He just had to get her to say yes.
“The helicopter will be here in two hours,” Dru said the following morning, careful to sound calm. Matter-of-fact. “The plane will be ready to go once we get to Tahiti.”
Cayo stood at the end of the pier, with his back to her. He looked remote, forbidding and still, she wanted to lean into all of that broad strength, rest her head against his shoulder blade. She wanted to let the pure, male scent of him surround her. She wanted to soak in his heat like the sun. Her bare toes curled into the smooth, warm wood beneath her feet and she told herself she was fine. That she felt nothing but relief that it was all almost over, with only the long plane ride left to survive. Perfectly fine.
They had woken up at dawn, wrapped around each other in Cayo’s huge bed. He had pulled her over him before she was wholly awake, sliding into her so smoothly she’d wondered whether it was real or a dream. Or goodbye, a harsher voice in her head had suggested. She’d ignored it, leaned down to him and kissed him.
Slowly, they’d explored each other. Long, drugging kisses and endless touches, building a different kind of flame. One that burned long and sweet. One that danced and seduced and drew out the perfection of each caress. One that made them both sigh out their pleasure when it turned white-hot and wild all around them.
Dru felt the glowing embers of that same fire inside her, even now. She’d almost been afraid to track Cayo down after she’d confirmed their arrangements—as if she thought he could see straight through her to that place that would never stop burning for him. That place he could ignite with so little effort—a look, a touch. Would that ever fade? Would time without him dim it? Somehow, she doubted it.
“I suppose no one can stay in paradise forever, can they?” she asked brightly when he didn’t turn to face her, trying to make conversation—anything to cover her own nervousness. Anything to pretend it didn’t hurt.
“Don’t.” It was hard. Fierce.
“It’s so lovely here.” She felt helpless. Unable to stop. “But it’s not real, is it?”
He turned then, so dark and ruthless, dressed in no more than a pair of white loose trousers and still, so dangerous. She almost took a step back to keep him from looming over her, but she restrained herself. His eyes slammed into hers.
“But this is?” His accent was more pronounced than usual, and she felt it inside, like an echo. “Your deliberately inane chatter? Surely you know by now that it won’t work on me.”
That might have stung—it did—but Dru couldn’t let herself fall into that trap. There would be no fighting that led to kissing, no explosions of temper or passion or anything else. No shoes. No jumping from the pier. She wouldn’t let him sabotage her departure. More importantly, she wouldn’t let herself do the same.
“You are far too busy to spend any more time hiding away from the world,” she said, and that wasn’t idle conversation or flattery. It was the simple truth. He was who he was. “Even here.”
“As you pointed out to me only last night,” he said gruffly, “the point of hiring the best people in the world is occasionally to delegate responsibilities to them.”
“I did say that.” She smiled, but it felt hollow. He didn’t return it. And last night felt so far away now. As if it belonged to other people. “Cayo …”
She bit her lip and watched his dark amber eyes turn nearly black with a mixture of pain and passion, and her heart seemed to squeeze tight in her chest. If she started crying now, she worried she would never stop. She tried to shove that dangerous ache away.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” she whispered.
Still, he only stared back at her, as if he were hewn from stone. He looked powerful beyond measure, ruthless and fierce and she thought it might kill her to leave him. That thing inside her that had no pride, no respect, no boundaries whatsoever, might physically take her down as she tried to walk away. Her little masochist within, who wanted him and only him, however she could have him. Whatever that meant.
However much it hurt.
“It doesn’t have to be hard,” he said then.
His voice was low, and there was an intense light deep in the dark of his gaze. He reached over and traced a lazy pattern just above the waistband of her linen trousers, where there was a gap between them and her top. She sucked in a breath, so attuned to him that even that faintest touch unleashed the fire in her, made her body ready itself for him, as if on command. When he looked at her again, there was gold in his eyes and the faintest curve on that cruel mouth of his.
“I think you should marry me,” he said.
The world stopped.
No breath. No sound. No air.
But somehow, she didn’t faint. She didn’t fall. She only stood there, staring back at him. “What did you just say?”
“Don’t play that game.” He took her chin in his hand, his gaze piercing into her, seeing far too much—and she couldn’t allow that. She wouldn’t survive it if he knew she loved him. Dru jerked her head back, and he let go, but not without reminding them both, wordlessly, that he’d allowed it.
“You can’t be serious,” she said, her breath, her voice—all of her ragged. Uneven. Trembling as if what he’d said was some kind of earthquake and she was still swaying in the aftermath.
“I have never been more serious in my life,” he grated out, his dark eyes flashing.
And this, she found, hurt worst of all. It was everything she’d ever wanted—more than she’d dreamed possible—but not like this. Never like this. Two weeks ago he’d tricked her onto that plane, claiming they were bound for Zurich. This was no different.
It just hurt more.
“No,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” It was the voice he used to do business, to make deals. To convince whoever dared say no to him that they should change their answer—and they usually did.
Dru felt bruised. Battered. Torn apart by what she knew was the right thing to do, and that treacherous part of her that wanted him however she could get him. Why couldn’t she simply jump at this chance, her masochistic side wondered. He might learn to love her. Maybe he already did, in as much as he was able. And wasn’t maybe good enough?
But there was another voice in there now, a new one. Fragile and tiny, but hers.
“I deserve better,” she heard herself say.
The effect on Cayo was immediate and dramatic, though he didn’t seem to move. It was as if all that power, all that ferocity, was suddenly burning in his exotic eyes while the rest of him went terribly, alarmingly still. As if she’d wounded him beyond measure.
“?’Better’?” he echoed.
Dru’s hands shot out, as if to touch him, to hold him, but at the final moment she found she didn’t dare. Her throat was thick with grief, her chest hurt, and there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t make this better—and he was making it worse.
“I have a promise to keep to my brother,” she whispered. “Nothing is more important than that.”
Not even you, she thought miserably, while everything inside her revolted.
“Marry me.” But it was less a command than a plea, wrapped up though it was in his ruthless delivery. “It’s the only solution.” When she only stared back at him through eyes that grew blurrier by the moment, he looked almost desperate. “I don’t know how to lose you,” he said, his voice near a whisper. “I can’t.”
“You’ll have to learn,” she managed to push out past the constriction in her throat.
“Dru—”
“I can’t settle, Cayo.” She threw that out, through the riot inside of her, through the tears that threatened. And it just kept hurting more. “Not even for you.”
“Dru.”
Even the way he said her name hurt. As if she was the one who’d mortally wounded him. He reached over and took her face in his hands, and that was when she noticed the tears wetting her cheeks, despite her best efforts.
But he di
dn’t love her. He didn’t even pretend. Not even now, to marry her. To keep her. He didn’t love her. So she could tear herself into pieces by leaving now, or she could stay with him and marry him and fall apart by degrees, year by loveless year, until she really did hate him the way she’d only wished she could two weeks ago.
“I am not the monster you think I am,” he said, soft and dark and straight into her heart, like a knife.
“Your two weeks are up, Cayo.” It was the hardest thing she’d ever done. The greatest sacrifice she’d ever made. She stepped back, watched his hands drop away, and knew she would never be whole again. “You have to let me go.”
CHAPTER NINE
If this was what it was like to care, Cayo thought some weeks after he’d returned from Bora Bora and Dru had left him on the tarmac without a backward glance, he had been right to discourage the practice for the whole of his adult life.
When I decide to sabotage you, she had told him once, there will be nothing the least bit passive about it. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was what she’d meant. This … aching sense of loss that colored everything a dull gray.
He hated it.
He glared at one of his many vice presidents across the wide expanse of his London desk, and managed, somehow, to refrain from wringing the man’s neck.
“I don’t understand why I’m having this conversation,” he said coldly. The other man winced. Cayo drummed his fingers on the glossy expanse of his desktop. “Surely I hired you to make decisions at this level yourself.”
He was being far kinder than he felt. Personable, even. But he knew he was measuring himself against the kind of results Dru could have wrung out of this man with a few smiles and a supportive word or two and, by that tally, he was a failure.
That was something he was getting used to, however gracelessly. And she still wasn’t here. She had disappeared completely after his plane had touched down on British soil, just as she’d promised she would. He supposed he hadn’t believed it would happen, that she would really do it. He still didn’t.
“Of course, of course, I would be happy—” the vice president in front of him stammered out. “It’s only that you always wanted to hear every detail of every potential negotiation before—”
“That was before,” Cayo said, and sighed. He rubbed at his temples and tried to stop glaring. “If there’s nothing else …?”
He sat back in his mighty chair behind his massive desk and watched the other man sprint for the safety of the outer office. And then, like clockwork, his new assistant appeared in the doorway to update him on his schedule and his messages.
Claire was everything anyone could want in a personal assistant, he thought then, eyeing her. The agency had placed her the day he’d arrived back from French Polynesia, and she’d acquitted herself beautifully in the weeks since. She was a quick learner. She was eager to please and yet didn’t tremble every time he spoke, like so many of his executives. She was even pleasant enough to look at, in a very blond and vaguely Nordic sort of way, which he knew always put the potential investors and various clients at ease. She’d been with him a month now and he had yet to detect a single flaw.
Save one. She wasn’t Dru. She hardly knew how he took his coffee, much less how to finesse his fractious and demanding board of directors with seeming ease and nonchalance. He didn’t ask for her thoughts on delicate business negotiations. He would never trust her to have his interests at heart while tending to long calls filled with unhappy executives. Claire was, he supposed, a perfectly decent personal assistant.
Which forced him to consider the fact that Dru had been far more than that. She’d been more like a partner. And she was gone now, as if she’d never been at Vila Group at all. As if she’d never been with him.
What had he expected? He kept asking himself the same question, and there was never any answer. Dru hated him. She’d told him so. Had he really believed that sex could change that? Or that it might change who he was—who he had always been? This monster who did not even know when he was crushing the life out of the only thing he’d ever really cared about?
“Mr. Vila?” Claire asked. A note in her voice suggested it was not the first time she’d said his name. “Shall I get Mr. Young on the phone for you?”
He was not himself. He had not been for some weeks now, and well did he know it.
“Yes,” Cayo muttered. It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t Dru. He had to keep reminding himself of this. Several times a day. “Fine.”
He dealt with the call with his usual lack of tact or mercy and when it was done, found himself at the great wall of windows that looked out over the City. He had been scowling out at the depressingly typical British rain for several minutes before it occurred to him that he’d been doing too much of this lately. Brooding like a moody adolescent.
He was disgusted with himself. Had he moped when his grandfather had tossed him out? He had not. After an initial moment to absorb what had happened, he had walked off that mountain and built a life for himself. He hadn’t mourned. He hadn’t brooded. He’d focused and he’d worked hard, and in time, he’d come to think of his grandfather’s betrayal as the best thing that had happened to him. Where would he be without it?
But, of course, he knew. He would have been a cobbler like his grandfather in that pretty little whitewashed town, living out a simple life beneath the red roofs, smiling at the tourists who snapped pictures and paid too much for their restaurant meals. Suffering through the whispers and the gossip that would never have subsided, no matter how diligently he worked to combat them, no matter what he did. Paying and paying for his mother’s sins, forever and ever without end. He let out a derisive snort at the thought.
I am better off, he told himself. Then told himself he believed it. Then and now.
But even so, he stared out the window and saw Dru instead.
They’d sprawled on a blanket on the sandy beach together one night in Bora Bora, wearing nothing but the bright, full moon beaming down from above them. Dru had been nestled against his shoulder, her breath still uneven from the heady passion they’d indulged in, scattering their clothes across the beach in their haste. Their insatiable need.
“I’ll admit it,” Cayo had said. “I never had a pet quite like you before.”
“No?” He’d heard laughter in her voice, though he could only see the top of her head. “Do I sit and stay better than all the rest?”
“I was thinking how much I enjoy it when you surrender,” he’d murmured. Hadn’t he had her sobbing out his name only a few moments before? He’d been teasing her—something he’d only just realized was reserved for her alone, but when she’d shifted position so she could look at him, her gaze had been serious.
“Careful what you wish for,” she’d said softly, in a voice that didn’t match the look in her eyes.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he’d said, reaching out to curl a dark wave of her hair behind her ear, reveling in the thick silk of it between his fingers. “There is nothing wrong with surrender. Particularly to me.”
“Easy for you to say.” Her voice had been wry. “You’ve never had the pleasure.”
He’d smiled, but then the moment had seemed darker, somehow. Or more honest, perhaps.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” he’d asked quietly.
She’d let out a small sound, as if she’d almost laughed, and then looked away.
“My brother was an addict,” she’d said, her voice small, but determined. “I don’t know why it feels like I’m betraying him to tell you that. It’s true.”
Cayo had said nothing. He’d only stroked her back, held her close, and listened. She’d told him about Dominic’s attempts at recovery, about his inevitable falls from grace. She’d told him about the way it had been before, when she’d worked in other jobs, and had dropped them to rush to Dominic’s side, only to find herself heartbroken and lied to, again and again. And occasionally sacked, to boot. She’d told him about the good tim
es peppered in with the bad. About how close she’d been to her twin once, how for a long time the only thing they’d had in the world had been each other.
“But that wasn’t quite true, because he also had his addictions,” she’d said. “And he always surrendered to them, eventually. No matter how much he claimed he didn’t want to. And then one day he just couldn’t come back.”
He’d turned then, rolling her over to her back so he could gaze down at her, searching her face, her eyes. But she’d been as unreadable as ever. Still hiding in plain sight, her gray eyes shadowed tonight, and darker than they should have been.
She’d reached out, then, carefully, as if he was something precious to her. She’d traced the line of his jaw, his nose, even the shape of his brows with her fingertips, then run them over his lips, her mouth curving slightly when he’d nipped at her.
“I wonder what that’s like?” she’d whispered then, and he’d seen something like agony in her eyes, there and then gone. “Unable to resist the very thing you know will destroy you. Drawn to it, despite yourself.”
“Dru,” he’d said, frowning down at her. “Surely you can’t think—”
But she hadn’t let him finish. She’d silenced him with a searingly hot kiss and then moved against him, seducing him that easily. He’d forgotten all about it, until now.
Had she been warning him? Had she known that she would get into his blood like this, poisoning him from the inside out, making him a stranger to himself? Cayo frowned out the window now, through the rain lashing across the glass. For the first time in almost twenty years, he wondered if it was worth it, this great empire he’d built and on which he focused to the exclusion of all else. Lately he wondered if, given the chance, he would trade it in. If he would take her instead.
Not that she’d offered him any such choice.
His intercom buzzed loudly behind him. He didn’t move. He didn’t know, any more, if he was furious or if he was simply the wreckage of the man he’d been. And he didn’t like it, either way.
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