He tried calling Leo’s phone but it went straight to voicemail. Gabriel was not unaware of the irony of his wife being pretty much the only woman who had ever consistently demonstrated that he wasn’t as irresistible as people liked to make out.
He summoned his own car and got into the back, instructing the driver to go to his hotel. All he could do was hope that she had returned there.
But she hadn’t.
He paced up and down, trying her phone again and again. Eventually he gave up. She’d run because she needed space. He couldn’t blame her. His conscience stung hard. He had gone after her that first night because he’d wanted her, but he’d also seen an opportunity to stick the knife into Sanchez by letting them be photographed leaving the hotel together.
He just hadn’t realised how much he would want her. Sanchez had become very much peripheral to everything once he’d slept with Leo and decided to ask her to marry him.
But could he convince her of that?
* * *
‘Oú allez-vous, madame?’
Leonora looked at the driver and blinked. Where was she going? Her instinct had been to get as far away as possible from Gabriel. But she had a limited amount of cash in her clutch bag and she was dressed in an evening gown. Hardly appropriate to roam the streets, even though she felt it would take miles to work off the anger she felt towards Gabriel.
Anger. And hurt.
She knew she had no choice but to go back to their hotel, so she gave the address reluctantly. The taxi did a U-turn in the road and went back the way it had come.
She felt sick. Bruised. And, worse, like a monumental fool. From the moment Gabriel had spoken to her he’d relished her strategic importance in scoring points against a rival.
Would he really be so petty?
Leonora ignored the question. Her anger was too fiery for her to try and be rational, to think this through. Lazaro had seen her as a pawn to use to get him accepted in a world closed to him. And Gabriel had seen her as a pawn to use to get back at Lazaro.
She knew she wasn’t a helpless victim in all of this, but the revelation tainted every single interaction she’d had with Gabriel since they’d met. How he must have laughed at her the morning after that first night together when he’d realised that she hadn’t even given her virginity to Lazaro. Another point scored.
For a moment she thought she might actually be sick, but she managed to control it. The hotel came into view, glittering in the distance. The taxi pulled up outside and Leonora paid the driver and got out.
As she ascended to their room in the elevator she nurtured her anger, feeling as if she needed some kind of armour against Gabriel’s inevitable effect on her. When she reached the door she realised she didn’t have a key, so she knocked on the heavy wood.
It opened almost immediately. Gabriel filled the doorway, jacket off, tie loose, top button undone. His hair was messy, as if he’d been running a hand through it. He held his mobile phone to his ear and he had the grimmest expression she’d ever seen on his face.
He said curtly, ‘She’s here. It’s fine. Thank you, Marc.’
He stood aside and took his phone down from his ear. Ridiculously, Leonora felt like a rebellious teenager who’d been caught sneaking home from an illicit party. She refused to let Gabriel make her feel as if she was in the wrong, so she tipped her chin up and stalked past him into the suite.
She turned around to face him. He’d followed her and she could see the anger on his face.
‘Don’t ever do that again.’
Leonora was genuinely confused. ‘What?’
‘Run away and turn your phone off. We had no way of tracking you or following you.’
‘We?’
‘My security team. The same security team that protects you without you even knowing it. You’re a target, Leo, because I’m a target.’
To her surprise, although she could still see the anger, she could also see something else. Fear? And Gabriel looked slightly pale. Or was it just a trick of the light?
But his revelation just stoked her anger. She welcomed it. ‘Well, if I had known that you had a security team I would have been more considerate. And I didn’t turn off my phone when I left. It’s been off since we arrived at the event.’
Gabriel ran a hand through his hair, mussing it up more. Leonora hated how fascinated she was by this far less urbane incarnation of Gabriel Torres.
Had he really been concerned?