“Name your price, Miss Bennett,” Cayo suggested, his voice like smoke and sin.

It was no wonder at all that so many hapless rivals went all wide-eyed and entranced and gave him whatever it was he wanted almost the very moment he demanded it. He was like some kind of corporate snake charmer.

But she wasn’t one of his snakes, and she refused to dance to his tune—no matter how seductive. She’d been dancing for far too long, and this was where it ended. It had to. It would.

“I have no price,” she said with perfect honesty. Once—yesterday—he could have smiled at her and she’d have found a way to storm heaven for him. But that had been yesterday. Today she could only marvel, if that was the word, at how naïve and gullible she’d been. At how well he’d played her.

“Everyone has a price.”

And in his world, she knew, that was always true. Always. One more reason she wanted to escape it. Him.

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

Recent titles by the same author:

THE MAN BEHIND THE SCARS

(The Santina Crown)

IN DEFIANCE OF DUTY

HEIRESS BEHIND THE HEADLINES

PRINCESS FROM THE PAST

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

A Devil

in Disguise

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Michelle Tadros Eidson for a few high finance

clues, Jane Porter for two key backstory points that

changed everything, and to Jeff Johnson for being the

perfect husband to a crazed writer on deadline. Again.

“OF course you are not resigning your position,” Cayo Vila said impatiently, not even glancing up from the wide expanse of his granite-and-steel desk. The desk loomed in front of a glorious floor-to-ceiling view over a gleaming wet stretch of the City of London, not that he had ever been observed enjoying it. The working theory was that he simply liked knowing that it was widely desired by others, that this pleased him more than the view itself. That was what Cayo Vila loved above all else, after all: owning things others coveted.

It gave Drusilla Bennett tremendous satisfaction that she would no longer be one of them.

He made a low, scoffing sound. “Don’t be dramatic.”

Dru forced herself to smile at the man who had dominated every aspect of her life, waking and sleeping and everything in between, for the past five years. Night and day. Across all time zones and into every little corner of the globe where his vast empire extended. She’d been at his beck and call around the clock as his personal assistant, dealing with anything and everything he needed dealt with, from a variety of his personal needs to the vagaries of his wide-ranging business concerns.

And she hated him. Oh, how she hated him. She did.

It surged in her, thick and hot and black and deep, making her skin seem to shimmer over her bones with the force of it. It was hard to imagine, now, knowing the truth, that she’d harbored softer feelings for this man for so long—but it didn’t matter, she told herself sternly. It was all gone now. Of course it was. He’d seen to that, hadn’t he?

She felt a fierce rush of that hard sort of grief that had flooded her at the strangest times in these odd few months since her twin brother Dominic had died. Life, she had come to understand all too keenly, was intense and often far too complicated to bear, but she’d soldiered on anyway. What choice was there? She’d been the only one left to handle Dominic’s disease—his addictions. His care. His mountain of medical bills, the last of which she’d finally paid in full this week. And she’d been the only one left to sort through the complexities of his death, his cremation, his sad end. That had been hard. It still was.

But this? This was simple. This was the end of her treating herself as the person who mattered least in her life. Dru was doing her best to ignore the swirling sense of humiliation that went along with what she’d discovered in the files this morning. She assured herself that she would have resigned anyway, eventually, soon—that finding out what Cayo had done was only a secondary reason to leave his employ.

“This is my notice,” she said calmly, in that serene and unflappable professional voice that was second nature to her—and that she resolved she would never again utilize the moment she stepped out of this office building and walked away from this man. She would cast aside the necessarily icy exterior that had seen her through these years, that had protected her from herself as well as from him. She would be as chaotic and emotional and yes, dramatic as she wished, whenever she wished. She would be flappable unto her very bones. She could already feel that shell she’d wrapped around her for so long begin to crack. “Effective immediately.”

Slowly, incredulously, a kind of menace and that disconcerting pulse of power that was uniquely his emanating from him like a new kind of electricity, Cayo Vila, much-celebrated founder and CEO of the Vila Group and its impressive collection of hotels, airlines, businesses and whatever else took his fancy, richer than all manner of sins and a hundred times as ruthless, raised his head.

Dru caught her breath. His jet-black brows were low over the dark gold heat of his eyes. That fierce, uncompromising face made almost brutally sensual by his remarkable mouth that any number of pneumatic celebutantes swooned over daily was drawn into a thunderous expression that boded only ill. The shock of his full attention, the hit of it, that all these years of proximity had failed to temper or dissipate, ricocheted through her, as always.

She hated that most of all. Her damnable weakness.

The air seemed to sizzle, making the vast expanse of his office, all cold contemporary lines and sweeping glass that seemed to invite the English weather inside, seem small and tight around her.

“I beg your pardon?”

She could hear the lilt of Spanish flavor behind his words, hinting at his past and betraying the volatile temper he usually kept under tight control. Dru restrained a small ripple of sensation, very near a shiver, that snaked along her spine. They called him the Spanish Satan for a reason. She would like to call him far worse.

“You heard me.” The bravado felt good. Almost cleansing.

He shook his head, dismissing her. “I don’t have time for this,” he said. “Whatever this is. Send me an email outlining your concerns and—”

“You do,” she interrupted him. They both paused; perhaps both noting the fact that she had never dared interrupt him before. She smiled coolly at him as if she were unaware of his amazement at her temerity. “You do have time,” she assured him. “I cleared this quarter-hour on your schedule especially.”

A very tense moment passed much too slowly between them then, and he did not appear to so much as blink. And she felt the force of that attention, as if his gaze were a gas fire, burning hot and wild and charring her where she stood.

“Is this your version of a negotiation, Miss Bennett?” His tone was as cool as hers, his midnight amber gaze far hotter. “Have I neglected your performance review this year? Have you taken it upon yourself to demand more money? Better benefits?”

His voice was curt, clipped. That edge of sardonic displeasure with something darker, smokier, beneath. Behind her professional armor, Dru felt something catch. As if he could sense it, he smiled.

“This is not a negotiation and I do not want a raise or anything else,” she said, matter-of-factly, wishing that after all this time, and what she now knew he’d done, she was immune to him and the wild pounding of her heart that particular smile elicited. “I don’t even want a reference. This conversation is merely a courtesy.”

“If you imagine that you will be taking my secrets to any one of my competitors,” he said in a casual, conversational tone that Dru knew him far too well to believe, “you should understand that if you try, I will dedicate my life to destroying you. In and out of the courts. Believe this, if nothing else.”

“I love nothing more than a good threat,” she replied in the same tone, though she doubted very much that it made his stomach knot in reaction. “But it’s quite unnecessary. I have no interest in the corporate world.”

His mouth moved into something too cynical to be another smile.

“Name your price, Miss Bennett,” he suggested, his voice like smoke and sin, and it was no wonder at all that so many hapless rivals went over all wide-eyed and entranced and gave him whatever it was he wanted almost the very moment he demanded it. He was like some kind of corporate snake charmer.

But she wasn’t one of his snakes, and she refused to dance to his tune, no matter how seductive. She’d been dancing for far too long, and this was where it ended. It had to. It would.

“I have no price,” she said with perfect honesty. Once—yesterday—he could have smiled at her and she’d have found a way to storm heaven for him. But that was yesterday. Today she could only marvel, if that was the word, at how naive and gullible she’d been. At how well he’d played her.

“Everyone has a price.” And in his world, she knew, this was always true. Always. One more reason she wanted to escape it. Him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Vila,” she said. She even shrugged. “I don’t.”

Not anymore. Dominic was gone. She was no longer his sole support. And the invisible chains of emotion and longing that had ruled her for so long could no longer keep her here. Not now she’d discovered, entirely by accident, what Cayo truly thought of her.

He only watched her now, those dark amber eyes moving over her like the touch of his hands, all fire and demand. She knew what he saw. She had crafted her corporate image specifically to appeal to his particular tastes, to acquiesce, as ever, to his preferences. She stood tall before his scrutiny, resisting the urge to fuss with her pencil skirt or the silk blouse she wore, both in the muted colors he preferred. She knew the deceptively simple twist that held her dark brown hair up was elegant, perfect. There was no bold jewelry that he might find “distracting.” Her cosmetics were carefully applied, as always, to keep her looking fresh and neat and as if she hardly needed any at all, as if she simply possessed a perfect skin tone, attractively shaded lips and bright eyes without effort. She had become so good at playing this role, at being precisely what he wanted. She’d done it for so long. She could do it in her sleep. She had.

Dru could see the precise moment he realized that she was serious, that this wasn’t merely a bargaining tactic she was trotting out as some kind of strategic attempt to get something from him. That she meant what she was saying, however impossible he found it to fathom. The impatience faded from his clever gaze and turned to something far more calculating—almost brooding. He lounged back against his massive, deliberately intimidating chair, propped his jaw on his hand, and treated her to the full force of that brilliant, impossible focus of his that made him such a devastating opponent. No was never a final answer, not to Cayo Vila. It was where he began. Where he came alive.

And where she got off, this time. For good. She couldn’t help the little flare of satisfaction she got from knowing that she would be the one thing he couldn’t mogul his way into winning. Not anymore. Not ever again.

“What is this?” he asked quietly, sounding perfectly reasonable, having obviously concluded that he could manipulate her better with a show of interest in what she might be feeling than the sort of offensive strategy he might otherwise employ. “Are you unhappy?”

What a preposterous question. Dru let out a short laugh that clearly hit him the wrong way. In truth, she’d known it would. His eyes narrowed, seeming almost to glow with the temper that would show only there, she was well aware. He so rarely unleashed the full force of it. It normally only lurked, beneath everything, like a dark promise no one wanted him to keep.

“Of course I’m unhappy,” she replied, keeping herself from rolling her eyes by the barest remaining shred of her once iron control. “I have no personal life. I have no life at all, in point of fact, and haven’t for five years. I manage yours instead.”

“For which you are extraordinarily well paid,” he pointed out. With bite.

“I know you won’t believe me,” she said, almost pityingly, which made his eyes narrow even further, “and you will certainly never discover this on your own, God knows, but there is more to life than money.”

Again, that shrewd amber stare.

“Is this about a man?” he asked in a voice she might have called something like disgruntled had it belonged to someone else. She laughed again, and told herself she couldn’t hear the edge in it, that he should hit so close to a bitter truth she had no intention of acknowledging.

“When do you imagine I would have the time to meet men?” she asked. “In between assignments and business trips? While busy sending farewell gifts to all of your ex-lovers?”

“Ah,” he said, in a tone that put her back right up, so condescending was it. “I understand now.” His smile then was both patronizing and razor-sharp. Dru felt it drag across her, clawing deep. “I suggest you take a week’s holiday, Miss Bennett. Perhaps two. Find a beach and some warm bodies. Drink something potent and scratch the itch. As many times as necessary. You are of no use to me at all in this state.”

“That is a charming idea,” Dru said, something dark and destructive churning inside her, through lips that felt pale with rage, “and I appreciate the offer, naturally. But I am not you, Mr. Vila.” She let everything she felt about him—all these years of longing and sacrifice, all the things she’d thought and hoped, all the foolish dreams she’d had no idea he’d crushed in their infancy until today, even that one complicated and emotional night in Cadiz three years ago they never discussed and never would—burn through her as she stared at him. “I do not ‘scratch the itch’ with indiscriminate abandon, leaving masses in my wake, like some kind of oversexed Godzilla. I have standards.”

He blinked. He did not move a single other muscle and yet Dru had to order herself to stay in place, so powerfully did she feel the lash of his temper, the kick of those amber eyes as they bored into her.

“Are you unwell?” he asked with soft menace, only the granite set of his jaw and the deepening of his accent hinting at his mounting fury. But Dru knew him. She knew the danger signs when she saw them. “Or have you taken complete leave of your senses?”

“This is called honesty, Mr. Vila,” she replied with a crispness that completely belied the alarms ringing wildly inside her, screaming at her to run, to leave at once, to stop taunting him, for God’s sake, as if that would prod him into being who she’d imagined he was! “I understand that it’s not something you’re familiar with, particularly not from me. But that’s what happens when one is as carelessly domineering and impossible as you pride yourself on being. You are surrounded by an obsequious echo chamber of minions and acolytes, too afraid of you to speak the truth. I should know. I’ve been pretending to be one among them for years.”

He went terrifyingly still. She could feel his temper expand to fill the room, all but rattling the windows. She could see that lean, muscled body of his seem to hum with the effort she imagined it took him to keep from exploding along with it. His gaze locked on hers, dark and furious. Infinitely more lethal than she wanted to admit to herself.

Or maybe it was that she was simply too susceptible to him. Still. Always, something inside her whispered, making her despair of herself anew.

“I suggest you think very carefully about the next thing that comes out of your mouth,” he said in that deceptively measured way, the cruelty he was famous for rich in his voice then, casting his fierce face into iron. “You may otherwise live to regret it.”

This time, Dru’s laugh was real. If, she could admit to herself, a little bit nervous.

“That’s what you don’t understand,” she said, grief and satisfaction and too many other things stampeding through her, making her feel wild and dangerously close to a certain kind of fierce, possibly unhinged joy. That she was defying him? That she was actually getting to him, for once? She had no idea anymore. “I don’t care. I’m essentially bulletproof. What are you going to do? Sack me? Blacklist me? Refuse me a reference? Go right ahead. I’ve already quit.”

And then, at long last, fulfilling the dream she’d cherished in one form or another since she’d taken this horribly all-consuming job in the first place purely to pay for Dominic’s assorted bills—because she couldn’t help but love her brother, despite everything and because she was all he’d had, and that had meant something to her even when she’d wished it didn’t—Dru turned her back on Cayo Vila, her own personal demon and the greatest bane of her existence, and walked out of his life forever.

Just as she’d originally planned she would someday.

There really should have been trumpets, at the very least. And certainly no trace of that hard sort of anguish that swam in her and made this much, much more difficult than it should have been.

She was almost to the far door of the outer office, where her desk sat as guardian of this most inner sanctum, when he snapped out her name. It was a stark command, and she had been too well trained to ignore it. She stopped, hating herself for obeying him, but it was only this last time, she told herself. What could it hurt?

When she looked over her shoulder, she felt a chill of surprise that he was so close behind her without her having heard him move, but she couldn’t think about that—it was that look on his face that struck her, all thunder and warning, and her heart began to pound, hard.

“If memory serves,” he said in a cool tone that was at complete odds with that dark savagery in his burnished gold gaze, “your contract states that you must give me two weeks following the tendering of your notice.”

It was Dru’s turn to blink. “You’re not serious.”

“I may be an ‘oversexed Godzilla,’ Miss Bennett …” He bit out each word like a bullet she shouldn’t have been able to feel, and yet it hurt—it hurt—and all the while the gold in his gaze seemed to sear into her, making her remember all the things she’d rather forget. “But that has yet to impede my ability to read a contract. Two weeks, which, if I am not mistaken, includes the investor dinner in Milan we’ve spent months planning.”

“Why would you want that?” Dru found she’d turned to face him without meaning to move, and her hands had become fists at her sides. “Are you that perverse?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t already found the answer to that from my ex-lovers, with whom you are so close, apparently,” he threw at her, his voice a sardonic lash. “Didn’t you spend all of those hours of your wasted life placating them?”

He folded his arms over his chest, and Dru found herself noticing, as always, the sheer, lean perfection of his athletic form. It was part of what made him so deadly. So dizzyingly unmanageable. Every inch of him was a finely honed weapon, and he was not averse to using whatever part of that weapon would best serve him. That was why, she understood, he was standing over her like this, intimidating her with the fact of his height, the breadth of his shoulders, the inexorable force and power of his relentless masculinity. Even in a bespoke suit which should have made him look like some kind of dandy, he looked capable of anything. There was that hint of wildness about him, that constant, underlying threat he wore proudly. Deliberately.

She didn’t want to see him as a man. She didn’t want to remember the heat of his hands against her skin, his mouth so demanding on hers. She would die before she gave him the satisfaction of seeing that he got to her now. Even if she still felt the burn of it, the searing fire.

“You know what they say,” she murmured, sounding almost entirely calm to her own ears. Almost blasé. “Those who sleep with someone for the money earn every penny.”

He didn’t appear to react to that at all, and yet she felt something hard and hot flare between them, almost making her step back, almost making her show him exactly how nervous he made her. But she was done with that. With him. She refused to cower before him. And she was finished with quiet obedience, too. Look what it had got her.

“Take the rest of the day off,” he suggested then, a certain hoarseness in his voice the only hint of the fury she couldn’t quite see but had no doubt was close to liquefying them both. And perhaps the whole of the office building they stood in as well, if not the entire City of London besides. “I suggest you do something to curb your newfound urge toward candid commentary. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Half-seven, as usual, Miss Bennett.”

And it was suddenly as if a new sun dawned, bathing Dru in a bright, impossible light. Everything became stark and clear. He loomed there, not three feet away from her, taking up too much space, dark and impossible and faintly terrifying even when quiet and watchful. And he would never stop. She understood that about him; she understood it the way she comprehended her own ability to breathe. His entire life was a testament to his inability to take no for an answer, to not accept what others told him if it wasn’t something he wanted to hear. He had never encountered a rule he didn’t break, a wall he couldn’t climb, a barrier he wouldn’t slap down simply because it dared to stand in his way.

He took. That was what he did. At the most basic level, that was who Cayo Vila was.

He’d taken from her and she hadn’t even known it until today, had she? Some part of her—even now—wished she’d never opened that file drawer, never discovered how easily he’d derailed her career three years ago without her ever the wiser. But she had.

She could see the whole rest of her life flash before her eyes in a sickening, infinitely depressing cascade of images. If she agreed to his two weeks, she might as well die on the spot. Right here, right now. Because he would take possession of her life the way he’d done of her last five years, and there would be no end to it. Ever. Dru knew perfectly well that she was the best personal assistant he’d ever had. That wasn’t any immodesty on her part—she’d had to be, because she’d needed the money he’d paid her and the cachet his name had afforded her when it came time to wrangle Dominic into the best drug-treatment clinics and programs in the States, for all the good it had done. And she still believed it had all been worth it, no matter how little she had to show for it now, no matter how empty and battered she felt. Dominic had not died alone, on a lonely street corner in some desperate city neighborhood, never to be identified or mourned or missed. That was what mattered.

But Dominic had only been the first, original reason. Her pathetic feelings for Cayo had been the second—and far more appalling—reason she’d made herself so indispensible to Cayo. She’d taken pride in her ability to serve him so well. It left a bitter taste in her mouth today, but it was true. She was that much of a masochist, and she’d have to live with that. If she stayed even one day more, any chance she had left to reclaim her life, to do something for herself, to live, to crawl out of this terrible hole she’d lowered herself into all on her own, would disappear into the big black smoke-filled vortex that was Cayo Vila.

He would buy more things and sell others, make millions and destroy lives at a whim, hers included. And she would carry on catering to him, jumping to do his bidding and smoothing the path before him, anticipating his every need and losing herself, bit by bit and inch by inch, until she was nothing more than a pleasant-looking, serene-voiced husk. A robot under his command. Slave to feelings he would never, could never return, despite small glimmers to the contrary in far-off cities on complicated evenings never spoken of aloud when they were done.

Worse, she would want to do all of it. She would want to be whatever she could be for him, just so long as she could stay near him. Just as she had since that night she’d seen such a different side of him in Cadiz. She would cling to anything, wouldn’t she? She would even pretend she didn’t know that he’d crushed her dreams of advancement with a single, brutal email. She was, she knew, exactly that pathetic. Exactly that stupid. Hadn’t she proved it every single day of these past three years?

“No,” she said.

It was, of course, a word he rarely heard.

His black brows lowered. His hard gold eyes shone with amazement. That impossibly lush mouth, the one that made his parade of lovers fantasize that there could be some softness to him, only to discover too late that it was no more than a mirage, flattened ominously.

“What do you mean, no?”

The lilt of his native Spanish cadence made the words sound almost musical, but Dru knew that the thicker his accent, the more trouble she was in—and the closer that volcanic temper of his was to eruption. She should have turned on her heel and run for safety. She should have heeded the knot in her belly and the heat that moved over her skin, the panic that flooded through her.

“I understand that you might not be familiar with the word,” she said, sounding perhaps more empowered, more sure of herself, than was wise. Or true. “It indicates dissent. Refusal. Both concepts you have difficulty with, I know. But that is, I am happy to say, no longer my problem.”

“It will become your problem,” he told her, a note she’d never heard before in his voice. His gaze narrowed further, into two outraged slits of gold, as if he’d never actually seen her until this moment. Something about that particular way he looked at her made her feel lightheaded. “I will—”

“Go ahead and take me to court,” she said, interrupting him again with a careless wave of her hand that, she could see, visibly infuriated him. “What do you think you’ll win?”

For the first time in as long as she’d known him, Cayo Vila was rendered speechless. The silence was taut and breathless between them, and, still, was somehow as loud as a siren. It seemed to hum. And he simply stared at her, thunderstruck, an expression she had never seen before on his ruthless face.

Good.

“Will you take my flat from me?” she continued, warming to the topic. Emboldened, perhaps, by his unprecedented silence. By the chaos inside of her that was all his fault. “It’s only a leased bedsit. You’re welcome to it. I’ll write you a check right now, if you like, for the entire contents of my current account. Is that what it will take?” She laughed, and could hear it bouncing back at her from the glass wall, the tidy expanse of her desk, even the polished floor that made even the outer office seem glossy and that much more intimidating to the unwary. “I’ve already given you five years. I’m not giving you two more weeks. I’m not giving you another second. I’d rather die.”

Cayo stared at his assistant as if he’d never seen her before.

There was something about the way she tilted that perfect, pretty oval of her face, the way her usually calm gray eyes sparkled with the force of her temper, and something about that mouth of hers. He couldn’t seem to look away from it.

Unbidden, a memory teased through his head, of her hand on his cheek, her gray eyes warm and something like affectionate, her lips—but no. There was no need to revisit that insanity. He’d worked much too hard to strike it from his consciousness. It was one regrettable evening in five smooth, issue-free years. Why think of it at all?

“I would rather die,” she said again, as if she was under the misapprehension that he had not heard her the first time.

“That can always be arranged,” he said, searching that face he knew so well and yet, apparently, so little—looking for some clue as to what had brought this on. Here, now, today. “Have you forgotten? I am a very formidable man.”

“If you are going to make threats, Mr. Vila,” she replied in that crisp way of hers, “at least pay me the compliment of making them credible. You are many things, but you are not a thug. As such.”

For the first time in longer than he could remember—since, perhaps, he had been the fatherless child whose mother, all the village had known too well, had been so disgraced that she had taken to the convent after his birth rather than face the wages of her sin in its ever-growing flesh—Cayo was at a loss. It might have amused him that it was his personal assistant who had wrought this level of incapacity in him, his glorified secretary for God’s sake, when nothing else had managed it. Not another multimillion-pound deal, not one more scandalous affair reported breathlessly and inaccurately in the tabloids, not one of his new and—dare he say it—visionary business enterprises. Nothing got beneath his skin. Nothing threw him off balance.

Only this woman. As she had once before.

It was funny. It was. He was certain he would laugh about it at some point, and at great length, but first? He needed her. Back in line where she belonged, back securely in the role he preferred her to play, and he ignored the small whisper inside him that suggested that there would be no repairing this. That she would never again be as comfortably invisible as she’d been before, that it was too late, that he’d been operating on borrowed time since the incident in Cadiz three years ago and this was only the delayed fallout—

“I am leaving,” she told him, meeting his gaze as if he were a naughty child in the midst of a tiresome strop, and enunciating each word as if she suspected he was too busy tantruming to hear her otherwise. “You will have to come to terms with that and if you feel it necessary to file suit against me, have at it. I booked a ticket to Bora Bora this morning. I’m sorted.”

And then, finally, his brain started working again. It was one thing for her to take herself off to wherever she lived in London, or even off on a week’s holiday to, say, Ibiza, as he’d suggested. But French Polynesia, a world away? Unacceptable.

Because he could not let her go. He refused. And he wanted to examine that as little as he had the last time he’d discovered that she wanted to leave him. Three years ago, only a week after that night in Cadiz he’d seen—and still saw—no point in dredging forth.

It wasn’t personal, of course, then or now; she was an asset. In many ways, the most valuable asset he had. She knew too much about him. Everything, in fact, from his inseam to his favorite breakfast to his preferred concierge service in all the major cities around the globe, to say nothing of the ins and outs of the way he handled his business affairs. He couldn’t imagine how long it would take to train up her replacement, and he had no intention of finding out. He would do as he always did—whatever was necessary to protect his assets. Whatever it took.

“I apologize for my behavior,” he said then, almost formally. He shifted his stance and thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers, rocking back on his heels in a manner he knew was the very opposite of aggressive. “You took me by surprise.” Her gray eyes narrowed suspiciously, and he wished that he had taken the time to learn how to read her as thoroughly as he knew she could read him. It put him at a disadvantage, another unfamiliar sensation.

“Of course I will not sue you,” he continued, forcing himself to keep an even, civil tone, and the rest of himself in check. “I was simply reacting badly, as anyone would. You are the best personal assistant I’ve ever had. Perhaps the best in all of London. I am quite sure you know this.”

“Well,” she said, dropping her gaze, which he found unaccountably fascinating. She said something almost under her breath then, something that sounded very much like that’s nothing to be proud of, is it?

Cayo wanted to pursue that, but didn’t. He had every intention of cracking her wide open and figuring out every last one of her mysteries until he was sure that none remained, that she could never take him by surprise again, but not now. Not here. Not until he’d dealt with this situation the only way he knew how.

Which was to dominate it and contain it and make it his, by whatever means necessary.

“As you must be aware, however,” he continued, “there will be a great number of papers to sign before you can leave the company. Confidentiality agreements being the least of it.” He checked the watch on his wrist with a quick snap of his arm. “It’s still early. We can leave immediately.”

“Leave?” she echoed, openly frowning now, which was when it occurred to him that he’d never seen her do that before—she was always so very serene, with only the odd flash in her eyes to hint at what went on in her head. He’d never wanted to know. But this was a full frown, brows drawn and that mouth of hers tight, and he was riveted. Why could he not tear his attention away from her mouth? The lines he’d never seen before, making the smooth expanse of her forehead more interesting somehow? It made him much too close to uncomfortable. As if she was a real person instead of merely his most prized possession, exhibiting brand-new traits. Worse, as if she was a woman.

But he didn’t want to think about that. He certainly didn’t want to remember the only other time he’d seen her as anything more than his assistant. He didn’t want this woman in his bed. Of course he didn’t. She was too clever, too good at what she did. He wanted her at his beck and call, at his side, where she belonged.

“My entire legal team is in Zurich,” he reminded her gently. “Surely you have not forgotten that already in your haste to leave?”

He watched her stiffen, and thought she would balk at the idea of a quick trip to Switzerland, but instead, she swallowed. Visibly. And then squared her shoulders as if a not-quite-two-hour trip on the private jet was akin to a trial by fire. One that she was reluctantly willing to suffer through, if it would rid her of him.

“Fine,” she said, with an impatient sort of sigh that he did not care for in the least. “If you want me to sign something, anything, I’ll sign it. Even in bloody Zurich, if you insist. I want this over with.”

And Cayo smiled, because he had her.

BY the time the helicopter touched down on the helipad on the foredeck of the gently moving luxury yacht, Dru had worked herself into what she could only call a state.

She climbed out of the sleek little machine only when she realized she had no other choice, that the pilot was shutting it down and preparing to stay on board the great yacht himself—and Dru did not fancy spending who knew how long sitting in a helicopter simply to prove a point. She was quite certain that Cayo would leave her there.

On some level, she was bitterly aware she really should have expected he’d pull a stunt like this. Unabashed abduction. Simply because he could.

So, in spite of the fact that she wanted to put whole worlds between them, she found herself following Cayo’s determined, athletic stride across the deck, too upset to really take in the sparkling blue sea on all sides and what she was afraid was the Croatian mainland in the distance. The sea air teased tendrils of her hair out of the twist that had been carefully calibrated to withstand the London drizzle, and she actually had a familiar moment of panic, out of habit, as if it should still matter to her what she looked like. As if she should still be concerned that he might find her professional appearance wanting in some way. It appalled her how deep it went in her, this knee-jerk need to please him. It was going to take her a whole lot longer to quit the Cayo Vila habit than she’d like.

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-anonymous 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 her 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.

He had the strangest feeling—he wouldn’t call it a premonition—that this woman might very well be the death of him. He shook it off, annoyed at himself and the kind of superstitious silliness he thought he’d left behind in his unhappy childhood.

“Why are you so concerned with the fate of ‘that poor girl’?” he asked, his voice dipping lower the more furious he became. “Do you even know her name?”

“Do you?” she threw back at him, even angling closer in outraged emphasis, as if she was seconds away from poking at him with something more than her words. “I’m sure I drew up the usual nondisclosure agreement whenever and wherever you picked her up—”

“Why do you care how I treat my women, Miss Bennett?” he asked icily. Dangerously. In a tone that should have silenced her for days.

“Why don’t you?” she countered, scowling at him, notably unsilenced.

And suddenly, he understood what was happening. It was all too obvious, and what concerned him was that he hadn’t seen this boiling in her, as it must have done for years. He hadn’t let a single meaningless night, deliberately ignored almost as soon as it had happened, haunt him or affect their working relationship. He’d thought she hadn’t, either.

“Perhaps,” he suggested in a tone that brooked no more of her nonsense, “when I asked you if there was a man and you denied it, you were not being entirely forthcoming, were you?”

For a moment she only stared back at him, blankly. Then she sucked in a breath as shocked, incredulous understanding flooded her gaze—followed by a sudden flare of awareness, hot and unmistakable. She jerked back. But he had already seen it.

“You are joking,” she breathed. She sounded horrified. Appalled. Perhaps a bit too horrified and appalled, come to that. “You actually think … You?”

“Me,” he agreed, all of that simmering fury shifting inside him, rolling over into something else, something he remembered all too well, despite his claims to the contrary. “You would hardly be the first secretary in history to have a bit of a sad crush on her boss, would you?” He inclined his head, feeling magnanimous. “And I will take responsibility for it, of course. I should not have let Cadiz happen. It was my fault. I allowed you to entertain … ideas.”

She seemed to pale before him, and despite himself, despite what he said and what he wanted, all he could think about was that long-ago night, the Spanish air soft around him as they’d walked back to their hotel from the bodega, the world pleasantly blurry and her arm around his waist as if he’d needed help. Support. And then her mouth beneath his, her tongue, her taste, far more intoxicating than the manzanilla he’d drunk in some kind of twisted tribute to the grandfather whose death that same day he’d refused to mourn. He’d kissed her instead. There’d been the wall. The sweet darkness. His hands against her curves, his mouth on her neck … All these years later, he could taste her still.

He’d been lying to himself. This was not just annoyance, anger, that moved in him, making him hard and ready, making his blood race through his veins. This was want.

“I would be more likely to have a ‘crush’ on the Grim Reaper,” she was saying furiously, her words tripping over each other as if she couldn’t say them fast enough. “That sounds infinitely preferable, in fact, scythe and all. And I was your personal assistant, not your secretary—”

“You’re whatever I say you are.” His tone was silken and vicious, as if that could banish the memory, or put it where it belonged. And her and this driving want of her with it. “Something you seem to have forgot completely today, along with your place.”

She sucked in a breath, and he saw it again—that flash of sizzling awareness, of sexual heat. Of memory. That light in her gray eyes that he’d seen once before and had not forgotten at all, much as he’d told himself he’d done. Much as he’d wanted to do.

More lies, he knew now, as his body hummed with the need to taste her. Possess her.

“I haven’t wasted a single second ‘entertaining ideas’ about your drunken boorishness in Cadiz,” she hissed at him, but her voice caught and he knew she was as much a liar as he was. “About one little kiss. Have you? Is that why you blocked me from that promotion? Some kind of jealousy?”

He wasn’t jealous, of course, it was a laughable idea—but he wanted that taste of her and he wanted her quiet, and there was only one way he could think of to achieve both of those things at once. He told himself it was strategy.

His heart pounded. He wanted his hands on her. He wanted.

Strategy, he thought again.

And he didn’t quite believe his own story, but he bent his head anyway, and kissed her.

It was as if the air between them simply burst into flame.

Or perhaps that was her.

This cannot be happening again—

But Dru had no time to think anything further. His mouth was on hers, his beautiful mouth, hard and cruel and impossible, and he closed the distance between them as ruthlessly as he did anything else. Just as he’d done years ago on a dark street, in the deep shadows of a Spanish night. One hand slid over her hip to the small of her back, hauling her against the wall of his chest, even as his lips took control of hers, demanding she let him in, insisting she kiss him back.

And, God help her, she did.

She dropped her other shoe, she lost her mind, and she did.

It was so hot. Finally, a small voice whispered, insistent and jubilant. He tasted of lust and command and she was dizzy, so dizzy, she forgot herself.

She forgot everything but the heat of that mouth, the way he angled his head to kiss her more deeply, the way his palm on the small of her back pressed into her and in turn pressed her into the hard granite expanse of his lean chest. Her breasts felt too full and almost sore as they flattened against him, into him, and everywhere they touched felt like a fever, and she was kissing him back because he tasted like sorcery and for one brief, searing, shocking moment she wanted nothing more than to lose herself in an incantation she could hardly understand.

But she wanted. She wanted almost more than she had ever wanted anything else, the inexorable pull of his mouth, his taste, him, roaring through her, altering her, changing everything—

He broke the kiss to mutter something harsh in Spanish, and reality slammed back into Dru. So hard she was distantly amazed her bones hadn’t shattered from the impact.

She shoved against his chest blindly, and was entirely too aware not only that he chose to let her go, but that it was as if her very blood sang out to stay exactly where she was, plastered against him, just as she’d done once before and to her own detriment.

She staggered back a foot, then another. She was breathing too hard, teetering on the edge of a terrible panic, and she was afraid it would take no more than the faintest brush of wind to toss her right over into its grip. She could see nothing through the haze that seemed to cover her vision but that hooded, dangerous, dark amber gaze of his and that mouth—that mouth—

She should know better. She did know better. She could feel hysteria swell in her, indistinguishable from the lump in her throat and the clamoring of her pulse. Her stomach twisted and for a terrifying moment she didn’t know if she was going to be sick or faint or some horrifying combination thereof.

But she sucked in another breath, and that particular crisis passed, somehow. He still only watched her. As if he knew exactly how hard her blood pumped through her body and where it seemed to pool. As if he knew exactly how much her breasts ached, and where they’d hardened. As if he knew how she burned for him, and always had.

Dru couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand here. So she turned on her bare heel, and bolted from the salon.

She picked up speed as she moved, aware as she began to run up the grand stairway toward the deck that she was breathing so heavily she might as well be sobbing. Maybe she was.

You little fool, some voice kept intoning in her head. You’re nothing but a latter-day Miss Havisham and twice as sad—

She blinked in the bright slap of sunshine when she burst out onto the deck, momentarily blinded. She looked over her shoulder when she could see and he was right there, as she knew he would be, lean and dark and those hot, demanding eyes that looked almost gold in the Adriatic sunshine.

“Where are you going?” He was taunting her, those wicked brows of his raised. That mouth—God, that mouth—”I thought you didn’t care about a little kiss?”

It’s the devil or the deep blue sea, she thought, aware that she was almost certainly hysterical now. But her heart was already broken. She couldn’t take anything more. She couldn’t survive this again. She wasn’t sure she’d survived it the first time, come to that.

Dru simply turned back around, took a running start toward the side of the yacht one story up from the sea, and jumped.

SHE had actually thrown herself off the side of the damned boat.

Cayo stood at the rail and scowled down at her as she surfaced in the water below and started swimming for the far-off shore, fighting to keep his temper under control. Fighting to shove all of that need and lust back where it belonged, shut down and locked away in the deepest recesses of his memory.

How had this happened? Again?

And yet he was all too aware there was no one to blame but himself. Which only made it worse.

“Is that Dru?” The voice that came from slightly behind him was shocked.

“‘Dru?’” Cayo echoed icily.

He didn’t want to know she had a casual nickname. He didn’t want to think of her as a person. He didn’t want this intoxicating taste of her in his mouth again, or this insane longing for her that stormed through him, making him so hard it bordered on the painful and, moreover, a stranger to himself. He didn’t want any of this. But that dark drum that he told himself was only temper beat ever hotter inside of him, making him a liar yet again.

“I mean Miss Bennett, of course,” the crew member beside him, the head steward if Cayo was not mistaken, all but stammered. “Forgive me, sir, but has she … fallen? Shouldn’t we go and help her?”

“That is an excellent question,” Cayo muttered.

He watched her for a long, tense moment, out there in the blue sweep of water, her strokes long and sure. He was very nearly forced to admire the willfulness and sheer bloody-mindedness she’d displayed today. Was still displaying, in fact. To say nothing of her grace and skill in the water, even fully dressed. He had to fight with himself to get his body under control, to force away the thick, near-liquid desire that still pumped through him and that thing in him that was far too alert now and would not have stopped at that kiss. Oh, no. That had been the sort of kiss that started scorching affairs, and had it not been Drusilla, he would not even have thought twice—he would have taken her there and then, on the floor of the salon if necessary.

And up against the wall. And down among the soft pillows in the seating area. And again and again, just to test all that shocking chemistry that had blown up around them—that he had told himself he’d forgotten entirely until it was all he could think of all over again. Just to see what they could make of it.

But it was Drusilla.

Cayo had always been a practical man. Deliberate and focused in all he did. He had never varied from the path he’d set himself; he’d never been tempted to try. Except for one unfortunate slip in Cadiz that night, and a repeat here on this yacht today.

That was two slips too many. And it was quite enough. He had to get himself back under control and stay there.

He watched as she flipped over to her back in the water, no doubt checking for any potential pursuit, and fought with that part of him that suggested he simply leave her there. She had already wasted too much of his time. His schedule had been packed full today, and he’d shoved it all aside so he could try to keep her from leaving. Why had he done any of this? And then kissed her?

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