"I don't want to live in London," she told him. She lifted a shoulder and then dropped it. She ignored the way her stomach twisted, and that howling, broken-hearted part of her that wanted him any way she could have him. Even now. Even like this. "I don't want a flat."
"Where, then?" He raised a brow. "Are you angling for a house? An estate? A private island? I think I have all of the above."
"Indeed you do," she replied. It was almost comforting to pull up all of that information she knew about him and his many and varied assets-until she remembered how deeply proud she'd always been that she so rarely had to consult the computer to access Cayo's details. It was yet more evidence of how deeply pathetic she was. "You have sixteen residential properties, some of which are also estates. You also own three private islands, as well as a modest collection of atolls. That's at last count. You do always seem to acquire more, don't you?"
Cayo leaned back against the wide desk that stretched across the center of the room as if it were a throne he expected to be worshipped upon and crossed his arms over his chest, and she couldn't deny the intensity of that midnight stare. She felt it like fire, down to the bare soles of her feet. Her toes curled slightly in response, and she flexed her feet to stop it. And still he merely watched her, that gaze of his dark and stirring, and she had no idea what he saw.
"Pick one." It was a command.
"You can't buy me back," she said, her own voice just as quiet as his. Just as deliberate. "I don't want your money."
"Everyone has a price, Miss Bennett." He rubbed at his jaw with one hand, a considering light in his unnerving eyes. "Especially those who claim they do not, I usually find."
"Yes," she said, shifting in her chair as a kind of restlessness swirled through her. She wanted to fast forward through this, desperately. She wanted to be on the other side of it, when she'd already found the strength to defy him, had walked away and was living without him. She wanted this done already; she didn't want to do it. "I know how you operate. But I have no family left to threaten or save. No outstanding debts you can leverage to your advantage. No deep, dark secrets you can threaten to expose or offer to hide more deeply. Nothing at all that can force me to take a job I don't want, I'm afraid."
He only watched her in that way of his, as if it made no difference what she said to him. Because, she realized, it didn't. Not to him. He was immoveable. A wall. And maybe he even enjoyed watching her batter herself against the sheer iron of his will. She wouldn't put anything past him. Desperation coursed through her then, a hectic surge of electricity, and Dru couldn't sit still any longer. She got to her feet and then eased away from him, as if by standing she'd ceded ground to him.
"Miss Bennett," he began in a voice she recognized. It was the voice he used to mollify his victims before he felled them with a killing blow. She knew it all too well. She'd heard it in a hundred board rooms. In a thousand conference calls.
She couldn't take it here, now. Aimed directly at her.
"Just stop!" she heard herself cry out. There was an inexorable force moving through her, despair and desperation swelling large, and she couldn't seem to do anything but obey it. She faced him again, her hands balling into fists while a scalding heat threatened the back of her eyes. "Why are you doing this?"
"I told you," he said impatiently, so cold and forbidding and annoyed while she fell into so many pieces before him. "You are the best personal assistant I've ever had. That is not a compliment. It is a statement of fact."
"That might be true," she managed to say, fighting to keep the swirl of emotion inside her to herself. "But it doesn't explain this." When he shifted his weight as if he meant to argue, because of course he did, he always did, she threw up her hands as if she could hold him off. "You could replace me with fifteen perfect assistants, a fleet of them trained and ready to serve you within the hour. You could replace me with anyone in the entire world if you chose. There is absolutely no reason for any of this-not three years ago and not now!"
"Apparently," he said coldly, "your price is higher than most."
"It's insane." She shook her hair back from her face, ordered herself not to burst into tears. "You don't need me."
"But I want you." Harsh. Uncompromising.
And not at all in the way she wanted him. That was perfectly plain.
It was as if something burst inside of her.
"You will never understand!" She stopped trying to hold herself back, to keep herself in check. What was the point? "There was someone I loved. Someone I lost. Years I can never get back." She didn't care that her voice was as shaky as it was loud, that her eyes were wet. She didn't care what he might see when he looked at her, or worry that he might suspect she was talking about more than her brother. She had given herself permission to do this, hadn't she? This was what flappable looked like. "There is no amount of money you can offer me that can fix the things that are broken. Nothing that can give me back what I lost-what was taken from me. Nothing." Nor, worse, what she'd given him, fool that she was. She heaved a ragged breath and kept on. "I want to disappear into a world where Cayo Vila doesn't matter, to me or anyone else."
She wanted that last bit most of all.
And in a cutting bit of unwelcome self-awareness, she accepted the sad truth of things. He didn't have to offer her flats or estates or islands. He didn't have to throw his money at her.
If he'd said he wanted her and meant, for once, that he wanted her...
If, even now, he'd pulled her close and told her that he simply couldn't imagine his life without her...
There was that little masochist within, Dru knew all too well, who would work for him for free, if only he wanted her like that.
But Cayo didn't want anyone like that. Especially not her. She could tell herself he was incapable of it, that he'd never known love and never would-but that was no more than a pretty gloss on the same ugly truth. She understood all of that.
And still, she yearned for him.
"You have made your point," he said, after a strained moment.
"Then, please. Let me go." It was harder to choke out than it should have been. She hated herself for that, too.
For a moment she thought he might, and her stomach dropped. Disbelief, she lied to herself.
There was that odd light in his fascinating eyes-but then his face seemed to shutter itself and darken, and he straightened to his full height, the better to look down at her. And she reminded herself that this was Cayo Vila, and he let nothing go. He never bent. He never compromised. He simply kept on going until he won.
She couldn't understand why she couldn't seem to breathe.
"You owe me two weeks," he said, as if he were rendering a prison sentence. "I intend to have them. You can do your job for those two weeks and fulfill your contractual obligations to me, or I'll simply keep you with me like a dog on a leash, purely out of spite."
But he didn't look spiteful. He looked something far closer to sad, and it made her stomach twist. Again. And that terrible longing swelled again inside her, making her ache. Making her wish-but her wishes were dangerous, and they tore her into tatters every time. She shoved them aside.
Cayo smiled, as if from far away, hard and wintry.
"Your choice, Miss Bennett."
CHAPTER FOUR
HE SHOULD HAVE been happy-or at the very least, satisfied.
Cayo lounged back against his chair and gazed around the white-linen-draped table that stretched the length of the formal dining room in the Presidential Suite of the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan, surveying the small dinner he'd had Drusilla throw here in one of Europe's most prestigious spaces. The rooms of the vast suite gave the impression of belonging to royalty perhaps, so stunning were they, all high ceilings, carefully selected antiques and the finest Italian craftsmanship on display at every turn. Wealth and elegance seemed to shimmer up from the very floors to dance in the air around them.