Chapter 21 Gabriel
Gabriel
Imake a sound low in my throat, my gaze on her mouth. “Don’t run, wife. Not to protect me. I’ll follow you into hell itself. I’m never giving up on you. Not in this life or the next.”
Her breath catches. Her scent, citrus and vetiver, curls through me. Her eyes, warm but ferociously intense, glint in the ambient light. I move my thumb down to brush over her lush bottom lip.
Opening her mouth, she draws my thumb inside and sucks.
Pure lust rages through me, my cock hardening to steel in an instant. My gaze flies from her lips to her eyes then back again.
“Fuck,” I breathe and slide my thumb in farther. Pull it nearly out, then press it back inside again for her tongue to curl around.
She sucks harder, her eyes on mine. When she releases me with a wet pop, my chest heaves as though I just sprinted ten miles.
I couldn’t stop myself even if I wanted to. She’s the shore, and I’m the tide rolling in. This moment was always inevitable.
She leans closer, and I move to my knees, sliding my hand from her neck to cradle her head.
I need her kiss. I’m dying for the feel of her skin against mine. My mouth on hers. The sweet tangle of our tongues.
Both of us have our adrenaline running hot after the confrontation with the doctor.
At this moment, her desire could be nothing more than gratitude.
I saw it in her eyes. She thought I would send her away somewhere she’d not only be behind locked doors, but where she’d be kept from me.
Somewhere it would be impossible to truly protect her.
It was never going to happen. Not after I saw her fear. But I don’t need her fucking thanks. I need my wife.
Her breathing hitches, her lips full and damp as she sways closer. Everything in me coils in readiness to take her. Sink into her.
One slow, wet kiss. I’ll allow myself that much. I can stop there.
Our mouths meet, and the first contact lights me on fire.
Patience, you asshole. Slow down. To her, this is our first kiss, not a reunion. I try to respond gently to her enthusiasm. Try.
But the moment her hands land in my hair, and she spreads her thighs on either side of my waist and yanks me against her, it’s too much to fight. No one could. Holding myself back from her is like trying to leash-train a mountain lion.
One hand guiding her head, the other sliding under her shirt to revel in the silk of her skin, I thrust my tongue into her mouth, mimicking the act of sex and grinding my cock against her clit.
Her damp heat cradles me through the thin fabric of our clothing, and my brain short-circuits.
I missed her. So damn much. Even when she was right here.
I lick and devour, picking her up from the chair without taking my mouth from hers, then laying her down on the area rug and working my way across her clavicle and down her body, lifting her red T-shirt to kiss my way from her belly button up the center of her body.
My conscience tries to interject. This feels like stealing. She doesn’t know me, but I know her. I can anticipate her shiver and the way she wraps her legs around me a split-second before she does it. I don’t have to slide my fingers into her underwear to know I’ll find her wet for me.
“Sydney.” I always say her name when I have her like this, and she knows why. She knows what it means. That she’s it for me. There’ll never be another.
She’ll say my name back, next, in that teasing voice I love.
But she doesn’t whisper, “Gabriel” . . . because she doesn’t know my name.
Breaths heaving, chest aching, I force my hands to the thick rug beneath us, clenching the soft wool instead of her skin.
I make myself move back up to her mouth and place another kiss there: one more gentle than the first. Then, with my body braced over hers, I bury my face in the place where her shoulder meets her neck and steal one more moment, surrounded by her taste and scent and warmth.
For a few seconds longer, the curtain of her brunette waves hides me from the real world—one where my wife may yet decide trusting me was the worst decision of her life.
Fingers that tugged at my hair only seconds ago, sift through it gently now. One of her arms moves down around my waist, and she holds me against her.
I want to tear her clothes off, spread her beneath me, and eat her until she climaxes so hard she’s shaking in the aftermath. I want her mouth around my cock while she looks up at me with those big burnished-mahogany eyes. I want to be inside her and feel her walls squeeze—
Sydney interrupts my internal sexual spiral with the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard: her first real laugh since I brought her home.
I lift my head. “What’s funny?”
“That was some first kiss,” she says.
She’s laughing. I’m dying from sexual frustration. “Did I live up to my hype?”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re an expert, and you know it.”
“Mmm, I have absolutely studied you, Mrs. McRae. For instance—” I run my hand from her belly button to her sternum. “I can kiss you straight up the center of your body, and it will turn you on. But”—I flutter my fingers briefly over her rib cage—“if I try to kiss you here—”
She shrieks with giggles.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to seduce you when you won’t stop laughing?” I fake annoyance.
“Probably not hard at all,” she says slowly, but a grin wreaths her beautiful face.
Smiling, I move to lay on my side next to her on the rug, elbow bent, and my head resting in the palm of my hand. “Correct.”
She mimics my pose, then reaches up a finger to tap the annoying cleft in my chin. “I like you.”
I’ll take it and be grateful. I won’t look at it as a downgrade. “I like you too.”
Her expression turns serious. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have a gun.”
I blink, then lift her shirt again, roll her this way and that.
Then, while she laughs and squirms, I make a show of patting her down, all the way to her ankles and back up again.
“Where, exactly, are you hiding your teeny tiny firearm? Don’t tell me you need me to do a cavity search?
It’s a tough job, but, for you, I’ll make the sacrifice. ”
She slaps my shoulder. “It’s in my drawer. Beside the bed.”
“Ah. I know about that one. You remembered it was there?”
She shakes her head. “Found it one night.”
“It’s for protection in case anyone gets past your guards.”
“I have i-intrusive thoughts. They scare me.” She shudders. “I’m afraid of what I could do with that gun.”
“Consider it gone,” I say immediately.
“I don’t want to hurt you. But Markov may have tried to make me.”
“You’re strong as hell. You know that, don’t you?”
She shakes her head. “How can you say that . . . when you see me . . . like this?”
“He forced that drug on you, and instead of listening to him, you created a mantra to keep him out. You repeated it until no one else could get in your head.”
She rubs her temple. “Not even myself. I need to remember how he got to me.”
“Don’t let my brother convince you that any of this is your responsibility. You don’t need to be the one to solve this case. There are private investigators working on it.”
“I signed in to my work account. IT helped me. Amelia filled in some blanks.”
I nod. “I know.”
“Most of my records from the last three months were gone, like they never existed. That can’t be . . . normal. IT should be able to find them. Even . . . deleted . . . files.”
“We don’t use cloud storage for information we need to protect, and the hard drives, themselves, are missing or were vandalized.”
“How could that happen? Weren’t there cameras? Security?”
My poker face isn’t nearly as good as my brother’s or father’s. She clocks me immediately.
“Tell me,” she says.
“Granthy said pushing you could put you into a crisis, maybe even a coma. The headaches and flashbacks scare the shit out of me.”
Her hands ball into fists, and she sits up on her knees. “I need to know. And I have to believe it’ll be easier to handle when I’m braced for it. The doctor blindsided me. This is different, and you’re right here if I need you.”
I straighten to my full height, then lend her my hand, giving her a boost to stand.
“I’ll show you, but fair warning: If anything happens to you because of it, I’m going to shout, ‘My God, what have I done?!’ in the most dramatic way possible.
” I say it as though it’s a joke, but the sentiment is dead serious.
“I’m still angry at Henry for sending you to the closet for three days.
Emotional stress causes physical symptoms all the time.
Tension headaches. High blood pressure. Heart attacks.
Elevated cortisol. Changes in insulin levels.
And even if it didn’t, recovering from trauma isn’t an easy thing.
Symptoms aren’t less important because they originated in your ‘head’ instead of your ‘body.’”
“I don’t have a migraine right now, and I got plenty stressed out during my appointment with Dr. Frankhouser. I want to see the security files,” she insists.
Stepping around to face the computer on the desk, I indicate the chair for her to sit.
When she does, I stand beside her and reluctantly wake the monitor before typing in the passcode to unlock the screen.
It takes three clicks of the mouse to reach the security footage from the day she went missing.
One more to locate the time stamp I need.
She watches, her knuckles blanching white where she clenches her hands in her lap. Then she reaches for the mouse and restarts the video. Soundlessly, she watches two more times.
“It was me,” she says, voice flat. “And I wore my lucky hat to do it. Like it was something to celebrate.”
“The footage doesn’t have a clear shot of your face,” I say. “And there were no cameras inside the lab or your office, only the hallways.”
“So, not me, just someone with my hair, my clothes, my height, my lucky hat, and my badge.”
She’s right. Her favorite cardigan was too baggy to see the body type beneath it, but it’s a stretch to imagine it wasn’t her.
She used her own keycard to sign in. She didn’t come home to our penthouse until much later that night, and she spent the rest of the evening afterward at home.
She didn’t disappear until sometime the next afternoon.
“Maybe you found the desktop computers vandalized already and took a couple laptops for safekeeping.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I would have called security. Where are the laptops now?”
“We never found them. Maybe you didn’t trust building security.”
“What about my own team?”
“There was a mix-up. Dave was on vacation, and the app you used for scheduling updated Troy’s schedule to compensate, then later moved him back onto night shift.
He received confirmation that you had alternate coverage, but you didn’t.
” I blow out a hard breath. “You realized what happened the next day but said it didn’t matter.
You’d lived twenty-eight years of your life without a bodyguard, and a couple days without one wasn’t hurting anything, so you sent Annabel home at the end of her shift and refused to allow her to call Troy in to work a double.
She was following orders, but she was pretty torn up that she agreed after what happened to you. ”
Rufus pads over and winds around her legs.
“Not her fault.” She picks him up and holds him close. His motor revs under her touch. “It almost sounds like I wanted my bodyguards out of the picture.”
Unfortunately, I agree. “You could have taken household security with you instead. But you left home without telling anyone. I was on a business trip and didn’t know about any of the scheduling issues until after the fact. Your private security team is separate from the rest.”
She frowns. “Why is that?”
I turn and sit on the edge of the desk, both to make eye contact and so I don’t loom over her.
“You felt it was the same thing as maintaining separate bank accounts. You have your own and ones we share. Having your own employees was important to you, and it made sense to me. There’s a certain power dynamic if I pay the people in charge of your safety.
I’d never use your guards against you, but you were uncomfortable with even the possibility of it. ”
“If you got b-bored or angry with me, you could turn on me,” she says.
“I wouldn’t do that, but I know that’s how you feel.”
“Were you bothered by me having separate guards?” she asks.
“It was my idea.” Did her lack of trust in me burn? Like acid, but I was more than used to it. I fought the demons from her past the only way I knew how: by giving her tools to fight them herself.
She cuddles the cat. “Does this mean I s-stole the data for Markov?”
I shake my head. “I wouldn’t believe that in a million years.”
“Then why?”
“Protecting it?” I theorize.
She frowns. “Who would I . . . protect it from . . . but not report to you or your father?”
“Maybe you planned to and didn’t have time.” She had all night—didn’t leave our penthouse until ten the next morning, but maybe she felt it warranted an in-person conversation.
“Maybe,” she says doubtfully.
“Or maybe you’d already been drugged before you were taken, and you weren’t in your own right mind.”
She scrubs her temple.
“Does your head hurt? Do you need me to call the doctor?”
“No. I’ll be good.”
“You do know that I’m not talking about punishment, right?” I ask gently.
She blinks, then laughs nervously. “Oh. Yeah. No . . . Yes. I know.”
She sets Rufus on the floor, then walks to the wall of windows and stares out into the sunshine. “No more appointments alone. No PT or doctor or . . . no one. I want you or Dave next to me for all of them. Part of what freaked me out was d-doubting my own mind.”
“You got it.”
“I need a new doctor. It’s not her fault, but Dr. Frankhouser freaks me out,” she says.
“No problem.”
“I’m going to start taking my meds.”
In response to her declaration, a tiny chord of hope strums to life inside me. It’s enough to make the events of the morning feel like progress. That’s the funny thing about hope—it doesn’t have to be big to be loud.
Moving closer, I bend to kiss her. She stiffens and shies away. I freeze, then do the only thing I can. Straightening, I put some space between us.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Until I know what I did . . .” She shakes her head.
“No apology necessary.” I give her a smile and wink and pretend she didn’t just put my heart through a cheese grater. “My kiss rocked your world. Take all the time you need to recover.”