A Devil in Disguise Read Free Page B

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 somehowas 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 wasunder 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