She squeezed Sean’s hand slightly.
“Then, David walked into a gallery showing,” she continued. “He was in his bespoke suit, carrying this aura of absolute, unshakeable authority. He was established. He was ten years older, and to me, that age gap felt like a sanctuary. It brought me so much comfort. He knew exactly what he wanted. He took care of everything. For the first time in my life, I felt protected. I thought I had finally found a man who would build a foundation with me, not tear it down.”
She let out a dry, bitter laugh, shaking her head. “Turns out, I just traded the chaotic boys for a coward wearing a very expensive suit.”
“He is a fool,” Sean stated, the words carrying the heavy, absolute weight of an undeniable fact. His dark eyes burned with an intense, fierce heat as he looked at her. “He had a masterpiece right in front of him, and he was too blind to see it.”
The air between them completely shifted, pulling taut with that familiar, heavy, electric tension. Rosália’s breath hitched. She looked into Sean’s eyes, seeing the depth of the man beneath the billionaire facade—the protector, the grieving son, the ruthless strategist, and the man who was currently holding her hand as if he never wanted to let it go.
They stayed at the glass conservatory until the sun began to set, painting the ocean in brilliant, violent shades of orange and bruised purple. They ate a candlelit dinner on the terrace, completely losing track of time, wrapped in the intoxicating, safe bubble they had created for themselves.
It was well past midnight when the black Range Rover finally pulled back into the quiet parking lot of theGrand Solstice.
As they rode the private elevator up to the penthouse floor, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the confined space, the silence was thick, heavy, and pregnant with unspoken promises. When the doors opened, they walked slowly down the hallway, stopping exactly between their two respective suites.
“Thank you,” Rosália whispered, looking up at him in the dim light of the corridor. “For today. For the conservatory. For everything, Sean.”
Sean reached out, his knuckles gently grazing the soft skin of her cheek, tucking a stray lock of dark hair behind her ear. He stepped incredibly close, his imposing frame shielding her from the rest of the world.
“Sleep well, Rosália,” he murmured, his voice a dark, velvet promise in the quiet hall. “Tomorrow, the real games begin.”
Chapter 13
David
The heavy crystal tumbler hit the surface of the mahogany desk with a sharp, violentcrackthat echoed through the dead quiet of the home office.
David stood rigid by the floor-to-ceiling window, the amber liquid burning a slow, hot path down his throat. Outside, the afternoon sun cast long, idyllic shadows across the manicured lawns. It looked like a picture-perfect suburban paradise.
To David, it looked like an absolute, suffocating cage.
It had been exactly two weeks since the agonizing humiliation of Sean’s fiftieth birthday party at theGrand Solstice, and the carefully constructed walls of David’s life were rapidly caving in.
Through the pristine glass, he watched the heavy oak front door of his own house open. Rosália stepped out onto the porch. She was wearing a simple, elegant beige trench coat, carrying a leather portfolio of artist sketches. She didn’t walk toward her SUV in the driveway. Instead, she bypassed the concrete entirely, her heels sinking slightly into the manicured grass as she headed straight toward the towering hedge that separated their property from Sean’s massive estate.
A second later, Sean appeared on the other side of the boundary.
David’s jaw locked so tightly a dull ache shot up to his temples. He watched his wife’s face light up with a bright, effortless, completely unguarded smile. He watched Sean lean against the stone pillar, sliding his hands into his pockets, looking down at Rosália with a relaxed, intimate familiarity that made David’s blood boil. The older man leaned in, saying something that made Rosália throw her head back and laugh.
They stood there, bathed in the afternoon sun, looking like they didn’t have a single care in the world.
The blatant, escalating friendship was driving David entirely out of his mind. He had commanded Rosália to stop. He had laid down the law, explicitly forbidding her from entertaining the billionaire neighbor.
And for the first time in ten years, Rosália had looked at him with eyes as cold as absolute zero, entirely ignored his demands, and walked out of the room. She was slipping through his fingers, building a quiet, terrifying independence that he couldn’t seem to crush.
But what infuriated David even more than his wife’s sudden defiance was the absolute, pathetic cowardice of his mistress.
He took another aggressive swallow of his scotch, his knuckles turning white around the glass. He had explicitly instructed Katherine to keep Sean on a tighter leash, to distract the older man and keep him away from the property line.
But Katherine was entirely useless. Ever since the weekend at the hotel, she had been a paranoid, trembling mess.She was absolutely terrified of losing her wealthy benefactor. Sean had been staying closer to home, working from his estate, and Katherine was too cowardly to risk the empire she was living in. She had completely cut David off. There were no more stolen, breathless hours in the middle of the day. There were no more desperate, hurried escapes in the early hours of the morning to fuck in the shadows of David’s expansive garage before the sun came up.
She was starving him, and the forced celibacy was making David feral.
As he watched Sean and Rosália exchange a lingering, overly familiar goodbye over the hedges, David closed his eyes. His mind violently dragged him backward, plunging into the dark, intoxicating memory of how this entire addiction had started.
It had been four months ago.
It was a torrential Tuesday afternoon. Rosália was across the city, overseeing a massive installation at the Lumen gallery. Sean was in New York for a three-day financial summit. David had been working from home, enjoying the absolute, pristine silence of his house, when the sharp ring of the doorbell pierced the quiet.
