He was ready to talk about it now. He needed to talk about it; needed to remind himself that Gabriella wasn’t the beautiful woman he woke to every morning but the treacherous rat whose life he’d spared.
He kept dreaming about her. Not the sexual dreams of old but of their confrontation in her apartment. In his dreams, his finger always slipped on the trigger, and he wrenched himself out of them with ice in his heart and his skin drenched in cold perspiration, fighting through the roar in his ears for the sound of her rhythmic breaths of sleep.
He should never have kissed her. That fleeting fusion of their mouths had short-circuited something in him. Hell, he’dcome within a breath of hitting his brother for one derogatory comment about her.
Three days on, and he was still trying to restore himself to primary circuit settings. He’d woken that morning to find he’d spooned himself to her. It had taken more strength than he’d known he possessed to turn away. He watched her eat and wondered if her taste buds zinged at the same things as his did, watched her drink her coffee and wondered if she got a hit of that bitter coffee taste or if the sugar and cream she paired it with drowned it out on her tongue. He watched her dress and wondered what the material of her clothes felt like on her skin. When they’d been in Milan the day before to see how the filming of the Christmas commercials for their main social media site was going – it never failed to astound him that many festive adverts were filmed before summer had fully started – he’d seen her smile at the young, hip director and seen the young, hip director smile back, and had wanted to knock the young, hip director’s young, hip teeth out.
“How did you find them?” he repeated evenly. His brother, Mattia, was a master at controlling his emotions, and it was a control Tommaso now sought. He’d never cared about controlling any aspect of his personality before, had never done anything in half measures. He liked tofeellife as well as live it. With Gabriella, though, he felt too damn much. Sitting in his office with her, fully attuned to her every tiny movement, her every breath…
It had to stop. The ache to possess her,allof her, had to stop. He had to stop feeding it. He had to kill it, and that meant going cold turkey. He hadn’t touched her in three days and wouldn’t touch her again until his primary circuit had been restored.
There was wariness in her stare and tone when she eventually replied. “A combination of observation, detective work and hacking.”
“You’re a hacker?” He could have been confirming her star sign.
“I did computer science at school.”
“They taught you the science of hacking?”
“One of the boys in my class did.” She could have been confirming her star sign. “I’m not a master hacker, but I know my way around a computer – once I’m in, I can find all kinds of things, but it wasn’t my computer skills that got me into your shadowed world. It was learning the coded language you all speak in it.”
“How did you do that?” He could be asking how she’d passed her driving test.
“Your father kept me nearly as close to him as you do. I suppose it must be like someone being continuously exposed to a foreign language – eventually, they pick it up through osmosis. I wanted to learn the language. Any time I thought I could get away with it, I recorded it on my phone.” She could be explaining how she’d learned to reverse park. “It took a few years, but once I understood it, I knew what to look for. I never got evidence of the big stuff; no drugs or arms or anything like that, but money laundering and bribes, all that kind of stuff, it leaves a paper trail if you know where the trail starts.”
“And you learned to find the start of the trails?”
Her shrug was so nonchalant that he could fool himself into believing she found the subject they were discussing boring, but he knew Gabriella too well to be fooled. He knew damned well it was just a façade and that her heart was beating as hard as his was.
“Things that look innocent in isolation…put them in context with other documentation, and a picture starts to emerge,” she explained. “I got lucky a few times – your father left a flight manifest on his desk that had nothing to do with the legitimate business, so I took a picture of it. Lots of little things like that.”She swallowed. The slightest of tremors came into her voice. “I transferred files off your phone once.”
His jaw clenching of its own accord, he raised an eyebrow in silent question.
“Last summer. You had a meeting with that politician who turned up early. I’d been discussing something with Rico.” Rico’s office was next to Tommaso’s. “I left his office, and you were heading to the conference room. You’d left your door open. I had a file to give you, so I put it on your desk. There was a burner phone on it. You must have just been using it as it was unlocked. I paired my phone to it and transferred all your stored docs via Bluetooth.”
Now it felt like everything inside him had clenched, even the roots of his hair. Tommaso had multiple burner phones, some more important than others. “How did you know it was a burner phone?”
“Your normal phone has a dark blue case around it. This one had a black case.”
His heart thumping too hard to speak, he took a moment to gather himself. “You always pay that much attention to people’s phone cases?”
Cheeks flaming with colour, her eyes pulsed. There was the tiniest of hesitations before she shook her head.
His mouth ran so dry he had to clear it to say, “That was risky.”
“Very.” Of all the risks Gabriella had taken, that had been the most foolhardy. It was also the one she remembered the most vividly. Always she’d believed the vividness of the memory was because of the danger she’d put herself in – how could she have explained away what she was doing? – and the fact that it had been her first foray over the threshold of Tommaso’s office. It was an office he rarely used but she’d felt his mark as indelibly as if he’d been standing in it with her caressing her skin.
It was a risk she would never have taken with any of the other Espositos, she realised with a heart that managed to sink and inflate in one churning motion.
“How did you print all the documents off?” he asked after another long pause. “There was no printer in your apartment.”
She had to swallow to speak. “Your father was bugging my apartment – whoever was tasked with listening to me would have recognised the sound of a printer being used and flagged it.”
“So?”
“So I used my office printer.”
“Very risky.”
