Page 40 of The Photograph

“Aelin, baby, come here.”

I walk straight into his arms where he wraps me tight and curl my arms around his shoulders. “Gabe.”

He curves his hand around my nape. “You have to stop saying my name like that.”

I can’t help it. When you touch me, my heart explodes.I touch the tip of my tongue to his bottom lip and moan when he crushes me against him to take my mouth in a deep kiss.

After a few minutes, with my heart beating out of my chest, I pull back to catch my breath and frown. His jaw is clenched tight.Is he angry?

“Gabe—”

His thumb brushes my cheek. “Come away with me for a few days.”

Yes.“When?” Please don’t say this weekend. Please…

He rubs his nose against mine. “Friday.”

I close my eyes and rest my forehead on his chest before raising my eyes to his.

“I can’t. Not this weekend, I have plans tomorrow. Then I’m going out of town and will be back on Tuesday. Can we do this when I come back?”Please?

When his hold on me tightens, the angry expression carves deeper into his features. I dislodge my arm, trapped between us, to cup his cheek.

“Gabe, what—?”

He kisses me again, and underneath the ferocity of his kiss, I feel his anger, his need, and something else I can’t name, so I open my mouth wider, press closer, and let him take whatever will quiet his tumult. When the kiss ends, I’m a little dazed.

“Gabe…”

He yanks himself from me, and in three strides he’s at the door. “Ga—” The door slams behind him rattling the windows.

What’s wrong?

I drop in my drawing chair and shut my eyes. I don’t get it. Sometimes he acts like I’m the most precious thing in the world, and others…Why would he be angry?

Since that first night, we rarely go out and we meet exclusively at his place, mainly because our kiss hello always catches fire, and within seconds we’re naked. Also, between the long hours I put into finishing Holloway and Gabe’s frequent traveling, the penthouse has become the cocoon we need to collide into each other.

But we’ve never spent a whole night together. Even after mind blowing sex, he’d leave the bed when I’m about to drift away. The rare times I’ve fallen asleep for more than a couple of hours, I’d wake up and find him in his office or in his living room working. We’d have more brain melting sex before he’d ask his driver to get me home.

The first time it happened, I got home and went straight to the shower where I scrubbed my skin nearly raw. Then I cried because in that moment I knew that I couldn’t tell him about me.

And it stopped being necessary since the sex was so good—for him as well—and I know this because he tells me. His voice gets all growly, and his eyes burn into mine, and his breath catches mine while he’s moving slow inside me. And … I groan, shake off the full body shiver that swallows me whole.All right, enough of this.I spring on my feet to make my way back to my office.

When I walk in, Emma grins from behind her desk and looks behind me. “Where’s Gabe?”

Who knows? He just took his sexy and complicated self somewhere else.

I gesture my hand in the direction of the bay window while I settle at my desk and stare at the swirly graphics on the screen of my laptop. I push on my knees and lurch toward my drawing table where I try to memorize every grain of the blank canvas. The faint tapping of Em’s fingers on her keyboard stops.

“Ael, the man is the definition of male. Capital ‘m.’”

And then some.I make an I-agree humming sound but keep my back to her while my throat tightens.There’s a brief silencebefore my friend touches the middle of my back.

“What’s wrong?”

Unable to talk about what I, myself don’t understand, I shake my head and let her pull me to the sofa on the other side of the office where I grab a cushion I press against my stomach.

“I don’t understand him, Em.”

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