Alex wondered whether a man of his importance was incapable of working a coffee machine. ‘I…I really can’t stay…’
Gabriel frowned. ‘Maybe you didn’t quite understand me when I told you that I don’t tolerate clock-watching in my employees.’
‘I know. And I’m more than happy to work overtime, but I need a day’s notice. As it is, I’m already really late for…’
Gabriel raised one imperious hand. ‘Not interested. Whatever date you’ve got lined up will have to wait. There are a few things we need to discuss.’ He thought that he had swept all traces of her from his mind but he must have been mistaken because there was a familiarity about her that was strangely disconcerting and he was aware that the faintest colour scored his slashing cheekbones. Déjà vu slammed into him with pulsating intensity and suddenly he could remember everything about her, right down to the smallest details, the tiny freckles across her shoulder blades, the way she always smelt of the pine soap she liked to use, the sounds she used to make when he ran his hands all over her body.
The memories stole into his head like destructive gremlins and he banished them without conscience. ‘What things?’
‘You said that I reminded you of someone you used to know. Tell me.’
‘Wh…what?’
‘And stop clinging to that door knob as though you’re on the verge of collapse! I told you to sit down!’
Alex could barely hear herself think. The blood was rushing through her and, even though she could see a precipice yawning open at her feet, she was still desperately happy to kid herself that everything was fine. She was having an inconvenient conversation but that was the extent of it.
‘I…I really have to go, Mr Cruz. I have…obligations. I know you hate clock-watchers but…’
‘I told you. Cancel your date. It’ll be a lot easier than you think.’
Alex tried not to look resentful in the face of his implacable smile. In fact, she was trying hard not to look at him at all.
‘Okay.’ She angled her body away from him and spoke in a low, hurried voice, explaining the situation and lacing her request with a thousand apologies. Then, feeling a bit calmer, she turned to face him.
‘So.’ Gabriel watched as she gingerly sat down. Her body language was shrieking discomfort. ‘This guy you tell me that I remind you of.’
‘It’s not important. I thought you called me here to find out how my day with your fiancée went.’
‘Okay. Shall we use that as our starting point? How did the day go? Feel free to speak your mind. It’s something I encourage in all my employees.’
Alex refrained from pointing out that he hadn’t much liked it when she had spoken her mind and told him that she had to leave the office. ‘The day went very well. She’s demanding but I think she got a few things accomplished.’
‘Yes,’ Gabriel mused thoughtfully, ‘I can imagine that you might have found Cristobel a little challenging. What else did you think of her?’
‘I don’t think it’s my place to say, sir.’
‘There’s no need to keep repeating sir at the end of every sentence. So I take it that you two didn’t get along…’
‘I think she found my translating skills very useful.’
‘I’m beginning to get the drift.’
‘She’s a very…a very…polished woman…’ She had broken out in a film of perspiration because she suspected that traps were being laid, except she had no idea where the traps were. If she inadvertently stepped on one, would it signal the end of her career? Women, apparently, had a great deal of influence over their men, or so she had read somewhere, and if the mind-numbingly empty-headed socialite Cristobel decided to blacken her name, then she might very well find herself out of a job before she had had a chance to even get her feet under the table. But there was no way that she could pretend a rapport where none had existed. Nor was she finding it comfortable to look at him, which meant that she was addressing her answers to her feet. Hardly the sign of an efficient rising executive in his dynamic company.
An uncomfortable silence lengthened between them until Alex was eventually driven to look up at him and, as their eyes tangled, she felt her skin begin to prickle. The thread of reason that had held sway throughout the course of the day, the notion that there was no way that this man was the same one who had invaded her life and turned it upside down, began to fray at the edges.
When he said softly, ‘Would that guy you remember have gone by the name of Lucio…?’ Alex barely heard him. His words floated around her head and then, like laser-guided torpedoes, shattered through her protective barriers and her eyes widened in shock and dawning horror.
‘How…how did you know?’ The truth had already sunk in but, in her determination to block it out, she had subconsciously created all sorts of pointless justifications in her head as to why the guy sitting in front of her, oozing sex appeal and power, couldn’t possibly be the Lucio she remembered from years ago. Lucio had been broke. He hadn’t descended from the Spanish hierarchy. And surely he hadn’t been as tall or aggressive or dangerously masculine as this man?
‘I’m surprised you don’t recognise me, Alex. I recognised you the second you walked through my door. You know, in a way, I’m a little offended but I’ll rise above that.’
‘But…but your name’s not Lucio…it’s…it’s…’ A great chasm was opening up at her feet and she tried not to stare down into its dark abyss.
‘Lucio is my middle name.’
Having laboured to avoid looking at him at all, Alex now felt driven to stare as her memory of Lucio overlapped and merged with the reality of Gabriel Cruz, one and the same person, and of course she had been a complete fool to have thought otherwise. His was not a face to be forgotten, even with the benefit of some serious wishful thinking, and if she had found him good-looking back then, he was scarily sexy now. Time had taken the guy of twenty-six and honed him into staggering perfection.
And he was engaged.
‘I don’t understand,’ Alex stammered in complete confusion.
‘What don’t you understand?’
‘You lied to me? All those years ago? When I saw you in this office, I just thought you resembled the guy I used to know. Why would I think that you had lied to me? I knew someone who didn’t have much money and liked the simple things in life. Who were you?’
Gabriel’s lips thinned and he flushed darkly at the wounded accusation in her voice. She had always been upfront and honest. It had been one of the things he had enjoyed about her. No games, no subterfuge, no hidden agendas. No way was she going to understand his harmless pretence and now he felt like a bastard, which didn’t sit well with him because he was someone accustomed to always feeling pretty good about himself.
‘I indulged in a piece of innocent fiction,’ he drawled with a shrug of his broad shoulders. And it had been innocent. Saddled with the weight of responsibility from a young age and already prematurely jaded by the nature of women and the lengths they would go to in order to fall into the bed of a man with money and power, the lure of allowing Alex to believe that he was no more than an ordinary guy who happened to be working at a nearby fancy hotel, had been irresistible. For the first time in his life, he had left his gilded cage and tasted a certain freedom. The vague, nebulous feeling that somewhere, buried deep inside, he had protected that memory, was something that Gabriel barely registered on a conscious level. He was not one of those weak men who wasted time indulging in a load of pointless introspection. He certainly wasn’t going to start now. ‘A piece of innocent fiction? What’s so innocent about lying to someone?’ She was momentarily distracted by the shocking concept of having been wilfully duped. She had fallen head over heels with a guy who had thought so little of her that he had found it okay to spin her a bunch of lies about himself. How big an idiot had she been? ‘I believed every word you told me about yourself!’
‘Your memory’s playing tricks on you. I never told you anything about myself.’
&n
bsp; ‘You allowed me to believe that you were an ordinary guy! You took walks on the beach with me and we ate out at cheap and cheerful restaurants and you sympathised with the fact that I was broke and all the time you were actually Gabriel Cruz, mega-rich and mega-powerful! You played with the truth and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the same as lying! You weren’t really working at the Tivoli, were you?’ On the fringes of her mind, she knew that this was all irrelevant but she shied away from confronting her truly ugly dilemma. It was easier to postpone that by taking refuge in the details of his deception.
‘I was, in a manner of speaking.’
‘What manner of speaking would that be?’
‘I own the Tivoli Hotel. At least, I do now. At the time, I was in the process of acquiring it.’
Alex’s mind reeled. How was it that she had never questioned his self-assurance? His confident charm? The effortless way he seemed to command the space around him? She had just found it unbelievably thrilling. So different from the boys she had known who had seemed like toddlers in comparison.
She wondered whether they had gone to cheap places because he would have been safe from recognition. Rich people wouldn’t have been seen dead in cheap tapas bars frequented by local fishermen so the chance of him inconveniently bumping into a fellow millionaire acquaintance would have been nil.
And, hard on the heels of that thought, came another, even more sickening one. She had committed the grave error of telling him that she loved him and he had scarpered. Sure, he hadn’t done a midnight flit, but as good as. He had let her down gently, explained that she was young, that they had had fun, that she had her whole life in front of her. He had been immune to her distraught expression and had kindly set her aside when she had clung to him. It had been a sobering experience but over time she had managed to persuade herself that she had had the misfortune to have invested all her youthful love in someone who hadn’t felt the same towards her. These things happened. The music charts were littered with singers crooning on about broken hearts and unrequited love.
She was working out now that, even if he had been madly in love with her, which he hadn’t been, he still would have walked out of her life because he was Gabriel Cruz and there was no way he would ever have hitched his wagon to a nobody.
Hadn’t she met his fiancée first-hand? Hadn’t she seen for herself what he was all about? Rich men needed all the right trappings and that applied to everything, from houses to cars to fiancées. On every level she was waking up to the fact that she had been an even bigger fool than she could ever have imagined possible.
‘So,’ she said slowly, very, very angry now, ‘let me get this straight. Five years ago, you pretended to be someone you weren’t for a bit of fun. I’m right about that, aren’t I? Were you bored with fawning rich girls? Was that it? So you decided that you’d take a bit of time out and pretend to be just like everybody else and I just happened to be the poor schmuck who landed up in your path.’
‘You’re overreacting!’
‘I am not overreacting! You may be rich and powerful but that’s no excuse to manipulate other people! I trusted you!’
‘I didn’t manipulate you,’ Gabriel muttered, ‘and I didn’t do anything with you that you didn’t enjoy!’ He raked restless fingers through his black hair and Alex followed that graceful movement with a compulsion that terrified her. She didn’t want to think about exactly how much she had enjoyed all those things he had done with her.
‘That’s not the point! The point is, I might have liked having an idea of the person I was dealing with!’
‘Why? Would you have behaved differently? Expected a bit more? Five-star hotels, perhaps? Four-poster feather beds and my limo to ferry you everywhere?’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say!’
‘Why is it horrible? Call me cynical, but I’ve noticed that a healthy bank balance brings out all sorts of predictable behaviour patterns in women.’ From the unusual position of self-defence, Gabriel fell back on the dispassionate air of someone delivering self-evident truths.
‘Yes, well, believe it or not, there are some women who would run a mile from a man with a healthy bank balance.’
Gabriel gave a roar of incredulous laughter, which made her even more furious. ‘Really? Let me think about that… No-o-o…don’t think I’ve ever met that particular species…’
‘Would you mind telling me why you summoned me here?’
‘Why do you think, Alex?’ He linked his fingers behind his head and leaned back. ‘You don’t seriously imagine that you can carry on working for me and kidding yourself that you don’t know who I am, do you?’
Alex steeled herself to meet his gaze levelly, without flinching. She was thinking fast now, thinking about all the different ways his reappearance might jeopardize the life she now led, thinking that the last thing she wanted was for him to start picking her out from the herd. It wasn’t likely. He was almost a married man. But what if he decided to play catch up games, just for the heck of it? There was too much at stake.
‘You’re right,’ she conceded quietly. ‘I shouldn’t have…have let my feelings run away with me. It’s been a bit of a shock but I’m over it now. You caused me a lot of sleepless nights when you walked out of my life…’ she forced herself to smile wryly at him ‘…but that was a long time ago. It was just an eye-opener hearing the truth about who you were. If I reacted a little over the top, then I apologise…’
Gabriel was watching her carefully, his eyes narrowed. Her volte face was almost as dramatic as her outburst had been. His initial thought was that she was waking up to the fact that there was such a thing as kicking up too much of a fuss. She could reasonably get away with a little, given their past connection, but he was her boss and she was expendable. Hence her strategic back down.
Less welcome was the suspicion that she was trying to get rid of him, but he decided to discard that option.
‘Apology accepted,’ he drawled, his sharp eyes picking up the way her mouth tightened at that. Sorry, he realised, was something she certainly wasn’t feeling.
God, he’d forgotten how feisty the woman was. He’d forgotten how refreshing it had been to be with a woman who didn’t tiptoe around him. He’d put into mental cold storage that memory of being able to drop his cynicism and function with an openness he had never had and didn’t have now. Crazy, inappropriate memories.
‘If that’s all, then…?’ Alex sprang to her feet and snatched up her bag from where she had earlier dumped it on the ground next to the chair.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that she couldn’t wait to get out of his office. Gabriel stood up with his usual lithe, easy grace and strolled over to where she was making a hasty beeline for the door.
‘So…’ His voice exuded the lazy confidence of a man who expected to be obeyed the second he opened his mouth and, sure enough, Alex paused in her tracks and turned to look at him. ‘Where can I find you…?’
‘What?’ Her face drained of colour. Find her? Why would he want to find her?
‘I mean, which department do you work for?’
‘Why?’ Alex asked cautiously.
Gabriel could feel irritation getting the better of him. ‘Because I might need your services again,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Cristobel comes to London on a regular basis. It would be helpful if you could act as her tour guide if I am not available.’ Had he meant to say that? Maybe not, but her desperation to get away from him was annoying.
Alex lowered her eyes, cut to the quick. Was he that thoughtless that he could suggest some kind of bonding experiment between his ex-lover and his wife-to-be? How thick could one guy get? But then hadn’t he proved that his only concern was himself? He had wanted time out five years ago and so he had lied to her and used her. Now, he might need a Spanish translator and so he would demand her services and to heck if she found the arrangement inappropriate.
Put in an impossible situation and already coming to terms with the fact that the
re was too much at stake for her to remain in her job, Alex raised her eyes to his and ignored the way her pulse quickened as his dark gaze swept over her. She remembered the way he could make her feel. She reasoned that that was why her body felt so tingly, as though she had suddenly become uncomfortable in her own skin.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ she told him quietly. ‘I’m not paid to babysit your fiancée whenever she happens to be in London. I also didn’t enjoy my duties today. You may be crazy about your fiancée and I’m really happy for you, but there’s no way that I’m going to be ordered to go shopping with her again. We aren’t similar and we didn’t get along. We tolerated each other because neither of us had a choice.’ She took a deep breath and found that her hands were shaking so she stuck them behind her back and bunched them into fists. ‘Today’s been a bit of a shock. It’s a weird coincidence that I’ve ended up being employed in your company but there’s no reason why we should have anything further to do with one another. We’ve both moved on with our lives. I wish you all the best but when I walk out that door, I really don’t want to see you again.’
She fled with the last word, even resorting to taking the stairs rather than wait in mounting anxiety for the lift to arrive.
She’d always wondered how things might have turned out had she been able to get in touch with him all those years ago…tell him about Luke. Now he was getting married and his life was in a different place. He had moved on, found the perfect partner. Alex realised that she would just have to accept that there were some waters that could never be disturbed.
CHAPTER TWO
ALEX handed in her resignation the following Monday. There were a lot of questions and raised eyebrows but Alex played it down, using the old time worn favourite about family problems. No one liked to ask too many questions when confronted with someone else’s family problems, especially when the someone else in question had only been employed by the company for less than a month.
A Spanish Birthright aka The Secret Spanish Love-Child Page 2