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.
