Not Just the Boss's Plaything(69)

"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.