A Devil in Disguise (14 page)

“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.”

I
f
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 times 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.

It took everything he had not to sic his team of investigators on her, not to have her every move reported back to him, wherever she was now, like the jealous, obsessive fool she’d once accused him of being. He’d been fighting the same near-overwhelming urge for weeks. She’d told him he needed to learn how to lose her, and he’d found it was not a lesson he was at all interested in mastering. The truth was, Cayo had never been any good at losing.

You have to let me go,
she’d said. And he had, though it had nearly killed him, kept him up at nights and ruined his days. She was the one thing he’d ever given up on. The one thing he’d let slip through his hands.

And that felt like the greatest failure of all.

Cayo couldn’t forgive himself. For any of it. Or her, for doing this to him. For turning him into this weak, destroyed creature, not at all who he’d believed himself to be, before.

Worst of all, for making him
care
.

Dru hadn’t had time to collapse into the fetal position under her duvet once she’d made it back to her tiny bedsit in Clapham from the rainy tarmac where she’d last seen Cayo, despite the fact that was all she wanted to do.

Her already-booked flight straight back to Bora Bora had been leaving in two days’ time. She’d met with Cayo’s studiously blank-faced attorneys on the morning before her flight, and she’d signed whatever they’d put in front of her, not caring if it took blood and her firstborn, so long as it ensured her freedom. Finally. It had been the last necessary step.

And more than that, it had meant he was letting her go.

Some part of her had imagined he might pull his Godzilla routine. Roar and smash, grab and hoard. Demand another two weeks. Trap her into that marriage he’d proposed.
Something.
But he’d let her walk away from him at the airport. There had been nothing but a look in his eyes that she’d never seen before, turning all of that dark amber nearly black and eating her alive inside. The cold, dull, gray English day around them had been so depressingly
real life
she’d almost wondered if Bora Bora, the yacht in the Adriatic, Milan, and everything that had happened between them had been no more than a fevered dream.

The attorneys had been real, however, sliding papers at her one after the next in the Costa Coffee near Clapham Junction. She’d signed the last five years of her life away with every pen stroke. At his command. With his blessing.

Cayo Vila, who never gave in, who had never heard the word
no,
had let her go, at last.

Just as she’d told him to do, she’d reminded herself. Just as she’d asked.

And then she’d gone back home, carefully taken the tin that held Dominic’s ashes, taped it shut and wrapped it up, and packed it away in her checked bag.

The trip had been brutal. When she’d finally staggered into her hotel on the southern part of Bora Bora’s main island, far away from Cayo’s private island, it had been impossible not to notice the differences. She’d told herself she didn’t care. That she’d come for a specific reason and to perform a specific task, and when had she become such a princess that she found her rather smallish room that faced a bit of garden
depressing?
It was still a garden in Bora Bora
.

She’d been furious with herself—and with Cayo—

for spoiling her so thoroughly. She’d become used to all of the luxury he surrounded himself with, apparently. It had only served to make her that much more appalled at herself and all the many ways she’d let herself down.

It had taken her a week to get up her nerve—and, if she was honest, to recover a little bit from those two intense weeks she’d spent with Cayo. But finally she’d been ready. One evening, at sunset, she’d taken one of the kayaks out and brought Dominic’s ashes with her. As the sky exploded in oranges and pinks, she’d tipped his ashes out into the beautiful, peaceful lagoon.

And while she’d kept her promise to the first man she’d ever loved, and always would, she’d talked to him.

“I wish I could have saved you,” she’d whispered to the water, the sky, the sea beyond. “I wish I’d tried harder.”

She’d remembered her brother’s delighted laughter that she’d never heard enough of. She’d thought of his wickedly amused gray eyes, so much brighter and more alive than hers—and then, sometimes, so much duller. She thought of his too-lean form, his shaggy dark hair, his poet’s hands, and the tattoo on his shoulder of two hummingbirds that was, he’d once said with his cheeky grin, meant to represent the two of them. Free and in flight, forever.

“I wish I knew what happened to that picture of us as babies,” she’d said, smiling at the memory of the old photograph. “I still don’t know which one of us was which.”