That annoyed him, too.
"Has something happened with the Vila Resort there which requires your personal attention?" she asked, her voice as calm and unruffled as the rest of her-as if last night she hadn't sounded so uneven, so breakable. As if she hadn't spoken to him the way she would to the architect of her despair. As if he hadn't touched her like that, as though she were fragile. Precious, even.
What are you so afraid of? he heard her ask again, and it made something inside him seem to tear itself in half.
"It is a part of the Vila Group," he replied, in a voice far short of civility. "It all requires my personal attention."
Her too-knowing gray eyes met his, held for a moment, then dropped to the tablet she'd placed on the table before her. She smiled when the hovering staff placed a large silver pot of tea before her, and waved away the offer of food. And for some reason, her silence felt like a rebuke.
"We leave tonight," he said, his tone still clipped, though markedly more polite than it had been. He didn't know why he was responding meekly instead of as he'd prefer, which involved hauling her up and into his arms and dealing with all of this sexual tension once and for all. No matter what she thought of him-or what he thought of himself, for that matter. "Consider it my gift to you for your years of service, if you must."
Something flared in her gaze again, then disappeared behind that smooth, calm wall of hers he found he liked less and less the longer he looked at it. He wondered if it was as hard for her to maintain that courteous, professional veneer as it was becoming for him to keep his hands off her.
He rather doubted it.
"Will this 'gift' count as part of my final two weeks?" she asked lightly, though when her gaze met his, it hinted of steel. "Because that's all the time you have left, Mr. Vila. No matter what you choose to do with it."
"You said it was where you wanted to go," he reminded her, furious-at her for not accepting what he was reluctant to admit was an olive branch, and at himself for offering it in the first place. But something in the way she'd looked at him last night had burrowed deep beneath his skin. He could feel it now, like an impossible itch.
"Yes," she agreed softly. "I want to go to Bora Bora." She raised one delicate shoulder and then let it fall. "I never said I wanted to go with you."
That sat there between them.
There was no reason at all, Cayo reasoned, that it should feel like a slap when he could see clearly that she was only being frank. He already knew what she thought of him. Hadn't she been at such great pains to make sure of it? No matter how different it might have appeared in the dark last night? He shouldn't be surprised, if that was what this odd feeling was. He wasn't.
"Life," he said after a moment, his accent thicker than it should have been, almost as if his temper was high, which wasn't in the least bit rational, "is all about compromise."
"Really?" she asked. Her eyes searched his, and she looked somewhere between amused and genuinely baffled, which somehow made it worse. "How would you know?"
Cayo tossed back the rest of his espresso and decided he was tired, that was all. There was no deeper reason for any of this. How could there be? He hadn't slept. That was why his head was so muddled. Why he could not seem to sort through his own thoughts, his own motivations. Nor even his own reactions.
"I am finding it difficult to track all of your accusations," he said after a moment, his tone dry. Almost conversational. "You believe I am a sociopath, yet last night you told me I am also afraid. Today I am unfamiliar with compromise. Before, I was Godzilla, was I not?" He was fascinated by the color that rose in her cheeks, and then equally intrigued by the way she squared her shoulders, as if withstanding an attack. "I believe I take your meaning, Miss Bennett. I am a monster without equal."
Monster. It was only a word, he told himself then, as it seemed to echo hard in him, recalling that whitewashed village high in the Spanish mountains, his grandfather's harsh pleasure on his eighteenth birthday. It is just a word. It means nothing.
"You are a man who assumes that his will is sufficient permission to do anything he likes," Drusilla said slowly, as if she were considering each word carefully. "There are no consequences for the things you do." She reached for her tea, and poured a stream of the hot liquid into the delicate cup before her. Her gaze flicked to his, then away. "It would never occur to you to care."
He wanted to touch her with a new kind of fury, so intense was his desire to feel her skin against his. To take that mouth of hers and learn it, own it, make it his. To follow her down onto the nearest flat surface and lose himself inside her, at last.
But he did nothing of the kind. He held on to his control by the faintest, thinnest thread. Again.
"Of course not," he said coldly, as if there was nothing steaming up the air between them, as if there were no tension at all, no desire, no need. He reached for the Financial Times folded beside his plate and told himself he was dismissing her as he'd always done before, without thought. Without a single care, as accused. "That's what I pay you for."
* * *
It was a remarkably long trip.
I didn't want you to leave, he'd said.
Dru couldn't stop replaying it in her head, again and again. She handled the packing, the delivery of appropriate clothes for Cayo from the Milan ateliers he preferred and her own hurried selections from La Rinascente, the city's premier department store hardly a stone's throw from the Duomo. She sent out a flurry of emails, made the day's series of phone calls, and carried out the usual duties of her job, accustomed as she was to performing it wherever she happened to find herself.
But she couldn't seem to get last night out of her mind. The chill of the air, the inky dark and his hand so soft against her cheek. That storm in his midnight gaze that had crashed through her, too. That still did. Why should a few quiet words and a couple of touches affect her so? Why should she feel as if everything was different, when nothing seemed to have changed at all?
They boarded one of Cayo's jets in Milan late that evening, and Dru made her way to her usual bedchamber. She stretched out on the bed and dared not let herself succumb to the turmoil inside herself, not when there was still the rest of her two weeks to live through. She couldn't let herself crack so soon. She'd never survive.
When she woke hours later, they simply went to work as if they were in the Vila Group's London headquarters rather than on a plane headed across the planet. She sat right there at his side in the area set apart for business. She queued up his calls, handling the many details of each, presenting him with the necessary documents and background materials he needed, and reminding him of anything he might have forgot or overlooked as the calls wore on. She prepped the various people who rang in, alerting them to Cayo's shifting moods and often suggesting ways to combat them. Between calls, they discussed various strategies to employ or different approaches to take to tackle each new issue or person.
"I'm tired of his games," Cayo said of one mutinous board member at one point, raking his hands through his hair in agitation. "I want to end him."
"That's one approach." Dru removed a stack of documents from in front of him and replaced them with another, larger stack. "Another might be to simply work around him the way you did with the Argentina project last year. Isolate him. Who will he play his games with then?"