Not Just the Boss's Plaything(64)
He groaned. And Dru worshipped him, tasting the velvet smoothness of him, loving him with her mouth, her tongue, her hands and her lips, bringing him to a roaring finish with his hands gripped tight in her hair.
It was these moments she was collecting, she told herself as he lifted her into his lap and kissed her hungrily, his heartbeat pounding hard beneath her as he held her against his chest. These moments when she could kid herself and pretend that he was hers.
They fell into a kind of pattern as the days passed. Cayo was still her boss, despite the dramatic change in their relationship, and Dru did not dispute that. What might have been untenable if she hadn't already planned to leave him was really more like a game when it was only her heart, not her career, at stake. So she was happy enough to continue performing her duties, with only cosmetic alterations.
"Don't do that thing with your hair," Cayo said one morning as she stepped out of the massive, glass-enclosed shower, complete with a window overlooking the ocean, that was its own room in the master suite's bath.
He stood in the door that led out into his bedroom, his dark eyes burning as they tracked over her, watching as she wrapped herself in a towel. He'd pulled on another pair of the linen trousers he favored in the warm weather, but no shirt, and all of that muscled masculine perfection on display made her feel overheated. Again.
They'd woken at dawn and gone for a swim in the quiet lagoon. He'd lifted her against him where he stood, simply pulled her bikini bottoms to the side and slid inside her, rocking them both to mindlessness in the clear, warm water, as the sun began to light the perfect sky above them.
She was still trembling slightly from the aftereffects.
"Don't do what with my hair?" she asked. It couldn't be healthy, wanting someone like this. She'd imagined sleeping with him would be a single act, a fix, the end of all that yearning and infatuation.
But instead, you made it worse, that voice inside was quick to remind her. As if she didn't know.
He made a vague gesture toward the back of his head. "That twist," he said. A strange expression crossed his face then, something she might have called vulnerability on another man-but that was impossible. This was Cayo. "I like it down around your shoulders," he said gruffly. "I like my hands in it."
And he'd turned and disappeared, leaving Dru to make of that what she would.
She pulled on the cheerful, bright blue-and-yellow maxidress she'd adopted as her uniform here, and ran her fingers through her hair as it settled around her shoulders in damp waves. She stared at herself in the large mirror that dominated the nearest wall, and hardly recognized herself. The exposure to the sun had brought out her freckles, and that sheen to her skin. Her eyes were bright, her mouth soft, somehow. And her dark hair tumbled all around her, still wet from her shower, giving her a sensual and sultry sort of look. She was poles apart from the image of Dru Bennett she'd prided herself on embodying in her five years at the Vila Group: impeccably, quietly fashionable. Professional above all else.
She could lie and tell herself that it was the islands doing this to her, turning her into a different person, but she knew better. It was Cayo.
She just had to remember that it was temporary.
Back in London, Dru would never dress this way. Just as she would never interrupt a dictation session as she had the other day, or wear her hair down because a man demanded it. Just as she would never sleep with her boss, no matter how much she might have wanted him, and then carry on working for him. But this was Bora Bora, and it was as if what she did here didn't count.
It's only a handful of days, she reminded herself now as she walked to meet him in the office. It will be like none of this happened when I get back home.
She told herself that the twisting feeling in her stomach was joy. That it was happiness that she was letting herself do this, experience this, live in the moment here, when it was so unlike her. She had her whole life in front of her to regret this, after all. There was no sense starting now.
But it was as if Cayo knew that there was something she wasn't telling him-or perhaps he felt the pressure of the temporary nature of this as well. Sometimes he merely picked her up and held her against the nearest wall when he wanted her, his expression so fierce as he thrust within her, as if he saw the same painful future before him. Or he woke her again and again in the night, to taste her, to touch her, to send her flying over the edge. As if to prove he could. As if to make sure it was real.
One afternoon, after he'd ended their workday, he found her on the lanai outside the library. He stood in the entryway for a long moment, watching her, until Dru set her crime novel aside and gave him her full attention.
"Did you need something?" she asked, and smiled at him, ready for another series of commands. Plans for the next day's business, perhaps.
"I don't know how you do it." His voice was dark and low. It made a shiver of unease snake along the back of her neck.
"Read?" she asked mildly.
He ignored that.
"Your words, your smiles." He ran a hand along the jaw he shaved irregularly here, and looked not unlike a pirate as he gazed down at her, rakish and unapologetically lethal. But she didn't recognize that look in his eyes. "Even in my bed. There are a thousand places for you to hide, aren't there? And you do."
Her heart thudded hard against her ribs. And there was a kind of ringing in her ears, as if alarms were going off all around them. But she knew that wasn't true-there was only the sound of the waves as they crashed against the sand. The birds singing in the trees. The wind dancing through the chimes out on the terrace.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Do you know, I almost believe you."
He didn't look angry, or upset in any way. She could have handled either of those without blinking. He looked almost...resigned. All of that clever attention of his focused on her, and growing darker by the moment. And it was making her feel panicky. Desperate. Afraid, again, of what he might see.
"I'm not hiding." She stood, then opened up her arms, proving it. "I'm right here."
He smiled, and it had the usual effect of rendering her breathless, for all it was shaded as much with regret as with desire. She didn't want to know why.
"Are you, Dru?" he asked. But he closed the distance between them as if he found her as difficult to resist as she did him, and pulled her against him. "Are you really?"
Dru didn't answer. She kissed him instead. Hot. Desperate. With everything she was capable of giving him.
He didn't speak again.
He had her kneel on the small sofa, then took her from behind, his hands on her hips and his hard chest at her back as he thrust into her, making her sob out his name with only the glittering sea before them as witness.
And when he bent his head to her neck, spent in the aftermath of their passion, she murmured soothing words and told herself it was another victory. Another memory; hers to hoard.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY SAT OUT on one of the patios one evening, surrounded by softly flickering candles, with the canopy of stars bright and astonishing above them. Dru leaned back in her chair and stared up at them, aware on some level that time was passing even in moments like this one, when she felt outside of time altogether.
Don't forget what temporary means, she advised herself. Don't pretend that any of this can last.
Across from her, Cayo was finishing a call with a CFO at one of his New York companies. He frowned out toward the dark ocean as he talked, his voice growing increasingly more impatient. Dru sipped at her wine and watched him, imprinting that impossible face into her memory, making sure she had memories enough to spare. That blade of a nose, that granite jaw. Her boss become her lover. Now that it had happened, it felt inevitable. As if they had always been headed here. As if the three years in between Cadiz and now had been part of some grander plan.