A Devil in Disguise by Caitlin Crews

that terrible day when she’d received the news that Dominic was dead. She’d had to trail Cayo through a manufacturing plant in Belgium, acting as if her heart hadn’t been ripped from her body and stamped into oblivion half the world away, not thatCayo had noticed any difference. Not that she’d let him see it. She’d made certain that all of Dominic’s bills and debts were paid, while a squat and encompassing grief hunkered down on her, waiting. Just waiting. She’d ignored that, too. She’d reasoned it was her
job
to ignore it, to pretend she was perfectly fine. She’d taken pride in her ability to be perfect for Cayo. To fulfill his needs no matter what was happening to her.
    Reading that email early this morning in London and seeing her years with Cayo for the sham they really were had landed the killing blow. It was the final straw. And part of her wanted simply to sink like a stone now, deep into the embrace of the Adriatic, and be done with all of this. Just let it all go. Hadn’t Dominic done the same, at the end of the day? Why shouldn’t she? What was she holding on to, anyway?
    But Cayo would think it was all about him, wouldn’t he? She knew he would. And she couldn’t allow that. She simply couldn’t.
    She kicked, hard, and shot back up to the surface and the sun, pulling in a ragged breath as her gaze focused on Cayo. He still sat there, noticeably irritated, as if it was no matter to him whether she sank or swam, only that she was disrupting his afternoon.
    Somehow, that was galvanizing.
    She would not go under again, she understood then, as she stared up at him, at this man to whom she’d sacrificed herself, day in and day out, thanks to her own rich fantasy life. She would not break, not for Cayo, not for anything.
    How could she? She was already broken.
    And there was a strength in that, she thought, wiping the water from her face and pretending she didn’tfeel a heat beneath her eyes that indicated it was not entirely the sea she was scrubbing away.
    I promise you, Dominic,
she thought fiercely, her own little prayer,
I will walk away from this man at long last and I will take you to Bora Bora the way you always wanted. I’ll give you to the wind and the water the way I swore I would. And then we’ll both be free.
    So she swallowed back the bitter words she would have liked to throw out to make herself feel better about just how much of a fool she’d been and swam over to the side of the boat. She reached up to grip the edge of it. Cayo shifted, moving that taut, tense body of his even closer. He was more furious than she’d ever seen him. She could feel it as easily as she felt the sun far above, the sea all around.
    “Fine,” she said, tilting her head to look up at him as if none of that bothered her in the least. “I’ll get in the boat.”
    “I know you will,” he agreed silkily.
Furiously,
she thought. “But while I have you here, Miss Bennett, let’s talk terms, shall we?”
    Dru let go of the gunwale with one hand and used it to slick her hair back from her face. The twist she’d carefully created this morning in London was long gone now, and she imagined that the dark mass of her hair hung about her like seaweed. Happily, she was certain that Cayo would deeply disapprove of it. That little kick of pleasure allowed her to simply raise her brows at him and wait. As if none of this hurt her. As if
he
didn’t hurt her at all.
    “I imagine that this entire display was a calculated effort to get me to recognize that you are, in fact, a person,” he said in that insufferable way of his, so verypatronizing, that Dru would not have been at all surprised if it had left marks.
    “How good of you to ignore almost everything I actually said,” she murmured in a similar tone, even as she eyed him warily.
    “I will double your salary,” he told her as if he hadn’t heard her.
    Dru was forced to calculate how very much money it was that he was offering her, and wonder, for the