Gabriel's Rule Read online

  They’d had coffee and then walked down to the waterfront where they’d even seen a few seals frolicking around the barnacle covered pilings of the pier. She’d been most surprised when he started pointing out different buildings in the city’s skyline and had spoken of their history and early use. It turned out that he had a fascination with architecture, something she’d never had any interest in, but when she heard the passion in his voice as he explained why certain buildings looked the way they did, she was intrigued. And she lost a little more of herself to him.

  Back in the truck she kept glancing at the clock. It was like it was mocking her, reminding her that she only had a few precious minutes left with Gabe because once they were back home, they would return to the “neighbor” zone. Maybe she should tell him she wanted to try being friends. It would be better than nothing, right? They could maybe grab coffee once in a while or even catch a movie.

  She started thinking about the best way to broach the subject when she remembered all the women that had stared at him at the marketplace. Most had been subtle but some had openly flirted with him, clearly not worried that Riley would be any kind of competition. Could she really handle watching him take some woman up on that one day? Would she be able to say a friendly “hello” to her buddy Gabe as she watched him say goodbye to a lover as she left his apartment? She felt an actual ache in her chest at the image that had popped in her head and she knew she had her answer.

  “Riley,” she suddenly heard from next to her. She realized Gabe had asked her something.

  “What?” she asked dumbly.

  “I asked if you still wanted me to drop you off at Mac’s.”

  “Um, no, thanks. Just home please.” He seemed relieved and returned his attention back to the road. He found a place to park a few minutes later and then they were walking up the stairs. Riley jammed her key in her lock and then swung open her door. She turned around and forced a smile to her lips. Why did she feel so cold all of a sudden?

  “Thanks for today Gabe. Nell, the marketplace, everything.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said. He was in front of his door but he hadn’t made a move to open it yet and the way he was looking at her made her feel like a bug on a slide about to be studied under a microscope.

  “Bye Gabe,” she managed to get out before she disappeared inside. She leaned back against the door and forced back the tears that were threatening to drop. It was better this way, she assured herself. She just hoped her heart would get the message sooner rather than later because this hurt like hell.

  ***

  Between his day job and the three clients he had booked, Gabe had run himself ragged over the next week. Add in the fact that he’d slept only a few hours each night and it was clear why he looked like the walking dead. Even the guys at his construction job had noticed because he’d started making stupid mistakes that either put the project behind or, even worse, had put the crew’s safety at risk. He needed to get it together.

  There’d been no peep out of his mother which was unusual because he was sure she’d be out of money by now and would have either come begging him to loan her some or she would have done something to get herself put in jail. Just to make things harder, his brain had decided to play images of Riley on a repeating loop. He’d been confused by how sad she’d looked after their last day together and he hadn’t been able to figure out why. According to his frequent check-ins with Nell, Riley was thriving at her new job. She was courteous, efficient, quick, and her welcoming, friendly demeanor had made her a customer favorite, and not in the same way she’d been at Mac’s.

  He hadn’t spoken to her at all since that day and he wasn’t sure if it was because she was avoiding him or he was avoiding her. He’d only actually seen her once when he’d been out jogging and had neared their building. Riley had seen him coming as she’d been unpacking groceries from her car. She’d snatched her bags up so quickly and run up the stairs that he had actually looked around to see if she was being chased before he realized she’d been fleeing him.

  His sessions with clients hadn’t gone well, at least not for him. His clients, as always, had gotten exactly what they’d ordered. He, on the other hand, had continued to picture Riley as he had pleasured each woman and when he was done he’d pretended it was Riley’s tight, wet body milking his cock in the shower instead of his hand. But last night there’d been a new twist. After fucking his customer into a stupor, he’d gone into the hotel bathroom to clean up and shame at what he’d done had overtaken him. He’d somehow managed to pull sweet, beautiful, innocent Riley into this sick, twisted mess. And right there in the fancy hotel bathroom, his client asleep in the next room, he’d actually vomited into the toilet. His erection had disappeared but the self-disgust had remained.

  Now it was nearly 10 on a Saturday night and instead of going out to meet Shane for drinks like he usually did, he’d stayed home to try and work his body into a state of exhaustion so that he might actually sleep tonight. He had just finished his bag work and had managed two reps on his weight bar when he heard a tentative knock on his door. He carefully lowered the weight, grabbed a towel to wipe the sweat from his brow and went to answer it.

  ***

  Riley’s jaw nearly dropped when Gabe answered the door shirtless, a fine sheen of sweat covering his body. His hair was damp and mussed and all she could think about was running her fingers through it. He had little hair on his upper body so she could see all the definition of his muscles clearly. She finally got her first real look at the tattoo on his arm and saw that it was actually what looked like the thin ends of a couple of tree branches intertwined with one another. She thought she saw some writing too, but she didn’t have time to check for sure because he had cleared his throat to get her attention. Damn, caught staring again.

  “Hey,” she stammered.

  “Hi.”

  “Am I interrupting?”

  “Uh, no, I was just working out.” He wiped the towel over the back of his neck and she saw a tuft of hair under his arm and some part of her wacked out brain couldn’t help but notice how sexy it was.

  “I brought you some pie.” She held up a paper bag. “Nell made lemon meringue again and there’s a piece of French Silk too – Nell said that one was your favorite.”

  Instead of taking the bag from her, he opened the door wider. “Come on in,” he said in that panty-melting tone. She stepped over the threshold and waited as he closed and locked the door.

  “You want to stay for a bit and help me eat that pie?”

  Yes. “No, these are for you…I should go.”

  “Please.” There was that damn word again. She wondered if he knew the power he had over her with just that one word. She finally nodded and he grinned. She couldn’t help but notice how tired he looked.

  “I’m gonna go hop in the shower real quick. There’s some drinks in the fridge – help yourself.” As he turned, she saw he had a huge tattoo on his back but he disappeared into the bathroom before she could tell what it was. As she heard the shower turn on, she went to the kitchen and put the bag on the counter. Uncomfortable with looking through his cabinets for plates without his permission, she settled on searching the fridge for something to drink. She found a can of soda, opened it and took a long swig and then wandered around his living room.

  It was sparsely furnished and his furniture looked even older then hers. There was no TV but there were a few books on the bookshelf and a couple more on the coffee table. She skimmed the titles – mostly mysteries and thrillers but there were also a few architecture books in the mix as well. There were no pictures on the wall or knickknacks of any kind but the apartment was clean and the walls looked freshly painted.

  Drifting into the dining room, she pushed at his heavy weight bag and was surprised at how much effort it actually took her to get it to move. Glancing at the weight bench, she could imagine him lying there as he lifted all those pounds. A naughty image of her on the bench with him flashed through her mind. Sh
e laughed at herself because she’d never had such a vivid, sexual imagination before. She’d read some romance novels that she borrowed from the library and sneaked into her parents’ house when she was a teenager, but they’d been pretty tame.

  Her ex had been the only man she’d been with and sex with him hadn’t been anything like she imagined and he’d made sure to remind her often that she wasn’t good at it. Even at the end when she’d found him with someone else, he’d put the blame on her saying he’d tried to make it work but her body just didn’t turn him on enough. He’d hinted that if she would just work on how she looked, then things could be different. She shuddered when she remember what had happened after she told him what she thought of his suggestion.

  Riley heard the shower stop and a minute later Gabe crossed the hallway from the bathroom into his bedroom, a tiny white towel wrapped around his lean hips and outlining his incredible ass. She took another long pull on the soda and then went and dropped down on the couch since it appeared to be the only place to sit. She heard him come out of his bedroom and then go to the kitchen. He rummaged around for a minute, then came into the living room. He sat down next to her and turned so that he was facing her. He held one plate with both pieces of pie on it and handed her one of the two forks in his hand.

  “I figured we could share,” he said as he dug into the French Silk piece. His hair was still pretty wet and it looked like he’d run his fingers through it rather than a brush or comb. He wore a pair of jeans and a dark blue T-shirt. His gorgeous big feet were bare.

  “Nell makes the best pie,” she mumbled after swallowing down a bite of the lemon meringue.

  “If you ever get a chance to try her cookies, take it. She makes the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. She doesn’t sell them in the diner but if you ask her nicely she’ll whip some up for you.”

  “Have you known her long?”

  Gabe hesitated as if knowing they were treading towards the “friend” waters just by sharing a little bit more personal information.

  “We lived in a house next door to her and Pete for a while when I was growing up.”

  “We?”

  “My mom and I. We moved when I was about twelve but I ran into Nell and Pete at their diner when I went there with some college buddies my freshman year at the UW.” He switched to the other pie so she did the same.

  “UW? Is that the University of Washington?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you study there?”

  “Architecture. I didn’t graduate though; had to drop out in the middle of my senior year.” He didn’t expand on that and Riley didn’t ask, sensing it was a sensitive subject.

  “Does your mom still live around here?” His hand stilled for a long moment before he took another bite of pie. When he finished chewing but still didn’t answer her Riley said, “Sorry, it’s none of my-”

  “She’s an addict.” Riley stayed silent – saying sorry seemed insufficient. “It started when I was nine. Doctors gave her a prescription for some pain killers after she hurt her back in a car accident. She got hooked pretty quick and it didn’t take long before she lost her job and we had to move out of our house. She finally switched over to heroin because it’s so much cheaper and the high is about the same.” Riley saw his hand tighten on the plate – his tone may have been nonchalant but it clearly hurt for him to talk about it.

  “You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” she said gently. She ran her fingers over the hand that looked like it might shatter the plate at any moment. He seemed to relax slightly at her touch.

  “She pops up now and again and I put her into rehab. She usually leaves after a few weeks and ends up back on the street. When she runs out of money she shows up here and if I’m not home then she helps herself to whatever she can find here that she might be able to pawn.”

  Riley remembered the broken door he’d been working on the day they met.

  “So she breaks in?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t worry, she only ever does it to my place. I don’t have much left for her to take,” he said as he motioned around the apartment. “So I’m hoping she’ll give up on it soon. That lock I installed is supposed to be pretty good too.”

  “Have you ever called the cops on her?” He just shook his head and she dropped the subject.

  “What about your folks? They who you’re running from?” Gabe asked.

  “I’m not really running, more like starting over I guess.”

  “But you don’t want them to know where you are.”

  It was her turn to shrug. Her appetite was starting to dwindle so she put her fork down on the plate and folded her hands into her lap. “I just don’t want to give them a chance to talk me into going back with them. They have ways of making me feel…” She didn’t know how to phrase it without sounding like a complete loser.

  “You question yourself when they’re around,” he finished for her. She nodded.

  “I was engaged and I broke it off before I left.”

  Gabe stopped eating at her admission. What moron would have let someone like her get away?

  “What happened?” he asked gently.

  “I figured out he was using me. My parents are Televangelists.”

  “Like the preachers on TV who heal people who can’t walk?” he asked, openly curious.

  “Not quite that far out there but they’re ultra conservative and they have a pretty big following. My ex –fiancé is in politics and he figured if he could get their support, he’d have a whole new constituency that might get him into the governor’s mansion one day, maybe even the White House. Of course, I didn’t figure any of this out until after I caught him in bed with another woman.” She left out the rest of the details of that night because it would be humiliating to admit to Gabe what her ex had said to her.

  Gabe had stopped eating and looked tense, angry. “Do you think he’ll come after you?”

  “No, I doubt it,” Riley said, although truthfully she wasn’t really that sure. Her ex had shown some nasty new colors that night.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  Lord, did Gabe have some kind of secret decoder ring that made it possible for him to read her mind? She was this far in, she might as well finish it.

  “He hit me the night I found him with another woman. I left the next day – nobody gets to lay a hand on me like that.” He nodded in approval and finished the last of the pie.

  “Gabe, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why’d you stop coming to the diner for lunch? Nell says you used to come in every day, sometimes for dinner too. Is it because of me?”

  ***

  Gabe wanted to lie to her but after the honesty she’d shown he just couldn’t.

  “In part. I figured it would be easier for you to adjust if I wasn’t around.” He heard her sigh sadly.

  “I know you don’t want to be friends Gabe, and I can respect that. I’m not so hard up that I would bother you if you came into the diner to eat and see your friends.” She dropped her eyes to her hands.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, knowing he wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “I’m a big girl Gabe. You’ve been really nice and I know the stuff you did at the bar was because you’re a protective guy, but I’m not going to read too much into it. Or this,” she said, motioning to the now empty plate that sat on the couch between them. “I’m not going to walk out of here with dreams in my head that we’re best buddies or something.”

  “Buddies,” he whispered incredulously. She sat there innocently, not knowing that lust had started pooling in his belly the second he’d opened the door to her. When she touched his hand in response to his confession about his mother, his dick had started to harden and he’d had to shift his weight more than once to ease the near pain his now too tight jeans were causing him.

  “Shane is my buddy,” he began as he carefully moved the plate between them to the table, his
eyes never leaving hers. “Pete’s my buddy, even Nell is my buddy.” Each time he said ‘buddy’ it came out a little harsher.

  “I know, that’s what I’m saying-” She stuttered to a stop as he pushed himself up and over her, forcing her back against the arm of the sofa.

  “You’re right, I don’t want you to be my buddy because I don’t dream night after night about how my ‘buddies’ feel wrapped around my dick as they come over and over again.” She gasped at his words and he used the momentary distraction to push her further into the arm of the couch, his body settling over hers. Her hips cradled his aching cock perfectly.

  “Gabe?”

  “What was his name?”

  “Who?”

  “Your ex.”

  “Paul.”

  Gabe put his face against her neck and inhaled. Yep, she still smelled like peaches. Reminding himself that he needed to stay in control, he brought his eyes back up to hers. She was perfectly still but her flushed skin and heavy breathing indicated how turned on she was.

  “Did you have sex?” She nodded. “How often?”

  “A few times.”

  “Did you like it?” he asked as he used one of his hands to pull her hips closer to his. The move forced her flat on her back and he felt her hands close over the backs of his arms. She finally responded by shaking her head.

  “Why didn’t you like it?”

  She hesitated and then quietly said, “It hurt.”

  “Every time?” he asked gently.

  “Yes.”

  He could tell she was fighting back tears and he needed to get her back. He brushed his right hand over one of her nipples. As it hardened she cried out and he did the same to the other one.

  “Did you come?”

  “What?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Did he make you come?”

  She shook her head. He was still stroking her nipples so he wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t spoken her response out loud.