www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To Michelle Tadros Eidson for a few high finance

      clues, Jane Porter for two key backstory points that changed everything, and to Jeff Johnson for being the perfect husband to a crazed writer on deadline. Again.

      CHAPTER ONE

      “OF course you are not resigning your position,” Cayo Vila said impatiently, not even glancing up from the wide expanse of his granite-and-steel desk. The desk loomed in front of a glorious floor-to-ceiling view over a gleaming wet stretch of the City of London, not that he had ever been observed enjoying it. The working theory was that he simply liked knowing that it was widely desired by others, that this pleased him more than the view itself. That was what Cayo Vila loved above all else, after all: owning things others coveted.

      It gave Drusilla Bennett tremendous satisfaction that she would no longer be one of them.

      He made a low, scoffing sound. “Don’t be dramatic.”

      Dru forced herself to smile at the man who had dominated every aspect of her life, waking and sleeping and everything in between, for the past five years. Night and day. Across all time zones and into every little corner of the globe where his vast empire extended. She’d been at his beck and call around the clock as his personal assistant, dealing with anything and everything he needed dealt with, from a variety of his personal needs to the vagaries of his wide-ranging business concerns.

      And she hated him. Oh, how she hated him. She did.

      It surged in her, thick and hot and black and deep, making her skin seem to shimmer over her bones with the force of it. It was hard to imagine, now, knowing the truth, that she’d harbored softer feelings for this man for so long—but it didn’t matter, she told herself sternly. It was all gone now. Of course it was. He’d seen to that, hadn’t he?

      She felt a fierce rush of that hard sort of grief that had flooded her at the strangest times in these odd few months since her twin brother Dominic had died. Life, she had come to understand all too keenly, was intense and often far too complicated to bear, but she’d soldiered on anyway. What choice was there? She’d been the only one left to handle Dominic’s disease—his addictions. His care. His mountain of medical bills, the last of which she’d finally paid in full this week. And she’d been the only one left to sort through the complexities of his death, his cremation, his sad end. That had been hard. It still was.

      But this? This was simple. This was the end of her treating herself as the person who mattered least in her life. Dru was doing her best to ignore the swirling sense of humiliation that went along with what she’d discovered in the files this morning. She assured herself that she would have resigned anyway, eventually, soon—that finding out what Cayo had done was only a secondary reason to leave his employ.

      “This is my notice,” she said calmly, in that serene and unflappable professional voice that was second nature to her—and that she resolved she would never again utilize the moment she stepped out of this office building and walked away from this man. She would cast aside the necessarily icy exterior that had seen her through these years, that had protected her from herself as well as from him. She would be as chaotic and emotional and yes, dramatic as she wished, whenever she wished. She would be flappable unto her very bones. She could already feel that shell she’d wrapped around her for so long begin to crack. “Effective immediately.”

      Slowly, incredulously, a kind of menace and that disconcerting pulse of power that was uniquely his emanating from him like a new kind of electricity, Cayo Vila, much-celebrated founder and CEO of the Vila Group and its impressive collection of hotels, airlines, businesses and whatever else took his fancy, richer than all manner of sins and a hundred times as ruthless, raised his head.

      Dru caught her breath. His jet-black brows were low over the dark gold heat of his eyes. That fierce, uncompromising face made almost brutally sensual by his remarkable mouth that any number of pneumatic celebutantes swooned over daily was drawn into a thunderous expression that boded only ill. The shock of his full attention, the hit of it, that all these years of proximity had failed to temper or dissipate, ricocheted through her, as always.

      She hated that most of all. Her damnable weakness.

      The air seemed to sizzle, making the vast expanse of his office, all cold contemporary lines and sweeping glass that seemed to invite the English weather inside, seem small and tight around her.

      “I beg your pardon?”

      She could hear the lilt of Spanish flavor behind his words, hinting at his past and betraying the volatile temper he usually kept under tight control. Dru restrained a small ripple of sensation, very near a shiver, that snaked along her spine. They called him the Spanish Satan for a reason. She would like to call him far worse.

      “You heard me.” The bravado felt good.