"Mr. Vila?" Claire asked. A note in her voice suggested it was not the first time she'd said his name. "Shall I get Mr. Young on the phone for you?"
He was not himself. He had not been for some weeks now, and well did he know it.
"Yes," Cayo muttered. It wasn't her fault she wasn't Dru. He had to keep reminding himself of this. Several times a day. "Fine."
He dealt with the call with his usual lack of tact or mercy and when it was done, found himself at the great wall of windows that looked out over the City. He had been scowling out at the depressingly typical British rain for several minutes before it occurred to him that he'd been doing too much of this lately. Brooding like a moody adolescent.
He was disgusted with himself. Had he moped when his grandfather had tossed him out? He had not. After an initial moment to absorb what had happened, he had walked off that mountain and built a life for himself. He hadn't mourned. He hadn't brooded. He'd focused and he'd worked hard, and in time, he'd come to think of his grandfather's betrayal as the best thing that had happened to him. Where would he be without it?
But, of course, he knew. He would have been a cobbler like his grandfather in that pretty little whitewashed town, living out a simple life beneath the red roofs, smiling at the tourists who snapped pictures and paid too much for their restaurant meals. Suffering through the whispers and the gossip that would never have subsided, no matter how diligently he worked to combat them, no matter what he did. Paying and paying for his mother's sins, forever and ever without end. He let out a derisive snort at the thought.
I am better off, he told himself. Then told himself he believed it. Then and now.
But even so, he stared out the window and saw Dru instead.
They'd sprawled on a blanket on the sandy beach together one night in Bora Bora, wearing nothing but the bright, full moon beaming down from above them. Dru had been nestled against his shoulder, her breath still uneven from the heady passion they'd indulged in, scattering their clothes across the beach in their haste. Their insatiable need.
"I'll admit it," Cayo had said. "I never had a pet quite like you before."
"No?" He'd heard laughter in her voice, though he could only see the top of her head. "Do I sit and stay better than all the rest?"
"I was thinking how much I enjoy it when you surrender," he'd murmured. Hadn't he had her sobbing out his name only a few moments before? He'd been teasing her-something he'd only just realized was reserved for her alone, but when she'd shifted position so she could look at him, her gaze had been serious.
"Careful what you wish for," she'd said softly, in a voice that didn't match the look in her eyes.
"I don't know what you mean," he'd said, reaching out to curl a dark wave of her hair behind her ear, reveling in the thick silk of it between his fingers. "There is nothing wrong with surrender. Particularly to me."
"Easy for you to say." Her voice had been wry. "You've never had the pleasure."
He'd smiled, but then the moment had seemed darker, somehow. Or more honest, perhaps.
"Is that what you're afraid of?" he'd asked quietly.
She'd let out a small sound, as if she'd almost laughed, and then looked away.
"My brother was an addict," she'd said, her voice small, but determined. "I don't know why it feels like I'm betraying him to tell you that. It's true."
Cayo had said nothing. He'd only stroked her back, held her close, and listened. She'd told him about Dominic's attempts at recovery, about his inevitable falls from grace. She'd told him about the way it had been before, when she'd worked in other jobs, and had dropped them to rush to Dominic's side, only to find herself heartbroken and lied to, again and again. And occasionally sacked, to boot. She'd told him about the good times peppered in with the bad. About how close she'd been to her twin once, how for a long time the only thing they'd had in the world had been each other.
"But that wasn't quite true, because he also had his addictions," she'd said. "And he always surrendered to them, eventually. No matter how much he claimed he didn't want to. And then one day he just couldn't come back."
He'd turned then, rolling her over to her back so he could gaze down at her, searching her face, her eyes. But she'd been as unreadable as ever. Still hiding in plain sight, her gray eyes shadowed tonight, and darker than they should have been.
She'd reached out, then, carefully, as if he was something precious to her. She'd traced the line of his jaw, his nose, even the shape of his brows with her fingertips, then run them over his lips, her mouth curving slightly when he'd nipped at her.
"I wonder what that's like?" she'd whispered then, and he'd seen something like agony in her eyes, there and then gone. "Unable to resist the very thing you know will destroy you. Drawn to it, despite yourself."
"Dru," he'd said, frowning down at her. "Surely you can't think-"
But she hadn't let him finish. She'd silenced him with a searingly hot kiss and then moved against him, seducing him that easily. He'd forgotten all about it, until now.
Had she been warning him? Had she known that she would get into his blood like this, poisoning him from the inside out, making him a stranger to himself? Cayo frowned out the window now, through the rain lashing across the glass. For the first time in almost twenty years, he wondered if it was worth it, this great empire he'd built and on which he focused to the exclusion of all else. Lately he wondered if, given the chance, he would trade it in. If he would take her instead.
Not that she'd offered him any such choice.
His intercom buzzed loudly behind him. He didn't move. He didn't know, anymore, if he was furious or if he was simply the wreckage of the man he'd been. And he didn't like it, either way.
It took everything he had not to sic his team of investigators on her, not to have her every move reported back to him, wherever she was now, like the jealous, obsessive fool she'd once accused him of being. He'd been fighting the same near-overwhelming urge for weeks. She'd told him he needed to learn how to lose her, and he'd found it was not a lesson he was at all interested in mastering. The truth was, Cayo had never been any good at losing.
You have to let me go, she'd said. And he had, though it had nearly killed him, kept him up at nights and ruined his days. She was the one thing he'd ever given up on. The one thing he'd let slip through his hands.
And that felt like the greatest failure of all.
Cayo couldn't forgive himself. For any of it. Or her, for doing this to him. For turning him into this weak, destroyed creature, not at all who he'd believed himself to be, before.
Worst of all, for making him care.
* * *
Dru hadn't had time to collapse into the fetal position under her duvet once she'd made it back to her tiny bedsit in Clapham from the rainy tarmac where she'd last seen Cayo, despite the fact that was all she wanted to do.
Her already-booked flight straight back to Bora Bora had been leaving in two days' time. She'd met with Cayo's studiously blank-faced attorneys on the morning before her flight, and she'd signed whatever they'd put in front of her, not caring if it took blood and her firstborn, so long as it ensured her freedom. Finally. It had been the last necessary step.
And more than that, it had meant he was letting her go.
Some part of her had imagined he might pull his Godzilla routine. Roar and smash, grab and hoard. Demand another two weeks. Trap her into that marriage he'd proposed. Something. But he'd let her walk away from him at the airport. There had been nothing but a look in his eyes that she'd never seen before, turning all of that dark amber nearly black and eating her alive inside. The cold, dull, gray English day around them had been so depressingly real life she'd almost wondered if Bora Bora, the yacht in the Adriatic, Milan, and everything that had happened between them had been no more than a fevered dream.