A Devil in Disguise (15 page)

She’d mourned. She’d thought of their mother, so terrified of being on her own that any man had done, no matter how vicious. She’d thought of all those years when it had been Dominic and Dru against the world,
and how much she’d miss that for the rest of her life. He’d taken something from her she could never get back, and as she floated out there with jagged Mount Otemanu before her and the world she knew so far away, she’d let herself weep for the family she’d lost, her potential children who would never know their uncle, the whole rest of her life stretching out before her with nothing of her twin in it except what she carried with her. In her.

Which wasn’t enough, she’d thought then, bitterly. It would never be enough.

“You took part of me with you, Dominic,” she’d told him as the inky darkness fell. “And I’ll never forget you. I promise.”

And when all his ashes were gone she’d made her way back to her hotel, where, finally, she’d curled up on the bed, pulled the duvet over her head, and fallen apart.

She’d stayed there for days. She’d cried until she’d felt blinded by her own tears, until she’d made herself retch from the force of her sobs. She’d let it all out, at last, the terrible storm she’d been carrying with her all this time. The grief of so many years, the pain and the fury and all the lies she’d told herself about her motivations. How much she’d loved Dominic and yes, to her shame, how much she’d sometimes hated him, too. His excuses and his promises, his grand plans that never amounted to anything and his pretty, pretty lies that she’d so desperately wanted to believe. She’d wept for everything she’d lost, and how alone she was, and how little she knew what to do with herself now that she had nothing left to survive, no purpose to fulfill, no great sacrifice remaining to build her life around.

But one day she sat up, and opened all the windows.

She let the breeze in, sweet with flowers and the sea. She breathed in, deeply. She had her tea out on the hotel’s pretty beach, and felt born again. Made new. As if she really had put Dominic to rest.

Which meant it was time to face the truth about her feelings for Cayo.

“Am I so scary?” he’d asked so long ago that night in Cadiz. The restaurant had been noisy and crowded, and his arm had brushed against hers as they sat so close together at the tiny table. His unforgettable eyes had still been so sad, but there was a curve to that cruel mouth of his, and Dru had felt giddy, somehow. As if they were both lit up with the magic of this night when everything, she’d been sure, was changing.

“I think you take pride in being as scary as possible,” she’d replied, smiling. “You have a reputation to uphold, after all.”

“I am certain that somewhere beneath it all, I am nothing but clay, waiting to be molded by whoever happens along,” he’d said, that near-smile deepening at the absurdity of a man like him being swayed by anything at all save his own inclination.

“Metal that might, under certain circumstances, be welded, perhaps,” she’d said, laughing. “Never clay.”

“I bow to your superior knowledge,” he’d said, swirling his sherry in his glass, his gaze oddly intent on hers. She’d felt herself flush with heat, and had felt out of control. Reckless. Yet it had felt right, even so
.
More right than she could remember anything else feeling, maybe ever. He’d leaned close, then murmured close to her ear. “What would I do without you?”

She knew what he’d do without her, Dru thought now, staring up at the perfect sky and the glorious lagoon, neither of which seemed to be as bright as they’d
been before. Without Cayo. He was probably doing it right now—carrying on being Cayo Vila, scary by design, taking whatever he wanted and expanding his holdings on a whim.

But she was distorted by his absence. Disfigured. And it didn’t seem to get any better, no matter how many days passed.

She sat in her cramped seat on an Air Vila flight from Los Angeles to London, staring at the picture of him on the back of the in-flight magazine, and she thought her heart might tear itself apart in her chest.

I can’t do this,
she thought then, scraping away the tears before they fell on her snoring seatmate. She couldn’t live out whatever life it was she thought she ought to live, knowing that he was out there, knowing that she would only ever see him in these painful, faraway glimpses. On the telly, perhaps. In the magazines. But never again right in front of her. Never again close enough to touch, to taste, to tease.

She’d been in love with him for so long. She was still in love with him, however hard she wished it away. It hadn’t changed. She was starting to believe it never would. She felt minimized. Diminished, somehow, without him. As if she’d depended on him just as much as he’d depended on her all this time.

Back in her bedsit in London, she tried to tell herself that her whole life was ahead of her. That she need only pick a path to follow and the world was hers. She woke the morning after her return and scanned the papers, looking for clues to her next chapter—but it all seemed cold and empty. Pointless.

She was haunted by Cayo even now, in a tiny flat he’d never visited, on a bright morning that shouldn’t have had anything at all to do with him. Her eyes
drifted shut as she stood at her small refrigerator, and she saw him. Dark amber eyes. That fierce, ruthless face, with that blade of a nose and his cruel, impossible mouth. She
felt
him. She couldn’t breathe without imagining his hands on her skin, his smile, the sound of his voice as he said her name. And that same old fire still burned within her, stubborn and hot, even now.

Did it really matter how he wanted her, as long as he did? Dru found herself pacing the small space that was her kitchen in agitation. She wished he’d handled it differently back in Bora Bora. She wished he’d lied and told her he wanted her, needed her—and not only as his assistant. She might not have believed him, but she’d have wanted to. And maybe it would have been enough.

But she couldn’t marry him when he couldn’t even pretend to love her. It turned out that was her line in the sand. Her single remaining boundary.

“A girl has to have some standards,” she said out loud, shaking her head at herself. At the things she’d clung to all her life, like her belief that she would never be like her mother—and here she was, alone in her flat, halfway to Miss Havisham, arguing her way back to a man who could never love her the way she deserved to be loved.

But that was the problem. Dru didn’t simply want to be loved. She wanted to be loved
by Cayo.
And she couldn’t see how it made any kind of sense to do without him entirely. Maybe a sliver of Cayo really was better than nothing at all—because nothing else would do. The thought of another man was laughable. What would be the point? Another man wouldn’t be Cayo.

Why couldn’t they continue as they’d been? She considered it now, scowling fiercely into her sink basin,
and the truth was, she couldn’t even remember why she’d been so angry with him. Or why she’d been so desperate to get away from him. These weeks were the longest she’d gone without seeing him since she’d started to work for him five years ago. And she hated it. She craved the simple solace of his dark gaze, his impatient voice. Him. She missed
him
.

He might not want her the way she wished he could. He might only have proposed to her as some last-ditch effort to hold on to something he didn’t want to lose, the same way he might feel about a particularly limited-edition racecar, for example. Dru understood that. And it wasn’t that it didn’t hurt. It was that being without him hurt more.

She wanted him more than she wanted her self-respect, it turned out, whatever that made her. A fool. Her mother. A very sad woman destined for a sad life of
slivers.
She supposed she would spend the rest of her life dealing with the fallout of this choice she couldn’t seem to help making today. One way or the other.

But in the meantime, she knew exactly what she had to do.

Dru strode back into his life, and into the center of his office, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday afternoon.

She looked casual and chic in tight black trousers tucked into high, gleaming boots with dangerous heels and a very complicated sort of burgundy jumper that tied like a scarf and was somehow carelessly elegant. Her glorious hair was swept back into a low ponytail. She’d clearly spent more time in the sun, and it suited her. She had a healthy glow about her, and her eyes were clear as they met his.

Mine,
he thought, with a nearly vicious surge of desire.

He wanted his mouth on her. He wanted to be inside her. He wanted her with a savagery that should have taken him out at the knees. Instead, Cayo thrust his hands into his pockets and stood there behind his desk, watching her, as the fury he’d been tamping down began to boil.

“I know how little you like it when people drop in on you without appointments,” Dru said in that calm, easy voice of hers that had been haunting him for weeks. “I apologize.” She smiled that damned smile of hers. The one he hated. “Your new assistant seems lovely.”

“She is perfect in every way,” Cayo agreed, his voice all but a growl. “A paragon, in fact. Truly the best personal assistant I’ve ever had.”

“I’m delighted to hear that,” she said, so very pleasantly. As if he was just another rich man she had to placate. As if she was working. “Though, if memory serves, you are a bit free with that particular bit of praise. It does render it rather meaningless, I’d say.”

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t.

“I went back to Bora Bora, as planned,” she told him quietly, her gaze searching his, though he didn’t know for what.

“I hope your flight was pleasant.” He couldn’t help his sardonic tone, or the way his brow lifted. “Fly commercial, did you?”

“It took over forty hours.” There was the hint of a rueful smile on her lips, which was closer, at least, to something real.

He was meant to respond to that, he knew. He should have. Her eyes met his as if she was encouraging him simply to talk to her, as he might have done before. But
he couldn’t do it. She’d wrecked him in ways he still didn’t understand. She’d left him. He’d let her leave. He still couldn’t comprehend either one of those things.

And beyond all that, he wanted her. Pure and simple. Despite knowing exactly how much wanting her destroyed him.

“Dru.” He said her name with all the fury and betrayal and longing inside him, letting it pour out of him, not even caring how it hit her. “Why are you here?”

He watched her swallow, hard, as if she was nervous. It became physically painful that he still wasn’t touching her.

“I’ve come to interview,” she said, and her voice didn’t quite shake but still, he heard emotion there beneath it. A better man might not have taken that as some kind of victory—but he had no such pretensions.

“Interview?” he echoed. He could hear the chill in his own voice. “For what?”

Her chin rose, those gray eyes of hers glittered, and once more, she was hiding from him. He could see it.

“My old position, of course.”

He’d dreamed of this. Exactly this. He couldn’t help but smile, and he didn’t have to see her reaction to know it wasn’t a very nice smile at all.

But she didn’t break. Not his Dru.

“I’d like my old job back,” she said, very distinctly. Politely. She folded her hands in front of her like the passive and obedient underling she had only ever pretended she was, and walked straight into his hands with her head held high. “I’ve come to beg for it, if necessary.”

H
E
looked as though he wanted to take her apart with his teeth. Dru fought to control herself—her pounding heart, her galloping pulse, that heaviness in her stomach that couldn’t decide if it was desire or anxiety. Or some combination of both.

“If you would like to beg, don’t let me stop you,” Cayo bit out after a long moment, though his midnight amber eyes gleamed. “You can begin on your knees.”

She remembered that day in Bora Bora with picture-perfect clarity. She remembered crawling to him across the polished wood floor, smiling up at him from between his strong legs. Wanting him more than her next breath. She still did. Heat flashed over her, and she was afraid she turned bright red. His eyes were narrow and hot, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was remembering the same thing.

“Sweet memories,” he said, deliberately provoking her, but she couldn’t seem to react the way she might have before. She couldn’t seem to breathe past the sheer
force
of him. It was if she’d dulled the intensity of him in her memory, to protect herself. He was shocking and bold, dark gold eyes and jet-black hair, and all that mouthwatering muscle and masculine grace. His
suit was perfectly tailored and made him look sleek. Predatory. But not at all tamed. Not Cayo.

And now she knew what he could do with every last inch of that beautiful body. She found she’d lost her voice completely.

His eyes gleamed even more molten gold than before. He stepped out from behind his desk and roamed around to the front, leaning back against it so he was only a foot or two away from her. She schooled herself not to react, not to step away or show anything on her face, even as the back of her neck prickled in warning. In desperate, mindless want.

“Tell me,” he said in that soft, supremely dangerous voice of his. “What would possess you to reapply for this job you wanted so desperately to leave? What will it look like the next time you decide you hate me, do you think? What will you throw at me then?”

“Perhaps I was hasty,” she managed to say, before she lost what remained of her sense and begged him to take her, however he wanted her. “I may have let my grief over the loss of my brother affect my better judgment.”

He eyed her for a long, chilly moment.

“The position is already filled.” Cold. Harsh. Absolute. “You were correct,” he continued, and there was so much Spanish in his voice that her breath caught. “It was ridiculously easy to replace you. It took a single phone call.”

“Oh, I see,” she said then, pretending she was as strong as she made herself sound. “You feel I deserve you at your scariest. Vicious and cutting. Is this my latest punishment?”

“What would I possibly punish you for?” he demanded, his voice low and dark. It connected hard
with her belly. “It seems that I was nothing more than a convenient way for you to scratch that itch. Just as I told you to do.” His smile then should have drawn blood. “What happened, exactly, that I should feel you need punishing?”

Maybe he
had
drawn blood. Maybe this was her, unable to move, bleeding out where she stood and all too aware it was her own fault. She should have left well enough alone. She should have figured out how to survive it—after all, she’d known going into it that getting closer to Cayo would end like this. Exactly like this. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so cavalier.

“Nothing,” she said, and it was just as well that she was already so close to numb, already so worn out from all the heartbreak and the grief, that it was only a quiet sort of storm that shook through her then. Only a little bit of rain and another gray sky. No need for any commotion. “Nothing happened at all.”

She inclined her head at him and then she turned and started for the door. It had been a mistake to come here. Cayo was a bell that could never be unrung. She had to move on, no matter how much it hurt. In time, she’d recover sufficiently from all of this. Of course she would. She’d stop thinking about him. People recovered from heartbreak all the time, all the world over.

She would, too, she vowed.
She would.

“There is still one position that remains open, however,” he said from behind her, and the dark, almost satisfied tone he used made goose bumps break out all over her skin.

Dru stopped walking, and hated herself for it.
You are no better than a junkie,
her inner voice castigated.
No better than your brother—and just like your mother. You’d take any punishment he doled out.
The masochist
inside preened, and she did nothing to prove either one wrong.

“What position is that?” she asked, her voice cool. Disembodied, perhaps, as if she was somewhere else, far from here. Watching from a distance while people other than her were cut to pieces. “Your personal punching bag?”

“My wife.”

It was another slap, just as it had been on his island, and this time, she was already so weak. She had already broken down enough to come here. This was just another blow. For a moment she thought she might succumb to the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes—but she blinked them away, furiously, and then turned back to him.

They stared at each other. His dark, wicked brows were raised high, challenge and command. All of the tension and pain, all of the hurt and longing, everything he was to her no matter how she fought against it seemed to hang there and draw tight between them. He looked like thunder. His eyes blazed. And she couldn’t seem to summon the pride or self-preservation that might have let her laugh at his twisted version of a proposal. She could only endeavor to keep her tears at bay just a little while longer.

He didn’t say that he needed her, that he wanted her. That he longed for
her.
He didn’t say that this was hard for him. He looked the way he always looked. Untouchable. Impossibly ruthless. And the most dangerous man she’d ever met.

“Your wife,” she said, as if she barely recognized the word. She could hardly speak past the lump in her throat. “And what would that position entail, exactly?”

That predatory gleam shone in his gaze, and his
lean body was so tense, rippling with tension, that she thought he really might pounce. Behind him, rain began to lash at the windows and the sky was dark, and there he stood in the middle of all that, more elemental by far.

“I’m sure we’ll think of something,” he said, in a voice that made her imagine him thrusting into her: that slick, perfect fit. The electricity. The wildness that made her forget herself completely.

“And when that fades?” she asked, her voice thick. “You are not known for your attention span, are you?”

He pushed away from the desk and started toward her, like a lethal weapon aimed directly at her, and Dru had to fight herself to stand still. Not to run in the opposite direction. Or toward him.

“I have thought of very little else but you since the day you walked in here and quit,” he said, moving far too close, forcing her to look up at him. “I never wanted you to leave in the first place. It’s not my attention span that’s at issue here, is it?”

“I can’t marry you.” She bit that out, final and sure. Desperate.

His dark brows lowered. “Are you holding out for someone richer, Dru? More powerful?” He didn’t laugh as he said it. He didn’t have to. His voice dropped, even as his mouth curved into that cold, mocking facsimile of a smile. “Better in bed?”

“Love,” she heard herself say, to her utter horror. But there was no unsaying it, even when he looked at her as if she’d thrown another shoe at his head—and had hit her target this time. “There’s no point marrying without love.”

“Of course,” he breathed, and she had never seen that look on his face. Remote and terrible, and if he’d
been someone else she’d think she’d ripped his heart from his chest. But this was Cayo. His mouth twisted. “You have already made clear your opinion on my character. Who indeed could marry a monster such as me?”

But though his words were the bitterest she’d ever heard, so much so they made her flinch in reaction, he still moved closer. He reached over and ran his hand down the sleek end of her ponytail, drawing it forward to drape over one shoulder, the gentle touch at odds with the way his gaze burned into hers, fierce and uncompromising. And she remembered, then, that night on the chilly terrace in Milan, when he’d done the same thing. When he’d made her heart ache. When he’d made her believe there was more to this than simply that wild fire.

She remembered treading water in the sea, how she’d ducked under the waves and felt, for a moment, that she might simply let herself sink. How that had seemed better than facing this man who cast such a shadow over her whole life. Who she could not seem to do without, however much she thought she should.

Who had accused her of hiding from him, time and again, and here she was, hiding the most important truth of all from him. When really, what was she protecting? She had nothing and no one. She was wholly alone. She had nothing to lose.

But it was still so hard, so overwhelming, that spots danced before her eyes.

“I don’t think you’re a monster, Cayo,” she whispered. And maybe she had nothing to lose, but it still felt like leaping from a very high cliff into nothingness. “I love you.”

He went terrifyingly still, his eyes turning to poured gold.

“And you like to collect things,” she continued, not caring about how scratchy her voice sounded, or how many unshed tears pressed against her throat. “You’re good at it. You obsess for a time and then you forget all about it while you chase your next obsession.” She shook her head, and stepped back from him. “I can’t even blame you for that. I saw what your grandfather was like. But how can I marry you when you don’t love me back? When you can’t?”

“Dru—” he started, but it was a stranger’s voice, and he was looking at her as if she’d become a ghost again, right there in front of him, and she knew that it was time to leave. That she should never have come. That she had betrayed herself once again.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she said softly, and she meant it. She did. “I should have stayed away. I’m sorry.”

And then she turned back around and walked away from him. For the last time.

He tracked her back to a converted townhouse in a part of Clapham that was a world away from his three-story penthouse at the top of an old Victorian warehouse perched at the edge of the Thames. This was what she preferred to him, he told himself as he caught the door from one of her neighbors and climbed the narrow, grimy stairs to her second-floor flat—this dingy little place and the dim little life that went with it.

He was so angry with her, Cayo thought it might actually burn off the top of his head.

He pounded on her door, not even pretending to be polite.

“I know you’re in there,” he growled through the door. “I saw you enter the building not five minutes ago.”

He heard the rattle of her locks and then she swung the door open and stood there, scowling up at him, and his curse was that he felt her prettiness like a punch to his gut. Her cheeks were flushed with emotion, making her gray eyes gleam, and he was tired of playing nice. Or trying to. He’d let her go, hadn’t he? What else was he meant to do? And she’d been the one to come back and make it perfectly clear that he’d been a fool to do so. That he should have ignored what she’d told him. That he shouldn’t have let her go in the first place.

“You are not welcome here,” she told him in that cold voice that only made him want her more. It made him think about what best melted all of that ice, and he was certain she could see it on his face when he saw her eyes widen. “Go away.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. He stepped toward her and she leapt back, terrified, he suspected, that he might touch her and prove what a liar she was. He simply shouldered his way inside the flat and kicked the door shut behind him.

And then they were all alone. No brand-new personal assistant in the outer office. And he was blocking the only exit. Cayo could see precisely when that occurred to her, and he smiled.

It was a laughably tiny little place, a bedsit indeed, all in white with a few accent colors—a wooden headboard, the pop of scarlet pillows on her bed—to suggest the idea of space without actually having any. She kept it scrupulously neat, and that was why it seemed slightly bigger than it was—but only slightly.

To his right, a wardrobe and a double bed jutted out
into the small, fitted kitchen. Her laptop lay there, on a café table next to what looked like an abandoned cup of tea, and something about the sight made his chest feel tight. He could imagine her there, dressed in whatever she slept in, her glorious hair knotted on the back of her head as she scrolled through the internet with her morning tea. To his left, when he wrenched his gaze away from her laptop and his imagination, was the smallest version of a living room he’d ever seen, featuring only a plush white armchair, a small trunk and a little shelf with a television sat on it.

This was where she slept. Dreamed. Imagined her life without him. Lived it. Even while claiming she was in love with him.

She would pay for that, too, he promised himself. And dearly.

“This is my space,” she fumed at him. “It’s not one of the many things that belong to you, that you can storm in and out of as you please. I get to decide what happens here, and I want you to leave.”

“I’m not leaving.” He leveled a dark look at her. “Nor am I planning to run away if things become intense, unlike some.”

He moved farther into the room, grimly amused at the way she skittered away from him, or tried to, as there was nowhere left to go. He picked up one of the handful of framed photographs that sat on the narrow bookshelf at the top of her headboard. A younger Dru and a pale, skinny boy who looked just like her, the same dark hair, those same unfathomable gray eyes. Dru was staring into the camera, mischief in her eyes and a slight smile on her lips, while her brother slung an arm around her neck and laughed. They looked
happy, he thought. Truly happy. The constriction in his chest pulled taut.

“I did not
run away,
” she was protesting. She reached over and snatched the picture from his hand, holding it against her chest for a moment before replacing it. “There was no point continuing that conversation. There still isn’t. It hurts too much.”