‘Somewhere close to me, for a start.’ He held up one imperious hand, cutting her off before she could establish her protest vote. ‘Remember, Alex. This was your choice. The twenty-first century option. An amicable relationship working together to do the best by our son. What we had is history. This is what we have now and you will not fight me on it.’ Except, was it history? When the sight of her body sparked something inside him and the curiosity to see what that body looked like now, having given birth to his child, was like a slow-burning fire?
For the moment, though, this was the road he would take. God knew, she thought he was a complete bastard and, that being the case, he would keep all inappropriate impulses under wraps. No problem there. Hadn’t he perfected the art of self-control?
CHAPTER FIVE
ALEX settled into the comfortable seat on the plane and closed her eyes. She felt as though she was closing her eyes for the first time in three days because life, in the space of seventy-two hours, had become a crazy roller coaster ride.
Gabriel had taken charge with a ruthless efficiency that had given her very little time to think and even less time to argue. Had he thought that, given half a chance, she would have dug her heels in and refused to go along with his plans? In actual fact, she would have loved to because the thought of meeting his parents and being subjected to their certain disappointment and hostility was terrifying, but there were no grounds on which she could object. She had rejected his offer of marriage and had thereby somehow ended up removing her ability to contradict any further proposals without sounding uncooperative and selfish, two traits which were unacceptable when there was a child to consider.
So her house had now been valued and was in the hands of an estate agent for sale. Even though she had tried to insist on a rental.
‘No can do.’ He had shaken his head without any apparent remorse at flatly turning down that request. ‘Rental carries the unacceptable whiff of lack of commitment. The minute you don’t get your own way, you’d be back in your little terraced house and I would be back to square one, with my son living in a place of which I don’t approve, and subjected to a traffic-laden drive every time I wanted to visit.’
Of course, that was a blazingly obvious piece of exaggeration but she just had to accept that Gabriel was never going to consider her modest little house as anywhere near what his son deserved. And any trip spent crawling on a busy London road for longer than twenty minutes would always constitute an arduous and unacceptable journey.
Alex had folded her arms and muttered under her breath and given him a look of open incredulity, all of which he had contrived to ignore.
But her hands had been tied. And it didn’t seem to help that he was being the perfect gentleman. She had stood on her platform and spoken her piece about not wanting either of them to sacrifice themselves to a marriage made for all the wrong reasons, had asserted her independence, had scoffed at something as Victorian as marrying for the sake of a child and had proclaimed that they could be perfectly good parents, adult, civilised and connected only by their son. She had got what she had wanted. He had been adult, civilised and perfectly friendly. In a detached, polite way that she hated.
And then she hated herself for being silly.
It had all been exhausting.
The only positive had been Gabriel meeting Luke.
She reached out her hand with her eyes still closed and placed it gently over the chubby arm draped on the cushioned arm rest separating them.
Her mouth twitched. Gabriel might have conducted the technicalities with military precision, but it had been a different story with his son. Of course, she had sat Luke down and explained to him that Gabriel, the man he had glimpsed for a few seconds, was his father, wishing heartily that there were books on how to deal with conversations like that. But Luke had accepted what she had told him with a little frown, then he had nodded slowly and proceeded to ask her about a toy he had seen on television which he had to have because his best friend had one. He was too young to fully understand the implications of what she had told him, although she was pretty sure that he would wise up soon enough.
So when Gabriel had appeared at the door and introduced himself by shaking Luke’s hand, the child had hidden behind Alex and only peeped out when Gabriel had extended the set of toy planes which he had bought as an ice-breaker.
‘I obeyed instructions,’ he had said, looking at Alex. ‘Nothing too expensive.’
They had all sat at the kitchen table and Gabriel had asked awkward questions while Luke messily wolfed down his plate of spaghetti bolognese and looked up now and again to answer something in childish detail.
Now, Luke was sleeping between them, his head drooping against her shoulder, while, on the other side of him, Gabriel frowned at something on his laptop.
Alex half opened her eyes and glanced surreptitiously at him from under her lashes. No amount of tough talking to herself could minimise the impact he had on her every time she set eyes on him. Five years on and he was still drop dead beautiful. He had discarded his jacket and now, as though aware of her staring at him, he snapped shut his computer and turned to her before she had the chance to close her eyes and feign sleep.
Gabriel looked down at the sleeping Luke and thought how easy it was when he didn’t have to wear his paternal gear. He had foreseen difficulties in bonding and he had been right. Meeting his son formally for the first time had been an uncomfortable experience. The boy had hidden behind Alex, clearly terrified at the sudden intrusion in his life of a complete stranger. Today had not been much better. He had been gratified to see Luke carrying the set of toy planes over which he had agonised for a ridiculous length of time at Harrods, but he had still looked at Gabriel with barely concealed suspicion and gripped his mother’s hand as though terrified that he might be left with the guy he had yet to refer to as Dad.
‘This isn’t going well, is it?’ Gabriel asked abruptly and Alex frowned and straightened in her seat. ‘What isn’t?’
Unaccustomed to dealing with failure on any level, Gabriel looked away and said nothing.
‘You’re not used to young children,’ Alex told him reassuringly. In his dealings with Luke, she could glimpse the vulnerability that was so alien to his nature and she knew, with some deep, inborn instinct, that recognising that vulnerability would be a mistake. ‘He really likes the set of planes you bought for him.’
‘He was less impressed with the real thing.’
‘Maybe he takes after me.’ Alex looked around her at the high level comfort afforded by a private jet. She could have been sitting in a tasteful lounge with very helpful waiting staff who seemed to appear on cue, without needing prompting of any sort.
Gabriel relaxed a bit. He slid his eyes over her long jeans-clad legs and the fitted striped jumper that would have been a glaring fashion mistake on any other woman but seemed to be just right on her. If he had picked a person out of a hat, he could not have picked someone less like Cristobel. Physically and intellectually, they barely seemed to come from the same planet.
‘Don’t tell me you’re not impressed to death,’ Gabriel said lazily, almost forgetting the whole friendship thing she had encouraged. Under the jumper he could make out the jut of her breasts and the usual host of lustful thoughts sprang out of their loosely contained cages.
‘I’m not!’
‘Liar,’ he said softly, with one of those killer smiles that made her break out in nervous goose bumps. ‘I remember when I showed you that Ferrari all those years ago and told you that it belonged to a local celebrity. You were awe struck.’
‘I was a kid!’ Alex said loftily, trying and failing to drag her eyes away from his face. ‘Did it belong to you, by the way?’
‘Will you throw something at me if I tell you that it did?’
‘Well, I’m not impressed with that sort of stuff now,’ she said. She had a sudden image of them making love in the back of the red Ferrari, which had impressed her to death at the time. It would
have been a disaster, of course. They were both way too tall to ever do anything serious in the back seat of a sports car, but that sleek BMW he now drove…
She went bright red and thanked all the saints that he couldn’t read her mind.
Then she wondered whether his politeness was so horrible because she didn’t feel polite around him. Did she secretly want him to still fancy her? Even though she knew that his taste in women ran to a completely different sort and probably always had? Even though he was the kind of guy she had repeatedly told herself over the years she would never again get involved with?
‘And I hope you don’t expect me to bow and scrape to your parents just because they’re rich…’
‘I expect you to be yourself.’ Gabriel could sense her withdrawal. Just when the conversation relaxed between them, she would pull back and it enraged him because, whatever she thought of the man he was, she should open her eyes to the guy he had become, a guy who was willing to stick around for a son he had never known he had. Did it get more praiseworthy than that?
‘How much longer before we land?’
‘Very soon.’
Alex’s stomach clenched. He had told her that his parents now knew everything. His plan to tell them face to face had been scuppered by his inability to get over to Spain in time and he could hardly show up with a ready-made family in tow and expect them not to jointly collapse from the shock. So Alex knew that she would be entering the lion’s den with no defensive suit of armour. She only hoped that they would be charmed by their grandson, even if they loathed her on sight, although if they were as stiff as Gabriel then she could look forward to some heavy going.
And they would be out there for nearly four weeks!
Alex had been stunned when Gabriel had casually inserted that into the conversation as they’d boarded the plane to Madrid. Two weeks of possible hell with his parents and then a further two weeks criss-crossing Spain, where he apparently had a series of houses in various places. He needed to get to know his son and he intended to do it on his home turf. What could she say to that?
‘They’re not monsters,’ he told her with a hint of impatience. ‘You won’t be eaten alive.’
Between them, Luke stirred and curled closer towards Alex. She saw Gabriel note that imperceptible shift away from him and for a few painful seconds her heart constricted. Before she could be sucked in by her emotions, however, she felt the plane begin to dip and circle and then Luke was flying his pretend plane in his hand and bombarding her with questions. Somehow considering himself eliminated from the magic circle, Gabriel stared frowningly through the window and watched as the land beneath them got closer and closer until the plane was bumping along the runway and then, at last, coming to a smooth halt in the airfield.
Between the cluster of other small planes, against which his gleaming black jet stood out like a sore thumb, he could see his parents’ driver waiting behind the fence.
‘Alonso has come to meet us—’ he turned to Alex, who was looking uncertainly around her as if waiting for the captain’s voice to come across the tannoy telling her that she could safely unclasp her seat belt and disembark ‘—so you can put your nerves on hold temporarily.’
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Alex mumbled, finally galvanising her body into action and turning her attention to Luke, who was busily occupying himself in her arms, making plane-like noises and pretending to give orders to an imaginary crew.
‘My turn will come,’ Gabriel said dryly. ‘When I confront your family and get beaten to death by your brothers.’ His fabulous dark eyes met hers and she gave him a reluctant smile.
‘I can’t imagine you being nervous.’
‘Good,’ he drawled, tipping her face up to his before she could begin leaving the plane. ‘I like that.’
That was so typically Gabriel, even the Gabriel she used to know, that she laughed and he felt his breath catch in his throat. With driving intensity, he focused on her soft, full lips, her pearly white teeth and then the nervous way her fingers raked through her short hair as she tuned in to his wavelength. For a second, the rest of the world disappeared.
Alex’s breath caught in her throat and, when he reached out to brush a strand of hair from her face, she inhaled sharply before turning away with a slight stumble. She was horrified to find that she hadn’t wanted that sudden electric connection to end and if it had to end, she had wanted it to end with him kissing her. How could she have so completely forgotten the nerve-racking present in favour of a treacherous, erotic fantasy? Luke had stopped the random twirling of his toy plane and was now contorting his little body in her arms so that he could stare directly into her eyes.
Flushed with guilt, Alex dropped him to his feet as soon as they were on the tarmac and her polite chit-chat about the heat dried up as she saw him reach out and unconsciously slip his tiny hand in his father’s.
Above his curly dark head, Gabriel’s eyes met hers and there was a moment of wordless communication before she looked away.
The long black limo waiting for them rescued her from dwelling on her nerves as it was a source of boundless fascination for Luke in a way the plane had failed to excite him. While she grappled with the ever advancing and dreaded meeting with Gabriel’s parents, he squirmed and investigated everything there was to investigate in the car, from the little drinks bar to the dark windows to the various high-tech gadgets, there to make life more comfortable for the average billionaire. In the process, he babbled a running commentary on nothing in particular, peppering random insights into some of the other children in his pre-school class with a hundred questions about what in the car did what and why.
‘He seems highly intelligent,’ Gabriel remarked, looking at Alex, and, for the first time since they had stepped into the limo, she gave him a genuinely warm smile.
‘I think that’s called parental bias.’
With a mere forty minutes left before they reached his parents’ impressive mansion on the outskirts of the city, Gabriel determined to employ distraction tactics. There was no way that he wanted Alex to be on the defensive when she met his parents. It would be a sure fire way of ensuring that the two weeks spent with them was a crashing failure. He hadn’t been able to gauge the level of his parents’ disappointment with the abrupt change of wedding plans via a phone call but he was banking on severe. Nor had he been able to decipher the depth of their shock at what he had had to tell them a scant twenty-four hours previously but he was also betting on severe. To add a defensive and belligerent Alex into the mix could be a catastrophe.
So he maintained a light-hearted murmuring banter about Luke throughout the journey, making sure to fill any pauses with conversation and focusing so hard in his efforts that he was barely aware of the casual ease with which he scooped his son on to his lap and ruffled his silky dark hair.
Released from his own self-imposed inhibitions, he was communicating with his son without even being aware of it and Alex was surprised at the tightness in her chest as she witnessed that unconscious breaking of the ice. When she had been pregnant, and when she had first had Luke, she had daydreamed about what might have been had she and Gabriel—or Lucio, as she had thought of him back then—ended up together. She had fantasised about being a normal, happily married couple. In her fantasies, he had related to his son pretty much the way he was relating now, holding him on his lap with those big, strong hands and bending to smile distractedly at something his son said.
She was surprised when she next glanced out of the window to discover that they were no longer on the main road but navigating through a series of small side roads, on either side of which orchards stretched away into the distance. It couldn’t have been further from the dreary listless grey weather they had left behind in London and, for the first time, Alex felt a little kick at thinking that perhaps it had been right, after all, to remove herself and Luke from their familiar territory. He had never had the chance to go abroad. It was occurring to her that this would be just one o
f the things that he would be able to enjoy, being the son of Gabriel Cruz.
Trips abroad, big houses, fancy cars…they had been the stuff of Gabriel’s life, not that she had known that when they had met. Was it any wonder that he passionately wanted the same for his son?
‘We’re here.’
Alex blinked and gazed at the sprawling mansion looming into view at the end of the private avenue. A massive circular courtyard, elaborately landscaped at its centre, fanned out to impeccable lawns on either side. Whilst it bore no resemblance to the stately homes in England, it was much too big to be classified as a villa.
‘Your parents live here…on their own?’ Alex asked weakly.
‘There’s staff.’
‘Right.’
Gabriel looked at her incredulous saucer eyes and was catapulted back to that heady teenage feeling of having successfully impressed a girl. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced for a very, very long time and it felt good.
Against him, Luke stirred out of the catnap he had fallen into with the ease of a child and Gabriel looked down at the flushed little face staring drowsily up at him, weirdly confused and surprised. His instinct was to return the child to his mother, but he resisted the impulse and was gratified when Luke showed no signs of wriggling away.
‘I can see why you thought my place was a bit on the small side,’ she whispered to cover her nerves as the driver moved around to open the door for her. On top of everything else, she felt horribly underdressed for the occasion. She had dressed casually as a protest vote, wanting to establish from the start that she was her own person and would not be bullied by anyone. She was regretting it.
‘Will we be living here?’ Luke asked Gabriel with keen interest.
‘For a little while.’ Gabriel smiled. ‘But you’ll be able to come and visit any time you want to.’ He shot Alex a warning look, just in case she was about to protest. ‘Your grandparents would love to have you whenever you want.’
A Spanish Birthright aka The Secret Spanish Love-Child Page 8