A Devil in Disguise by Caitlin Crews Page A

across the planet. She sat right there at his side in the area set apart for business. She queued up his calls, handling the many details of each, presenting him with the necessary documents and background materials he needed, and reminding him of anything he might have forgot or overlooked as the calls wore on. She prepped the various people who rang in, alerting them to Cayo’s shifting moods and often suggesting ways to combat them. Between calls, they discussed various strategies to employ or different approaches to take to tackle each new issue or person.
    “I’m tired of his games,” Cayo said of one mutinous board member at one point, raking his hands through his hair in agitation. “I want to end him.”
    “That’s one approach.” Dru removed a stack of documents from in front of him and replaced them with another, larger stack. “Another might be to simply work around him the way you did with the Argentina project last year. Isolate him. Who will he play his games with then?”
    Cayo eyed her for a moment, an approving gleam in his dark gaze that should not have given her so much pleasure.
    “Who indeed?” he asked softly.
    Dru made sure his coffee was always hot and fixed to his taste, and insisted that he eat something substantial after a certain span of time, simply serving him a meal if he refused to step away from the work at hand. When his voice took on that particularly icy edge that boded only ill, she calmly suggested he repair to the master suite to either rest or work out his temper on the exercise equipment that flew with him everywhere. She was on top of their travel plans, too; making certain that there was not the smallest chance that Cayo Vila should find himself inconvenienced in any small way, no matter where he was in the world or what he had to do. All of which she’d done a million times before.
    But it wasn’t the same.
    Something really had changed last night, and it permeated even their most simple exchanges. The very air between them seemed electric, charged. Her hand brushed his and they both froze. She looked up from her tablet to find him watching her, a brooding sort of expression in those dark eyes of his, the gold in them gleaming in a way she didn’t recognize. But she
felt
it. In her breasts, deep in her belly. In her limbs that were too heavy today, her breath that she couldn’t quite catch.
    It made her wonder. It made her too hot, too shivery,
too aware.
It made her want—again, anew—what she could never have.
    Some seventeen hours into the almost twenty-four-hour trip, plus refueling stops, and they had workedroughly nine of them. Hardly half a day’s work in Cayo’s book, Dru knew. They took a break, sitting in the common area of the plane. Dru sipped at her water and knew better than to ask why Cayo was watching her with that new, disconcerting light in his eyes. Dark and considering, as if he had never seen her before. As if that strange, dream-like conversation on the terrace in Milan really had shifted something fundamental between them. That, she was sure, was why she felt almost watery, insubstantial. Needy and breathless. Unable to think about anything but Cayo, in all the ways she shouldn’t.
    “Why Bora Bora?” he asked. “When I suggested you take a holiday, I assumed you’d go to Spain. Portugal, perhaps. This seems like something of a reach.”
    Dru rolled the water bottle between her palms, letting the cold glass soothe her, letting the sound of the engines wash over her like white noise.
    “Why
not
Bora Bora?” she asked lightly. “If working for you has taught me nothing else, it’s to demand the best in all things.”
    “Indeed.” Some fire flared there, in that golden topaz gaze, and for a moment she couldn’t look away. Then his lips quirked into a hard sort of smile, sardonic and faintly amused. “I’m delighted to discover you take indolence as seriously as you take everything else.”
    “Perhaps all I want from life is to sit