LITMIR.BIZ

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of a masochist, and she’d have to live with that. If she stayed even one day more, any chance she had left to reclaim her life, to do something for herself, to live, to crawl out of this terrible hole she’d lowered herself into all on her own, would disappear into the big black smoke-filled vortex that was Cayo Vila.

      He would buy more things and sell others, make millions and destroy lives at a whim, hers included. And she would carry on catering to him, jumping to do his bidding and smoothing the path before him, anticipating his every need and losing herself, bit by bit and inch by inch, until she was nothing more than a pleasant-looking, serene-voiced husk. A robot under his command. Slave to feelings he would never, could never return, despite small glimmers to the contrary in far-off cities on complicated evenings never spoken of aloud when they were done.

      Worse, she would want to do all of it. She would want to be whatever she could be for him, just so long as she could stay near him. Just as she had since that night she’d seen such a different side of him in Cadiz. She would cling to anything, wouldn’t she? She would even pretend she didn’t know that he’d crushed her dreams of advancement with a single, brutal email. She was, she knew, exactly that pathetic. Exactly that stupid. Hadn’t she proved it every single day of these past three years?

      “No,” she said.

      It was, of course, a word he rarely heard.

      His black brows lowered. His hard gold eyes shone with amazement. That impossibly lush mouth, the one that made his parade of lovers fantasize that there could be some softness to him, only to discover too late that it was no more than a mirage, flattened ominously.

      “What do you mean, no?”

      The lilt of his native Spanish cadence made the words sound almost musical, but Dru knew that the thicker his accent, the more trouble she was in—and the closer that volcanic temper of his was to eruption. She should have turned on her heel and run for safety. She should have heeded the knot in her belly and the heat that moved over her skin, the panic that flooded through her.

      “I understand that you might not be familiar with the word,” she said, sounding perhaps more empowered, more sure of herself, than was wise. Or true. “It indicates dissent. Refusal. Both concepts you have difficulty with, I know. But that is, I am happy to say, no longer my problem.”

      “It will become your problem,” he told her, a note she’d never heard before in his voice. His gaze narrowed further, into two outraged slits of gold, as if he’d never actually seen her until this moment. Something about that particular way he looked at her made her feel lightheaded. “I will—”

      “Go ahead and take me to court,” she said, interrupting him again with a careless wave of her hand that, she could see, visibly infuriated him. “What do you think you’ll win?”

      For the first time in as long as she’d known him, Cayo Vila was rendered speechless. The silence was taut and breathless between them, and, still, was somehow as loud as a siren. It seemed to hum. And he simply stared at her, thunderstruck, an expression she had never seen before on his ruthless face.

       Good.

      “Will you take my flat from me?” she continued, warming to the topic. Emboldened, perhaps, by his unprecedented silence. By the chaos inside of her that was all his fault. “It’s only a leased bedsit. You’re welcome to it. I’ll write you a check right now, if you like, for the entire contents of my current account. Is that what it will take?” She laughed, and could hear it bouncing back at her from the glass wall, the tidy expanse of her desk, even the polished floor that made even the outer office seem glossy and that much more intimidating to the unwary. “I’ve already given you five years. I’m not giving you two more weeks. I’m not giving you another second. I’d rather die.”

      Cayo stared at his assistant as if he’d never seen her before.

      There was something about the way she tilted that perfect, pretty oval of her face, the way her usually calm gray eyes sparkled with the force of her temper, and something about that mouth of hers. He couldn’t seem to look away from it.

      Unbidden, a memory teased through his head, of her hand on his cheek, her gray eyes warm and something like affectionate, her lips—but no. There was no need to revisit that insanity. He’d worked much too hard to strike it from his consciousness. It was one regrettable evening in five smooth, issue-free years. Why think of it at all?

      “I would rather die,” she said again, as if she was under the misapprehension that he had not heard her the first time.

      “That can always be arranged,” he said, searching that face he knew so well and yet, apparently, so little—looking for some clue as to what had brought this on. Here, now, today. “Have you forgotten? I am a very formidable man.”

      “If you are going to make threats, Mr. Vila,” she replied in that crisp way of hers, “at least pay me the compliment of making them credible. You are many things, but you are not a thug. As such.”

      For the first time in longer than he could remember—since, perhaps, he had been the fatherless child whose mother, all the village had known too well, had been so disgraced that she had taken to the convent after his birth rather than face the wages of her sin in its ever-growing flesh—Cayo was at a loss. It might have amused him that it was his personal assistant who had wrought this level of incapacity in him, his glorified secretary for God’s sake, when nothing else had managed it. Not another multimillion-pound deal, not one more scandalous affair reported breathlessly and inaccurately in the tabloids, not one of his new and—dare he say it—visionary business enterprises. Nothing got beneath his skin. Nothing threw him off balance.

      Only this woman. As she had once before.

      It was funny. It was. He was certain he would laugh about it at some point, and at great length, but first? He needed her. Back in line where she belonged, back securely in the role he preferred her to play, and he ignored the small whisper inside him that suggested that there would be no repairing this. That she would never again be as comfortably invisible as she’d been before, that it was too late, that he’d been operating on borrowed time since the incident in Cadiz three years ago and this was only the delayed fallout—

      “I am leaving,” she told him, meeting his gaze as if he were a naughty child in the midst of a tiresome strop, and enunciating each word as if she suspected he was too busy tantruming to hear her otherwise. “You will have to come to terms with that and if you feel it necessary to file suit against me, have at it. I booked a ticket to Bora Bora this morning. I’m sorted.”

      And then, finally, his brain started working again. It was one thing for her to take herself off to wherever she lived in London, or even off on a week’s holiday to, say, Ibiza, as he’d suggested. But French Polynesia, a world away? Unacceptable.

      Because he could not let her go. He refused. And he wanted to examine that as little as he had the last time he’d discovered that she wanted to leave him. Three years ago, only a week after that night in Cadiz he’d seen—and still saw—no point in dredging forth.

      It wasn’t personal, of course, then or now; she was an asset. In many ways, the most valuable asset he had. She knew too much about him. Everything, in fact, from his inseam to his favorite breakfast to his preferred concierge service in all the major cities around the globe, to say nothing of the ins and outs of the way he handled his business affairs. He couldn’t imagine how long it would take to train up her replacement, and he had no intention of finding out. He would do as he always did—whatever was necessary to protect his assets. Whatever it took.

      “I apologize for my behavior,” he said then, almost formally. He shifted his stance and thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers, rocking back on his heels in a manner he knew was the very opposite of aggressive. “You took me by surprise.” Her gray eyes narrowed suspiciously, and he wished that he had taken the time to learn how to read her as thoroughly as he knew she could read him. It put him at a disadvantage, another unfamiliar sensation.

      “Of course I will not sue you,” he continued,

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