Again.And that terrible longing swelled again inside her, making her ache. Making her wish—but her wishes were dangerous, and they tore her into tatters every time. She shoved them aside.
Cayo smiled, as if from far away, hard and wintry.
“Your choice, Miss Bennett.”
CHAPTER FOUR
H E should have been happy—or at the very least, satisfied.
Cayo lounged back against his chair and gazed around the white-linen-draped table that stretched the length of the formal dining room in the Presidential Suite of the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan, surveying the small dinner he’d had Drusilla throw here in one of Europe’s most prestigious spaces. The rooms of the vast suite gave the impression of belonging to royalty perhaps, so stunning were they, all high ceilings, carefully selected antiques and the finest Italian craftsmanship on display at every turn. Wealth and elegance seemed to shimmer up from the very floors to dance in the air around them.
The investors were duly impressed, as expected. They smoked cigars and let out loud belly laughs over the remains of the last of the seven courses they’d enjoyed. Their pleasure seemed to ricochet off the paneled mahogany walls and gleam forth from the impressive Murano glass chandeliers that hung above them, in resplendent reds and blues, and would no doubt be reflected in the size of their investments, as planned. This would be another success, Cayo knew withoutthe smallest doubt. More money, more power for the Vila Group.
And yet all he could seem to concentrate on tonight was Drusilla.
“Fine,” she had thrown at him on the yacht, those gray eyes of hers both furious and something far darker, her mouth very nearly trembling in a way that had made him feel restless. Unsettled. “I’m not going to play this game with you any longer. If you want your two weeks, you’ll have them—but that’s the end of it.”
“Two weeks as my assistant or my pet,” he’d reiterated. “I don’t care which.”
She’d laughed, and it was a hollow sound. “I hate you.”
“That bores me,” he’d replied, his gaze hard on hers. “And furthermore, makes you but one among a great many.”
“By that you mean, I imagine, the entire world?” she’d sniped at him. Her tone, the way she was standing there with her hands in fists—it had made him suspicious.
“I’d suggest you think twice before you attempt to sabotage me in some passive-aggressive display in your last days with me, Miss Bennett,” he’d cautioned her, and the look she’d turned on him then should have flayed him alive. Perhaps it had. “You won’t like the result.”
“Don’t worry,
Mr. Vila,
” she’d said, his name a low, dark curse, hitting him in ways he didn’t fully understand. “When I decide to sabotage you, there will be nothing in the least bit passive about it.”
She’d stalked away from him that afternoon, and he hadn’t seen her again until the following morning, when she’d presented herself in his suite at breakfast,dressed in the perfectly unremarkable sort of professional clothes she usually wore. No skintight white jeans licking over her long legs to taunt him and remind him how they’d once clenched over his hips. No wild gypsy hair to shatter his concentration and invade his dreams. She’d sat herself in a chair with her tablet on her lap, and had asked him, as she’d done a thousand times before, with no particular inflection or agenda, if his plans for the day deviated from his written schedule.
As if the previous day had never happened.
If he didn’t know better, he thought now, watching her through narrowed eyes, he could almost imagine that nothing had changed between them at all. That she had never quit, that he had never forced her into giving him her contracted two weeks.
That they had never kissed like that, nor let their tempers flare, revealing too many things he found he did not wish to think about, and too much heat besides.
Almost.
Tonight she
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