Page 42 of Ruthless Enforcer

Iwake to silence and pale-gray light filtering through the curtains.

For a moment, I don’t know where I am. Then it comes back to me. Oregon. The beach house. Gabriel's rules. The marriage that isn't a marriage. The ring on my finger.

I sit up slowly, pushing the covers aside. The house is quiet. Too quiet. Did Gabriel make it home? I slip out of bed and pad barefoot into the hallway.

Gabriel's door is cracked open.

I shouldn't look. I know I shouldn't look.

I look anyway.

He's sprawled across the bed on his stomach, one arm flung over his head, the sheet tangled around his hips. His back is bare, and his tattoos are fully visible.

There's a serpent coiled around his left shoulder, its scales rendered in such fine detail I can almost see them shift when he breathes. Below it, a series of dates in small, precise script. On his right side, a geometric pattern that looks like shattered glass or a broken compass rose.

It's an art gallery I could spend days exploring.

I wonder if he's hard beneath the sheet.

My pulse kicks up, and I force myself to step back before I do something monumentally stupid like walk into his room and crawl on top of him.

I turn and head downstairs instead.

The house is still unfamiliar in the early morning light. I move through the living room, past the kitchen, down a hallway I didn't explore last night.

And then I see it. The door at the end of the hall is open.

I step inside and stop breathing.

It's my studio—not a room with my supplies dumped in the corner or a makeshift workspace. My studio.

The paints are arranged by color on the worktable, exactly the way I keep them in Helena. The brushes are sorted by size in the ceramic jar I've had since college. My sketchbooks are stacked on the shelf near the window. The blank canvases are waiting next to my easel. Even the palette knives are in the right order.

I walk forward slowly, my bare feet silent on the hardwood floor. My hands are shaking.

He did this. Gabriel went to Helena. He packed everything I needed and brought it here and set it up like he'd been watching me work for years.

I sink down onto the stool he set in front of the easel and press my palms against my face. I'm not crying—I'm laughing.

Or maybe I'm doing both. Because this—this—is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. Gabriel saw the part of me I don't let anyone see and decided it mattered. He didn't just protect my life. He protected the part of my life that makes it worth living.

I sit there for a long time, staring at the paintings and the paints and the light spilling through the windows, and I realize something.

Gabriel Reyes didn't just give me a room. He told me I'm allowed to remain myself.

How the hell can I walk away from a man who does that?

35

GABRIEL

Iwake to a sound that doesn’t belong.

My eyes open in the dark. I don’t move.

There it is again—a faint scrape somewhere downstairs. Then a dull thud.

Someone is in my fucking house.