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.”