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Not Just the Boss's Plaything(42)

By:Caitlin Crews


And it was suddenly as if a new sun dawned, bathing Dru in a bright,    impossible light. Everything became stark and clear. He loomed there,    not three feet away from her, taking up too much space, dark and    impossible and faintly terrifying even when quiet and watchful. And he    would never stop. She understood that about him; she understood it the    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.