Page 81 of Vicious Temptation

Warmth crawls up my skin, my heart beating a little faster. I slowly put my hand on top of his, curling my fingers around the side of his palm. And we sit like that, all the way into the city, our hands wrapped together on my leg.

When we park outside the botanical gardens, I’m not sure I want to let go.

Gabriel comes around to open my door for me, and I slide out of the passenger’s side. I’m close enough to him to touch as I stand up, and he sucks in a breath, his eyes darkening as they land on my face. He closes the door slowly, turning towards me, and his voice is husky when he speaks.

“Can I kiss you?”

My heart pounds in my chest. We’re in public. I’m not entirely sure why that feels like it matters, except that it does. “That feels real,” I whisper, and Gabriel hesitates.

“This is all real, Bella,” he says softly. “There’s just an endpoint. If that’s still okay with you. If you still want to, knowing?—”

Don’t fall for this man. I know what I should do. I should step back, and not let him kiss me in public. We should keep this behind closed doors, in quiet rooms, out of sight, the way you’re supposed to when the affair you’re having will eventually come to an end. When you know there’s a ticking clock, an end date, a finish line to the thing that you’re sharing with someone else.

But instead, I step closer. Gabriel reaches up, sliding my sunglasses off of my face, and tosses them onto the seat, through the open window behind him. And then he only hesitates for one moment before he cups my face in both of his hands, drawing me up against him as he brings my mouth up to his.

His mouth is warm and soft, his body a hard contrast everywhere—over six feet of firm muscle—and I lean into him. My hands settle on his waist, and I feel tears prick behind my eyelids again, because for the first time in months—maybe the first time ever—I feel normal.

I’m outside, wearing a dress, with a handsome man kissing me before we go on a semi-date. I could be any girl, anywhere in the world, having this exact experience, and the normalcy of it almost makes me dizzy. I laugh, smiling against Gabriel’s mouth, and even the knowledge that this is temporary isn’t enough to dull my happiness.

He reaches up, brushing away a tear with his thumb, and I don’t flinch. I don’t know how easy it will be with someone else, but with Gabriel, it’s becoming easier and easier to let him touch me. He makes me feel safe.

“Kissing you isn’t supposed to make you cry,” he says softly. But from the look in his eyes, I know I don’t have to explain why it did. And that makes me feel safe, too. It’s not just my body that feels safe with him, but my emotions, my heart, everything that makes up me—my past and my present, all carefully guarded by him.

I’m in so much trouble. The thought ricochets through my head as I collect my camera and we start to walk into the gardens, but I push it out of my mind. I want to enjoy this. I want to feel all of it. And in the end, when we have to stop, it will probably hurt. But so does anything else, when it ends. I’ll probably have other relationships that will end, and hurt, too.

I want to enjoy this while it’s happening.

The afternoon is perfect. Gabriel walks with me through the botanical gardens, and I show him all my favorite flowers, taking pictures of each one. I tell him about angles and light and show him the images as I take them, and he actually listens. It’s not just him humoring me—I can tell that he’s really listening, that he really cares. That even if he doesn’t understand all of it, he’s happy to listen to me talk about it.

I see him wince when I take a photo of him, a glorious spray of roses as the backdrop behind him, and laugh. “What’s wrong?”

Gabriel shrugs. “I just don’t like my picture taken.”

“Oh.” I bite my lip. “I’m sorry.”

“No—I mean, it’s not like that. It’s not that it upsets me.”

I look at him curiously. “What is it, then?”

He shrugs again, carelessly. “It sounds stupid. I know I’m good-looking, I’m not pretending to be overly modest or anything. But I’ve never liked a picture of myself. I guess it just doesn’t translate. I’m not—photogenic, I suppose.”

I can’t help but smile at that. “Come look at this one,” I urge him. He gives me a long-suffering look, but finally walks over to my side, standing next to me so that I can tilt the back of the camera towards him, holding it up. “Look,” I urge him, and he does.

The photo is a good one. I know that as soon as I see it. I managed to catch him perfectly framed by the roses, the light coming from the glass behind him setting off his chiseled face to perfection, the shadows exactly where they should be. He looks like a model, standing there with his hands in the pockets of his dark grey chinos, the black t-shirt that he’s wearing clinging to his muscles in all the right places. “You look like a perfume ad,” I tell him with a laugh, and Gabriel rubs a hand over his mouth, looking at me sideways.

“That’s—a really incredible picture,” he concedes. “I don’t really think I look like myself, honestly.”

“That’s what I see every time I look at you.”

It comes out before I realize what I’m saying, and I almost drop the camera. Those words should have stayed tightly locked inside of my head—I know they should have. For all the intimacies we’ve shared so far and all the ones we probably still will, despite the way Gabriel said it is real, earlier—I can’t help but feel that was a step too far. And that feeling only sinks in deeper when I look up, and see the expression in Gabriel’s eyes.

There’s heat there, and longing—but also regret. The regret of a man who is seeing something he wants to keep, and knows he can’t.

A lump rises in my throat, and I let the camera fall back against my chest. “Come on,” I say, a little too brightly. “I want to show you the butterfly garden.”

We leave an hour and a half later, my camera full of photos and my heart lighter once again. I got stunning pictures of the butterflies, ones I can’t wait to look at on my laptop, and I sit next to Gabriel at lunch, going through them as he leans across, close enough to me that I can smell the woodsy scent of his cologne and feel the heat coming off of his skin.

I’ve had Clara in my life for a long time, and she’s always cared about the things that were important to me. But no one else ever has. Gabriel isn’t bored, or just tolerating it until I’m done going on about which pictures I love the most and why, or what I’d do differently with others if I went back. He’s not patronizing me. He clearly has no idea what I’m talking about for half of it, but he also clearly doesn’t care.

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