gaze made every hair on her body prickle to attention. She sucked in a breath.
“What on earth are you talking about?” he asked silkily. At his most dangerous, but she couldn’t let that intimidate her. She wouldn’t. “Nobody forced you to come on this trip. There was no gun to your back. You agreed.”
“This is not Switzerland,” she pointed out, trying to keep her rising panic at bay. “It doesn’t even resemble Switzerland. The sea is a dead giveaway and unless I am very much mistaken, that is Dubrovnik.”
She stabbed a finger in the general direction of the red-roofed, whitewashed city that clung to the rugged coastline off the side of the yacht, and the walls and fortress that encircled it so protectively. The blue waters of the Adriatic—because she knew where she was, she didn’t need him to confirm it so much as explain it—were as gorgeous and inviting as ever. She wanted to throw him overboard and watch those same waters consume him, inch by aggravating inch. Only the fact that he was so much bigger than she—and all of it sleek and smooth muscle she did not trust herself near enough to touch—prevented her trying. And only barely prevented her, at that.
He didn’t glance toward the shore. Why should he? He had undoubtedly known where they were going the moment he’d mentioned Zurich back in London. He’d certainly known when they’d landed in a mysterious airfield somewhere in Europe and he’d hurried her onto the helicopter before she could get her bearings. This was only a surprise for her.
“Did I say Switzerland?” he asked, that voice of his deceptively soft and all the more lethal for it, while his gaze remained hard. “You must have misheard me.”
“Exactly what is your plan?’ she threw at him, temper and fear and something else she couldn’t quite identify sloshing around inside her, making her feel like a bomb about to detonate. “Am I your prisoner now?”
“How theatrical you are,” he said, and she had the impression that he was choosing his words carefully. That much harsher words lurked behind that quiet tone that she knew meant he was furious. “How did you manage to hide that so long and so well?”
“You must have mistaken me for someone else,” Dru hurled at him. “I’m not going to mindlessly obey your commands—”
“Are you certain?” That black gold gaze of his turned darker, harder as he cut her off. It made her feel oddly hollow, and much too hot. She assured herself it was anger, nothing more. “If memory serves, obedience is one of your strengths.”
“Obedience was my job,” she said with some remnant of her former iciness. “But I quit.”
He looked at her for a long, simmering moment.
“Your resignation has not been accepted, Miss Bennett,” he snapped out, fierce and commanding. As if she should not dare mention the matter again. And then he turned his back on her and strode off across the gleaming, sun-kissed deck as if it was settled.
Dru stood where he’d left her, feeling a little bit silly and more than a little off balance in her smart office clothes and delicate heels that were completely inappropriate for a boat. She stepped out of her stilettos and scooped them up in her hand, trying to breathe in the crisp sea air. Trying to curl her now-bare toes against the cool deck as if that might ground her.
Trying to breathe.
She moved over to the polished rail and leaned her elbows against it, frowning at the rolling waves, the gorgeously craggy coastline beckoning in the distance, rich dark greens and weathered reds basking in the sun. She felt it all twist and shift inside her then, all of the struggle and agony, the sacrifice and frustrated yearning. The grief. The hope. The brutal truth some part of her wished she’d never learned. It all seemed to swell within her as if it might crack her open and rip her apart—as if, having finally opened the door to all the things she’d repressed all this time, the lies she’d told herself, she couldn’t lock it back up. She couldn’t pretend any longer.
Misery rose inside her, thick and black and suffocating. And fast. And for a moment, she could do nothing but let it claim her. There was so much she couldn’t change, couldn’t help. She couldn’t go back in time and keep her father from dying when she and Dominic had still been toddlers. She couldn’t keep her mother from her string of lovers, each more vicious and abusive than the last. She couldn’t keep sweet, sensitive Dominic from choosing oblivion, and then courting it, his life and his drugs getting harder every year, until it was no more than a waiting game for his inevitable and tragic end.
The long, hard breath she took felt ragged. Too close to painful.
And she was free of those obligations now, it was true, but she was also irrevocably and impossibly alone. She hardly remembered her father and her mother hadn’t acknowledged her existence in years. She’d built her life around handling Dominic’s disease, and with him gone, there was nothing but … emptiness. She would fill it, she promised herself. She would build a life based finally on what she wanted, not as some kind of response to people and things that were forever out of her control. Not a life in opposition to her mother’s choices. Not a life contingent on Dominic’s problems. A life that was only hers, whatever that looked like.
All she had to do was escape Cayo Vila first.
Another fresh wave of pain crashed through her then, just as hard to fight off. Sharper, somehow. Wrenching and dark. Cayo. Three years ago she’d thought she’d seen something in him, some glimmer of humanity, an indication that he was so much more than the man he pretended to be in public. And she’d taken that night, some intimate conversation and a single, ill-conceived, far too passionate kiss, and built herself a whole imaginary world of possibility. Oh, the ways she’d wanted him, the ways she’d believed in him—and all the while he’d thought so very little of her that he’d blocked her chances for another position in the Vila Group and, in so doing, any kind of independent career. Without a word to her. Without any conversation at all.
With three careless sentences.
Miss Bennett is an assistant, he’d emailed Human Resources not long after that night she’d so foolishly believed had changed everything between them. She’d applied for the job in marketing, thinking it was high time she spread her wings in the company, took charge of her own career rather than merely supported his. She is certainly no vice president. Look elsewhere.
He hadn’t hidden the fact he’d done it, either. Why should he have? It was right there in Dru’s file, had she ever bothered to look. She hadn’t, until today, while doing a bit of housecleaning about the office. She’d been so sure everything was different after Cadiz, if unspoken, unaddressed. She hadn’t minded that she hadn’t got that job; she’d thought she and Cayo had an understanding—she’d believed they were a team—
So help her, she thought now, forcing back the angry, humiliated tears she was determined not to cry, she would never again be so foolish.
She’d known exactly who he was when he’d hired her, and she knew exactly who he was now. She’d spend the rest of her life working out how she’d managed to lose sight of that for so long, how she’d betrayed herself so completely for a fantasy life in her head, built around a single kiss that still made her flush hot to recall, but she wouldn’t forget herself again. It was cold comfort, perhaps, but it was all she had.
She found him in one of the yacht’s many salons, a sleek celebration of marble and glass down an ostentatious spiral stair that was as gloriously luxe as everything else on this floating castle he’d won in a late-night card game from a Russian oligarch.
