"I believe you." He kept himself from touching her, but barely. "But I'm not prepared to watch you martyr yourself. Not for me."
* * *
Dru felt as if he'd kicked her.
"I'm no martyr," she said in a low voice, her mind reeling.
"Are you certain?" His voice was like silk, danger and demand. And he didn't back down so much as an inch. "I can almost see the flames dance around you as you burn yourself at the stake of your choosing."
She couldn't handle this. He was so much larger than life and standing in the middle of her tiny flat, taking it over, as if the space could not contain him. As if it groaned around him, near enough to bursting at the seams with the effort of holding the force of him within these walls. She couldn't seem to make sense of it. Or breathe past the knot in her stomach.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said, but she hardly sounded like herself.
He started toward her, backing her up against the cold windows on the far side of the room. It took all of three steps, and then the cold glass was at her back and Cayo was a wall in front of her, big and tempting and more dangerous to her than anything else in the world.
"What have you told yourself?" he asked in that smooth way that made her look around wildly for some escape route. "Have you cried over me, Dru? The man who cannot love you back? Have you forgotten I know you, too?"
"Are you mocking me?" She was incredulous. Not sure if that was anger or agony that surged inside of her, she focused on that fiercely cruel face of his and asked herself why she'd expected anything else. "Are you really that much of a monster, after all?"
His dark amber eyes glowed with something that was not quite malice-something that shivered through her and made her catch her breath. Temper. Fury. And that simmering, unquenchable desire that had ensnared them in this in the first place.
"How convenient for you," he said, his voice no less deadly for all it was so soft, like a lover's. "To find yourself someone else you can love so bravely, and from afar."
His words slammed into her like blows. Dru heard herself make some kind of horrible squeaking sound, and thought her legs would give out. She staggered back against the windowsill, while Cayo only stood there, pitiless, and watched.
"You only love what can never love you back," he told her in that same way, so calmly, as if he didn't know how devastating it was. As if he couldn't see what it was doing to her-or more likely, didn't care. "You arrange your life around distant objects that you can circle but never approach. You thrive on it."
"You..." She could hardly speak. She felt winded. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't I?" She saw the shadows in his eyes, the darkness that lurked there. "Do you love me, Dru? Or do you only think you do because you imagine there's no danger I could ever return it? No chance you might risk yourself, not really. You get to pretend to suffer for your great love while remaining, as ever, completely and utterly alone. Hermetically sealed away. The perfect bloody martyr." He paused, his eyes flashed, and his voice dropped. "Just as you did with your brother."
She lifted a hand as if to stave him off, unable to keep herself from trembling, and sank down against the wall, her legs no longer capable of holding her upright. But he was relentless-he was ruthless down into his bones, and he squatted down before her, his coat flaring around him like a cape, his suit clinging to the hard muscles of his thighs. A perfect and pitiless god, rendering his terrible judgment.
"You," he said, as if she had missed his point, "have no idea what love is."
For what felt like a long time-whole ages, perhaps centuries-Dru could only stare at him, stricken, too deeply shaken even to weep. She felt cracked open, as if she yawned wide and he was the brash, bright light exposing all of her darkness to the air.
And it hurt so much and so deeply that she dimly suspected she hadn't yet got to the real pain-that this was only the shock that preceded it.
"And you do?" she asked eventually. Belligerently, though her voice quaked.
Cayo's eyes were brilliant. Dark and gold and molten fire, burning her alive. He reached over and took her hands in his, and she should have jerked away. But instead, she exulted in the feel of his skin against hers after all this time. It pumped through her like heat, as though her own blood betrayed her, as though there was no part of her that wasn't his no matter what she told herself. Or told him.
"Let me tell you what I know," he told her, his voice low, intense. Urgent. His accent was thick and melodic then, wrapping around her, caressing her. "I want you. I want you in ways that I don't understand. I can live without you, but I don't want to. I don't see the point."
"Cayo-"
"Callate," he ordered her. He shifted back on his heels, dropping her hands though she still felt as if he touched her, as if he surrounded her. She folded her hands over what was left of his heat. "I tried. I let you go. You came back." His fierce face looked almost harsh. Stark and serious. "You only love what you cannot have, and I have never been anything but a monster. I've never wanted to be anything but what I am." His cruel mouth moved slightly, hinting at that curve. "Until now."
Something swelled up in the space between them, precarious and new. Dru felt the tears trickle down her cheeks but made no move to wipe them away. She could only see Cayo. And like one of those hummingbirds that Dominic had inked into his skin, she felt something flutter up and hover, skittish and shy, like some kind of gift. Hope, she thought, and that great cavern inside her, that terrible emptiness that had eaten her alive for so long, began at last to shrink.
She didn't want pain. She didn't want that masochistic streak. She wanted him. She always had. And she was tired of hiding. It was time to stop. Past time.
This time she was the one who reached out. She sat forward and ran her hands along his severe jaw, then held his fierce, impossible face between her hands. She felt the heat of him moving through her, warming her from the inside out.
"If I am not a martyr," she said, her voice small but strong, "and you are not a monster, then who do you suppose we are?"
"That's the point," he said, his hands coming up to cover hers, his gaze melting into hers, the world shifting all around them and the fire that always burned between them bright and hot and true. Making them something more than they were before. Soldering them together. Welding them, finally, into one. Not clay, but tempered steel. "I want to find out. With you."
"I think we can do that," she whispered, and then she tipped forward and kissed him, like a vow.
* * *
He found her sprawled out on one of the loungers on the private deck off the owner's suite on the great yacht, her lovely curves displayed to mouthwatering perfection in a wickedly simple bikini.
She smiled as he approached, but did not set aside her tablet until he lifted her bodily into the air and captured her mouth with his. He had not seen her in almost a full twenty-four hours and felt as desperate as if it had been years.
He set her to her feet carefully, enjoying the slide of her against him.
"What is it?" she asked, her clever eyes moving over his face.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a long, narrow white box and handed it to her. She looked up at him for a moment, then looked down and opened the box. She gasped. And Cayo tensed, not certain this had been the right thing to do.