A Devil in Disguise Read Online Free PDF Page A

the last. She couldn’t keep sweet, sensitive Dominic from choosing oblivion, and then courting it, his life and his drugs getting harder every year, untilit was no more than a waiting game for his inevitable and tragic end.
    The long, hard breath she took felt ragged. Too close to painful.
    And she was free of those obligations now, it was true, but she was also irrevocably and impossibly alone. She hardly remembered her father and her mother hadn’t acknowledged her existence in years. She’d built her life around handling Dominic’s disease, and with him gone, there was nothing but … emptiness. She would fill it, she promised herself. She would build a life based finally on what she wanted, not as some kind of response to people and things that were forever out of her control. Not a life in opposition to her mother’s choices. Not a life contingent on Dominic’s problems. A life that was only hers, whatever that looked like.
    All she had to do was escape Cayo Vila first.
    Another fresh wave of pain crashed through her then, just as hard to fight off. Sharper, somehow. Wrenching and dark.
Cayo.
Three years ago she’d thought she’d seen something in him, some glimmer of humanity, an indication that he was so much more than the man he pretended to be in public. And she’d taken that night, some intimate conversation and a single, ill-conceived, far too passionate kiss, and built herself a whole imaginary world of possibility. Oh, the ways she’d wanted him, the ways she’d believed in him—and all the while he’d thought so very little of her that he’d blocked her chances for another position in the Vila Group and, in so doing, any kind of independent career. Without a word to her. Without any conversation at all.
    With three careless sentences.
    Miss Bennett is an assistant,
he’d emailed HumanResources not long after that night she’d so foolishly believed had changed everything between them. She’d applied for the job in marketing, thinking it was high time she spread her wings in the company, took charge of her own career rather than merely supported his.
She is certainly no vice president. Look elsewhere.
    He hadn’t hidden the fact he’d done it, either. Why should he have? It was right there in Dru’s file, had she ever bothered to look. She hadn’t, until today, while doing a bit of housecleaning about the office. She’d been so sure everything was different after Cadiz, if unspoken, unaddressed. She hadn’t minded that she hadn’t got that job; she’d thought she and Cayo had an understanding
—
she’d believed they were a team
—
    So help her, she thought now, forcing back the angry, humiliated tears she was determined not to cry, she would never again be so foolish.
    She’d known exactly who he was when he’d hired her, and she knew exactly who he was now. She’d spend the rest of her life working out how she’d managed to lose sight of that for so long, how she’d betrayed herself so completely for a fantasy life in her head, built around a single kiss that still made her flush hot to recall, but she wouldn’t forget herself again. It was cold comfort, perhaps, but it was all she had.
    She found him in one of the yacht’s many salons, a sleek celebration of marble and glass down an ostentatious spiral stair that was as gloriously luxe as everything else on this floating castle he’d won in a late-night card game from a Russian oligarch.
    “It was easy to take,” he’d said with a small shrug when she’d asked why he’d wanted another yacht to add to his collection. “So I took it.”
    He sat now in the sunken seating area with one ofhis interchangeable and well-nigh-anonymous companions melting all over him, all plumped-up breasts and sheaves of wheat-blond hair cascading here and there. He had discarded his jacket somewhere and now looked deliciously rumpled, white shirt open at the collar and his olive skin seeming to gleam. The girl pouted and whined something in