“Cayo …” She whispered his name, her eyes fluttering open, to gaze at him as he pressed against the core of her.
She was wet and hot and soft, and he wanted her so badly he nearly shook with it. He held her bottom in his hands, lifted her, and watched as she shivered in turn when he slid himself along the entrance to her core, teasing her. Her gray eyes darkened again. She pulled her perfect lower lip between her teeth. She lifted her arms and wrapped them around his shoulders, bringing her breasts flush against his chest.
“Surrender,” he whispered, and then he drove into her, and there was nothing at all but fire.
That perfect, encompassing fire. It roared through him, into him. It incinerated everything he thought, everything he knew, until there was nothing at all but Dru. And she was supple and curvy and draped all around him. She began to move her hips and he groaned, too close to the edge.
He wrapped his hands around her hips to slow her down, then set his own pace. Slow. Deliberate. Torturing them both. Hot and endless strokes that made him grit his teeth and made her drop her head to his neck and sob out her pleasure. He moved her up and down as he thrust into her, again and again, wanting it never to end. Wanting to stay balanced in all this lush perfection forever. Wanting to breathe her in like this, so deep inside her he hardly knew which one of them was which.
She lifted her head then and her gaze locked with his. Held. He felt her breath on his face, her legs tight around him, and still he moved, building that fire into a raging blaze, making her moan even louder, watching those gray eyes of hers glaze over with the same incomparable passion that stormed through him. Taking him over. Making him want nothing more than to burn in it, over and over, too hot to bear, until there was nothing left of him.
This is Dru, he thought, unable to stop looking at her, touching her, feeling her in every part of him. And this is mine.
And he understood then that he had no intention of ever letting her go. Whatever that might mean.
She closed her eyes and threw back her head, her lovely back arching toward the setting sun through the windows behind her, the fading light casting her lush body in oranges and golds.
Like some kind of pagan goddess, and all of her his.
She started to shudder again, wild and untamed in his arms, and when she called out his name this time, he followed her over the edge. At last.
Dru lay tangled with him in the wide bed and watched the sun drip down toward the sea, then melt away.
She could not seem to form coherent thoughts. There was only the buzzing in her limbs and under her skin, like some kind of high-voltage live wire, still sending out sparks. She felt Cayo’s hard shoulder beneath her cheek. She felt the heat of his skin and the way his chest rose and fell. She did not think. She wasn’t sure she wanted to think. She watched the sky instead.
Cayo stirred beside her when the sun dropped below the horizon, as if roused by the twilight. He turned to face her, his eyes dark and once again unreadable in the deep shadows of his chamber.
He slid his hand up to hold her cheek and then brought her face to his. For a moment he only gazed at her, and she felt a great stillness inside her, a kind of hush. As if she was waiting for something, poised on the edge of another high cliff while all the rest of her seemed to shiver.
The clock is already ticking, a voice whispered inside her head, ruthlessly practical when Dru felt anything but. He’s already gone.
But as if he could hear her, he kissed her. Deep and slow. Sweet. Addicting. And then the fire kicked in. As if it could never be quenched. As if none of this would ever be enough. She had been a terrible fool, she acknowledged as his hand moved over her face, angling her mouth closer to his for a better fit, a deeper kick. She should have known better than to think she could handle this. She would leave him as planned, she understood then in some deep, primitive way, but then she would mourn him, and she might never stop. She had walked right into this, and there was nothing for her but Miss Havisham and regret on the other side of it. And still she kissed him, unable to help herself. Unable to stop what she’d already started, what she’d already done.
No sense borrowing trouble, she thought then, in some desperation. It would come no matter what she did. It would hurt. Maybe she’d always known that.
He rose over her in the bed and settled himself between her legs, and Dru let go of a future that seemed far away from this moment, too far away to matter. He settled his weight on his hands and looked down at her, still watching her with those too-shrewd eyes of his.
“Dru,” he said. Just her name. As if he was tasting it.
“Cayo,” she replied in kind, feeling far too vulnerable. She didn’t know what he saw when he looked down at her like that. She didn’t know how to prevent him from seeing everything, all of her hopes and fears and terrors, not when she had abandoned herself so completely to be with him like this.
But he simply twisted his hips and thrust into her. Slick. Hot.
And she stopped caring what he saw. What he knew. She concentrated instead on the sleek perfection of this age old dance between them. As if she’d been made to fit him, just like this.
He moved slowly, hypnotically. As if he did not wish to build that fire between them this time so much as encourage it to burn high on its own. She matched his lazy rhythm, her hips rising to meet his, every part of her exulting in the way they fit together. In the way they moved together. Slow and easy and devastating.
She told herself it was the only thing that mattered.
This time, she could reach up and explore the sheer beauty of his lean, smooth torso. She ran her hands over his hard pectorals, then trailed her way down that mouthwatering abdomen. Smooth skin stretched across steel. Hard male beauty unlike any other. Ferocious and proud. Fierce and demanding. She pulled herself up from the bed to kiss his chest, to taste the bold heat of him, the incomparable strength. The delectable power.
The pace began to change, then, the fire burning ever hotter. Cayo’s shoulders blocked out the world, and she forgot everything but this. Everything but him. Everything but the wildness they made here, and the way it stormed through her, tearing her apart from within.
He slid down to pull her close and she loved it. The full, hard weight of him against her, pressing her into the bed, making her feel somehow small and yet cherished, all at once. She could feel his breath in her ear, and then he began to murmur words she didn’t know in Spanish, crooning against the length of her neck while still he thrust into her, over and over and over again. She wrapped her legs around his hips and clung to him, mindless and wanton, entirely at his command. And when he reached between them and pressed his fingers against the heart of her need, she burst into a million pieces. Again.
He kept on as she shattered around him, until he shouted out her name and shuddered against her, burying his face into the crook between her neck and her shoulder. And even broken into too many pieces to count, even thrown as she was off the side of a very high cliff and still floating her way down to earth, Dru understood that nothing was ever going to be the same again. Especially not her.
Cayo’s version of enjoying himself in paradise, Dru was not greatly surprised to learn, involved cutting down his business hours to something like six or eight hours per day instead of more than twice that.
“What a great sacrifice this must be,” she murmured toward the end of one such “holiday” afternoon as she took more dictation, her fingers flying across the keyboard when she would have preferred to explore him instead, not that he had asked. “To abandon yourself so hedonistically into a normal person’s version of a workday.”
Cayo eyed her, his dark eyes as hot as they were amused. In deference to the fact he’d decreed this a vacation—and, perhaps, all that had changed between them—he wore a white shirt he had not bothered to button, displaying his mouthwatering physique and olive complexion and making Dru glad she was so adept at touch-typing. She could stare at him without missing a single word. His feet
were even propped up on the desk in front of him, completing the picture. He would have looked like indolence incarnate had he not been sitting in his office suite, composing lists of commands for his fleet of vice presidents the world over to obey as soon as Dru pressed Send.
“You are always welcome to distract me,” he said after a moment.
She opened her mouth to offer a knee-jerk sort of demurral, but stopped herself. What was there to lose? Cayo’s business would storm ahead the way it always did when these strange days were over, when she was gone. But she would never get another chance to have him like this. She had the sense again, as she had repeatedly since that first day here, that she was gathering up all these white-hot, deliriously passionate moments to hoard later, when she was alone. When she was free. When she had nothing but memories to hold on to.
“If you insist, Mr. Vila,” she said now, watching that fierce light blaze in his eyes. She slid out of the chair she’d pulled up next to his desk and onto the floor, smiling slightly as his hard face tightened with desire.
Slowly, holding his gaze, she crawled between his legs.
“Is this a new form of taking dictation, Miss Bennett?” he asked, that dark amusement in his low voice, though she could hear the faint rasp in it that hinted at the fire within him, and she smiled, running her hands over his hard thighs, his taut abdomen. His legs thudded down on either side of her, caging her right where she wanted to be. “I’m a fan.”
Then she reached into his soft trousers, lifting out the hard, smooth length of him and taking him deep in her mouth.
He groaned. And Dru worshipped him, tasting the velvet smoothness of him, loving him with her mouth, her tongue, her hands and her lips, bringing him to a roaring finish with his hands gripped tight in her hair.
It was these moments she was collecting, she told herself as he lifted her into his lap and kissed her hungrily, his heartbeat pounding hard beneath her as he held her against his chest. These moments when she could kid herself and pretend that he was hers.
They fell into a kind of pattern as the days passed. Cayo was still her boss, despite the dramatic change in their relationship, and Dru did not dispute that. What might have been untenable if she hadn’t already planned to leave him was really more like a game when it was only her heart, not her career, at stake. So she was happy enough to continue performing her duties, with only cosmetic alterations.
“Don’t do that thing with your hair,” Cayo said one morning as she stepped out of the massive, glass-enclosed shower, complete with a window overlooking the ocean, that was its own room in the master suite’s bath.
He stood in the door that led out into his bedroom, his dark eyes burning as they tracked over her, watching as she wrapped herself in a towel. He’d pulled on another pair of the linen trousers he favored in the warm weather, but no shirt, and all of that muscled masculine perfection on display made her feel overheated. Again.
They’d woken at dawn and gone for a swim in the quiet lagoon. He’d lifted her against him where he stood, simply pulled her bikini bottoms to the side and slid inside her, rocking them both to mindlessness in the clear, warm water, as the sun began to light the perfect sky above them.
She was still trembling slightly from the aftereffects.
“Don’t do what with my hair?” she asked. It couldn’t be healthy, wanting someone like this. She’d imagined sleeping with him would be a single act, a fix, the end of all that yearning and infatuation.
But instead, you made it worse, that voice inside was quick to remind her. As if she didn’t know.
He made a vague gesture toward the back of his head. “That twist,” he said. A strange expression crossed his face then, something she might have called vulnerability on another man—but that was impossible. This was Cayo. “I like it down around your shoulders,” he said gruffly. “I like my hands in it.”
And he’d turned and disappeared, leaving Dru to make of that what she would.
She pulled on the cheerful, bright blue-and-yellow maxidress she’d adopted as her uniform here, and ran her fingers through her hair as it settled around her shoulders in damp waves. She stared at herself in the large mirror that dominated the nearest wall, and hardly recognized herself. The exposure to the sun had brought out her freckles, and that sheen to her skin. Her eyes were bright, her mouth soft, somehow. And her dark hair tumbled all around her, still wet from her shower, giving her a sensual and sultry sort of look. She was poles apart from the image of Dru Bennett she’d prided herself on embodying in her five years at the Vila Group: impeccably, quietly fashionable. Professional above all else.
She could lie and tell herself that it was the islands doing this to her, turning her into a different person, but she knew better. It was Cayo.
She just had to remember that it was temporary.
Back in London, Dru would never dress this way. Just as she would never interrupt a dictation session as she had the other day, or wear her hair down because a man demanded it. Just as she would never sleep with her boss, no matter how much she might have wanted him, and then carry on working for him. But this was Bora Bora, and it was as if what she did here didn’t count.
It’s only a handful of days, she reminded herself now as she walked to meet him in the office. It will be like none of this happened when I get back home.
She told herself that the twisting feeling in her stomach was joy. That it was happiness that she was letting herself do this, experience this, live in the moment here, when it was so unlike her. She had her whole life in front of her to regret this, after all. There was no sense starting now.
But it was as if Cayo knew that there was something she wasn’t telling him—or perhaps he felt the pressure of the temporary nature of this as well. Sometimes he merely picked her up and held her against the nearest wall when he wanted her, his expression so fierce as he thrust within her, as if he saw the same painful future before him. Or he woke her again and again in the night, to taste her, to touch her, to send her flying over the edge. As if to prove he could. As if to make sure it was real.
One afternoon, after he’d ended their workday, he found her on the lanai outside the library. He stood in the entryway for a long moment, watching her, until Dru set her crime novel aside and gave him her full attention.
“Did you need something?” she asked, and smiled at him, ready for another series of commands. Plans for the next day’s business, perhaps.
“I don’t know how you do it.” His voice was dark and low. It made a shiver of unease snake along the back of her neck.
“Read?” she asked mildly.
He ignored that.
“Your words, your smiles.” He ran a hand along the jaw he shaved irregularly here, and looked not unlike a pirate as he gazed down at her, rakish and unapologetically lethal. But she didn’t recognize that look in his eyes. “Even in my bed. There are a thousand places for you to hide, aren’t there? And you do.”
Her heart thudded hard against her ribs. And there was a kind of ringing in her ears, as if alarms were going off all around them. But she knew that wasn’t true—there was only the sound of the waves as they crashed against the sand. The birds singing in the trees. The wind dancing through the chimes out on the terrace.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you know, I almost believe you.”
He didn’t look angry, or upset in any way. She could have handled either of those without blinking. He looked almost … resigned. All of that clever attention of his focused on her, and growing darker by the moment.
And it was making her feel panicky. Desperate. Afraid, again, of what he might see.
“I’m not hiding.” She stood, then opened up her arms, proving it. “I’m right here.”
He smiled, and it had the usual effect of rendering her breathless, for all it was shaded as much with regret as with desire. She didn’t want to know why.
“Are you, Dru?” he asked. But he closed the distance between them as
if he found her as difficult to resist as she did him, and pulled her against him. “Are you really?”
Dru didn’t answer. She kissed him instead. Hot. Desperate. With everything she was capable of giving him.
He didn’t speak again.
He had her kneel on the small sofa, then took her from behind, his hands on her hips and his hard chest at her back as he thrust into her, making her sob out his name with only the glittering sea before them as witness.
And when he bent his head to her neck, spent in the aftermath of their passion, she murmured soothing words and told herself it was another victory. Another memory; hers to hoard.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY sat out on one of the patios one evening, surrounded by softly flickering candles, with the canopy of stars bright and astonishing above them. Dru leaned back in her chair and stared up at them, aware on some level that time was passing even in moments like this one, when she felt outside of time altogether.
Don’t forget what temporary means, she advised herself. Don’t pretend that any of this can last.
Across from her, Cayo was finishing a call with a CFO at one of his New York companies. He frowned out toward the dark ocean as he talked, his voice growing increasingly more impatient. Dru sipped at her wine and watched him, imprinting that impossible face into her memory, making sure she had memories enough to spare. That blade of a nose, that granite jaw. Her boss become her lover. Now that it had happened, it felt inevitable. As if they had always been headed here. As if the three years in between Cadiz and now had been part of some grander plan.
Just as she had always intended to leave him, eventually. Lest she forget her own plans. Her promises.
Victory, she chanted quietly in her own head. This is a victory. I’ll go home the winner at the end, and do exactly as I planned to do two weeks ago.
But she wasn’t sure she believed her own cheering squad.
The staff brought out plates of tuna tartare to start, and Dru took a bite, sighing with pleasure at the burst of flavor, the excruciatingly fresh taste. She took a sip of her wine. She smiled when Cayo ended his call and ignored the way he looked at her, so dark and brooding.
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