at all that this man who had kissed her with so much heat and longing in an ancient city, and who had looked at her as if she were the only person in the world who could ever matter to him, slaked his various lusts with all of these anonymous women. Why should it matter? she’d argued with herself a thousand times in the middle of the night while she lay alone and he was off tending to his companion du jour. What we have is so much deeper than sex …
It was all so desperate. So delusional and terribly, gut-wrenchingly pathetic.
She held a shoe in each hand now, like potential weapons, and she allowed herself a grim moment of amusement as she watched Cayo’s ever-calculating gaze move to the sharp stiletto heels immediately, as if he joined her in imagining her sinking them deep into his jugular. He smirked and returned his attention to the television and the almighty scroll of the New York Stock Exchange across the bottom of the screen, as if he’d assessed the threat that quickly and dismissed it that easily.
And her. Again. As ever.
“Have you finished having your little fit?” he asked. She felt her heart race, that same anger—at him and, worse, at herself—shaking through her, making her very nearly tremble.
“I want to know what you think is going to happen now that you’ve stranded me on this boat,” Dru replied, biting the words out. “Will you simply keep me imprisoned here forever? That seems impractical, at the very least. Boats eventually dock, and I can swim.”
“I suggest you take a deep breath, Miss Bennett,” he said in that obnoxiously patronizing tone, not even bothering to glance at her again, his entire lean body insulting in its disinterest. “You are becoming hysterical.”
It was too much, finally. She didn’t even think.
She cocked one arm back in a moment of searing, possibly insane, mind-numbing rage and threw a shoe.
At his head.
It sliced through the air, the wicked heel seeming almost to glow, and she pictured it spearing him directly between the mocking, impossible eyes—
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
