Not Just the Boss's Plaything(57)
Cayo eyed her for a moment, an approving gleam in his dark gaze that should not have given her so much pleasure.
"Who indeed?" he asked softly.
Dru made sure his coffee was always hot and fixed to his taste, and insisted that he eat something substantial after a certain span of time, simply serving him a meal if he refused to step away from the work at hand. When his voice took on that particularly icy edge that boded only ill, she calmly suggested he repair to the master suite to either rest or work out his temper on the exercise equipment that flew with him everywhere. She was on top of their travel plans, too; making certain that there was not the smallest chance that Cayo Vila should find himself inconvenienced in any small way, no matter where he was in the world or what he had to do. All of which she'd done a million times before.
But it wasn't the same.
Something really had changed last night, and it permeated even their most simple exchanges. The very air between them seemed electric, charged. Her hand brushed his and they both froze. She looked up from her tablet to find him watching her, a brooding sort of expression in those dark eyes of his, the gold in them gleaming in a way she didn't recognize. But she felt it. In her breasts, deep in her belly. In her limbs that were too heavy today, her breath that she couldn't quite catch.
It made her wonder. It made her too hot, too shivery, too aware. It made her want-again, anew-what she could never have.
Some seventeen hours into the almost twenty-four-hour trip, plus refueling stops, and they had worked roughly nine of them. Hardly half a day's work in Cayo's book, Dru knew. They took a break, sitting in the common area of the plane. Dru sipped at her water and knew better than to ask why Cayo was watching her with that new, disconcerting light in his eyes. Dark and considering, as if he had never seen her before. As if that strange, dream-like conversation on the terrace in Milan really had shifted something fundamental between them. That, she was sure, was why she felt almost watery, insubstantial. Needy and breathless. Unable to think about anything but Cayo, in all the ways she shouldn't.
"Why Bora Bora?" he asked. "When I suggested you take a holiday, I assumed you'd go to Spain. Portugal, perhaps. This seems like something of a reach."
Dru rolled the water bottle between her palms, letting the cold glass soothe her, letting the sound of the engines wash over her like white noise.
"Why not Bora Bora?" she asked lightly. "If working for you has taught me nothing else, it's to demand the best in all things."
"Indeed." Some fire flared there, in that golden topaz gaze, and for a moment she couldn't look away. Then his lips quirked into a hard sort of smile, sardonic and faintly amused. "I'm delighted to discover you take indolence as seriously as you take everything else."
"Perhaps all I want from life is to sit under a palm tree and stare at the sea," she said, though the very thought was faintly unnerving, somehow.
"And be waited upon hand and foot?" he asked, a note in his voice she couldn't decipher.
She thought of Dominic's ashes, packed away in the tin that functioned as an urn and sat in the center of her bookshelf back in London. And of the promises she'd made, to him and to herself. That she would let him go into the wind, the water. The least she could do was honor the man he might have been, had he made different choices, or been stronger against his own demons. And she knew that she needed it, too. The closure. The ceremony. A way to let go, once and for all.
"Something like that," she said now, not quite meeting Cayo's eyes.
He didn't believe her. She could see it in the way he shifted in his deep leather seat, as he scraped that thick, black hair back from his brow.
"How debaucherous." It was a taunt. And it hit hard, though she should have been impervious to him.
"I leave that kind of thing to you, Mr. Vila," she snapped.
Unwisely.
Everything seemed to pull taut. There was no air, no sound. Dru had the panicked sense that the plane had dropped from the sky-but no, Cayo did not move a muscle, it was only in her head. She felt her heart thud hard against her chest, then slow, and she could not seem to look away from him, from that hard mouth of his that she could not pretend she didn't crave. From that dangerous light in his eyes as he stared back at her.
"Is that a challenge, Miss Bennett?" he asked softly, that voice rolling through her, turning all of that need into an ache, insistent and sweet, burning her from the inside out. His cruel mouth moved into a hard smile, and she felt it like a caress. "I will endeavor to live up to your fantasies."
Did he know? Dru felt herself flush. Did he know what kept her awake-what tormented her, what she could see all too clearly even now-that delicious fusion of what had happened in Cadiz and on the yacht and what she imagined came next-
"But first," he continued in that silky, supremely dangerous tone, his gaze narrow on hers even as he gestured toward his phone again, "let's close this deal in Taiwan."
Dru felt hollowed out and more than a little light-headed with jet lag, not to mention her own much too vivid imagination, when they finally made it to what she assumed was Bora Bora, but which could have been anywhere for all she was able to discern in the thick, heavy dark.
The helicopter they'd taken after their landing in Tahiti set down in a small field lit with tall tiki torches. The night was close and warm, sultry against her skin. She could smell the sea and the deep green of wild, fragrant growing things. The sweetness of flowers hung heavy, like perfume against the dark, and when she tipped her head back to watch the helicopter fly away again, she had to stifle a gasp at the brilliance of the stars that crowded the night sky. The roar of the helicopter faded, leaving only a deep tropical hush behind. It seemed to arrow into her soul.
"Come," Cayo ordered her impatiently, and strode off.
Porters appeared from the darkness to handle the bags, and Dru followed Cayo over a wooden walkway, lit with more torches and hemmed in on all sides with lush greenery. Even in the dark, Dru could all but taste the burst of jungle all around her. Cayo was ahead of her, his long legs eating up the distance and before she knew it, she was hurrying-matching her stride to his, just as she'd always done.
Just like the dog on a leash he'd threatened to make her, a small voice inside of her pointed out. She shook it off.
Cayo stopped walking before a large Polynesian-style house with high, arched rooftops and wide, open windows that stretched the length and width of the walls, featuring pulled-back sliding shutters and unobstructed views.
And on the other side of the walkway was water. Nothing but dark water, lapping gently against the shore, and off in the distance, a smattering of low lights. Dawn was coming, bluing the inky night. Dru could make out a mountain in front of her, off on its own island across the water, black and high.
"This is the villa," Cayo said.
He looked down at her as she drew closer to him, his ruthless face softened, somehow, by the soft tropical dark. Or perhaps she was only being fanciful. The torch lights surrounded them in a halo of golden light, and somehow made it seem as if they were standing even closer together than they were. As if there was nothing else in the world but the two of them, adrift in all this lushness.
"I don't know why you would ever leave a place like this," she said, trying to shift the focus back to the place. Away from the two of them. She smiled, but suspected it looked as nervous, as unsettled, as she felt. Still, she pushed on. "But perhaps it takes a different kind of imagination to conquer the world from this far-off little corner of it."