And she knew that she needed it, too. The closure. The ceremony. A way to let go, once and for all.
“Something like that,” she said now, not quite meeting Cayo’s eyes.
He didn’t believe her. She could see it in the way he shifted in his deep leather seat, as he scraped that thick, black hair back from his brow.
“How debaucherous.” It was a taunt. And it hit hard, though she should have been impervious to him.
“I leave that kind of thing to you, Mr. Vila,” she snapped.
Unwisely.
Everything seemed to pull taut. There was no air, no sound. Dru had the panicked sense that the plane had dropped from the sky—but no, Cayo did not move a muscle, it was only in her head. She felt her heart thud hard against her chest, then slow, and she could not seem to look away from him, from that hard mouth of his that she could not pretend she didn’t crave. From that dangerous light in his eyes as he stared back at her.
“Is that a challenge, Miss Bennett?” he asked softly, that voice rolling through her, turning all of that need into an ache, insistent and sweet, burning her from the inside out. His cruel mouth moved into a hard smile, and she felt it like a caress. “I will endeavor to live up to your fantasies.”
Did he know? Dru felt herself flush. Did he know what kept her awake—what tormented her, what she could see all too clearly even now—that delicious fusion of what had happened in Cadiz and on the yacht and what she imagined came next—
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