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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.
CHAPTER THREE
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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