A Devil in Disguise Read Online Free PDF Page B

looking down at the vicious little stiletto she’d flung at his throat. It was a weapon, certainly, but it was also one of those delicate, wickedly feminine shoes that he did not want to think about in reference to his personal assistant. He did not want to imagine her slipping the sleek little shoe on over those elegant feet of hers that he’d never noticed before, or think about what the saucy height of the heel would do to her hips as she walked—
    Damn her.
    Cayo rose to his feet slowly, not taking his eyes from hers.
    “What am I going to do with you?” he asked, impatientwith her defiance. And equally impatient with his own failure to end this distracting and disruptive situation that was already well out of hand. But those errant strands of silky dark hair teased at the curve of her lips, her chin, and he could not seem to look away.
    “You have had a number of options of things to do with me over the years,” she pointed out, in something less than her usual crisp tone. As if she was boiling over with fury, which he should not find as compelling as he did. “You could have let me move to a different position in your company, for example. You could have let me go today. You opted to kidnap me instead.”
    Abruptly, Cayo remembered that they were not alone. He dismissed the clingy blonde with a careless wave of his hand and ignored the sulky expression that followed it. The woman huffed and muttered as she exited the salon, irritating him far more than she should have. Could not one female in his usually carefully controlled existence do as he wished today? Must everything be a trial?
    He tossed Drusilla’s stiletto down on the seat where the blonde had been, and wondered why he was even having this conversation in the first place. Why was he encouraging Drusilla further by allowing her to speak to him in that decidedly disrespectful tone?
    And why on earth did he have the wholly uncharacteristic urge to explain the reasons he’d shot down her bid for that promotion three years ago? What was the matter with him? The last time he’d defended or justified his behavior was … never.
    “I don’t share my things,” he said then, coolly, purely to put her in her place. She stiffened, and then what could only be hurt washed through her gray eyes. And for the first time in years, Cayo felt the faintesthint of something that might have been shame move through him. He ignored it.
    “I’d ask you what kind of man you are to say something so deliberately insulting and borderline sociopathic, but please.” Drusilla sniffed, her eyes still wounded, which he hated more than he should have. “We both already know exactly what kind of man you are, don’t we?”
    “The papers call me a force of nature,” he replied, his voice light if cold, and it was a reminder. The last one he planned to give her. He was not a man who suffered insubordination, and yet he’d been tolerating hers for hours, up to and including an attempted attack on his person. Had she been a man, he would have responded in kind.
    Basta ya!
he thought, impatiently
.
Enough was enough.
    He found himself moving toward her, tracking the nervous swallow she took as he came closer, as if she was neither as disgusted nor as impassive as she appeared. That same, seductive memory rolled over then inside him, and shook itself awake. Dangerously awake.
    She shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other, reminding him as she did so that she was, in fact, a woman. Not a perfect robot built only to serve his needs as any good assistant should. That she was made of smooth, soft flesh and that her legs were perfectly formed beneath that sleek skirt. That she was not the ice sculpture of his imagination, nor a shadow. And that he’d tasted her heat himself.
    He didn’t like that, either. But he let his gaze fall over her anyway, noting as if for the first time that her trim figure boasted lush curves in all the right places, had he only let himself pay