Not Just the Boss's Plaything(39)

"It's terrible, I know," Ivan agreed. He leaned close and kissed his    daughter's soft forehead, contentment radiating from him. "A disaster    waiting to happen."                       
       
           



       

Nikolai smiled. "Only if she fights like you."

Later, after he and Ivan spent a happy few hours throwing each other    around and each claiming victory, he found Alicia out on the balcony    that wrapped around their suite of rooms. He walked up behind her    silently, watching the breeze dance through the cloud of her black    curls, admiring the short and flirty dress she wore in a bright shade of    canary yellow, showing off all of those toned brown limbs he wanted    wrapped around him.

Now. Always.

She gasped when he picked her up, but she was already smiling when he    turned her in his arms. As if she could read his mind-and he often    believed she could-she hooked her legs around his waist and let him hold    her there, both of them smiling at the immediate burst of heat. The    fire that only grew higher and hotter between them.

"Move in with me," he said, and her smile widened. "Live with me."

"Here in Malibu in this stunning house?" she asked, teasing him. "I    accept. I've always wanted to be a Hollywood star. Or at least adjacent    to one."

"The offer is for rain and cold, London and me," he said. He shifted her higher, held her closer.

"This is a very difficult decision," she said, but her eyes were    dancing. "Are you sure you don't want to come live with me and Rosie    instead? She's stopped shrieking and dropping things when you walk in    rooms. And she did predict that the night we met would be momentous.    She's a prophet, really."

"Move in with me," he said again, and nipped at her neck, her perfect    mouth. He thought of that look on his brother's face, that deep    pleasure, that peace. "Marry me, someday. When it's right. Make babies    with me. I want to live this life of yours, where everything is    multicolored and happiness wins."

And then he said the words, because he finally knew what they meant.    She'd promised him he had a heart, and she'd taught it how to beat. He    could feel it now, pounding hard.

"I love you, Alicia."

She smiled at him then as if he'd given her the world, when Nikolai knew    it was the other way around. She'd lit him up, set him free. She'd    given him back his brother, broke him out of that cold, dark prison that    had been his life. She was so bright she'd nearly blinded him, all    those beautiful colors and all of them his to share, if he liked. If he    let her.

"Is that a yes?" He pulled back to look at her. "It's okay if you don't-"

"Yes," she said through her smile. "Yes to everything. Always yes."

She'd loved him when he was nothing more than a monster, and she'd made him a man.

Love hardly covered it. But it was a start.

"Look at you," she whispered, her dark eyes shining. She smoothed her    hands over his shoulder, plucking at the T-shirt she'd bought him and    made him wear. He'd enjoyed the negotiation. "Put the man in a blue    shirt and he changes his whole life."

She laughed, and as ever, it stopped the world.

"No, solnyshka," Nikolai murmured, his mouth against hers so he could    feel that smile, taste the magic of her laughter, the miracle of the    heart she'd made beat again in him, hot and alive and real. "That was    you."

* * * * *





 A Devil in Disguise





 To Michelle Tadros Eidson for a few high finance clues, Jane    Porter for two key backstory points that changed everything, and to Jeff    Johnson for being the perfect husband to a crazed writer on deadline.    Again.





 Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EXCERPT





 CHAPTER ONE

"OF COURSE YOU are not resigning your position," Cayo Vila said    impatiently, not even glancing up from the wide expanse of his    granite-and-steel desk. The desk loomed in front of a glorious    floor-to-ceiling view over a gleaming wet stretch of the City of London,    not that he had ever been observed enjoying it. The working theory  was   that he simply liked knowing that it was widely desired by others,   that  this pleased him more than the view itself. That was what Cayo   Vila  loved above all else, after all: owning things others coveted.                       
       
           



       

It gave Drusilla Bennett tremendous satisfaction that she would no longer be one of them.

He made a low, scoffing sound. "Don't be dramatic."

Dru forced herself to smile at the man who had dominated every aspect of    her life, waking and sleeping and everything in between, for the past    five years. Night and day. Across all time zones and into every  little   corner of the globe where his vast empire extended. She'd been  at his   beck and call around the clock as his personal assistant,  dealing with   anything and everything he needed dealt with, from a  variety of his   personal needs to the vagaries of his wide-ranging  business concerns.

And she hated him. Oh, how she hated him. She did.

It surged in her, thick and hot and black and deep, making her skin seem    to shimmer over her bones with the force of it. It was hard to   imagine,  now, knowing the truth, that she'd harbored softer feelings   for this  man for so long-but it didn't matter, she told herself   sternly. It was  all gone now. Of course it was. He'd seen to that,   hadn't he?

She felt a fierce rush of that hard sort of grief that had flooded her    at the strangest times in these odd few months since her twin brother    Dominic had died. Life, she had come to understand all too keenly, was    intense and often far too complicated to bear, but she'd soldiered on    anyway. What choice was there? She'd been the only one left to handle    Dominic's disease-his addictions. His care. His mountain of medical    bills, the last of which she'd finally paid in full this week. And she'd    been the only one left to sort through the complexities of his death,    his cremation, his sad end. That had been hard. It still was.

But this? This was simple. This was the end of her treating herself as    the person who mattered least in her life. Dru was doing her best to    ignore the swirling sense of humiliation that went along with what she'd    discovered in the files this morning. She assured herself that she    would have resigned anyway, eventually, soon-that finding out what Cayo    had done was only a secondary reason to leave his employ.

"This is my notice," she said calmly, in that serene and unflappable    professional voice that was second nature to her-and that she resolved    she would never again utilize the moment she stepped out of this office    building and walked away from this man. She would cast aside the    necessarily icy exterior that had seen her through these years, that had    protected her from herself as well as from him. She would be as   chaotic  and emotional and yes, dramatic as she wished, whenever she   wished. She  would be flappable unto her very bones. She could already   feel that  shell she'd wrapped around her for so long begin to crack.   "Effective  immediately."

Slowly, incredulously, a kind of menace and that disconcerting pulse of    power that was uniquely his emanating from him like a new kind of    electricity, Cayo Vila, much-celebrated founder and CEO of the Vila    Group and its impressive collection of hotels, airlines, businesses and    whatever else took his fancy, richer than all manner of sins and a    hundred times as ruthless, raised his head.

Dru caught her breath. His jet-black brows were low over the dark gold    heat of his eyes. That fierce, uncompromising face made almost brutally    sensual by his remarkable mouth that any number of pneumatic    celebutantes swooned over daily was drawn into a thunderous expression    that boded only ill. The shock of his full attention, the hit of it,    that all these years of proximity had failed to temper or dissipate,    ricocheted through her, as always.