Page 32 of Room 810

“Thank you, Fred,” I whispered. He didn’t know the gift he’d given me.

“Please, none of that Fred nonsense. You can call us Mom and Dad, if you’d like.”

“Really?” I looked over at Emma, and she nodded, wiping away a stray tear of her own.

When I had insisted Gabriel and I come back to the States so I could meet his parents, I had been hoping to help bridge the gap between them, to help him make peace with his rough childhood. He knew they’d meant well, but the distance between them had always seemed too great. Now that I was here, something amazing had happened. Not only was Gabe smiling and reconnecting with something he’d lost, but I had somehow gained a set of parents—and a set of grandparents for our child.

19

Gabriel

Myparentsputusup in the guest suite, with an attached bathroom. It was getting late, and the house was quiet, but Toby had insisted he needed to freshen up after the day we’d had, between travel, a doctor’s appointment, then a long drive, followed by visiting with my parents for hours. So, while he was in the shower, I did the thing I’d been dying to do for the past three hours.

I googled Tobias Bradbury.

Toby had always been tight-lipped about his past, and I hadn’t pushed because I understood what it meant not to want to dig into long-dead history. He’d given me the abridged version about his father’s death and the regret he felt over it, but beyond that, I knew all I needed to know about Toby. I knew that I loved him and he loved me. That was what mattered.

But after what my dad had said about him, it made me feel like this was important background to know. Was Toby famous? My eyes flicked over to the closed door, making sure I still heard the shower running, before I typed in his name. Pages and pages of results popped up. From business magazines and tech review sites, all praising the direction Tobias was taking the company, as son of Terrence Bradbury, groundbreaking tech mogul. The more recent articles, though, were less about the company and more about Toby’s downfall and disappearance from the public eye. There had been a lot of speculation about his whereabouts, but eventually, those had stopped too. Nobody had mentioned Tobias in the past six months. The tech industry was a fast-changing business, and it seemed they had moved on without him.

I hadn’t been paying attention to when the shower turned off. Suddenly, the bathroom door swung open, and Toby stood there in nothing but a towel around his waist. He leaned up against the doorframe and struck a pose. “Hey there, sexy. Come here often?”

I didn’t feel bad laughing because that was his goal in acting ridiculous... but he was also gorgeous as hell, with his blond hair damp and curling over his forehead, his baby bump giving his toned body new softness and curves in surprising places. I felt my body stir at the sight.

Instead of listening to my body, however, I blurted, “Are you rich?” out of nowhere, thoroughly killing the mood as the smile slipped off his face.

“Do we have to talk about this?” he asked, resigned, as he plodded over to the bed and flopped down beside me. “Because I can think of better things to do with our time.”

I rolled to face him and placed a gentle kiss on his bare shoulder. “I don’t care about your money,” I told him. “And I don’t care that you used to be some bigshot businessman making bigshot negotiations in the boardroom. I do, however, care that your father’s death hit you hard. Hard enough that you ran away from everyone and everything you ever knew.” He stared up at the ceiling, his face stony, but I knew he was listening. “Have you been hiding on Creston Cay?”

He took a long, deep breath, blowing out a sigh. “Maybe I was at first. I could’ve ended up anywhere, it didn’t matter. All I cared about was that I was anywhere but here, doing anything but this. It was only a total fluke that I saw that resort up for sale. I figured I could lounge on the beach and drink margaritas all day, until I was too drunk to think about my mistakes. But somewhere along the line, my little resort started to worm its way into my heart, with its quirky staff and travelers who came from all over the world looking for a way to unwind from their stressful lives—the same kind of life I had run from.” His lips stretched into a soft smile, a dimple forming in his cheek. “I was uniquely qualified in forgetting at that point, so I figured, why not help others in their task? My favorite thing is to take a workaholic and show him what really matters the most in life is love.” He threw me a look, and I knew he meant me.

Toby took a little effort to roll my way, his belly filling some of the space between us, and I instantly reached for it, hoping to feel our baby kick beneath my palm. “And now?” I asked. “If you’re done hiding and you want to come home, I’ll follow you anywhere. Just say the word, and I’ll take care of everything.”

His smile went gooey when I said things like that, offering to take control. Moving to a new country, buying houses, selling businesses—these were the kinds of tasks most people despised because of all the paperwork and the details that too easily fell through the cracks, but that was exactly what I lived for. I needed that control, and meanwhile, Toby was completely fine with letting me drive.

“No,” he said finally. “I think… I’m not hiding anymore, but that doesn’t mean I want to come back. I love my little island.”

“Now, when you say ‘your island’…” I said, leading, “you don’t mean you own thewholeisland… right?”

Instead of answering, his eyes got that mischievous gleam to them that I knew meant trouble. He walked his fingers up my arms and started tugging at the buttons on my nightshirt. “Have I ever told you how sexy these pajamas are? I especially love how you button them right to the top.”

“You’re trying to distract me,” I said, narrowing my eyes on him. “It’s not going to work.” That was a lie; it was already working. In fact, it had been working since he opened that bathroom door, the towel acting as nothing but a tease.

“Uh-huh,” he mumbled, busy with trying to get me out of my clothes.

“Toby, we can’t have sex,” I scolded, peeling his hands away, even as my traitorous body told me very clearly that wecouldhave sex. “My parents are just down the hall.”

“So? I can be quiet.”

“We both know that’s a lie.” I loved the sounds he made, starting with adorable little mewls, then moving to purrs and moans. They acted like a user’s manual to his pleasure, telling me what he liked best. When to linger, when to move faster or harder. The louder he got, then I knew I was hitting just the right spot.

He moved from trying to get me naked, to himself. He knew I wouldn’t be able to resist him in the end. With a flick of his wrist, his towel fell from his hips, exposing his weeping cock, and as he tossed the towel to the floor, my mouth flooded with saliva.

“Toby…” I said darkly, fighting against the urge to take him.

“Yes?” He was so damn good at playing coy. Then he rolled onto his front and raised his hips, knees spread wide, offering himself to me. “I’m just gonna do some yoga before bed, if that’s all right with you. It helps me sleep when I’m allstretched out.” From this angle, I couldn’t get a good look, but the scent of his slick reached my senses, and my balls clenched hard.

I growled in the back of my throat. “You’re killing me,” I griped, but I was already rolling off the bed to remove my pajamas. “Not a peep, you got it? The first moan I hear out of you, I’ll stop.”

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