How to Woo a Wallflower (Romancing the Rules #3)(62)
“Adamson? No, Clary. You’ve heard him. He has an accent sharp enough to cut glass.” Kit guffawed. “I imagine the little upstart went to Eton or Harrow. Father wouldn’t stomach anything less for his precious publishing enterprise.”
“But he did, Kit. Father did many things that I suspect would surprise both of us.” A painful knocking started in her head, and she swiped a hand across her brow. “Gabriel’s history isn’t mine to tell.”
“Yet clearly you’re privy to his past, and I’m not.” Her brother had a gaze that saw deep, behind whatever facades people erected. He cast her one of those searching gazes now. “My God, if he’s taken advantage of you in any way—”
“No, he never took anything from me I didn’t willingly give.” Body, heart, devotion, love—there was so much she wished to give Gabriel. Now her feelings for him were a tangled knot. His departure devastated her. Was it only Friday when he’d held her hand at the waxworks? Made love to her as if it was all he ever wished to do? She hated how easy it had been for him to walk away. But if he came striding into Ruthven’s at that moment, there was no place she’d want to be but in his arms.
“Clary?” Kit had spoken her name more than once while she’d been lost in thoughts of Gabriel. “What are you saying?” He clenched a fist on the desktop. “Tell me he hasn’t touched you. R-ruined you.”
Clary walked calmly to the edge of the desk, remembering how she’d walked into the V of Gabriel’s thighs. Washed paint from his forehead. Slid her fingers through his hair.
“Clary, tell me the truth.”
“I love him.” Mercy, it felt good to say the words aloud again. Especially to Kit. She was tired of keeping secrets from him. Exhausted with secrets all together. “Maybe I did from the first moment I saw him in this office. I never forgot Gabriel, even after four years at Rothley. Some part of me knew he’d come back into my life.” Her voice quavered to admit it. She hadn’t even admitted that much to herself. “I knew the path I was on would lead me to him.”
Standing and coming around from behind the desk, Kit laid a hand gently on her arm. “You’re rambling, sweet.” Softly, in his brotherly tone, he cajoled, “Just tell me what he did to you. If he . . . ruined you.”
“That’s an ugly word. An ugly sentiment.” Clary couldn’t bear to look at him. Not because she was embarrassed, but because he wasn’t listening to a word she’d said. “I told you, Kit. I love him.” Finally, she lifted her head, confident and clear on that one certainty above all else. “I regret nothing.”
He nodded, and for a moment she thought he understood. That he heard her and had some sense of what Gabriel meant to her. Placing a hand her shoulder, he offered her a mournful pinched-brow look. “I’m sorry I entrusted you to his care, Clary. I thought I could trust him. Now I fear I’m going to have to kill him.”
“Mr. Wellbeck will see you now, Mr. Adamson.” Talbot, Wellbeck’s spindly-limbed managing editor, swept a hand toward the offices of T. J. Wellbeck.
Gabe rose to his feet, straightened the lapels of his suit, and strode into the spacious room.
“Have a seat wherever you can find one.” A white-haired man sat behind a room-spanning desk, inspecting a document through pince-nez glasses, and gestured toward a collection of chairs, most of which were overflowing with folders, documents, and books.
Gabe found a bare seat and pulled the chair closer to the cluttered desk.
“Tell me who you are again?” Wellbeck quizzed, finally casting his squinty gaze over the edge of his document.
“Gabriel Adamson, Mr. Wellbeck. Former manager and editor at Ruthven Publishing.” Gabe cleared his throat to push away the razor-sharp scratchiness that hadn’t eased since his last words to Clary. As if his body was determined to remind him that if he was going to speak, his words should be to her. “You did offer me a position a few weeks ago, sir. And several months before that.”
“Ah, yes.” Wellbeck settled back in his chair and piled his hands one on top of the other. “Former manager of Ruthven’s, you say? Have they dismissed you?”
“No, sir.” This, Gabe had known, would be the sticking point. “I have resigned my position.”
“Without first securing another?” Wellbeck huffed and fluttered his hands in the air before dropping them on a pile of correspondence. He rifled through and plucked one particular letter from the stack. “According to this letter dated . . . ” He peered up.
“About a month ago, sir.”
“Precisely. A month since one Gabriel Adamson sent a rather curt, artless refusal of our offer. Never to be heard from again, I presumed.” He dove his nose toward his desk, and his heavy-lidded eyes bulged in Gabe’s direction. “Yet here you are.”
“Is the position you offered still available, Mr. Wellbeck?”
His head bobbed up and down on his neck. “The position remains vacant.”
Gabe let out the breath he’d been holding. There was no burst of relief in his chest, loosening knots, or easing of the jagged pain there. But Wellbeck’s news brought a marginal lessening of the fear he’d known since leaving a resignation letter on his desk at Ruthven’s before anyone else arrived. He’d been desperately tempted to remain and wait for Clary. If she did come. Perhaps she planned to stay away to avoid him. He couldn’t blame her. Whatever she felt today—regret, hatred, anger—he couldn’t blame her for any of it.