"That is a charming idea," Dru said, something dark and destructive churning inside her, through lips that felt pale with rage, "and I appreciate the offer, naturally. But I am not you, Mr. Vila." She let everything she felt about him-all these years of longing and sacrifice, all the things she'd thought and hoped, all the foolish dreams she'd had no idea he'd crushed in their infancy until today, even that one complicated and emotional night in Cadiz three years ago they never discussed and never would-burn through her as she stared at him. "I do not 'scratch the itch' with indiscriminate abandon, leaving masses in my wake, like some kind of oversexed Godzilla. I have standards."
He blinked. He did not move a single other muscle and yet Dru had to order herself to stay in place, so powerfully did she feel the lash of his temper, the kick of those amber eyes as they bored into her.
"Are you unwell?" he asked with soft menace, only the granite set of his jaw and the deepening of his accent hinting at his mounting fury. But Dru knew him. She knew the danger signs when she saw them. "Or have you taken complete leave of your senses?"
"This is called honesty, Mr. Vila," she replied with a crispness that completely belied the alarms ringing wildly inside her, screaming at her to run, to leave at once, to stop taunting him, for God's sake, as if that would prod him into being who she'd imagined he was! "I understand that it's not something you're familiar with, particularly not from me. But that's what happens when one is as carelessly domineering and impossible as you pride yourself on being. You are surrounded by an obsequious echo chamber of minions and acolytes, too afraid of you to speak the truth. I should know. I've been pretending to be one among them for years."
He went terrifyingly still. She could feel his temper expand to fill the room, all but rattling the windows. She could see that lean, muscled body of his seem to hum with the effort she imagined it took him to keep from exploding along with it. His gaze locked on hers, dark and furious. Infinitely more lethal than she wanted to admit to herself.
Or maybe it was that she was simply too susceptible to him. Still. Always, something inside her whispered, making her despair of herself anew.
"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."