Page 23 of Vicious Devotion

He turns away from me, quickly, as if he’s thinking the same thing. He opens the door next to us, swinging it wide. “This is your room,” he says, his voice a little raspy in a way that sends a shiver down my spine. “Unless you want a different one. But this is the only room besides the master and the sitting room on this floor, and I thought you might want to be on a different floor from Agnes and Aldo, and the kids. Just to have a little more space of your own.”

A dozen different thoughts about that flick through my head—including that he’s doing this in case I have nightmares, to give me more of a chance at privacy…and that this means I’m on the same floor as him. Sleeping a few feet and a doorway away. Just him and I up here, with no one to accidentally run into in the middle of the night if?—

“Bella?” Gabriel looks at me with a hint of worry in his face, and I push the thought away. It seems like he’s not thinking about that, and I shouldn’t be, either.

I walk past him, into the bedroom. It’s shabbily beautiful, in a state of disrepair and possibility, like everything else in this house, but not unlivable. There’s a dusty hardwood floor with a faded rug stretched over the center of it, big windows covered with curtains that look out to two sides of the estate, and what looks like antique furniture under the cloths and plastic covering each piece.

“There’s no household staff working here any longer,” Gabriel says apologetically. “I can get Agnes to?—”

I shake my head quickly. “I can handle it, Gabriel. There’s no need for Agnes to come all the way up here. I’ll get it cleaned up—” I pause. “Is there anything to clean up with?”

“I had some things delivered to the hotel back in New York, to bring with us before we got on the flight here. Not much, but enough to get the place livable before anyone really digs into it. There’s a small town about a forty-five-minute drive from here where we can restock. Also, where we can get groceries, clothes…pretty much anything else you need, within reason. Only a couple of shops for each thing, though,” he adds with a chuckle. “It’s not New York.”

There’s a tinge of worry in his voice, as if he’s concerned that I’m going to be unhappy here. As if I could be unhappy about this, when I’m here at all because Gabriel cared enough to steal me right out from under the nose of one of the most powerful Bratva bosses in New York. On the east coast of the United States, probably.

There’s a lot that I’m afraid of. A lot that makes me feel like I’m fighting panic and tears at any given moment, struggling to remain strong in the face of all of this. But being in this house, with Gabriel, is far from anything that could make me unhappy.

“It’ll be fine,” I reassure him. “Now, let me get to work, before we both start sneezing.”

The only unhappiness I feel is the tiny sliver of disappointment that wormed its way into me when I realized that Gabriel was putting me in a room of my own, and not in his. I manage to keep any sign of it off of my face, but it digs in a little deeper when he just nods and leaves, closing the door behind him. On the surface, I know he’s being a gentleman, giving me space, letting me acclimate to what is another adjustment on top of days filled with chaos, fear, and shock, compounding my already too-close trauma from my disastrous wedding that’s less than six months behind me.

There are three ways to interpret all of this—how quick he was to stop touching me last night, how careful he’s been with me since, the distance he’s left between us, him setting me up in my own room in this house. One is that he’s keeping to the letter of the agreement we made when we changed our relationship to each other, ever so briefly, from business to pleasure and back again. Another is that he’s just being careful not to assume what I want—waiting for me to come to him, to tell him that I want him to touch me, that I want to share a bed with him, that I want to complicate our already messy relationship even more.

The third possibility, though, is the reason why I can’t ask him for any of that. Why I can’t talk to him about all of the tangled feelings rattling around in my chest. The third possibility is that the one night was enough for him. Even if it wasn’t, everything that’s happened since has just underlined his decision from the start that feelings aren’t possible between us. That, aside from his minor lapse last night—which could have been the product of adrenaline and not real desire for me—he just simply doesn’t want me like that any longer.

That he doesn’t feel anything close to what I’ve started to feel for him.

And beyond that, there’s the ever-present fact that the closer we get to each other, the more dangerous it is for everyone. That if Gabriel were to feel more for me, he might make decisions even more foolish than what he’s already done. And the more I feel for him, the more likely it is that my heart will break into even smaller pieces, by the time all of this is over.

By the time dinnertime has rolled around, I’ve managed to get my room clean enough to comfortably sleep in. All the dust covers are taken off and stowed away, the floor swept and mopped, and the furniture dusted. Fresh bedding will have to wait—there’s going to be mountains of laundry to do, but the dust cloth kept the worst of it off of the bed itself. It’s made up with a dark blue embroidered duvet, and tasseled throw pillows stacked against the softer pillows behind them, and I have a sudden urge to simply crawl into the bed and go to sleep now.

Instead, I find my way downstairs to see if Agnes needs any help with dinner.

“There’s enough groceries for a few days,” she tells me as I come into the kitchen, catching my glance around. Cecelia is on a stepstool at the granite counter, chopping vegetables, and Danny is sitting at the long wooden table with a comic book. It could be a scene straight out of the home we just fled from, and I feel myself relax just a little, seeing it. A small bit of normalcy, clicking back into place. “Gabriel had the estate manager go and pick up some things, and have them ready for us. We’ll have to take a trip into town before too long, though.”

“That sounds nice,” I murmur, a little absently as I look around. The kitchen is a far cry from the ultra-modern, updated kitchen in Gabriel’s New York home. Agnes clearly scrubbed this room while I was working on cleaning my bedroom, but the stove and refrigerator are charmingly out of date, the floor is in the same shape as the rest of the floors in the house, and the furnishings have seen better days. The countertops could use replacing, too. “I wonder how much money Gabriel is willing to put into renovating the place,” I murmur, looking around, and Agnes chuckles.

“He said something about you getting it into your head to take this on as a project. He said he was just going to ask me if I’d be willing to clean it up, but you’re picturing a lot more than that.” She raises an eyebrow, and I laugh without meaning to. It sounds odd as it rings in my ears, after so many days of thinking I might never have a reason to laugh again, but it feels good.

“Well, Gabriel said he wanted to renovate. And I could use a distraction.” I bite my lip, looking around again. “I don’t know. I think it could be fun.”

“I agree, actually,” Agnes says, surprising me.

“Really?” I look at her, startled, and it’s her turn to laugh.

“We could all use a little distraction,” she says, picking up a rolled-out pie crust and putting it into a fluted ceramic pie plate. “And I worked for Gabriel’s parents, before him. I remember this place in its prime. I wouldn’t mind getting it back to that.”

I felt a small flutter of excitement in my stomach, and I gave Agnes a smile, one filled with camaraderie. “We’ll start tomorrow, then.”

—

I wake up in the morning feeling hopeful for the first time since Igor and his men barged into Gabriel’s house. The night before—our first night in the villa—went well. I helped Agnes finish the steak and mushroom pie she’d been making, and then we’d all crowded around the table and dug into it, and the salad that Cecelia had helped make. Gabriel had found an excellent bottle of red wine in the cellar, and once Cecelia and Danny had fallen exhaustedly into bed, the four adults had finished it off in the kitchen, since the living room was still covered in dust cloths.

The hardest thing is not letting my mind run away with itself. It’s all too easy to imagine what it would be like if Gabriel and I were moving into this new house together, if all of this were ours and not his, if we’re something more than what we really are to each other. On paper, I’m an employee just like Agnes and Aldo, but he’s treated me differently than even the familiar way he treats them since day one. I’ve never really been just an employee. And now, more than ever, it feels like I’m a part of this family.

Just not in the role that, deep down, I’m starting to wish I could occupy.

I can smell breakfast cooking as soon as I get up. I’m beginning to understand why Gabriel’s house in New York has the cozy, warm feeling that’s so rare in a billionaire’s mansion—this villa has that same rustic warmth, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his parents modeled their home in New York that he grew up in after it. I throw on a pair of worn jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt, tossing my hair up into a messy bun, and head downstairs with only a fleeting glance towards Gabriel’s bedroom door.

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