Dru stood where he’d left her, feeling a little bit silly and more than a little off balance in her smart office clothes and delicate heels that were completely inappropriate for a boat. She stepped out of her stilettos and scooped them up in her hand, trying to breathe in the crisp sea air. Trying to curl her now-bare toes against the cool deck as if that might ground her.
Trying to breathe.
She moved over to the polished rail and leaned her elbows against it, frowning at the rolling waves, the gorgeously craggy coastline beckoning in the distance, rich dark greens and weathered reds basking in the sun. She felt it all twist and shift inside her then, all of the struggle and agony, the sacrifice and frustrated yearning. The grief. The hope. The brutal truth some part of her wished she’d never learned. It all seemed to swell within her as if it might crack her open and rip her apart—as if, having finally opened the door to all the things she’d repressed all this time, the lies she’d told herself, she couldn’t lock it back up. She couldn’t pretend any longer.
Misery rose inside her, thick and black and suffocating. And fast. And for a moment, she could do nothing but let it claim her. There was so much she couldn’t change, couldn’t help. She couldn’t go back in time and keep her father from dying when she and Dominic had still been toddlers. She couldn’t keep her mother from her string of lovers, each more vicious and abusive than the last. She couldn’t keep sweet, sensitive Dominic from choosing oblivion, and then courting it, his life and his drugs getting harder every year, until it was no more than a waiting game for his inevitable and tragic end.
The long, hard breath she took felt ragged. Too close to painful.
And she was free of those obligations now, it was true, but she was also irrevocably and impossibly alone. She hardly remembered her father and her mother hadn’t acknowledged her existence in years. She’d built her life around handling Dominic’s disease, and with him gone, there was nothing but … emptiness. She would fill it, she promised herself. She would build a life based finally on what she wanted, not as some kind of response to people and things that were forever out of her control. Not a life in opposition to her mother’s choices. Not a life contingent on Dominic’s problems. A life that was only hers, whatever that looked like.
All she had to do was escape Cayo Vila first.
Another fresh wave of pain crashed through her then, just as hard to fight off. Sharper, somehow. Wrenching and dark. Cayo. Three years ago she’d thought she’d seen something in him, some glimmer of humanity, an indication that he was so much more than the man he pretended to be in public. And she’d taken that night, some intimate conversation and a single, ill-conceived, far too passionate kiss, and built herself a whole imaginary world of possibility. Oh, the ways she’d wanted him, the ways she’d believed in him—and all the while he’d thought so very little of her that he’d blocked her chances for another position in the Vila Group and, in so doing, any kind of independent career. Without a word to her. Without any conversation at all.
With three careless sentences.
Miss Bennett is an assistant, he’d emailed Human Resources not long after that night she’d so foolishly believed had changed everything between them. She’d applied for the job in marketing, thinking it was high time she spread her wings in the company, took charge of her own career rather than merely supported his. She is certainly no vice president. Look elsewhere.
He hadn’t hidden the fact he’d done it, either. Why should he have? It was right there in Dru’s file, had she ever bothered to look. She hadn’t, until today, while doing a bit of housecleaning about the office. She’d been so sure everything was different after Cadiz, if unspoken, unaddressed. She hadn’t minded that she hadn’t got that job; she’d thought she and Cayo had an understanding—she’d believed they were a team—
So help her, she thought now, forcing back the angry, humiliated tears she was determined not to cry, she would never again be so foolish.
She’d known exactly who he was when he’d hired her, and she knew exactly who he was now. She’d spend the rest of her life working out how she’d managed to lose sight of that for so long, how she’d betrayed herself so completely for a fantasy life in her head, built around a single kiss that still made her flush hot to recall, but she wouldn’t forget herself again. It was cold comfort, perhaps, but it was all she had.
She found him in one of the yacht’s many salons, a sleek celebration of marble and glass down an ostentatious spiral stair that was as gloriously luxe as everything else on this floating castle he’d won in a late-night card game from a Russian oligarch.
“It was easy to take,” he’d said with a small shrug when she’d asked why he’d wanted another yacht to add to his collection. “So I took it.”
He sat now in the sunken seating area with one of his interchangeable and well-nigh-anonymous companions melting all over him, all plumped-up breasts and sheaves of wheat-blond hair cascading here and there. He had discarded his jacket somewhere and now looked deliciously rumpled, white shirt open at the collar and his olive skin seeming to gleam. The girl pouted and whined something in what sounded like Czech when she saw Dru walk in, as if it was Dru’s presence that was keeping Cayo’s attention on the flat-screen television on the inner wall rather than on the assets she had on display. As if, were Dru not there, he might actually pay her some mind.
You are fast approaching your expiration date, Dru seethed uncharitably at the other woman, but then caught herself. This was not a cat fight. It wasn’t even a competition.
Dru had spent entirely too long telling herself that it was all perfectly fine with her, that she didn’t mind at all that this man who had kissed her with so much heat and longing in an ancient city, and who had looked at her as if she were the only person in the world who could ever matter to him, slaked his various lusts with all of these anonymous women. Why should it matter? she’d argued with herself a thousand times in the middle of the night while she lay alone and he was off tending to his companion du jour. What we have is so much deeper than sex …
It was all so desperate. So delusional and terribly, gut-wrenchingly pathetic.
She held a shoe in each hand now, like potential weapons, and she allowed herself a grim moment of amusement as she watched Cayo’s ever-calculating gaze move to the sharp stiletto heels immediately, as if he joined her in imagining her sinking them deep into his jugular. He smirked and returned his attention to the television and the almighty scroll of the New York Stock Exchange across the bottom of the screen, as if he’d assessed the threat that quickly and dismissed it that easily.
And her. Again. As ever.
“Have you finished having your little fit?” he asked. She felt her heart race, that same anger—at him and, worse, at herself—shaking through her, making her very nearly tremble.
“I want to know what you think is going to happen now that you’ve stranded me on this boat,” Dru replied, biting the words out. “Will you simply keep me imprisoned here forever? That seems impractical, at the very least. Boats eventually dock, and I can swim.”
“I suggest you take a deep breath, Miss Bennett,” he said in that obnoxiously patronizing tone, not even bothering to glance at her again, his entire lean body insulting in its disinterest. “You are becoming hysterical.”
It was too much, finally. She didn’t even think.
She cocked one arm back in a moment of searing, possibly insane, mind-numbing rage and threw a shoe.
At his head.
It sliced through the air, the wicked heel seeming almost to glow, and she pictured it spearing him directly between the mocking, impossible eyes—
But then he reached up and snatched it out of its flight at the last moment, his hand too large and masculine against the delicate point of the heel.
When he looked at her then, his dark golden stare burned with outrage. And something else—something that seemed to echo in her, hard and loud. Anticipation?