Page 27 of Vicious Devotion

“Come back down when you’re done, and have a glass of wine with me?”

I see the hesitation on her face. I can guess what she’s thinking about, what she’s remembering—that first night that we sat in the living room back at the house in New York and had a drink together, and the glass that she spilled, that moment when it took everything in me not to kiss her.

My blood throbs in my temples. I should tell her never mind. I should tell her that I’m going to turn in for the night, instead. But I say none of that, no matter how clearly I know that I should.

“Okay,” she says softly, and then she turns to go.

When she comes back down, I’m in the living room. She and Agnes got the room reasonably livable today—the plastic and drop cloths are gone, the furniture is dusted. The fireplace doesn’t look usable just yet, but fortunately, it’s summer. I’m standing at the mantle, looking out at the darkened estate beyond the tall window just to my right, when I hear her footsteps behind me.

I have to force myself not to turn around instantly. Not to make it abundantly clear with a single motion how much I was looking forward to seeing her when she came down.

When I finally turn around, I see her silhouetted in the doorway, walking into the room. Even in sweatpants and a loose t-shirt, her hair piled messily atop her head, she takes my breath away. I want to reach out and run my fingers down one of the thin strands of hair brushing against her cheek. In the low, golden light from the lamps scattered around the room, she looks luminous.

Not touching her feels like one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

I reach for one of the two glasses of wine I poured, handing it to her instead. “I know you’ve told me you want to,” I say finally, casting another glance around the room, “but I feel like I need to remind you that you don’t have to do anything involving these renovations, or getting the house livable. It’s not your job. You can stop anytime.”

“You make it sound like an addiction,” Bella teases quietly, taking the wine glass. Her fingers ghost against mine as she does, and I feel the touch jolt over my skin, like electricity. “I know I don’t have to,” she adds, sinking down on the edge of the couch and taking a sip of the wine. “But it’s good to have a project. It occupies my mind. I know my job is watching Cecelia and Danny, but it’s not as if they’re babies. They take care of themselves a lot of the time. I’m just here to structure it, and to be there if they need me. Cecelia is loving the project, by the way,” she adds with another small laugh. “If you couldn’t tell at dinner. I never knew she’d get so excited over decorating.”

“Neither did I.” I fight the urge to sit down next to her on the couch, knowing it will be harder to keep from touching her if I do. I sink down in a wing chair near the fireplace instead, running my fingers over the worn velvet nap. “It makes sense, though, now that I think about it. She had a dollhouse she loved when she was little. She reorganized it constantly. Always wanted new furniture for it more than new dolls. And now she’s obsessed with the ones from that store you took her to.”

“I saw that she brought the one I picked out with her.” Bella takes another sip of her wine, looking pensively towards the window. “She was really worried about me. I’m sorry, Gabriel.” She glances back towards me. “I’m sorry I brought that into your life. I?—”

“Don’t,” I say firmly, shaking my head. “We talked about this on the plane, Bella. It’s not your fault.” The expression on her face tells me that she’s not going to drop it, but I wish she would. I want her to trust me. To believe that I’ll keep her safe.

Mine. The word burns through my head again, and I shove it away. She isn’t, whether I want her to be or not. But that doesn’t mean I can’t protect her.

“It’s objectively—” she starts to say, but I fix her with a look that makes her drop her gaze. “I know you had some idea of the risks, after I told you what happened. But did you really think Igor would?—”

“No. I didn’t,” I interrupt, before she can go any further. “But that’s on me, Bella. Not you. I didn’t take the threat seriously enough, and I’ll regret that to my dying fucking day, but taking it seriously would never have involved sending you back to your father, or anywhere else. I should have added more security, and reached out to contacts to find out a way to head the threat off—shit, there’s any number of things I could have done that I’m working on doing now, to try to fix it. But I don’t regret anything about you, Bella. And I don’t want you blaming yourself.”

She takes another sip of the wine silently. From the look on her face, I can’t tell if it’s going to be that easy for her. But I have every intention of reinforcing it, if it comes up again, as many times as it takes for her to believe me when I say that this isn’t her fault. I’ll never be convinced that it is.

“How can I not?” she asks finally, her teeth still biting her lower lip. I want to reach out and take her face in my hand, pry her lip from her teeth with my thumb, and kiss away the sting. Just the thought sends a pulse of desire through me, a warm ache swelling in my blood. But I don’t move. She looks up at me, and her eyes look glossy, as if she’s holding back tears. “How can I not blame myself? The things Igor said?—”

“Don’t matter.” I cut her off again, before it can spiral. “He’s not going to get to you here, Bella. Whatever he threatened you with, whatever he said, whatever plans he had for you, they’re over. Finished. And he can try to follow through; he can try to come after you, but I will find a way to stop him. I promise you that.”

Bella nods, dropping her gaze again. I can’t tell what she’s thinking, and all I want is to take that worried look off of her face. I want to see her the way she was at dinner, happy and self-assured, as if she’d started to believe me when I say that I’ll keep her safe. As if she’d started to feel at home again.

“You seem more confident here.” I look at her, letting my gaze drift over her face as she leans forward, clasping her wine glass in both hands. “When you were helping Agnes serve dinner earlier, the way you moved around the kitchen—” I break off, unsure of how to finish the sentence. I want to say like you belong here, but there are so many layers to that sentence, so many parts of it that I know I should keep to myself.

Bella laughs softly, lifting her wine glass to her lips again. I see them brush against the rim, and I feel my cock twitch in my jeans, swelling against my thigh. Looking at her mouth has always made me feel like I’m going to come undone, from the very beginning.

“I don’t know,” she says softly, draining the glass of wine. I pluck it from her fingers and reach for the bottle on the old coffee table, refilling it halfway before I hand it back to her. “Maybe it’s that the house in New York feels like it’s so completely your space. Like I was a newcomer there, a little bit of an intruder, from the very start. Always on the back foot, learning the routines, getting used to things. It was already home to everyone there, when I moved in. But this isn’t home to anyone—not even you.”

The quickness with which she grasped that makes me feel slightly startled, taken aback. I hadn’t realized she could read me so well, that she understood me that well. But Bella is someone who pays attention, who notices details, and we know each other in a number of intimate ways now. I suppose, I think as I watch her take another sip of the wine, that it shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does.

“This is a neutral space,” she says quietly. “And maybe since I’m helping to fix it up, I feel a little bit of ownership over it, too.” She laughs. “Not that I actually think it’s mine or anything like that,” she adds hurriedly.

It could be. The thought springs up, and I try to squash it down just as quickly, along with my growing arousal. It’s a foolish thought to have. Bella and I aren’t together, and even if we were, I have plans to sell the estate. But I can’t bring myself to talk about them out loud, right now. I’m not sure why, but it feels like I can’t bring myself to say it. It feels like that same thought I had at dinner—that if anything is making her happy, making her laugh, I don’t want to do anything to ruin it. She’s had so much taken from her, and even though there have never been any plans to stay here, for some reason, telling her right now—when she’s so hopeful about fixing the house up—that I plan to sell feels like taking something else away. It makes no sense, but my gut feeling is to stay quiet about that.

So I do. Because I’m beginning to realize, more and more, how much it means to me to make Bella happy.

She sits there, quietly sipping her wine, and I don’t know what else to say. I can feel the tension between us, heavy in the air, and I want to get up and go to her. I want her. But I don’t move, because I know all of the things we agreed to. And I don’t know what she wants from me.

“I should go to bed,” Bella says, draining her glass of wine and setting it down. “We have a lot of work to do tomorrow. And the kids are always up earlier than I would be, if I didn’t have an alarm.”

She smiles at me, standing up, and I watch her hesitate, for just a second, as she turns to go. “Good night, Gabriel,” she says softly, and then she walks out of the living room, heading towards the stairs.

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