“What project?” he pressed. “Who were you working for?”
Serafia started to stutter over her words, as though she was failing to come up with an adequate lie when she was put on the spot. “I—it w-was for a confidential client. I can’t tell you who it was.”
“A confidential client? Of course it was.” Gabriel tried not to take it personally that she thought he was so stupid. “You may not have been a plant, but you were a tempting little worm dangling on a hook right in front of me. I snatched you up just as surely as you’d weaseled your way into my inner circle on your own. You pretended to help me be a better king, building up my confidence in and out of bed, while slowly undermining every inch of progress I’ve made along the way.”
Serafia looked at him with hurt reflecting in her dark eyes. “Is that all you think of the two of us? Of what we have together?”
“I didn’t at first, but now I see how wrong I was. I can see it must have been really difficult for you.”
She narrowed her gaze at him, her tears fading. “What must be?”
Gabriel swallowed hard and spat out the words he’d been holding in all day. “Trying to screw me in two different ways at once.”
Serafia gasped and raised her hand to cover her mouth. She stumbled back on her heels until her back collided with the doorframe. “You’re a bastard, Gabriel.”
“Maybe,” he said thoughtfully. “But it’s people like you who made me this way.”
“I quit!” she shouted, disappearing into the house.
“Fine. Quit!” he yelled back at her. “I was just going to fire you, anyway.”
He heard her bedroom door slam shut down the hallway. With her gone, the anger that had boiled over suddenly drained out of him. He slumped back into his chair and dropped his head into his hands.
It didn’t matter whether she quit or he fired her. In the end, the damage was done and she would soon be gone.
Eleven
Harder. Faster. Keep pushing.
It didn’t matter if Serafia’s lungs were burning or that her leg muscles felt as if they could rip from her bones at any second. She had to keep going.
Just when she hit the point where she couldn’t take any more, she reached out for the console and dropped the speed on the treadmill by half a mile. Giving herself only a minute or two to recover, she then increased it by a whole mile. Her sneakers pounded hard against the rotating belt, which was reaching speeds she could barely maintain in the past.
But she had to now. She had to keep running or everything would catch up with her. It wasn’t until she could feel her heart pounding like Thor’s hammer against her breast that she realized she’d taken this too far. She reached out and pounded the emergency stop button, slamming into the console and draping her broken body over it. The air rushing from her lungs blazed like fire, her heart feeling as if it was about to burst. She’d run for miles today. Hours. Longer and harder than her doctor-appointed forty-five-minute daily limit.
And yet the moment she looked up, the world around her was just the same. The same heartache. The same confusion. The same anger at herself and at Gabriel. All she’d managed to do was pull a hamstring and sweat through her clothes.
She gripped her bottle of water and stepped down onto the tile floor with gelatinous, quivering legs. Unable to go much farther, she opened the door to her garden courtyard. The cold water and ocean breeze weren’t enough to soothe her overheated body, so she set down her bottle and approached her swimming pool. Without stopping to take off her shoes, she stepped off the edge, plunging herself into the cool turquoise depths.
Rising to the surface, she pushed her hair out of her face and took a deep breath. She felt a million times better. Her heart slowed and her body temperature was jerked back from the point of disaster.
And yet she was still at a loss over what to do with herself. She had returned home to Barcelona in disgrace. Her last-minute flight had delivered her home late in the night; she hadn’t even told her family or staff that she was returning. All she knew was that she had to get out of Alma that instant. She would work the rest out later.
Once she’d escaped...she didn’t know what to do. She had no jobs lined up for several weeks. She’d cleared her calendar when she took the Montoro job because she wasn’t sure how long it would truly take. The first few days in Miami had been excruciating and she’d wondered if two weeks would be enough.
Two weeks were more than enough, at least for her. And while she was relieved to be home, returned to the sanctuary she’d built for herself here, something felt off. She’d wandered through the empty halls, sat on the balcony overlooking the sea, lay in bed staring at the ceiling...the thought of Gabriel crept into everything she did.