LITMIR.BIZ

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and snaked her touch around his arm, smooshing her breasts against his elbow. “Introduce me to your wife.”

      “Brittany Farris,” he said after a brief pause. “Lucrecia Dean.”

      Brittany offered air kisses and had to know everything about how they had met.

      Luli had met variations of this woman before. Some girls on the pageant circuit were genuinely nice—and scared to be on their own. They did everything they could to make friends, needing bolstering and the safety of numbers. Some, like Luli, were there to win. They weren’t mean, but they didn’t make friends because feelings got hurt and friendships folded when there could be only one winner.

      Then there were these kind—the ones who acted like friends, but didn’t have a nice bone in their bodies.

      “Luli managed my grandmother’s business affairs for the last eight years,” Gabriel explained.

      “I saw the headlines about your inheritance! You’re a trillionaire!” Her excitement was quickly schooled into a pout of sympathy. “But I’m so sorry, of course. I didn’t even know you had a grandmother, let alone a raging romance with her business manager.” She gave Luli a once-over. “You must be very shrewd if you’ve kept this relationship under wraps all this time.”

      Luli did what she had done with every other witch who thought she could backhand her with a compliment.

      “Gabriel called me cunning the other day, didn’t you?”

      Over the rim of his glass, he asked her if that was really how she wanted to play this, as if he didn’t think she understood who she was dealing with.

      “I did,” he admitted after a beat. “And I meant it.”

      Someone else came up, forcing Brittany on her way. Gabriel held court for the rest of the evening, continuing to introduce her as Mae’s manager even when a professor from a prestigious design school asked if Luli had ever considered modeling, providing the perfect opportunity to talk about her pageant experience.

      Gabriel squeezed her hand, however, warning her to demur.

      “Every tall girl is told they must model or play basketball, aren’t they?” she said.

      “Not every girl is told as vehemently as I’m telling you. I have contacts at several agencies. Gabriel, she needs to be immortalized in the pages of Vogue, wearing Chanel. You can’t let these cheekbones languish in an office.”

      “Why not? Mine do,” Gabriel said with blithe conceit. “Luli is one of the best programmers I’ve come across. I’ll fight to keep her.”

      She couldn’t tell if he was being sincere, but the man moved on and other people moved in.

      “You’ve been quiet,” Gabriel said a few hours later, when they arrived back at his penthouse. “Was it too much?”

      “No,” she murmured. “It was just a long night of being ‘on.’ My face hurts from smiling.”

      “Don’t feel you have to. I don’t.”

      She had read that memo in his expression of bored tolerance.

      She’d seen his home earlier so she wasn’t as agog returning to it, but was still taken aback that he lived in this massive split-level mansion in the sky. The foyer led to a sunken lounge where the exterior wall held another of his spectacular aquariums. It formed the inside wall of the infinity pool outside—which looked down onto Central Park.

      She lowered to the sofa, its cushion stuffed with goose down, he had informed her, when her first time sitting caused her to gasp with a sense of sinking into pure luxury. All of his furniture was custom-made for him by an Italian couture house that hand-turned legs and hand-stitched pleats into leather and velvet.

      They measure me like my tailor, even ask me which side I dress, he’d drawled.

      One of his servants appeared with a pot of Chinese tea, something she had confessed to craving after her breakdown in Paris. It appeared every night now, without her asking for it.

      “Thank you,” she said with a warm smile for the maid.

      The woman curtsied.

      Luli sighed. I’m one of you, she wanted to say, but Gabriel dismissed her.

      “I thought Brittany might have said something to upset you,” he said as the door closed. He shrugged out of his jacket and loosened his tie, throwing both on the back of the sofa, gaze staying fixed on her.

      “When?” She set aside her shoes and wiggled her toes with relief. Then she picked up her skirt as she walked across to where the tea had been left on the bar.

      “She came out of the ladies’ room after you did and smiled at me like she had sunk my battleship.”

      “Please.” Luli glanced over her shoulder so he could see her brow crinkled with scorn and pity. “I know a school in Venezuela where she could learn to be a cat with actual claws.”

      “So she did say something.” His voice tightened.

      “She told me you slept together.” She paused in pouring, glanced at him again and saw by his tense expression that it was true. She ignored the fresh strip that admission peeled off the back of her heart. “Actually, she asked whether you had told me that you’d been lovers.” She finished pouring and set the pot aside. “I said you probably didn’t think it was important enough to mention.”

      He looked away, but even in the subdued lighting she saw the twitch of his mouth.

      “Then she warned me that she could blackball me among the social elite here. I told her I’d never heard the expression, but that she must feel very disappointed things hadn’t worked out between you, and maybe it was because she talked about you behind your back.” One spoon of sugar. “I said I’d ask you. She didn’t like that.”

      She heard his snort.

      “Then I told her I would look up blackball so I understood exactly how that works.” Her spoon clinked as she stirred.

      He swore under his breath, head hanging and shoulders shaking. “Every time I worry about you, I discover you’re perfectly capable of taking care of yourself.”

      “Are you?” she asked, facetious, but also with tendrils of jealousy still working its poison through her veins in thorny little stings. “Why would you sleep with someone like that? What happened to saving it for someone special?”

      “I’m not a virgin.”

      She turned fully around to see his hands had balled in his pockets. His jaw had hardened. All of him had.

      “Is it easier to remain celibate when you know what you’re missing?” A horrifying thought occurred. “Have you been seeing someone while we’ve been—?”

      “No! When would I even—We’re together all the time. I have been celibate since we met and no, it is not easy.”

      “Then... How long does this marriage have to last, Gabriel? Are we supposed to wait to have sex until it’s over?”

      “What are you asking? Whether you’re allowed to have sex with other people? No. Neither of us is stepping out. It’s gossip we don’t need and would jeopardize the believability of this marriage.”

      “So I’m just supposed to live here with you, wondering what sex would be like?”

      He closed his eyes and sounded very beleaguered. “I’ve told you why we shouldn’t have sex.”

      “Because you might hurt my feelings when this is over. Well, I’ll tell you what. It hurts my feelings that you’d have sex with someone like her and can’t bring yourself to make love to me.”

      “Brittany? That’s what this is about?” He shoved a hand into

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