“You are joking,” she breathed. She sounded horrified. Appalled. Perhaps a bit too horrified and appalled, come to that. “You actually think … You?”
“Me,” he agreed, all of that simmering fury shifting inside him, rolling over into something else, something he remembered all too well, despite his claims to the contrary. “You would hardly be the first secretary in history to have a bit of a sad crush on her boss, would you?” He inclined his head, feeling magnanimous. “And I will take responsibility for it, of course. I should not have let Cadiz happen. It was my fault. I allowed you to entertain … ideas.”
She seemed to pale before him, and despite himself, despite what he said and what he wanted, all he could think about was that long-ago night, the Spanish air soft around him as they’d walked back to their hotel from the bodega, the world pleasantly blurry and her arm around his waist as if he’d needed help. Support. And then her mouth beneath his, her tongue, her taste, far more intoxicating than the manzanilla he’d drunk in some kind of twisted tribute to the grandfather whose death that same day he’d refused to mourn. He’d kissed her instead. There’d been the wall. The sweet darkness. His hands against her curves, his mouth on her neck … All these years later, he could taste her still.
He’d been lying to himself. This was not just annoyance, anger, that moved in him, making him hard and ready, making his blood race through his veins. This was want.
“I would be more likely to have a ‘crush’ on the Grim Reaper,” she was saying furiously, her words tripping over each other as if she couldn’t say them fast enough. “That sounds infinitely preferable, in fact, scythe and all. And I was your personal assistant, not your secretary—”
“You’re whatever I say you are.” His tone was silken and vicious, as if that could banish the memory, or put it where it belonged. And her and this driving want of her with it. “Something you seem to have forgot completely today, along with your place.”
She sucked in a breath, and he saw it again—that flash of sizzling awareness, of sexual heat. Of memory. That light in her gray eyes that he’d seen once before and had not forgotten at all, much as he’d told himself he’d done. Much as he’d wanted to do.
More lies, he knew now, as his body hummed with the need to taste her. Possess her.
“I haven’t wasted a single second ‘entertaining ideas’ about your drunken boorishness in Cadiz,” she hissed at him, but her voice caught and he knew she was as much a liar as he was. “About one little kiss. Have you? Is that why you blocked me from that promotion? Some kind of jealousy?”
He wasn’t jealous, of course, it was a laughable idea—but he wanted that taste of her and he wanted her quiet, and there was only one way he could think of to achieve both of those things at once. He told himself it was strategy.
His heart pounded. He wanted his hands on her. He wanted.
Strategy, he thought again.
And he didn’t quite believe his own story, but he bent his head anyway, and kissed her.
It was as if the air between them simply burst into flame.
Or perhaps that was her.
This cannot be happening again—
But Dru had no time to think anything further. His mouth was on hers, his beautiful mouth, hard and cruel and impossible, and he closed the distance between them as ruthlessly as he did anything else. Just as he’d done years ago on a dark street, in the deep shadows of a Spanish night. One hand slid over her hip to the small of her back, hauling her against the wall of his chest, even as his lips took control of hers, demanding she let him in, insisting she kiss him back.
And, God help her, she did.
She dropped her other shoe, she lost her mind, and she did.
It was so hot. Finally, a small voice whispered, insistent and jubilant. He tasted of lust and command and she was dizzy, so dizzy, she forgot herself.
She forgot everything but the heat of that mouth, the way he angled his head to kiss her more deeply, the way his palm on the small of her back pressed into her and in turn pressed her into the hard granite expanse of his lean chest. Her breasts felt too full and almost sore as they flattened against him, into him, and everywhere they touched felt like a fever, and she was kissing him back because he tasted like sorcery and for one brief, searing, shocking moment she wanted nothing more than to lose herself in an incantation she could hardly understand.
But she wanted. She wanted almost more than she had ever wanted anything else, the inexorable pull of his mouth, his taste, him, roaring through her, altering her, changing everything—
He broke the kiss to mutter something harsh in Spanish, and reality slammed back into Dru. So hard she was distantly amazed her bones hadn’t shattered from the impact.
She shoved against his chest blindly, and was entirely too aware not only that he chose to let her go, but that it was as if her very blood sang out to stay exactly where she was, plastered against him, just as she’d done once before and to her own detriment.
She staggered back a foot, then another. She was breathing too hard, teetering on the edge of a terrible panic, and she was afraid it would take no more than the faintest brush of wind to toss her right over into its grip. She could see nothing through the haze that seemed to cover her vision but that hooded, dangerous, dark amber gaze of his and that mouth—that mouth—
She should know better. She did know better. She could feel hysteria swell in her, indistinguishable from the lump in her throat and the clamoring of her pulse. Her stomach twisted and for a terrifying moment she didn’t know if she was going to be sick or faint or some horrifying combination thereof.
But she sucked in another breath, and that particular crisis passed, somehow. He still only watched her. As if he knew exactly how hard her blood pumped through her body and where it seemed to pool. As if he knew exactly how much her breasts ached, and where they’d hardened. As if he knew how she burned for him, and always had.
Dru couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand here. So she turned on her bare heel, and bolted from the salon.
She picked up speed as she moved, aware as she began to run up the grand stairway toward the deck that she was breathing so heavily she might as well be sobbing. Maybe she was.
You little fool, some voice kept intoning in her head. You’re nothing but a latter-day Miss Havisham and twice as sad—
She blinked in the bright slap of sunshine when she burst out onto the deck, momentarily blinded. She looked over her shoulder when she could see and he was right there, as she knew he would be, lean and dark and those hot, demanding eyes that looked almost gold in the Adriatic sunshine.
“Where are you going?” He was taunting her, those wicked brows of his raised. That mouth—God, that mouth—”I thought you didn’t care about a little kiss?”
It’s the devil or the deep blue sea, she thought, aware that she was almost certainly hysterical now. But her heart was already broken. She couldn’t take anything more. She couldn’t survive this again. She wasn’t sure she’d survived it the first time, come to that.
Dru simply turned back around, took a running start toward the side of the yacht one story up from the sea, and jumped.
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