A Devil in Disguise

A Devil in Disguise
CAITLIN CREWS

“Name your price, Miss Bennett,” Cayo suggested, his voice like smoke and sin.

It was no wonder at all that so many hapless rivals went all wide-eyed and entranced and gave him whatever it was he wanted almost the very moment he demanded it. He was like some kind of corporate snake charmer.

But she wasn’t one of his snakes, and she refused to dance to his tune—no matter how seductive. She’d been dancing for far too long, and this was where it ended. It had to. It would.

“I have no price,” she said with perfect honesty. Once—yesterday—he could have smiled at her and she’d have found a way to storm heaven for him. But that had been yesterday. Today she could only marvel, if that was the word, at how naïve and gullible she’d been. At how well he’d played her.

“Everyone has a price.”

And in his world, she knew, that was always true. Always. One more reason she wanted to escape it. Him.

About the Author

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

Recent titles by the same author:

THE MAN BEHIND THE SCARS

(The Santina Crown)

IN DEFIANCE OF DUTY

HEIRESS BEHIND THE HEADLINES

PRINCESS FROM THE PAST

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

A Devil

in Disguise

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://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. Almost cleansing.

He shook his head, dismissing her. “I don’t have time for this,” he said. “Whatever this is. Send me an email outlining your concerns and—”

“You do,” she interrupted him. They both paused; perhaps both noting the fact that she had never dared interrupt him before. She smiled coolly at him as if she were unaware of his amazement at her temerity. “You do have time,” she assured him. “I cleared this quarter-hour on your schedule especially.”

A very tense moment passed much too slowly between them then, and he did not appear to so much as blink. And she felt the force of that attention, as if his gaze were a gas fire, burning hot and wild and charring her where she stood.

“Is this your version of a negotiation, Miss Bennett?” His tone was as cool as hers, his midnight amber gaze far hotter. “Have I neglected your performance review this year? Have you taken it upon yourself to demand more money? Better benefits?”

His voice was curt, clipped. That edge of sardonic displeasure with something darker, smokier, beneath. Behind her professional armor, Dru felt something catch. As if he could sense it, he smiled.

“This is not a negotiation and I do not want a raise or anything else,” she said, matter-of-factly, wishing that after all this time, and what she now knew he’d done, she was immune to him and the wild pounding of her heart that particular smile elicited. “I don’t even want a reference. This conversation is merely a courtesy.”

“If you imagine that you will be taking my secrets to any one of my competitors,” he said in a casual, conversational tone that Dru knew him far too well to believe, “you should understand that if you try, I will dedicate my life to destroying you. In and out of the courts. Believe this, if nothing else.”