Not Just the Boss's Plaything

by Caitlin Crews

  She looked like...herself. At last. Yet Cayo stared at her as if she were a ghost.

  “Is this another version of throwing yourself overboard, Miss Bennett?” he asked, his voice a lash across the quiet room. It made her heart leap into a wild gallop in her chest. “Another desperate bid for my attention?”

  “You are the one who wanted to talk, not me,” she replied, summoning a cold smile from somewhere though she didn’t feel cold at all. Not when she was near him. No matter what he did. “I would have been perfectly happy to remove myself from the glare of your attention. For good.”

  That muscle in his lean jaw moved, but nothing else did. He was like a stone carving of simmering rage.

  “What if I triple your salary?” His voice was cold and yet grim, his dark eyes flat and considering. “Did you say you lived in a leased bedsit? I’ll buy you a flat. A penthouse, if you like. Pick the London neighborhood you prefer.”

  So much of her longed to do it. Who wouldn’t? He was offering her an entirely different life. A very, very good life, at the price of a job she’d always liked well enough, until today.

  But...then what? she asked herself. Wasn’t what he suggested really no more than a sterile form of prostitution, when all was said and done? Give herself over to him, and he would pay for it. And she would do it, she knew with a hollow, painful sort of certainty, not because it made financial sense, not because she stood to gain so much—but because she longed for him. Because he would be using her skills and she would be dreaming about one more night like the one in Cadiz. One more kiss like the one today. What would become of her after five more years of this? Ten? She’d put Miss Havisham to shame in her bought-and-paid-for London flat, tarting herself up every day in her corporate costume to better please him, his favorite little automaton....

  She could see it all too clearly and it made her feel sick. It would be easier if she could simply do it for the money, the way she had when this had started. But she was too far gone. At least, she thought now, she knew it. Surely that was something. A first step.

  “I don’t want to live in London,” she told him. She lifted a shoulder and then dropped it. She ignored the way her stomach twisted, and that howling, broken-hearted part of her that wanted him any way she could have him. Even now. Even like this. “I don’t want a flat.”

  “Where, then?” He raised a brow. “Are you angling for a house? An estate? A private island? I think I have all of the above.”

  “Indeed you do,” she replied. It was almost comforting to pull up all of that information she knew about him and his many and varied assets—until she remembered how deeply proud she’d always been that she so rarely had to consult the computer to access Cayo’s details. It was yet more evidence of how deeply pathetic she was. “You have sixteen residential properties, some of which are also estates. You also own three private islands, as well as a modest collection of atolls. That’s at last count. You do always seem to acquire more, don’t you?”

  Cayo leaned back against the wide desk that stretched across the center of the room as if it were a throne he expected to be worshipped upon and crossed his arms over his chest, and she couldn’t deny the intensity of that midnight stare. She felt it like fire, down to the bare soles of her feet. Her toes curled slightly in response, and she flexed her feet to stop it. And still he merely watched her, that gaze of his dark and stirring, and she had no idea what he saw.

  “Pick one.” It was a command.

  “You can’t buy me back,” she said, her own voice just as quiet as his. Just as deliberate. “I don’t want your money.”

  “Everyone has a price, Miss Bennett.” He rubbed at his jaw with one hand, a considering light in his unnerving eyes. “Especially those who claim they do not, I usually find.”

  “Yes,” she said, shifting in her chair as a kind of restlessness swirled through her. She wanted to fast forward through this, desperately. She wanted to be on the other side of it, when she’d already found the strength to defy him, had walked away and was living without him. She wanted this done already; she didn’t want to do it. “I know how you operate. But I have no family left to threaten or save. No outstanding debts you can leverage to your advantage. No deep, dark secrets you can threaten to expose or offer to hide more deeply. Nothing at all that can force me to take a job I don’t want, I’m afraid.”

  He only watched her in that way of his, as if it made no difference what she said to him. Because, she realized, it didn’t. Not to him. He was immoveable. A wall. And maybe he even enjoyed watching her batter herself against the sheer iron of his will. She wouldn’t put anything past him. Desperation coursed through her then, a hectic surge of electricity, and Dru couldn’t sit still any longer. She got to her feet and then eased away from him, as if by standing she’d ceded ground to him.

  “Miss Bennett,” he began in a voice she recognized. It was the voice he used to mollify his victims before he felled them with a killing blow. She knew it all too well. She’d heard it in a hundred board rooms. In a thousand conference calls.

  She couldn’t take it here, now. Aimed directly at her.

  “Just stop!” she heard herself cry out. There was an inexorable force moving through her, despair and desperation swelling large, and she couldn’t seem to do anything but obey it. She faced him again, her hands balling into fists while a scalding heat threatened the back of her eyes. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I told you,” he said impatiently, so cold and forbidding and annoyed while she fell into so many pieces before him. “You are the best personal assistant I’ve ever had. That is not a compliment. It is a statement of fact.”

  “That might be true,” she managed to say, fighting to keep the swirl of emotion inside her to herself. “But it doesn’t explain this.” When he shifted his weight as if he meant to argue, because of course he did, he always did, she threw up her hands as if she could hold him off. “You could replace me with fifteen perfect assistants, a fleet of them trained and ready to serve you within the hour. You could replace me with anyone in the entire world if you chose. There is absolutely no reason for any of this—not three years ago and not now!”

  “Apparently,” he said coldly, “your price is higher than most.”

  “It’s insane.” She shook her hair back from her face, ordered herself not to burst into tears. “You don’t need me.”

  “But I want you.” Harsh. Uncompromising.

  And not at all in the way she wanted him. That was perfectly plain.

  It was as if something burst inside of her.

  “You will never understand!” She stopped trying to hold herself back, to keep herself in check. What was the point? “There was someone I loved. Someone I lost. Years I can never get back.” She didn’t care that her voice was as shaky as it was loud, that her eyes were wet. She didn’t care what he might see when he looked at her, or worry that he might suspect she was talking about more than her brother. She had given herself permission to do this, hadn’t she? This was what flappable looked like. “There is no amount of money you can offer me that can fix the things that are broken. Nothing that can give me back what I lost—what was taken from me. Nothing.” Nor, worse, what she’d given him, fool that she was. She heaved a ragged breath and kept on. “I want to disappear into a world where Cayo Vila doesn’t matter, to me or anyone else.”

  She wanted that last bit most of all.

  And in a cutting bit of unwelcome self-awareness, she accepted the sad truth of things. He didn’t have to offer her flats or estates or islands. He didn’t have to throw his money at her.

  If he’d said he wanted her and meant, for once, that he wanted her...

  If, even now, he’d pulled her close and told her that he simply couldn’t imagine his life without her...

  There was that little masochist within, Dru knew all too well, who would work f
or him for free, if only he wanted her like that.

  But Cayo didn’t want anyone like that. Especially not her. She could tell herself he was incapable of it, that he’d never known love and never would—but that was no more than a pretty gloss on the same ugly truth. She understood all of that.

  And still, she yearned for him.

  “You have made your point,” he said, after a strained moment.

  “Then, please. Let me go.” It was harder to choke out than it should have been. She hated herself for that, too.

  For a moment she thought he might, and her stomach dropped. Disbelief, she lied to herself.

  There was that odd light in his fascinating eyes—but then his face seemed to shutter itself and darken, and he straightened to his full height, the better to look down at her. And she reminded herself that this was Cayo Vila, and he let nothing go. He never bent. He never compromised. He simply kept on going until he won.

  She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t seem to breathe.

  “You owe me two weeks,” he said, as if he were rendering a prison sentence. “I intend to have them. You can do your job for those two weeks and fulfill your contractual obligations to me, or I’ll simply keep you with me like a dog on a leash, purely out of spite.”

  But he didn’t look spiteful. He looked something far closer to sad, and it made her stomach twist. Again. And that terrible longing swelled again inside her, making her ache. Making her wish—but her wishes were dangerous, and they tore her into tatters every time. She shoved them aside.

  Cayo smiled, as if from far away, hard and wintry.

  “Your choice, Miss Bennett.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HE SHOULD HAVE been happy—or at the very least, satisfied.

  Cayo lounged back against his chair and gazed around the white-linen-draped table that stretched the length of the formal dining room in the Presidential Suite of the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan, surveying the small dinner he’d had Drusilla throw here in one of Europe’s most prestigious spaces. The rooms of the vast suite gave the impression of belonging to royalty perhaps, so stunning were they, all high ceilings, carefully selected antiques and the finest Italian craftsmanship on display at every turn. Wealth and elegance seemed to shimmer up from the very floors to dance in the air around them.

  The investors were duly impressed, as expected. They smoked cigars and let out loud belly laughs over the remains of the last of the seven courses they’d enjoyed. Their pleasure seemed to ricochet off the paneled mahogany walls and gleam forth from the impressive Murano glass chandeliers that hung above them, in resplendent reds and blues, and would no doubt be reflected in the size of their investments, as planned. This would be another success, Cayo knew without the smallest doubt. More money, more power for the Vila Group.

  And yet all he could seem to concentrate on tonight was Drusilla.

  “Fine,” she had thrown at him on the yacht, those gray eyes of hers both furious and something far darker, her mouth very nearly trembling in a way that had made him feel restless. Unsettled. “I’m not going to play this game with you any longer. If you want your two weeks, you’ll have them—but that’s the end of it.”

  “Two weeks as my assistant or my pet,” he’d reiterated. “I don’t care which.”

  She’d laughed, and it was a hollow sound. “I hate you.”

  “That bores me,” he’d replied, his gaze hard on hers. “And furthermore, makes you but one among a great many.”

  “By that you mean, I imagine, the entire world?” she’d sniped at him. Her tone, the way she was standing there with her hands in fists—it had made him suspicious.

  “I’d suggest you think twice before you attempt to sabotage me in some passive-aggressive display in your last days with me, Miss Bennett,” he’d cautioned her, and the look she’d turned on him then should have flayed him alive. Perhaps it had. “You won’t like the result.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Vila,” she’d said, his name a low, dark curse, hitting him in ways he didn’t fully understand. “When I decide to sabotage you, there will be nothing in the least bit passive about it.”

  She’d stalked away from him that afternoon, and he hadn’t seen her again until the following morning, when she’d presented herself in his suite at breakfast, dressed in the perfectly unremarkable sort of professional clothes she usually wore. No skintight white jeans licking over her long legs to taunt him and remind him how they’d once clenched over his hips. No wild gypsy hair to shatter his concentration and invade his dreams. She’d sat herself in a chair with her tablet on her lap, and had asked him, as she’d done a thousand times before, with no particular inflection or agenda, if his plans for the day deviated from his written schedule.

  As if the previous day had never happened.

  If he didn’t know better, he thought now, watching her through narrowed eyes, he could almost imagine that nothing had changed between them at all. That she had never quit, that he had never forced her into giving him her contracted two weeks.

  That they had never kissed like that, nor let their tempers flare, revealing too many things he found he did not wish to think about, and too much heat besides.

  Almost.

  Tonight she looked as professional and cool as ever, with the prettiness he could no longer seem to ignore an enviable accent to her quiet competence. She wore a simple blue sheath dress with a tailored jacket that trumpeted her restrained and capable form of elegance, her trademark. She operated as his right hand in situations like this, his secret weapon, making it seem as if he was not giving a presentation designed to result in lavish investments so much as sharing a fascinating opportunity with would-be friends.

  She made him seem far more engaging and charming than he was, he’d concluded over the course of the long evening, and wondered how he’d never seen that quite so clearly before. She gave him that human touch that so many furious and defeated rivals claimed he lacked.

  He’d watched her do it tonight—lighting up the carefully selected group of ten investors with her attention, making them talk about themselves, letting them each feel interesting and important. Valued. She hung on their words, anticipated their questions, soothed them and laughed with them in turn, all of it in that cool, intelligent way of hers that seemed wholly authentic instead of cloying. They ate her up.

  And because of her, Cayo could simply be his ruthless, focused self, and no one felt overly intimidated or defensive.

  She sat at the far end of the lavishly appointed table now, her tablet in her hand as always, periodically tapping into it as she fielded questions and tended to the various needs of everyone around her. She made it look so easy. She was smooth and matter-of-fact, as if it was only natural that the French businessman should demand a Reiki massage at two in the morning and it delighted her to be able to contact the concierge on his behalf. She was his walking computer, his butler, and, if Cayo was honest, his true second-in-command. Smart, dependable, even trustworthy. He should have encouraged her to leave him three years ago when she’d wanted that promotion. She could have been running companies for him by now. She was that good.

  Which was, of course, why he’d been so loath to let her do it.

  Or one reason, anyway, he thought now, darkly impatient with himself. He idly fingered his wineglass as he half pretended to pay attention to the conversation that swelled around him. Not that anyone expected him to charm them, of course. Or even be particularly polite, for that matter. That was Drusilla’s job.

  She is magnificent, he thought, and ignored the sudden pang that followed as he considered how soon she would be gone. How soon he would have to think up a new approach, a new game to get what he wanted from investors like this without her deft touch, her quiet, almost invisible support.

  And how soon he would have to face this stubborn thing in him
he didn’t want to acknowledge: how little he wanted her to leave, and his growing suspicion that it was far less about business than he was comfortable admitting. Even to himself.

  “Trust me, Mr. Peck,” he heard her say to the self-satisfied gentleman on her left, heir to what remained of a steel fortune in one of those smaller, ugly-named American cities, making the man puff up as if she was sharing a great confidence, “this is the sort of meal that will change your life. Three Michelin stars, naturally. I’ve made you a reservation for tomorrow at nine.”

  She straightened then, and her gaze met his down the length of the table, with all of the investors and cigar smoke and concentrated wealth in between them. It was as if the rest of the room was plunged into darkness, as if it ceased to exist entirely, and there was nothing but Drusilla. Nothing but the searing impact of their connection. And he saw the truth on that pretty face of hers he could now read far too well. He felt it kick in him, as if she’d reached across the table, over the remnants of the feast they’d all shared and the money they’d won, and landed a vicious blow with the nearest blunt object. A hard one, directly into his solar plexus.

  She hated him. He hadn’t thought much of it when she’d said it, as so many people had said the same over the years that it was like so much white noise. But he was beginning to believe she actually meant it. And more, that she thought he was a monster.

  None of that was new. None of it was surprising. But this was: he knew full well he’d acted like one.

  He’d do well to remember that.

  * * *

  Much later that night, the investors were finally gone, off to their own debaucheries or beds or both, and Cayo found he couldn’t sleep.

  He prowled through the suite’s great room, hardly noticing the opulence surrounding him, from the paintings that graced the walls of the vast, airy space to the hand-blown light fixtures at every turn and breathtaking antiques littered about. He pushed his way out onto the terrace that wrapped around the suite, offering commanding views across Milan. The spires of the famous Duomo in the city center pierced the night, lit up against the wet, faintly chilly dark. On a clear day the Alps would be there in the distance, snowcapped and beautiful, and he had the fanciful notion he could sense them out there, looming and watchful. But he could see nothing at all but Drusilla. As if she haunted him, and she hadn’t even left him yet.