wasn’t.
“Life,” he said after a moment, his accent thicker than it should have been, almost as if his temper was high, which wasn’t in the least bit rational, “is all about compromise.”
“Really?” she asked. Her eyes searched his, and she looked somewhere between amused and genuinely baffled, which somehow made it worse. “How would you know?”
Cayo tossed back the rest of his espresso and decided he was tired, that was all. There was no deeper reason for any of this. How could there be? He hadn’t slept. That was why his head was so muddled. Why he could not seem to sort through his own thoughts, his own motivations. Nor even his own reactions.
“I am finding it difficult to track all of your accusations,” he said after a moment, his tone dry. Almost conversational. “You believe I am a sociopath, yet last night you told me I am also afraid. Today I am unfamiliar with compromise. Before, I was Godzilla, was I not?” He was fascinated by the color that rose in her cheeks, and then equally intrigued by the way she squared her shoulders, as if withstanding an attack. “I believe I take your meaning, Miss Bennett. I am a monster without equal.”
Monster.
It was only a word, he told himself then, as it seemed to echo hard in him, recalling that whitewashed village high in the Spanish mountains, his grandfather’s harsh pleasure on his eighteenth birthday.
It is just a word. It means nothing
.
“You are a man who assumes that his will is sufficient permission to do anything he likes,” Drusilla said slowly, as if she were considering each word carefully.
“There are no consequences for the things you do.” She reached for her tea, and poured a stream of the hot liquid into the delicate cup before her. Her gaze flicked to his, then away. “It would never occur to you to care.”
He wanted to touch her with a new kind of fury, so intense was his desire to feel her skin against his. To take that mouth of hers and learn it, own it, make it his. To follow her down onto the nearest flat surface and lose himself inside her, at last.
But he did nothing of the kind. He held on to his control by the faintest, thinnest thread. Again.
“Of course not,” he said coldly, as if there was nothing steaming up the air between them, as if there were no tension at all, no desire, no
need.
He reached for the
Financial Times
folded beside his plate and told himself he was dismissing her as he’d always done before, without thought. Without a single care, as accused. “That’s what I pay you for.”
It was a remarkably long trip.
I didn’t want you to leave,
he’d said.
Dru couldn’t stop replaying it in her head, again and again. She handled the packing, the delivery of appropriate clothes for Cayo from the Milan ateliers he preferred and her own hurried selections from La Rinascente, the city’s premier department store hardly a stone’s throw from the Duomo. She sent out a flurry of emails, made the day’s series of phone calls, and carried out the usual duties of her job, accustomed as she was to performing it wherever she happened to find herself.
But she couldn’t seem to get last night out of her mind. The chill of the air, the inky dark and his hand so soft against her cheek. That storm in his midnightgaze that had crashed through her, too. That still did. Why should a few quiet words and a couple of touches affect her so? Why should she feel as if everything was different, when nothing seemed to have changed at all?
They boarded one of Cayo’s jets in Milan late that evening, and Dru made her way to her usual bedchamber. She stretched out on the bed and dared not let herself succumb to the turmoil inside herself, not when there was still the rest of her two weeks to live through. She couldn’t let herself crack so soon. She’d never survive.
When she woke hours later, they simply went to work as if they were in the Vila Group’s London headquarters rather than on a plane headed
“Life,” he said after a moment, his accent thicker than it should have been, almost as if his temper was high, which wasn’t in the least bit rational, “is all about compromise.”
“Really?” she asked. Her eyes searched his, and she looked somewhere between amused and genuinely baffled, which somehow made it worse. “How would you know?”
Cayo tossed back the rest of his espresso and decided he was tired, that was all. There was no deeper reason for any of this. How could there be? He hadn’t slept. That was why his head was so muddled. Why he could not seem to sort through his own thoughts, his own motivations. Nor even his own reactions.
“I am finding it difficult to track all of your accusations,” he said after a moment, his tone dry. Almost conversational. “You believe I am a sociopath, yet last night you told me I am also afraid. Today I am unfamiliar with compromise. Before, I was Godzilla, was I not?” He was fascinated by the color that rose in her cheeks, and then equally intrigued by the way she squared her shoulders, as if withstanding an attack. “I believe I take your meaning, Miss Bennett. I am a monster without equal.”
Monster.
It was only a word, he told himself then, as it seemed to echo hard in him, recalling that whitewashed village high in the Spanish mountains, his grandfather’s harsh pleasure on his eighteenth birthday.
It is just a word. It means nothing
.
“You are a man who assumes that his will is sufficient permission to do anything he likes,” Drusilla said slowly, as if she were considering each word carefully.
“There are no consequences for the things you do.” She reached for her tea, and poured a stream of the hot liquid into the delicate cup before her. Her gaze flicked to his, then away. “It would never occur to you to care.”
He wanted to touch her with a new kind of fury, so intense was his desire to feel her skin against his. To take that mouth of hers and learn it, own it, make it his. To follow her down onto the nearest flat surface and lose himself inside her, at last.
But he did nothing of the kind. He held on to his control by the faintest, thinnest thread. Again.
“Of course not,” he said coldly, as if there was nothing steaming up the air between them, as if there were no tension at all, no desire, no
need.
He reached for the
Financial Times
folded beside his plate and told himself he was dismissing her as he’d always done before, without thought. Without a single care, as accused. “That’s what I pay you for.”
It was a remarkably long trip.
I didn’t want you to leave,
he’d said.
Dru couldn’t stop replaying it in her head, again and again. She handled the packing, the delivery of appropriate clothes for Cayo from the Milan ateliers he preferred and her own hurried selections from La Rinascente, the city’s premier department store hardly a stone’s throw from the Duomo. She sent out a flurry of emails, made the day’s series of phone calls, and carried out the usual duties of her job, accustomed as she was to performing it wherever she happened to find herself.
But she couldn’t seem to get last night out of her mind. The chill of the air, the inky dark and his hand so soft against her cheek. That storm in his midnightgaze that had crashed through her, too. That still did. Why should a few quiet words and a couple of touches affect her so? Why should she feel as if everything was different, when nothing seemed to have changed at all?
They boarded one of Cayo’s jets in Milan late that evening, and Dru made her way to her usual bedchamber. She stretched out on the bed and dared not let herself succumb to the turmoil inside herself, not when there was still the rest of her two weeks to live through. She couldn’t let herself crack so soon. She’d never survive.
When she woke hours later, they simply went to work as if they were in the Vila Group’s London headquarters rather than on a plane headed
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