Page 37 of Vicious Devotion

The sound of the door closing behind him feels like it shakes me all the way down to my bones.

—

The next day, I try to focus on the house, and nothing else. Gabriel left instructions with Agnes that he wanted us to focus on sprucing up the kitchen and living room first, and some notes on things he’d seen throughout the house that he wants specifically removed or preserved. I’m curious about why he’s taken an interest in what Agnes and I are doing with it, when he seemed ready to brush the entire project aside when we first arrived, but he deflects any of my questions about it at breakfast. I want to press him on it, but the tension between us stops me.

From the moment I sit down at the breakfast table, I can feel it, the kind of tension that hasn’t been there since I was taken from the mansion in New York. I can feel my cheeks flushing the moment his eyes meet mine, and I quickly look down, my heart beating a little faster in my chest. I can feel Agnes’ eyes on me, too, and I can only imagine what she’s thinking. Thankfully, she doesn’t say anything about it as we start work on cleaning the kitchen after breakfast, but I can’t help wondering. She’s too astute to not have picked up on the fact that something happened with Gabriel and I.

Partway through the afternoon, Gabriel comes to collect Cecelia and Danny, saying he’s taking them out to venture around the estate. He doesn’t ask me to come along this time, and that tension is still there, letting me know that I didn’t imagine it this morning. I stay on the far side of the living room, working on taking apart the cracked baseboards there, and I only glance up to look at him once. When I do, and his eyes meet mine, I feel heat rush over me, the memory of what happened in the library yesterday too close for comfort.

I know I shouldn’t go out to find them later, when Agnes and I are done with the house for the day, and she retreats to the kitchen to work on dinner. I should just change into my running clothes and follow the path that I’ve found around the estate—which is what I intend to do. But as I jog past a set of outbuildings on one side of the vineyards, I see a shape near one of the paddocks in the distance, and my feet slow of their own accord.

Not just one shape, but four—one that I know must be Gabriel, and the shape of a small pony with a child on its back, the other child clinging to the fence rails. I realize Gabriel must have taken Cecelia and Danny out for riding lessons. Despite my better judgement, I start jogging in the direction of where they are.

I know I should be avoiding Gabriel. Putting as much distance between him and me as I can, so that things can cool down between us again—not that that’s ever been particularly successful for us. But going near him right now is only going to make it all harder.

Still, I can’t seem to stop myself. I jog all the way to the edge of the paddock, where I see that it’s Cecelia sitting on the edge of the railing, kicking booted feet against the wood as she watches her father lead Danny on the pony.

“Hi, Bella,” she calls out cheerfully, glancing over me as I slow my pace and stop to lean up against the side of the paddock next to her. “Dad’s giving us riding lessons. I rode that one.” She points to a nearby paddock where a taller, sleek black pony is drinking from a water trough. “Now Danny is getting his lesson.”

Danny’s pony is remarkably smaller, about half the size of the one Cecelia said she rode, with a creamy-colored coat and a long white mane and tail. He’s seated in what I recognize is an English-style saddle, one hand on the pommel while the other holds the reins. Gabriel has a leather lead attached to the pony’s bit, and he is murmuring quiet instructions as he leads them in a circle.

“I got to ride without the lead line,” Cecelia announces proudly.

“Good job.” I smile at her, glancing over briefly before looking back at Gabriel. He looks devastatingly handsome in jeans and a black t-shirt, his tanned, muscled arms exposed, and his dark hair tousled around his face. All of his focus is on Danny, and I watch as he stops the pony, moving to Danny’s side to adjust his feet in the stirrups.

The sight of it makes my chest ache. I’ve never seen any man who is as good of a father as Gabriel is. Patient, loving, kind—stern when he needs to be but never too much. I feel that wave of regret again that I’ve felt before, wishing that Gabriel could have been the man I was engaged to, instead of Pyotr. That he could have been the one to show me everything from the very start, to be my only experience of men in this world. I could have skipped all the trauma and hurt if I’d been given to him—or to someone like him.

But my experience is that there are very few men like him in the world at all.

He glances over, and I see the sudden tension in him when he sees me standing there, the tightness in his jaw, the way his eyes quickly rake over me before he regains his composure. He leads the pony over towards where I’m standing next to Cecelia, and I catch a glimpse of the broad smile on Danny’s face. It’s clear that both children are loving this.

“I didn’t expect to see you out here.” Gabriel’s voice is cool, even, betraying nothing. But the way his eyes darken ever so slightly, the way he looks at me, tells me exactly what he’s thinking. So soon after what happened between us, it’s hard for him to hide his reaction to me. That knowledge gives me a flush of pleasure, a heady sense of power that startles me. Similarly to the way I liked the feeling of him losing control in the library, it feels good to know that I’m affecting him now.

“I was out for a run, and I saw you. I wanted to get a closer look.” I realize how the words sound the moment they’re out of my mouth, but I can’t take them back. I almost wish I could, when I see the muscle tick in Gabriel’s jaw. He caught the unintentional innuendo there, that much is for sure.

“I brought them out here for riding lessons.” His voice is still cool, seemingly unaffected, but I know better. I can see the way he’s gripping the edge of the railing near where he’s standing, and heat washes over my skin, remembering him gripping the bookshelf next to my head. The hard, rhythmic thrust of his hips against mine, the way he sent me over the edge so easily. “We have bigger horses. I can teach you too, if you like.”

Much like what I said, I don’t think he meant to insinuate anything—and yet when his eyes meet mine as he says it, that rush of heat hits me again. My stomach twists, butterflies fluttering through me at an alarming rate, and I swallow hard.

“I should probably learn how to drive, first,” I manage, forcing a weak smile to my lips. A breeze blows past, fluttering my hair around my face and kicking up dust around us, and I see Gabriel’s hand twitch as his eyes flick to the pieces of hair clinging to my cheeks.

I want him to touch me. If we were alone, I don’t think he’d be able to stop, and a dozen different scenarios, each one more lurid than the last, flash through my imagination in an instant.

Gabriel clears his throat, wrapping the leather lead around his hand and taking a step back. “Tell Agnes I’ll have the kids up soon to clean up before dinner,” he says, clicking his tongue at the pony as he walks away. Danny nearly bounces in the saddle, gleeful at taking another turn around the paddock, and I bite my lip, unable to tear my eyes away from Gabriel for a moment. His dark hair, curling at the nape of his neck, sticking lightly to it with sweat. The flex of his muscles along his broad back. A shiver runs through me, and I turn away, ignoring the steady throb of heat in my veins and the fluttering in my chest as I start back up the path to the house, breaking into a jog partway there.

I can run away from the moment. But I can’t run from Gabriel himself—or how he makes me feel.

And I don’t know that I want to.

12

GABRIEL

Afew more ordinary, easy days pass on the estate, and as they do, I can feel my resolve of what I planned to do with it wavering. My nightly updates from Gio haven’t shown any sign that Igor is moving forward with plans to hunt us down, and while in my gut, I know that’s only the calm before the storm, it’s hard not to let myself become complacent again.

It’s also hard to think about seriously searching for buyers for the estate when I feel more peaceful here than I have in a long time.

My home in New York was mine and Delilah’s, bought shortly after our wedding before Cecelia was born. It’s full of memories—almost all good. We argued, of course, as normal married couples do, and those early days with our first child were sleepless and often tense, but the years spent together in that house were so overwhelmingly happy that those few bad moments have long since faded into the background. It’s been hard to escape my grief, there, even after so long. Hard to let myself heal, even when I know it’s normal, and natural, to need to live my life beyond the shadow of that loss. And having Bella there, with how I feel about her and the things we’ve done, only compounded the guilt.

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