And he wanted her so badly it was painful.
“What do you want, Cayo?” she asked then, her voice soft, as if it really did hurt her. And he hated that, but there was no other way.
“I want you,” he said, gravely. Deliberately holding her gaze. “That hasn’t changed, Dru. I don’t believe it will.”
She held herself even tighter, while her cheeks paled and she bit down on her lower lip. And he wanted his hands on her. He wanted to bury his face in her hair and inhale the sweet fragrance of it. He wanted to hold her slender shoulders in his hands. He wanted to be what chased her pain away, not what caused it. But he had never known how to do such things. He’d never tried. He didn’t know how to start, and all she ever did was leave.
But she loved him. And that was like a bright light where there had never been anything but dark. It was everything.
“I meant what I said in your office,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have come back. I should have stayed gone. If you leave now, you’ll never see me again.”
“I believe you.” He kept himself from touching her, but barely. “But I’m not prepared to watch you martyr yourself. Not for me.”
* * *
Dru felt as if he’d kicked her.
“I’m no martyr,” she said in a low voice, her mind reeling.
“Are you certain?” His voice was like silk, danger and demand. And he didn’t back down so much as an inch. “I can almost see the flames dance around you as you burn yourself at the stake of your choosing.”
She couldn’t handle this. He was so much larger than life and standing in the middle of her tiny flat, taking it over, as if the space could not contain him. As if it groaned around him, near enough to bursting at the seams with the effort of holding the force of him within these walls. She couldn’t seem to make sense of it. Or breathe past the knot in her stomach.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, but she hardly sounded like herself.
He started toward her, backing her up against the cold windows on the far side of the room. It took all of three steps, and then the cold glass was at her back and Cayo was a wall in front of her, big and tempting and more dangerous to her than anything else in the world.
“What have you told yourself?” he asked in that smooth way that made her look around wildly for some escape route. “Have you cried over me, Dru? The man who cannot love you back? Have you forgotten I know you, too?”
“Are you mocking me?” She was incredulous. Not sure if that was anger or agony that surged inside of her, she focused on that fiercely cruel face of his and asked herself why she’d expected anything else. “Are you really that much of a monster, after all?”
His dark amber eyes glowed with something that was not quite malice—something that shivered through her and made her catch her breath. Temper. Fury. And that simmering, unquenchable desire that had ensnared them in this in the first place.
“How convenient for you,” he said, his voice no less deadly for all it was so soft, like a lover’s. “To find yourself someone else you can love so bravely, and from afar.”
His words slammed into her like blows. Dru heard herself make some kind of horrible squeaking sound, and thought her legs would give out. She staggered back against the windowsill, while Cayo only stood there, pitiless, and watched.
“You only love what can never love you back,” he told her in that same way, so calmly, as if he didn’t know how devastating it was. As if he couldn’t see what it was doing to her—or more likely, didn’t care. “You arrange your life around distant objects that you can circle but never approach. You thrive on it.”
“You...” She could hardly speak. She felt winded. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?” She saw the shadows in his eyes, the darkness that lurked there. “Do you love me, Dru? Or do you only think you do because you imagine there’s no danger I could ever return it? No chance you might risk yourself, not really. You get to pretend to suffer for your great love while remaining, as ever, completely and utterly alone. Hermetically sealed away. The perfect bloody martyr.” He paused, his eyes flashed, and his voice dropped. “Just as you did with your brother.”
She lifted a hand as if to stave him off, unable to keep herself from trembling, and sank down against the wall, her legs no longer capable of holding her upright. But he was relentless—he was ruthless down into his bones, and he squatted down before her, his coat flaring around him like a cape, his suit clinging to the hard muscles of his thighs. A perfect and pitiless god, rendering his terrible judgment.
“You,” he said, as if she had missed his point, “have no idea what love is.”
For what felt like a long time—whole ages, perhaps centuries—Dru could only stare at him, stricken, too deeply shaken even to weep. She felt cracked open, as if she yawned wide and he was the brash, bright light exposing all of her darkness to the air.
And it hurt so much and so deeply that she dimly suspected she hadn’t yet got to the real pain—that this was only the shock that preceded it.
“And you do?” she asked eventually. Belligerently, though her voice quaked.
Cayo’s eyes were brilliant. Dark and gold and molten fire, burning her alive. He reached over and took her hands in his, and she should have jerked away. But instead, she exulted in the feel of his skin against hers after all this time. It pumped through her like heat, as though her own blood betrayed her, as though there was no part of her that wasn’t his no matter what she told herself. Or told him.
“Let me tell you what I know,” he told her, his voice low, intense. Urgent. His accent was thick and melodic then, wrapping around her, caressing her. “I want you. I want you in ways that I don’t understand. I can live without you, but I don’t want to. I don’t see the point.”
“Cayo—”
“Callate,” he ordered her. He shifted back on his heels, dropping her hands though she still felt as if he touched her, as if he surrounded her. She folded her hands over what was left of his heat. “I tried. I let you go. You came back.” His fierce face looked almost harsh. Stark and serious. “You only love what you cannot have, and I have never been anything but a monster. I’ve never wanted to be anything but what I am.” His cruel mouth moved slightly, hinting at that curve. “Until now.”
Something swelled up in the space between them, precarious and new. Dru felt the tears trickle down her cheeks but made no move to wipe them away. She could only see Cayo. And like one of those hummingbirds that Dominic had inked into his skin, she felt something flutter up and hover, skittish and shy, like some kind of gift. Hope, she thought, and that great cavern inside her, that terrible emptiness that had eaten her alive for so long, began at last to shrink.
She didn’t want pain. She didn’t want that masochistic streak. She wanted him. She always had. And she was tired of hiding. It was time to stop. Past time.
This time she was the one who reached out. She sat forward and ran her hands along his severe jaw, then held his fierce, impossible face between her hands. She felt the heat of him moving through her, warming her from the inside out.
“If I am not a martyr,” she said, her voice small but strong, “and you are not a monster, then who do you suppose we are?”
“That’s the point,” he said, his hands coming up to cover hers, his gaze melting into hers, the world shifting all around them and the fire that always burned between them bright and hot and true. Making them something more than they were before. Soldering them together. Welding them, finally, into one. Not clay, but tempered steel. “I want to find out. With you.”
“I think we can do that,” she whispered, and then she tipped forward and kissed him, like a vow.
* * *
He found her sprawled out on one of the loungers on the private deck off the owner’s suite on
the great yacht, her lovely curves displayed to mouthwatering perfection in a wickedly simple bikini.
She smiled as he approached, but did not set aside her tablet until he lifted her bodily into the air and captured her mouth with his. He had not seen her in almost a full twenty-four hours and felt as desperate as if it had been years.
He set her to her feet carefully, enjoying the slide of her against him.
“What is it?” she asked, her clever eyes moving over his face.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a long, narrow white box and handed it to her. She looked up at him for a moment, then looked down and opened the box. She gasped. And Cayo tensed, not certain this had been the right thing to do.
Dru pulled the pendant into the air and stared at it, her eyes filling with tears.
“Hummingbirds...” she whispered. Two birds nestled together on the silver chain, in the bright and bold colors that could only be Murano glass. They sparkled in the golden sunlight, looking very nearly alive. And when she looked at him again, her eyes were wet, but she was smiling.
“You won’t forget him,” Cayo said, his voice rough. “And neither will I.”
She threw her arms around him and kissed him then. For a long time. Soft and sweet. Making both of them sigh.
It had been eight months now since that scene in her cramped Clapham bedsit. Eight months of Dru in his life, testing him and changing him, making him wonder how he’d lived without her for so long. He could no longer imagine any possible scenario that did not include this woman, who had somehow made him the man he’d never believed he could be. Flesh and blood. Alive. Not a monster, after all. Not as long as she loved him.
“When are you going to marry me?” he demanded when they were both breathless and she was boneless against him.
“When you deserve it,” she said, pulling away from him. She wiped at her eyes and then she looked at him as if she thought that eventuality was highly unlikely, and he laughed.
“Must I bribe you into it?” he asked. “You won’t take a house. Land. Atolls or islands.”
He waved a hand and she followed the gesture, looking out over the deep blue of the Aegean Sea toward the sunny, green little island that stretched there off the side of the yacht. Private and uninhabited. And his. She had insisted that he visit all of his properties or sell them, and so he had, leaving the minutiae of his affairs more and more in the capable hands of his fleet of vice presidents. Delegating. This Greek island, one of the Cyclades not far from Mykonos, was the last on the list. He found he liked it. And the process of exploring them all, with her.
“No,” she agreed. “I don’t want your property. But...”
“Yes?” She amused him. Fascinated him.
“Perhaps a company.” Her gray eyes gleamed as she fastened the pendant around her neck. The hummingbirds seemed to dance and shimmer against her skin. “Just a small one.”
“Why am I unsurprised that the life of leisure bores you?”
She only smiled. “You have that boutique advertising agency in New York, don’t you, that is currently in dire need of leadership?”
He was aware she knew full well that he did.
“What do you know about managing an advertising agency?” But his tone was indulgent and in any case, he had no doubt that this woman could do anything she chose to do, and well.
“I managed you for five years,” she said dryly. “I imagine a company filled with artistic Americans could only be a breeze in comparison. A bit of holiday, really.”
“I love you,” he said, because he did, and because he could think of nothing that pleased him more than the idea of her doing this with him. Building all of this with him. Making it their empire, not his. Making it matter. “You can run whatever you want, mi amor. But I will have to insist that you marry me.”
She only watched him, her gray eyes clear and sparkling, and he reached over to take her hands in his, pulling her to him. The sun spilled all over her, bathing her in light, and still she shone brighter.
“There is a little-known clause in all my contracts,” he said softly, pressing kisses to her cheek, to the freckles across her nose, to her sweet mouth. “All Vila Group subsidiaries must be run by a Vila. So you see how it is. My hands are tied.”
Dru laughed and threaded her arms around his neck.
“You know how I love a sacrifice,” she teased him. “I suppose it’s a good thing, then, that I love you enough to make such a huge one.”
“It is,” he said gruffly, but he smiled, and then kissed her again, sealing it.
And it would be, he thought. A very good thing, and they would spend their whole lives making it better. He had no doubts.
He was Cayo Vila. He didn’t take no for an answer, and he didn’t know how to fail.
* * * * *
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CHAPTER ONE
TODAY WAS HER wedding day. Alyse Barras gazed at her pale, pinched face in the mirror and decided that not all brides were radiant. As it happened, she looked as if she were on the way to the gallows.
No, she amended, not the gallows; a quick and brutal end was not to be hers, but rather a long, drawn-out life sentence: a loveless marriage to a man whom she barely knew, despite their six-year engagement. Yet even so a small kernel of hope was determined to take root in her heart, to unfurl and grow in the shallowest and poorest of soils.
Maybe he’ll learn to love me...
Prince Leo Diomedi of Maldinia seemed unlikely to learn anything of the sort, yet still she hoped. She had to.
‘Miss Barras? Are you ready?’
Alyse turned from her reflection to face one of the wedding coordinator’s assistants who stood in the doorway of the room she’d been given in the vast royal palace in Averne, Maldinia’s capital city, nestled in the foothills of the Alps.
‘As ready as I’ll ever be,’ she replied, trying to smile, but everything in her felt fragile, breakable, and the curve of her lips seemed as if it could crack her face. Split her apart.
The assistant Marina came forward, looking her over in the assessing and proprietary way Alyse had got used to in the three days since she’d arrived in Maldinia—or, really, the six years since she’d agreed to this engagement. She was a commodity to be bought, shaped, presented. An object of great value, to be sure, but still an object.
She’d learned to live with it, although on today of all days—her wedding day, the day most little girls dreamed about—she felt the falseness of her own role more, the sense that her life was simply something to be staged.
Marina twitched Alyse’s veil this way and that, until she gave a nod of satisfaction. It billowed gauzily over her shoulders, a gossamer web edged with three-hundred-year-old lace.
‘And now the dress,’ Marina said, and flicked her fingers to indicate that Alyse should turn around.
Alyse moved slowly in a circle as Marina examined the yards of white satin that billowed out behind her, the lace bodice that hugged her breasts
and hips and had taken eight top-secret fittings over the last six months. The dress had been the source of intense media speculation, the subject of hundreds of articles in tabloids, gossip magazines, even respected newspapers, television and radio interviews, celebrity and gossip blogs and websites.
What kind of dress would the world’s real-life Cinderella—not a very creative way of typecasting her, but it had stuck—wear to marry her very own prince, her one true love?
Well, this. And Alyse had had no say in it at all. It was a beautiful dress, she allowed as she caught a glance of the billowing white satin in the full-length mirror. She could hardly complain. She might have chosen something just like it—if she’d been given a choice.
Marina’s walkie-talkie crackled and she spoke into it in rapid Italian, too fast for Alyse to understand, even though she’d been learning Italian ever since she’d become engaged to Leo. It was the native language of his country, and Maldinia’s queen-in-waiting should be able to speak it. Unfortunately no one spoke slowly enough for her to be able to understand.
‘They’re ready.’ Marina twitched the dress just as she had the veil and then rummaged on the vanity table for some blusher. ‘You look a bit pale,’ she explained, and brushed Alyse’s cheeks with blusher even though the make-up artist had already spent an hour on her face.
‘Thank you,’ Alyse murmured. She wished her mother were here, but the royal protocol was—and always had been, according to Queen Sophia—that the bride prepare by herself. Alyse wondered whether that was true. Queen Sophia tended to insist on doing things the way they’d ‘always been done’ when really it was simply the way she wanted them done. And even though Alyse’s mother, Natalie, was Queen Sophia’s best friend from their days together at a Swiss boarding school, she clearly didn’t want Natalie getting in the way on this most important and august of occasions.
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