She might not be sharing all her kinks within a week of meeting him, but Gabriel hardly shared anything of himself at all.
She stepped back, and disappointment flooded her chest when he didn’t step with her. “I need someone who doesn’t just care about my body, but me too. You don’t have to miss all your business calls, but I don’t want someone who is a slave to their phone. Thank you for this morning, Gabriel. I’ve had the best time at the Ranch. I just think our personal lives are at odds with each other.”
“Eris—” he began, pleading.
But she wanted some space, and she realized she should have excused herself when he was still on the call. It would give her more time to think instead of making rash decisions. Eris always did jump into things headfirst. Her flight would leave in a couple hours and she still needed to pack and head to the airport.
“I’m going to finish packing and ask for a ride,” she continued, stepping further away. Something in his expression shattered, but she didn’t stay to analyze it and pry. “Thank you for this week, Gabriel. This is an experience I will never forget.”
Turning, she ran off before he could pursue. A tiny, unspoken part of her hoped he would give chase, and run through the halls to get her back. Hunting her down to claim her and demand that they could work this out. But she never brought that desire up, and right now, she was in no mood to start talking about her fantasies, either. Not when the illusion of this past week was breaking apart right before her very eyes.
Eris came out of the memory as Gabriel returned, a pinch in his brow as he sat at the small, two-person table with her. He looked frustrated but not upset. “I’m sorry, Eris. That call was unexpected.”
She pushed around the cereal in her bowl, dropping her gaze. “Another… money issue?”
“Investments,” he said, and she didn’t bother to look up and read his face. He sounded surprised enough that she remembered something like that, and she wondered if he would guess where her mind went in his absence. “An unhappy client, but nothing to be overly concerned about. I gave him my hours and told him if he phoned again I would have to call him back, as I am on a vacation.”
She almost dropped her spoon, the memory from last year still fresh in her head. “You told him that? Your… client?”
“Eh, more like a business partner,” he said, placing an arm around the back of her chair. Unlike the last time this happened, he was open and providing more answers than he’d given her previously. “I invest the money in smart ways on ethical projects and on crypto that’s booming, and I take a percentage. Sometimes the market does fluctuate and sends people spiraling. They can stand to lose thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, but my job is to try and avoid that. I study the market and investments, but I don’t have as much to lose as they do. Still, it’s something I can address in emails and such around our day.”
“But your job is important?—”
“So is yours,” he said, finally drawing her gaze up. There was a deep frown on his face now. “I know, Eris, that last time I brushed you off. It was unfair of me. I let my frustration from a business prospect bleed into our conversation that morning, and it ruined our last few hours together. I never even got your number before you were gone.”
She pressed her lips into a thin line, thinking about that too. It was always on her mind about how they never bothered; the Ranch was so tight-knit that they could make plans with ease and they could stay together until they went to sleep, or later. Phone numbers almost felt like putting distance between them instead of creating intimacy, and she hated that. But not asking for his number, even once, created a void between them that she couldn’t cross after leaving. She didn’t dare call the Ranch and ask for his personal number, even if she knew it was a possibility. Gabriel had the same options, and he never did so, either.
“My work allows me to live a comfortable life,” he continued carefully. “And I made myself available to, well,clientsat all hours because I never had anyone that I was regularly seeing who I cared about. Now it’s different.”
Her heart swelled, and that sounded very close to an admission. It was almost a mirror of their conversation last year, but this time, it felt like things were heading somewhere positive instead of crashing out. “So the call you just took hiding in the room…”
He frowned again as her voice trailed off. “I could have stayed in here, but I didn’t think you’d want to hear all that jargon about numbers and bad decisions. My job is to invest and keep my clients from doing something too stupid that’ll end up costing both of us money. Other than that, it’s a lot of mentally calming down whoever just made a poor decision.”
Eris smiled finally, reaching over to grasp his hand. “Are you going to tell me about my poor financial decisions?”
“Depends,” he replied, arching a brow. “Did you buy a million-dollar boat because of a mid-life crisis?”
Unable to hold it together anymore, Eris snorted at the idea. It broke the tension between them, and Gabriel cracked a smile too. The idea that she might ever have money to burn like that was ridiculous.
He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles again, calming the roar of worry in her belly. They only had two days left, and he was quietening her concerns without even trying. So if he could give her that little extra assurance, why couldn’t she take it?
Scooting closer, she leaned in to kiss him until the doubts turned off and he responded by dragging her onto his lap. It would be a repeat of sex this morning before they’d crawled out of bed, but she wasn’t complaining. At this point, she dreaded the end.
Chapter Nineteen
Gabriel
Despite doing Eris’ two favorite things, horseback riding and walking through the adult play area, Gabriel could tell she was down. Even hot sex across the table in the cabin couldn’t quell her worries.
He remembered, vividly, when things had fallen apart last time. He didn’t want to take calls during this vacation, and he even had someone routing calls and emails while he was out. His cousin Zeke wasn’t impressed with the busywork during his vacation. Then again, Zeke also wasn’t going to complain since Gabriel was taking some time to himself.
Watching Eris as she walked through the play area, admiring the wide array of hedges that mapped out the maze on this end, he wondered how much he could pay his cousin to keep doing this. Zeke was more tech savvy than he was, but Gabriel managed pretty well. If he could somehow convince her that they should see each other more often, that this didn’t have to end with her vacation week, he’d pay his cousin whatever he had to in order to keep doing this.
But what could he offer to a girl who had a life for herself back home? She had a job, one she could talk about endlessly,and a knowledge of plants that far exceeded anything he was familiar with. Her eyes lit up each time they came over here, and he knew she was already anticipating the games they could play tonight.
He had a plan, but a different twist on their game of chase. Primal was fun, the hedge maze made it better, but he had plenty of other ways he dreamed about fucking her. They had tonight at the Ranch, and tomorrow, but he hadn’t even asked her when her flight was scheduled the day after that. Did he get most of a day with her, or would she flee in the early hours of the morning?
Gabriel desperately didn’t want to let her go. Not again.