Like some kind of pagan goddess, and all of her his.
She started to shudder again, wild and untamed in his arms, and when she called out his name this time, he followed her over the edge. At last.
* * *
Dru lay tangled with him in the wide bed and watched the sun drip down toward the sea, then melt away.
She could not seem to form coherent thoughts. There was only the buzzing in her limbs and under her skin, like some kind of high-voltage live wire, still sending out sparks. She felt Cayo's hard shoulder beneath her cheek. She felt the heat of his skin and the way his chest rose and fell. She did not think. She wasn't sure she wanted to think. She watched the sky instead.
Cayo stirred beside her when the sun dropped below the horizon, as if roused by the twilight. He turned to face her, his eyes dark and once again unreadable in the deep shadows of his chamber.
He slid his hand up to hold her cheek and then brought her face to his. For a moment he only gazed at her, and she felt a great stillness inside her, a kind of hush. As if she was waiting for something, poised on the edge of another high cliff while all the rest of her seemed to shiver.
The clock is already ticking, a voice whispered inside her head, ruthlessly practical when Dru felt anything but. He's already gone.
But as if he could hear her, he kissed her. Deep and slow. Sweet. Addicting. And then the fire kicked in. As if it could never be quenched. As if none of this would ever be enough. She had been a terrible fool, she acknowledged as his hand moved over her face, angling her mouth closer to his for a better fit, a deeper kick. She should have known better than to think she could handle this. She would leave him as planned, she understood then in some deep, primitive way, but then she would mourn him, and she might never stop. She had walked right into this, and there was nothing for her but Miss Havisham and regret on the other side of it. And still she kissed him, unable to help herself. Unable to stop what she'd already started, what she'd already done.
No sense borrowing trouble, she thought then, in some desperation. It would come no matter what she did. It would hurt. Maybe she'd always known that.
He rose over her in the bed and settled himself between her legs, and Dru let go of a future that seemed far away from this moment, too far away to matter. He settled his weight on his hands and looked down at her, still watching her with those too-shrewd eyes of his.
"Dru," he said. Just her name. As if he was tasting it.
"Cayo," she replied in kind, feeling far too vulnerable. She didn't know what he saw when he looked down at her like that. She didn't know how to prevent him from seeing everything, all of her hopes and fears and terrors, not when she had abandoned herself so completely to be with him like this.
But he simply twisted his hips and thrust into her. Slick. Hot.
And she stopped caring what he saw. What he knew. She concentrated instead on the sleek perfection of this age old dance between them. As if she'd been made to fit him, just like this.
He moved slowly, hypnotically. As if he did not wish to build that fire between them this time so much as encourage it to burn high on its own. She matched his lazy rhythm, her hips rising to meet his, every part of her exulting in the way they fit together. In the way they moved together. Slow and easy and devastating.
She told herself it was the only thing that mattered.
This time, she could reach up and explore the sheer beauty of his lean, smooth torso. She ran her hands over his hard pectorals, then trailed her way down that mouthwatering abdomen. Smooth skin stretched across steel. Hard male beauty unlike any other. Ferocious and proud. Fierce and demanding. She pulled herself up from the bed to kiss his chest, to taste the bold heat of him, the incomparable strength. The delectable power.
The pace began to change, then, the fire burning ever hotter. Cayo's shoulders blocked out the world, and she forgot everything but this. Everything but him. Everything but the wildness they made here, and the way it stormed through her, tearing her apart from within.
He slid down to pull her close and she loved it. The full, hard weight of him against her, pressing her into the bed, making her feel somehow small and yet cherished, all at once. She could feel his breath in her ear, and then he began to murmur words she didn't know in Spanish, crooning against the length of her neck while still he thrust into her, over and over and over again. She wrapped her legs around his hips and clung to him, mindless and wanton, entirely at his command. And when he reached between them and pressed his fingers against the heart of her need, she burst into a million pieces. Again.
He kept on as she shattered around him, until he shouted out her name and shuddered against her, burying his face into the crook between her neck and her shoulder. And even broken into too many pieces to count, even thrown as she was off the side of a very high cliff and still floating her way down to earth, Dru understood that nothing was ever going to be the same again. Especially not her.
* * *
Cayo's version of enjoying himself in paradise, Dru was not greatly surprised to learn, involved cutting down his business hours to something like six or eight hours per day instead of more than twice that.
"What a great sacrifice this must be," she murmured toward the end of one such "holiday" afternoon as she took more dictation, her fingers flying across the keyboard when she would have preferred to explore him instead, not that he had asked. "To abandon yourself so hedonistically into a normal person's version of a workday."
Cayo eyed her, his dark eyes as hot as they were amused. In deference to the fact he'd decreed this a vacation-and, perhaps, all that had changed between them-he wore a white shirt he had not bothered to button, displaying his mouthwatering physique and olive complexion and making Dru glad she was so adept at touch-typing. She could stare at him without missing a single word. His feet were even propped up on the desk in front of him, completing the picture. He would have looked like indolence incarnate had he not been sitting in his office suite, composing lists of commands for his fleet of vice presidents the world over to obey as soon as Dru pressed Send.
"You are always welcome to distract me," he said after a moment.
She opened her mouth to offer a knee-jerk sort of demurral, but stopped herself. What was there to lose? Cayo's business would storm ahead the way it always did when these strange days were over, when she was gone. But she would never get another chance to have him like this. She had the sense again, as she had repeatedly since that first day here, that she was gathering up all these white-hot, deliriously passionate moments to hoard later, when she was alone. When she was free. When she had nothing but memories to hold on to.
"If you insist, Mr. Vila," she said now, watching that fierce light blaze in his eyes. She slid out of the chair she'd pulled up next to his desk and onto the floor, smiling slightly as his hard face tightened with desire.
Slowly, holding his gaze, she crawled between his legs.
"Is this a new form of taking dictation, Miss Bennett?" he asked, that dark amusement in his low voice, though she could hear the faint rasp in it that hinted at the fire within him, and she smiled, running her hands over his hard thighs, his taut abdomen. His legs thudded down on either side of her, caging her right where she wanted to be. "I'm a fan."
Then she reached into his soft trousers, lifting out the hard, smooth length of him and taking him deep in her mouth.