Page 28 of Guarded Knight

I raise millions of dollars on the back of promises. I want to inform our supporters, but this month, two hundred thousand flowed to the Harris Family Foundation.

It’s impossible to know how the Harris Family Foundation will use the money unless they tell us, or we wait a year for them to file their public reports.

Why are we giving money to these other charities?

When I found the first problem a month ago, I asked Kevin about it. Why can’t we deliver the services ourselves? Or donate directly to families?

He explained it’s not our business model. He explained that what we’re good at is the funding, not the delivery, and that these charities can do it more efficiently. Can I really write to our donors,again, and say their hard-earned cash is just being sent to another charity? One that I can’t even really drill down into… shit, even the Harris Family Foundation website tells me very little, and most of the photos look like stock images of families and sick kids.

“Problem?” Gabriel’s voice is low behind me.

I jump, slamming the laptop shut before I can stop myself. “No,” I say too quickly. “Just spreadsheets.” I spin around and I’m met with his trim waist and a mile-wide chest. “And why are you snooping?”

He leans over, placing his tanned hand on the table next to my laptop, rolled-up sleeves and sexy veins in my eyeline.

“You looked stressed out.”

Freya doesn’t move, but her eyes peek up and over her screen with an inquisitive stare.

“My stress levels aren’t your concern.” I try to compose myself, but my heart beats a million miles an hour now, and all I can think is…

Cologne.Damn, he smells delicious. A woman wouldn’t mind being completely smothered and suffocated by that scent.

“Lara, you can’t keep things from me. We went through this.”

“Wrong. You don’t have access to my entire life. Do you want to join me in the bathroom, too?”

His jaw tics, and him seeing another intention between my words makes me think of it, too. To watch the shower trickle down abs and pecs like his…

He pushes himself upright and leans against the nearby wall as if carved from the beam itself. “I know when something isn’t right, and given you weren’t going to tell me about the text yesterday…”

“We’re past that, G.”

“Are we?” He stares at me like the boy I remember, the one who’d unzip his own skin to warm me if I so much as mentioned being cold.

He was so good back then.

God, I loved him.

I grab the girl inside me and shake her by the shoulders.

But you don’t anymore.

I cock an eyebrow. “Stand down, soldier. It’s just work stuff, and trust me, I’ll give you my daily steps and sleep activity if it gets me off your leash faster.”

Suddenly, I’m dipping into another fantasy involving leather playthings.

I shouldn’t have gone to that book club yesterday and I’m off romance until stamping out of Echo Valley. I need to scrub these Gabriel fantasies from my mind.

I open my laptop again and take a deep breath to cool off.

Is it even hot in here?

Just then, Freya’s cell blasts out ‘Who Runs the World’by Beyoncé, and she hurries to grab it from her purse to silence it.

She leaps up and answers as she takes quick steps into the hallway, leaving the door ajar. “Kevin… hi…”

Gabriel glances at Rio, who’s lounging near the window, pretending not to be listening. Gabriel pretends, too, and somehow, their interest in Freya’s conversation increases my own.