Not Just the Boss's Plaything(47)
He broke the kiss to mutter something harsh in Spanish, and reality slammed back into Dru. So hard she was distantly amazed her bones hadn't shattered from the impact.
She shoved against his chest blindly, and was entirely too aware not only that he chose to let her go, but that it was as if her very blood sang out to stay exactly where she was, plastered against him, just as she'd done once before and to her own detriment.
She staggered back a foot, then another. She was breathing too hard, teetering on the edge of a terrible panic, and she was afraid it would take no more than the faintest brush of wind to toss her right over into its grip. She could see nothing through the haze that seemed to cover her vision but that hooded, dangerous, dark amber gaze of his and that mouth-that mouth-
She should know better. She did know better. She could feel hysteria swell in her, indistinguishable from the lump in her throat and the clamoring of her pulse. Her stomach twisted and for a terrifying moment she didn't know if she was going to be sick or faint or some horrifying combination thereof.
But she sucked in another breath, and that particular crisis passed, somehow. He still only watched her. As if he knew exactly how hard her blood pumped through her body and where it seemed to pool. As if he knew exactly how much her breasts ached, and where they'd hardened. As if he knew how she burned for him, and always had.
Dru couldn't stand it. She couldn't stand here. So she turned on her bare heel, and bolted from the salon. She picked up speed as she moved, aware as she began to run up the grand stairway toward the deck that she was breathing so heavily she might as well be sobbing. Maybe she was.
You little fool, some voice kept intoning in her head. You're nothing but a latter-day Miss Havisham and twice as sad-
She blinked in the bright slap of sunshine when she burst out onto the deck, momentarily blinded. She looked over her shoulder when she could see and he was right there, as she knew he would be, lean and dark and those hot, demanding eyes that looked almost gold in the Adriatic sunshine.
"Where are you going?" He was taunting her, those wicked brows of his raised. That mouth-God, that mouth- "I thought you didn't care about a little kiss?"
It's the devil or the deep blue sea, she thought, aware that she was almost certainly hysterical now. But her heart was already broken. She couldn't take anything more. She couldn't survive this again. She wasn't sure she'd survived it the first time, come to that.
Dru simply turned back around, took a running start toward the side of the yacht one story up from the sea, and jumped.
CHAPTER THREE
SHE HAD ACTUALLY thrown herself off the side of the damned boat.
Cayo stood at the rail and scowled down at her as she surfaced in the water below and started swimming for the far-off shore, fighting to keep his temper under control. Fighting to shove all of that need and lust back where it belonged, shut down and locked away in the deepest recesses of his memory.
How had this happened? Again?
And yet he was all too aware there was no one to blame but himself. Which only made it worse.
"Is that Dru?" The voice that came from slightly behind him was shocked.
"'Dru?'" Cayo echoed icily.
He didn't want to know she had a casual nickname. He didn't want to think of her as a person. He didn't want this intoxicating taste of her in his mouth again, or this insane longing for her that stormed through him, making him so hard it bordered on the painful and, moreover, a stranger to himself. He didn't want any of this. But that dark drum that he told himself was only temper beat ever hotter inside of him, making him a liar yet again.
"I mean Miss Bennett, of course," the crew member beside him, the head steward if Cayo was not mistaken, all but stammered. "Forgive me, sir, but has she...fallen? Shouldn't we go and help her?"
"That is an excellent question," Cayo muttered.
He watched her for a long, tense moment, out there in the blue sweep of water, her strokes long and sure. He was very nearly forced to admire the willfulness and sheer bloody-mindedness she'd displayed today. Was still displaying, in fact. To say nothing of her grace and skill in the water, even fully dressed. He had to fight with himself to get his body under control, to force away the thick, near-liquid desire that still pumped through him and that thing in him that was far too alert now and would not have stopped at that kiss. Oh, no. That had been the sort of kiss that started scorching affairs, and had it not been Drusilla, he would not even have thought twice-he would have taken her there and then, on the floor of the salon if necessary.
And up against the wall. And down among the soft pillows in the seating area. And again and again, just to test all that shocking chemistry that had blown up around them-that he had told himself he'd forgotten entirely until it was all he could think of all over again. Just to see what they could make of it.
But it was Drusilla.
Cayo had always been a practical man. Deliberate and focused in all he did. He had never varied from the path he'd set himself; he'd never been tempted to try. Except for one unfortunate slip in Cadiz that night, and a repeat here on this yacht today.
That was two slips too many. And it was quite enough. He had to get himself back under control and stay there.
He watched as she flipped over to her back in the water, no doubt checking for any potential pursuit, and fought with that part of him that suggested he simply leave her there. She had already wasted too much of his time. His schedule had been packed full today, and he'd shoved it all aside so he could try to keep her from leaving. Why had he done any of this? And then kissed her?
It didn't matter, he told himself ruthlessly. She was too valuable to him as his assistant to risk her drowning, of course. Or to become his lover, as his body was still enthusiastically demanding. He'd decided the same thing three years ago when she'd applied for that promotion. He'd determined that she should stay exactly where she was and everything should remain exactly as it had been before they'd gone to Spain. He still didn't see why anything should change, when it had all been so perfect for so long, save two kisses that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
He didn't understand why she wanted to leave his employ so desperately, or why she was so furious with him all of a sudden. But he felt certain that if he threw enough money at the problem, whatever it was and especially if it was no more than her hurt feelings, she would find that it went away. His mouth twisted. People always did.
"Sir? Perhaps one of the motorboats? Only she's got a bit far out, now...?" the steward asked again, sounding simultaneously more subservient and more worried than he had before, a feat that might have amused Cayo had he not still been so at odds with his own temper.
He did not care for the feeling-uncertain and off balance. He did not like the fact that Drusilla made him feel at all, much less like that. She was the perfect personal assistant, competent and reliable. And impersonal. It was when he saw her as a woman that he ran into trouble. He started to feel the way he imagined other, lesser men felt. Unsure. Even needy. Wholly unlike himself and all he stood for. It horrified him unto his very bones.
Never again, he'd vowed when he was still so young. No more feelings. He'd felt far too much in the first eighteen years of his life, and done nothing but suffer for it. He'd decided he was finished with it-that succumbing to such things was for the kind of man he had no intention of ever becoming. Weak. Malleable. Common. He refused to be any of those things, ever again.