A Devil in Disguise (2 page)

“I suggest you think very carefully about the next thing that comes out of your mouth,” he said in that deceptively measured way, the cruelty he was famous for rich in his voice then, casting his fierce face into iron. “You may otherwise live to regret it.”

This time, Dru’s laugh was real. If, she could admit to herself, a little bit nervous.

“That’s what you don’t understand,” she said, grief and satisfaction and too many other things stampeding through her, making her feel wild and dangerously
close to a certain kind of fierce, possibly unhinged joy. That she was defying him? That she was actually getting to him, for once? She had no idea anymore. “I don’t care. I’m essentially bulletproof. What are you going to do? Sack me? Blacklist me? Refuse me a reference? Go right ahead. I’ve already quit.”

And then, at long last, fulfilling the dream she’d cherished in one form or another since she’d taken this horribly all-consuming job in the first place purely to pay for Dominic’s assorted bills—because she couldn’t help but love her brother, despite everything and because she was all he’d had, and that had meant something to her even when she’d wished it didn’t—Dru turned her back on Cayo Vila, her own personal demon and the greatest bane of her existence, and walked out of his life forever.

Just as she’d originally planned she would someday.

There really should have been trumpets, at the very least. And certainly no trace of that hard sort of anguish that swam in her and made this much, much more difficult than it should have been.

She was almost to the far door of the outer office, where her desk sat as guardian of this most inner sanctum, when he snapped out her name. It was a stark command, and she had been too well trained to ignore it. She stopped, hating herself for obeying him, but it was only this last time, she told herself. What could it hurt?

When she looked over her shoulder, she felt a chill of surprise that he was so close behind her without her having heard him move, but she couldn’t think about that—it was that look on his face that struck her, all thunder and warning, and her heart began to pound, hard.

“If memory serves,” he said in a cool tone that was at complete odds with that dark savagery in his burnished gold gaze, “your contract states that you must give me two weeks following the tendering of your notice.”

It was Dru’s turn to blink. “You’re not serious.”

“I may be an ‘oversexed Godzilla,’ Miss Bennett …” He bit out each word like a bullet she shouldn’t have been able to feel, and yet it hurt—it
hurt—
and all the while the gold in his gaze seemed to sear into her, making her remember all the things she’d rather forget. “But that has yet to impede my ability to read a contract. Two weeks, which, if I am not mistaken, includes the investor dinner in Milan we’ve spent months planning.”

“Why would you want that?” Dru found she’d turned to face him without meaning to move, and her hands had become fists at her sides. “Are you that perverse?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t already found the answer to that from my ex-lovers, with whom you are so close, apparently,” he threw at her, his voice a sardonic lash. “Didn’t you spend all of those hours of your wasted life placating them?”

He folded his arms over his chest, and Dru found herself noticing, as always, the sheer, lean perfection of his athletic form. It was part of what made him so deadly. So dizzyingly unmanageable
.
Every inch of him was a finely honed weapon, and he was not averse to using whatever part of that weapon would best serve him. That was why, she understood, he was standing over her like this, intimidating her with the fact of his height, the breadth of his shoulders, the inexorable force and power of his relentless masculinity. Even in a bespoke suit which should have made him look like
some kind of dandy, he looked capable of anything. There was that hint of wildness about him, that constant, underlying
threat
he wore proudly. Deliberately.

She didn’t want to see him as a man. She didn’t want to remember the heat of his hands against her skin, his mouth so demanding on hers. She would die before she gave him the satisfaction of seeing that he got to her now. Even if she still felt the burn of it, the searing fire.

“You know what they say,” she murmured, sounding almost entirely calm to her own ears. Almost blasé. “Those who sleep with someone for the money earn every penny.”

He didn’t appear to react to that at all, and yet she felt something hard and hot flare between them, almost making her step back, almost making her show him exactly how nervous he made her. But she was done with that. With him. She refused to cower before him. And she was finished with quiet obedience, too. Look what it had got her.

“Take the rest of the day off,” he suggested then, a certain hoarseness in his voice the only hint of the fury she couldn’t quite see but had no doubt was close to liquefying them both. And perhaps the whole of the office building they stood in as well, if not the entire City of London besides. “I suggest you do something to curb your newfound urge toward candid commentary. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Half-seven, as usual, Miss Bennett.”

And it was suddenly as if a new sun dawned, bathing Dru in a bright, impossible light. Everything became stark and clear. He loomed there, not three feet away from her, taking up too much space, dark and impossible and faintly terrifying even when quiet and watchful. And he would never stop. She understood
that about him; she understood it the way she comprehended her own ability to breathe. His entire life was a testament to his inability to take no for an answer, to not accept what others told him if it wasn’t something he wanted to hear. He had never encountered a rule he didn’t break, a wall he couldn’t climb, a barrier he wouldn’t slap down simply because it dared to stand in his way.

He
took.
That was what he did. At the most basic level, that was who Cayo Vila was
.

He’d taken from her and she hadn’t even known it until today, had she? Some part of her—even now—wished she’d never opened that file drawer, never discovered how easily he’d derailed her career three years ago without her ever the wiser. But she had.

She could see the whole rest of her life flash before her eyes in a sickening, infinitely depressing cascade of images. If she agreed to his two weeks, she might as well die on the spot. Right here, right now. Because he would take possession of her life the way he’d done of her last five years, and there would be no end to it. Ever. Dru knew perfectly well that she was the best personal assistant he’d ever had. That wasn’t any immodesty on her part—she’d had to be, because she’d needed the money he’d paid her and the cachet his name had afforded her when it came time to wrangle Dominic into the best drug-treatment clinics and programs in the States, for all the good it had done. And she still believed it had all been worth it, no matter how little she had to show for it now, no matter how empty and battered she felt. Dominic had not died alone, on a lonely street corner in some desperate city neighborhood, never to be identified or mourned or missed. That was what mattered.

But Dominic had only been the first, original reason. Her pathetic feelings for Cayo had been the second—and far more appalling—reason she’d made herself so indispensible to Cayo. She’d taken pride in her ability to serve him so well. It left a bitter taste in her mouth today, but it was true. She was that much of a masochist, and she’d have to live with that. If she stayed even one day more, any chance she had left to reclaim her life, to do something for herself, to
live,
to crawl out of this terrible hole she’d lowered herself into all on her own, would disappear into the big black smoke-filled vortex that was Cayo Vila.

He would buy more things and sell others, make millions and destroy lives at a whim, hers included. And she would carry on catering to him, jumping to do his bidding and smoothing the path before him, anticipating his every need and losing herself, bit by bit and inch by inch, until she was nothing more than a pleasant-looking, serene-voiced husk. A robot under his command. Slave to feelings he would never, could never return, despite small glimmers to the contrary in far-off cities on complicated evenings never spoken of aloud when they were done.

Worse, she would
want
to do all of it. She would
want
to be whatever she could be for him, just so long as she could stay near him. Just as she had since that night she’d seen such a different side of him in Cadiz. She would cling to anything, wouldn’t she? She would even pretend she didn’t know that he’d crushed her dreams of advancement with a single, brutal email. She was, she knew, exactly that pathetic. Exactly that stupid. Hadn’t she proved it every single day of these past three years?

“No,” she said.

It was, of course, a word he rarely heard.

His black brows lowered. His hard gold eyes shone with amazement. That impossibly lush mouth, the one that made his parade of lovers fantasize that there could be some softness to him, only to discover too late that it was no more than a mirage, flattened ominously.

“What do you mean, no?”

The lilt of his native Spanish cadence made the words sound almost musical, but Dru knew that the thicker his accent, the more trouble she was in—and the closer that volcanic temper of his was to eruption. She should have turned on her heel and run for safety. She should have heeded the knot in her belly and the heat that moved over her skin, the panic that flooded through her.

“I understand that you might not be familiar with the word,” she said, sounding perhaps more empowered, more sure of herself, than was wise. Or true. “It indicates dissent. Refusal. Both concepts you have difficulty with, I know. But that is, I am happy to say, no longer my problem.”

“It will become your problem,” he told her, a note she’d never heard before in his voice. His gaze narrowed further, into two outraged slits of gold, as if he’d never actually seen her until this moment. Something about that particular way he looked at her made her feel lightheaded. “I will—”

“Go ahead and take me to court,” she said, interrupting him again with a careless wave of her hand that, she could see, visibly infuriated him. “What do you think you’ll win?”

For the first time in as long as she’d known him, Cayo Vila was rendered speechless. The silence was taut and breathless between them, and, still, was somehow
as loud as a siren. It seemed to
hum.
And he simply stared at her, thunderstruck, an expression she had never seen before on his ruthless face.

Good.

“Will you take my flat from me?” she continued, warming to the topic. Emboldened, perhaps, by his unprecedented silence. By the chaos inside of her that was all his fault. “It’s only a leased bedsit. You’re welcome to it. I’ll write you a check right now, if you like, for the entire contents of my current account. Is that what it will take?” She laughed, and could hear it bouncing back at her from the glass wall, the tidy expanse of her desk, even the polished floor that made even the outer office seem glossy and that much more intimidating to the unwary. “I’ve already given you five years. I’m not giving you two more weeks. I’m not giving you another second. I’d rather die.”

Cayo stared at his assistant as if he’d never seen her before.

There was something about the way she tilted that perfect, pretty oval of her face, the way her usually calm gray eyes sparkled with the force of her temper, and something about that mouth of hers. He couldn’t seem to look away from it.

Unbidden, a memory teased through his head, of her hand on his cheek, her gray eyes warm and something like affectionate, her lips—but no. There was no need to revisit
that
insanity. He’d worked much too hard to strike it from his consciousness. It was one regrettable evening in five smooth, issue-free years. Why think of it at all?

“I would rather die,” she said again, as if she was
under the misapprehension that he had not heard her the first time.

“That can always be arranged,” he said, searching that face he knew so well and yet, apparently, so little—looking for some clue as to what had brought this on. Here, now, today. “Have you forgotten? I am a very formidable man.”

“If you are going to make threats, Mr. Vila,” she replied in that crisp way of hers, “at least pay me the compliment of making them credible. You are many things, but you are not a thug. As such.”

For the first time in longer than he could remember—since, perhaps, he had been the fatherless child whose mother, all the village had known too well, had been so disgraced that she had taken to the convent after his birth rather than face the wages of her sin in its ever-growing flesh—Cayo was at a loss. It might have amused him that it was his personal assistant who had wrought this level of incapacity in him, his glorified secretary for God’s sake, when nothing else had managed it. Not another multimillion-pound deal, not one more scandalous affair reported breathlessly and inaccurately in the tabloids, not one of his new and—dare he say it—visionary business enterprises. Nothing got beneath his skin. Nothing threw him off balance.

Only this woman. As she had once before.

It was funny. It was. He was certain he would laugh about it at some point, and at great length, but first? He needed her. Back in line where she belonged, back securely in the role he preferred her to play, and he ignored the small whisper inside him that suggested that there would be no repairing this. That she would never again be as comfortably invisible as she’d been before, that it was too late, that he’d been operating on
borrowed time since the incident in Cadiz three years ago and this was only the delayed fallout—

“I am leaving,” she told him, meeting his gaze as if he were a naughty child in the midst of a tiresome strop, and enunciating each word as if she suspected he was too busy tantruming to hear her otherwise. “You will have to come to terms with that and if you feel it necessary to file suit against me, have at it. I booked a ticket to Bora Bora this morning. I’m sorted.”

And then, finally, his brain started working again. It was one thing for her to take herself off to wherever she lived in London, or even off on a week’s holiday to, say, Ibiza, as he’d suggested. But French Polynesia, a world away? Unacceptable.