“Don’t do this, Chloe. Don’t listen to him. You know what he is,” Gabe bellowed desperately. “He’ll hurt you.”
“We’re going to work on our issues,” she answered, her voice almost robotic.
“Bullshit! You’ll go right back on the roller coaster again.” He paused before asking, “What about you and me? What about us?”
“There is no us, Gabe. It was temporary. We both knew that,” she said in a shaky voice.
“I fucking care about you!” he yelled into the phone. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“It means I’m sorry,” she said flatly. “I never meant to hurt you. But I need to be with James. Good-bye, Gabe.”
He stood there for a minute, trying to absorb exactly what Chloe had said. How was it possible that everything they’d had was one big bunch of horseshit, some kind of experiment for her, a test that led her back to James? Gabe’s heart was fucking bleeding, and she was sorry?
He didn’t bother disconnecting the call. Chloe had already done it. He sat down, rage flowing through his body like poison, burning at his soul. He tossed the phone against the wall, and brought his fist down on the glass table in front of him with all his strength, needing an outlet for his emotions.
“She fucking promised she’d never go back to him,” he bellowed, his rage exploding from his throat.
The glass shattered, shards cutting up his hand as he removed his fist from the hole in the glass. Blood poured from his fingers, but he didn’t care, didn’t even try to cover the bleeding limb.
He didn’t give a fuck about his hand. It was minor compared to how tortured his heart and mind were right now.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this, Chloe. I can’t,” Gabe said harshly, unable to accept that everything he’d shared, everything he’d felt, everything he’d dreamed about was all a lie.
He spent the entire night in denial with a bottle of whiskey, wondering if acceptance would ever come.
Gabe forced himself to hike over to Chloe’s office the next morning, even though he was blurry-eyed and hungover. If anything was outstanding in her office, he’d have to deal with it.
Well, that was what he told himself anyway.
Face it: all you want is to see if you can still feel her presence there, if her scent is still permeating the room.
Yeah, he was a stupid bastard, but something inside him couldn’t just leave the situation alone. As an adult, Chloe had to make her choices, but Gabe was finding it harder and harder to accept what she’d decided.
She didn’t want him.
He shook his head as he put his key in her office door, feeling pathetic. She’d told him straight out that their relationship had been temporary, and she hadn’t exactly ever said otherwise. He was the one who wanted more. He was the one who fucking felt like he couldn’t live without her. He was the one who would never get over her. Hell, she was already with her ex again, and probably wasn’t giving him a second thought.
Gabe was dumbfounded as he entered the office and found it a complete mess. Chloe was anal about paperwork, but it was scattered everywhere, a laptop on the floor looking like it had been carelessly tossed there, judging by the distance it was from the desk.
Her office wasn’t large, but it had additional rooms to do lab work and analyze data. The front office where she worked consisted of a number of file cabinets, a desk, chair, and mountains of paperwork.
It looked like papers had fallen when the laptop had left the desk, the sheets lying haphazardly on the floor. One piece of paper caught his eyes, standing out like a sore thumb because it was handwritten.
Gabe picked it up and scanned the contents, fury surging through his body as he read the words. It wasn’t signed, but he knew it was from James.
Picking up the laptop, he noticed a small flash drive embedded in it. He sat in Chloe’s chair, so pissed off now that he barely gave himself a moment to notice her subtle scent that still stuck to the fabric of the chair.
Sitting the laptop carefully on the desk, he booted it up, hoping it still worked.
His heart raced as it started to bring up the familiar trademarks signaling that it was still operational.
“Come on. Come on.” His voice was gruff and impatient.
He found the download quickly, as soon as the desktop screen came up, and he clicked on it. Gabe held his breath as he waited to see what dirt James thought he had on the Colter family, information that had been powerful enough to force Chloe back into his stranglehold.
His eyes widened and then every hair at the back of his neck rose up as he stared at what appeared to be a video.
It didn’t take him long to identify the subjects.
The film was so painful that he wanted to look away, but he forced himself to watch as James fucked the woman Gabe loved. James was hurting her, her body bound to the bed with her on her stomach while the bastard smiled evilly, his dick slamming into Chloe’s ass over and over again. Her shrieks of pain and pleas for him to stop shredded Gabe’s heart, and his gut rolled as he saw James turn directly toward what had to have been a hidden camera and smile. The asshole enjoyed the pain Chloe was experiencing, reveled in it.
For the first time since his father had passed away, Gabe felt tears of rage, regret, and anguish start to flow down his face. He didn’t wipe them away. He didn’t give a damn if he was crying. The excruciating pain of watching the woman who was his entire world being hurt and undeniably shamed by a heartless bastard was Gabe’s undoing. He couldn’t have cared less if the whole damn world was watching him at that moment. All he could think about was his Chloe.