And the fact that he had spirited her away to the wrong country didn’t help.
“You do realize this is kidnapping, don’t you?” she demanded. Not for the first time. The difference was that this time, Cayo actually stopped and looked at her, turning his dark head slowly so that his hard gaze made every hair on her body prickle to attention. She sucked in a breath.
“What on earth are you talking about?” he asked silkily. At his most dangerous, but she couldn’t let that intimidate her. She wouldn’t. “Nobody forced you to come on this trip. There was no gun to your back. You agreed.”
“This is not Switzerland,” she pointed out, trying to keep her rising panic at bay. “It doesn’t even resemble Switzerland. The sea is a dead giveaway and unless I am very much mistaken, that is Dubrovnik.”
She stabbed a finger in the general direction of the red-roofed, whitewashed city that clung to the rugged coastline off the side of the yacht, and the walls and fortress that encircled it so protectively. The blue waters of the Adriatic—because she knew where she was, she didn’t need him to confirm it so much as explain it—were as gorgeous and inviting as ever. She wanted to throw him overboard and watch those same waters consume him, inch by aggravating inch. Only the fact that he was so much bigger than she—and all of it sleek and smooth muscle she did not trust herself near enough to touch—prevented her trying. And only barely prevented her, at that.
He didn’t glance toward the shore. Why should he? He had undoubtedly known where they were going the moment he’d mentioned Zurich back in London. He’d certainly known when they’d landed in a mysterious airfield somewhere in Europe and he’d hurried her onto the helicopter before she could get her bearings. This was only a surprise for her.
“Did I say Switzerland?” he asked, that voice of his deceptively soft and all the more lethal for it, while his gaze remained hard. “You must have misheard me.”
“Exactly what is your plan?’ she threw at him, temper and fear and something else she couldn’t quite identify sloshing around inside her, making her feel like a bomb about to detonate. “Am I your prisoner now?”
“How theatrical you are,” he said, and she had the impression that he was choosing his words carefully. That much harsher words lurked behind that quiet tone that she knew meant he was furious. “How did you manage to hide that so long and so well?”
“You must have mistaken me for someone else,” Dru hurled at him. “I’m not going to mindlessly obey your commands—”
“Are you certain?” That black gold gaze of his turned darker, harder as he cut her off. It made her feel oddly hollow, and much too hot. She assured herself it was anger, nothing more. “If memory serves, obedience is one of your strengths.”
“Obedience was my job,” she said with some remnant of her former iciness. “But I quit.”
He looked at her for a long, simmering moment.
“Your resignation has not been accepted, Miss Bennett,” he snapped out, fierce and commanding. As if she should not dare mention the matter again. And then he turned his back on her and strode off across the gleaming, sun-kissed deck as if it was settled.
Dru stood where he’d left her, feeling a little bit silly and more than a little off balance in her smart office clothes and delicate heels that were completely inappropriate for a boat. She stepped out of her stilettos and scooped them up in her hand, trying to breathe in the crisp sea air. Trying to curl her now-bare toes against the cool deck as if that might ground her.
Trying to breathe.
She moved over to the polished rail and leaned her elbows against it, frowning at the rolling waves, the gorgeously craggy coastline beckoning in the distance, rich dark greens and weathered reds basking in the sun. She felt it all twist and shift inside her then, all of the struggle and agony, the sacrifice and frustrated yearning. The grief. The hope. The brutal truth some part of her wished she’d never learned. It all seemed to swell within her as if it might crack her open and rip her apart—as if, having finally opened the door to all the things she’d repressed all this time, the lies she’d told herself, she couldn’t lock it back up. She couldn’t pretend any longer.
Misery rose inside her, thick and black and suffocating. And fast. And for a moment, she could do nothing but let it claim her. There was so much she couldn’t change, couldn’t help. She couldn’t go back in time and keep her father from dying when she and Dominic had still been toddlers. She couldn’t keep her mother from her string of lovers, each more vicious and abusive than the last. She couldn’t keep sweet, sensitive Dominic from choosing oblivion, and then courting it, his life and his drugs getting harder every year, until it was no more than a waiting game for his inevitable and tragic end.
The long, hard breath she took felt ragged. Too close to painful.
And she was free of those obligations now, it was true, but she was also irrevocably and impossibly alone. She hardly remembered her father and her mother hadn’t acknowledged her existence in years. She’d built her life around handling Dominic’s disease, and with him gone, there was nothing but … emptiness. She would fill it, she promised herself. She would build a life based finally on what she wanted, not as some kind of response to people and things that were forever out of her control. Not a life in opposition to her mother’s choices. Not a life contingent on Dominic’s problems. A life that was only hers, whatever that looked like.
All she had to do was escape Cayo Vila first.
Another fresh wave of pain crashed through her then, just as hard to fight off. Sharper, somehow. Wrenching and dark. Cayo. Three years ago she’d thought she’d seen something in him, some glimmer of humanity, an indication that he was so much more than the man he pretended to be in public. And she’d taken that night, some intimate conversation and a single, ill-conceived, far too passionate kiss, and built herself a whole imaginary world of possibility. Oh, the ways she’d wanted him, the ways she’d believed in him—and all the while he’d thought so very little of her that he’d blocked her chances for another position in the Vila Group and, in so doing, any kind of independent career. Without a word to her. Without any conversation at all.
With three careless sentences.
Miss Bennett is an assistant, he’d emailed Human Resources not long after that night she’d so foolishly believed had changed everything between them. She’d applied for the job in marketing, thinking it was high time she spread her wings in the company, took charge of her own career rather than merely supported his. She is certainly no vice president. Look elsewhere.
He hadn’t hidden the fact he’d done it, either. Why should he have? It was right there in Dru’s file, had she ever bothered to look. She hadn’t, until today, while doing a bit of housecleaning about the office. She’d been so sure everything was different after Cadiz, if unspoken, unaddressed. She hadn’t minded that she hadn’t got that job; she’d thought she and Cayo had an understanding—she’d believed they were a team—
So help her, she thought now, forcing back the angry, humiliated tears she was determined not to cry, she would never again be so foolish.
She’d known exactly who he was when he’d hired her, and she knew exactly who he was now. She’d spend the rest of her life working out how she’d managed to lose sight of that for so long, how she’d betrayed herself so completely for a fantasy life in her head, built around a single kiss that still made her flush hot to recall, but she wouldn’t forget herself again. It was cold comfort, perhaps, but it was all she had.
She found him in one of the yacht’s many salons, a sleek celebration of marble and glass down an ostentatious spiral stair that was as gloriously luxe as everything else on this floating castle he’d won in a late-night card game from a Russian oligarch.
“It was easy to take,” he’d said with a small shrug when she’d asked why he’d wanted another yacht to add to his collection. “So I took it.”
He sat now in the sunken seating area with one of his interchangeable and well-nigh-ano
nymous companions melting all over him, all plumped-up breasts and sheaves of wheat-blond hair cascading here and there. He had discarded his jacket somewhere and now looked deliciously rumpled, white shirt open at the collar and his olive skin seeming to gleam. The girl pouted and whined something in what sounded like Czech when she saw Dru walk in, as if it was Dru’s presence that was keeping Cayo’s attention on the flat-screen television on the inner wall rather than on the assets she had on display. As if, were Dru not there, he might actually pay her some mind.
You are fast approaching your expiration date, Dru seethed uncharitably at the other woman, but then caught herself. This was not a cat fight. It wasn’t even a competition.
Dru had spent entirely too long telling herself that it was all perfectly fine with her, that she didn’t mind at all that this man who had kissed her with so much heat and longing in an ancient city, and who had looked at her as if she were the only person in the world who could ever matter to him, slaked his various lusts with all of these anonymous women. Why should it matter? she’d argued with herself a thousand times in the middle of the night while she lay alone and he was off tending to his companion du jour. What we have is so much deeper than sex …
It was all so desperate. So delusional and terribly, gut-wrenchingly pathetic.
She held a shoe in each hand now, like potential weapons, and she allowed herself a grim moment of amusement as she watched Cayo’s ever-calculating gaze move to the sharp stiletto heels immediately, as if he joined her in imagining her sinking them deep into his jugular. He smirked and returned his attention to the television and the almighty scroll of the New York Stock Exchange across the bottom of the screen, as if he’d assessed the threat that quickly and dismissed it that easily.
And her. Again. As ever.
“Have you finished having your little fit?” he asked. She felt her heart race, that same anger—at him and, worse, at herself—shaking through her, making her very nearly tremble.
“I want to know what you think is going to happen now that you’ve stranded me on this boat,” Dru replied, biting the words out. “Will you simply keep me imprisoned here forever? That seems impractical, at the very least. Boats eventually dock, and I can swim.”
“I suggest you take a deep breath, Miss Bennett,” he said in that obnoxiously patronizing tone, not even bothering to glance at her again, his entire lean body insulting in its disinterest. “You are becoming hysterical.”
It was too much, finally. She didn’t even think.
She cocked one arm back in a moment of searing, possibly insane, mind-numbing rage and threw a shoe.
At his head.
It sliced through the air, the wicked heel seeming almost to glow, and she pictured it spearing him directly between the mocking, impossible eyes—
But then he reached up and snatched it out of its flight at the last moment, his hand too large and masculine against the delicate point of the heel.
When he looked at her then, his dark golden stare burned with outrage. And something else—something that seemed to echo in her, hard and loud. Anticipation? The shared memory of an old street, that explosive kiss? But no, that was impossible. Nothing more than her desperate fantasies in action yet again.
Dru panted slightly, as if that had been her in vicious flight. As if he now held her like that, captured against his hard palm. That same current of wild, hot heat that she wished was simple fury seemed to coil within her and then pulse low, the way it always did when he was near.
“Next time,” she told him from between her teeth, her other hand clenching her remaining shoe, heel first, “I won’t miss.”
Once again, she’d surprised him. And he liked it as little as he had in London.
Her gray gaze was alert and intent and he didn’t like all the things he could see in it, none of which he understood or wanted to try to understand. He didn’t like the faint flush on her cheeks, or the way she looked with her feet bare and her hair something other than perfect for the first time in as long as he’d known her. Sexy.
He had to jerk his gaze from hers and when he did, he found himself looking down at the vicious little stiletto she’d flung at his throat. It was a weapon, certainly, but it was also one of those delicate, wickedly feminine shoes that he did not want to think about in reference to his personal assistant. He did not want to imagine her slipping the sleek little shoe on over those elegant feet of hers that he’d never noticed before, or think about what the saucy height of the heel would do to her hips as she walked—
Damn her.
Cayo rose to his feet slowly, not taking his eyes from hers.
“What am I going to do with you?” he asked, impatient with her defiance. And equally impatient with his own failure to end this distracting and disruptive situation that was already well out of hand. But those errant strands of silky dark hair teased at the curve of her lips, her chin, and he could not seem to look away.
“You have had a number of options of things to do with me over the years,” she pointed out, in something less than her usual crisp tone. As if she was boiling over with fury, which he should not find as compelling as he did. “You could have let me move to a different position in your company, for example. You could have let me go today. You opted to kidnap me instead.”
Abruptly, Cayo remembered that they were not alone. He dismissed the clingy blonde with a careless wave of his hand and ignored the sulky expression that followed it. The woman huffed and muttered as she exited the salon, irritating him far more than she should have. Could not one female in his usually carefully controlled existence do as he wished today? Must everything be a trial?
He tossed Drusilla’s stiletto down on the seat where the blonde had been, and wondered why he was even having this conversation in the first place. Why was he encouraging Drusilla further by allowing her to speak to him in that decidedly disrespectful tone?
And why on earth did he have the wholly uncharacteristic urge to explain the reasons he’d shot down her bid for that promotion three years ago? What was the matter with him? The last time he’d defended or justified his behavior was … never.
“I don’t share my things,” he said then, coolly, purely to put her in her place. She stiffened, and then what could only be hurt washed through her gray eyes. And for the first time in years, Cayo felt the faintest hint of something that might have been shame move through him. He ignored it.
“I’d ask you what kind of man you are to say something so deliberately insulting and borderline sociopathic, but please.” Drusilla sniffed, her eyes still wounded, which he hated more than he should have. “We both already know exactly what kind of man you are, don’t we?”
“The papers call me a force of nature,” he replied, his voice light if cold, and it was a reminder. The last one he planned to give her. He was not a man who suffered insubordination, and yet he’d been tolerating hers for hours, up to and including an attempted attack on his person. Had she been a man, he would have responded in kind.
Basta ya! he thought, impatiently. Enough was enough.
He found himself moving toward her, tracking the nervous swallow she took as he came closer, as if she was neither as disgusted nor as impassive as she appeared. That same, seductive memory rolled over then inside him, and shook itself awake. Dangerously awake.
She shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other, reminding him as she did so that she was, in fact, a woman. Not a perfect robot built only to serve his needs as any good assistant should. That she was made of smooth, soft flesh and that her legs were perfectly formed beneath that sleek skirt. That she was not the ice sculpture of his imagination, nor a shadow. And that he’d tasted her heat himself.
He didn’t like that, either. But he let his gaze fall over her anyway, noting as if for the first time that her trim figure boasted lush curves in all the right places, had he only let himself pay closer attention to them. Something about her disheveled hair, the temper in her gaze, the complete lack of h
er usual calm expression was getting under his skin. His heart began to beat in a rhythm that boded only ill, and made him think of things he knew he shouldn’t. Those sleek legs wrapped around his waist as he held her against a wall in the old city. That mouth of hers hot and wet beneath his. That cool competence of hers he’d depended upon all these years, melting all around him …
Unacceptable. There was a reason he never let himself think of that night, damn it. Damn her.
“Calling you a force of nature rather takes away from your responsibility, doesn’t it?” she asked, as if she didn’t notice or care that he was bearing down on her, though he saw her fingers tighten around the shoe she still clutched in one hand. “You’re not a deadly hurricane or an earthquake, Mr. Vila. You’re an insulated, selfish man with too much money and too few social skills.”
“I believe I preferred you the way you were before,” he observed then, his voice like a blade, though she didn’t flinch.
“Subservient?”
“Quiet.”
Her lips crooked into something much too cold to be a smile. “If you don’t wish to hear my voice or my opinions, you need only let me go,” she reminded him. “You are so good at dismissing people, aren’t you? Didn’t I watch you do it to that poor girl not five minutes ago?”
He took advantage of his superior height and leaned over her, putting his face entirely too close to hers. He could smell the faintest hint of something sweet—soap or perfume, he couldn’t tell. But desire curled through him, kicking up flames. He remembered burying his face in her neck, and the need to do it again, now, howled through him, shocking in its intensity. And he didn’t know if he admired her or wanted to throttle her when she didn’t move so much as an inch. When she showed no regard at all for her own safety. When, instead, she all but bristled in further defiance.
A Devil in Disguise Page 3