Alex smiled, unwilling to become embroiled in a circuitous argument about what constituted a precious upbringing and what didn’t. She was amused that Gabriel’s solution to the dilemma of eating out wasn’t a loyalty card to a supermarket but hiring a chef. He inhabited a different world to the one she knew but, bit by bit, she would make inroads into his world and change him.
His mobile gave its sharp intrusive buzz and he picked up the call, turning away from her and speaking in rapid Spanish. Business. She half listened to the conversation, bored by talk of share options and cost projections. She let her mind wander pleasantly and tried not to run her hands along his back in a nauseatingly loving manner. Thinking of herself as controlling the situation did her no end of good but she was still bitterly disappointed when he ended his call and turned to her with a regretful expression.
‘Crisis at work, cara. I know you’d rather I was around twenty-four seven but…’ he shrugged and smiled ruefully ‘…I’m going to have to fly to New York for a few days. Might even be as long as a week.’
Alex laughed and raked her fingers through her short dark hair, ruffling it so that it stood up in boyish spikes.
‘What makes you think that I want you around twenty-four seven?’
Gabriel frowned. ‘Your little speech about wanting me to spend time with you?’
‘Time with Luke.’ She beamed at him. However rosy her plans were for capturing him, she still didn’t intend for him to think that she was on her hands and knees begging for scraps of his attention. ‘So you can put that gigantic ego of yours away. Actually, I’m perfectly happy in your absence. I can start doing a little packing, just books and ornaments and stuff. I won’t look for a job yet if we might be moving further out of London. Hmm. Maybe,’ she mused aloud, ‘I’ll go visit my family in Ireland. Mum’s been complaining that she misses Luke and I can tell them about the wedding plans first-hand.’
Gabriel was disconcerted to feel a twinge of annoyance at this sudden, cheerfully independent plan of action. Of course it made perfect sense for her to talk to her family face to face! She was very close to them.
‘You’ll have to give me your landline there.’ He squashed the ridiculous notion that he wanted her to be there at his beck and call and certainly not grinning when he told her that he was going to be out of the country.
‘Why? I’ll take my mobile.’
‘No can do. You’re not good at remembering to charge it. What if I need to get in touch with you?’
Alex shrugged and rattled off her parents’ telephone number although, at the end of it, went on to say that she might change her mind.
‘Woman’s prerogative. I might just get Mum and Dad to come down to London. They haven’t been in ages. So I’m not sure. I’ll let you know.’ Another broad smile.
Gabriel grunted. His timescale for the wedding was shortening by the second. He didn’t like this house. He didn’t like the fact that he had to trek halfway across London to see his son, particularly as he had become accustomed to having him around. And he didn’t like Alex thinking that she could skip around wherever and whenever she wanted like a single girl. Which she wasn’t. Who knew if there was some guy lurking back in her home town? Naturally, he wasn’t going to express any concern in that area but, if she was married, there would be none of this nonsense. He decided that he would cut short his trip to New York by a day or two. There was no need for him to sit in on every single meeting and hold Edwards’s hand. Time the man stepped up to the mark.
Alex surreptitiously looked at him, proud that she had put on such a good show of not looking deflated at the thought of him leaving the country. The less dependent she was, the more he would respect her and the more he respected her, the more her value would rise. She was sure of it.
And, when he returned, she would welcome him with open arms. And Luke would be there with his floppy dark hair and his winning smile. And she would cook something, although she would take care not to make a great big deal of it. Just something hot and homely and heartwarming.
And she really would have, but something was slipped under her door two days later that would blow all her plans to smithereens…
CHAPTER TEN
THE neatly clipped newspaper page was accompanied by a saccharine note that read: I thought you should see this. Alex had just dropped Luke off to his playgroup and done some shopping; the envelope lying on the mat inside the door must have been hand-delivered. She stared at the picture for ages, during which time life seemed to slow to a standstill.
Gabriel was, as always, distinctive, his proud, arrogant head inclined down towards Cristobel’s uplifted face. Had Cristobel delivered the clipping? Of course she had! Who else? It was from an American tabloid. What had she been doing in New York? Suddenly a host of sickening doubts and misgivings rushed through Alex like a swarm of locusts, devouring everything in its path. She dumped the shopping bags on the floor and sat down so that she could give the picture one hundred per cent of her attention.
Gabriel had spoken to her on the telephone twice since he had left the country and she had spent ages talking to him, chatting about nothing in particular, content to enjoy the rich, lazy drawl of his voice and to hear about what he had been doing. Now she wondered whether Cristobel had been in the hotel room whilst he had made those calls. Maybe she had been tapping her long scarlet nails and looking at her diamond watch as she had impatiently waited for him to wrap it up.
In complete turmoil, Alex found that she couldn’t concentrate at all for the remainder of the day. She had intended to start packing away some of her possessions, boxing up the ones she would take with her to her new house. Her new life! Now, it all seemed pointless. She would have fought tooth and nail to turn her charade of a marriage into something meaningful, but seeing that picture of Cristobel with Gabriel had shown her that there was nothing to fight over and to carry on kidding herself otherwise would have reduced her to the level of a joke.
She wondered if she should just pack her bags and return to Ireland. Should she? What would be the point of that? Gabriel would find her and he wouldn’t be pleased.
It was all too easy to project a scenario in which Gabriel hunted her down and used his mighty power and influence to take Luke away from her. Would he do that? Previously she would have sworn with one hand on the Bible that he would never have been capable of any such thing, but just how well did she know him? Hadn’t her very first meeting with him been based on a lie? Hadn’t he manipulated a situation years ago because it had suited him at the time? He had pretended to be someone he wasn’t and he had told her that it was because anonymity had given him a taste of freedom for a while but couldn’t it equally have been true that he had sussed her within seconds and realised that she wasn’t the kind of girl who found rich, spoiled men attractive? And so he had cleverly dropped the trappings and adopted a different cover?
Alex hated thinking like that, but she couldn’t deny the grainy photo of Gabriel and Cristobel together. The bags of shopping, lots of food items in preparation for the Domestic Goddess she was to become, lay on the floor cruelly mocking her fanciful, pie-in-the-sky dreams.
By seven that evening she was ready for bed and was so spent from her troubled thoughts that she failed to stir when the phone rang at ten. And rang. And rang.
Frustrated, Gabriel raked his fingers through his hair and stared at his mobile. No reply from the landline and her cellphone was switched off. He had never met a woman who was so disorganised when it came to her mobile phone. It was seldom charged and, when it was, it was continually programmed on silent so that phone calls were routinely missed because she couldn’t hear it ring and, when she did hear it, locating the thing in her oversized bag was an accomplishment based solely on luck.
He would have to phone her in the morning. He would never have credited it, but whereas women had always run a poor second to work, Alex seemed to fly in the face of this immutable truth. He thought about her way too much when she wasn’t arou
nd and especially now, when Cristobel had appeared on the scene because she just happened to be doing some shopping in New York and had heard that he was around from his secretary. Out of a misplaced sense of good manners and residual guilt, he had taken her to dinner and had had a first hand opportunity to see for himself just how inconsequential Cristobel had been to him. It astounded him that he had ever found himself drifting into an engagement to her. For someone who prided himself on his astute judgement and razor-sharp acumen, he realised that he had very nearly sleep-walked himself into the worst situation of his life.
He had been struck by a strong sense of gratitude that he now had Alex and Luke in his life. Frankly, he found it difficult to remember a time when he didn’t, which was weirdly comforting and confusing at the same time.
When, the following day, he tried calling again, this time at six in the morning, when she surely could be nowhere else but in the house, and received no answer, a sense of foreboding edged its way past his initial concern.
He had a series of meetings lined up and he did his best to concentrate on the business of sealing this deal, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
Had she decided to go and visit her parents in Ireland? On the spur of the moment, he dialled the landline number she had given him and the phone was answered by a woman who confirmed that her parents were away and wouldn’t be back for another week. He had to cut short a rambling description of where they had gone and how long overdue the holiday had been.
Never again would Gabriel underestimate the power of his imagination. Unable to get through to her, he could only think that a disaster had occurred. His palms grew clammy and he began to feel sick as he thought of various scenarios involving hospitals and emergency rooms. Had Luke been taken ill? Surely Alex would have called him immediately if that had been the case? The answer to that was yes. With lightning speed, his thoughts veered off that train of thought to a more likely one: Alex had had an accident of some sort and had been unable to get through to him.
Once planted in his head, he was unable to shake the feeling that something was disastrously wrong.
Gabriel was not of the temperament to sit around twiddling his thumbs and stressing and he was honest enough to admit that no amount of high level meetings had the power to distract. He was a man of action and, in a move that would have shocked anyone who knew him well, he delegated the remainder of what needed doing to the members of the board who had accompanied him on the trip to New York. He had always been pivotal in any talks of strategic importance but he had to concede that if the deal fell through, then the deal fell through. No amount of success in this matter was worth the way his mind was going off the rails.
Not for the first time, he missed the availability of Concorde for transatlantic speed. However, his name carried sufficient weight to ensure that he was sitting in the next available first class cabin leaving New York.
He would have had a very hard time admitting it to anyone, but he felt out of control and he breathed a sigh of relief when the plane finally landed at Heathrow.
In possession of hand luggage only, he was out of the airport in record time and heading for her house without bothering to detour past his apartment.
Three loud bangs on the door had Alex almost spilling the cup of coffee she had made, her first for the day. In an effort to conceal her terrible frame of mind, she had spent the past day and a half over-compensating with Luke and had had a hellish time trying to settle him in bed after two bowls of ice cream and a chocolate bar. She knew that Gabriel had been trying to get hold of her and she had taken care to ignore his persistent ringing because she just didn’t trust herself not to lash out at him. He had also tried her mobile. She had seen the missed calls and had erased them, furious with herself for having got herself all tangled up again, just like she had before, hopelessly loving a guy who was so bad for her.
Her whole body tensed with shock as she pulled open the door to find Gabriel standing in front of her, the lines of his strong face tense.
‘Gabriel! What are you doing here? You’re not due back for a couple of days…’ Her voice trailed off as he strode past her into the small hallway, turning at the bottom of the stairs to look at her with a dark, shuttered expression.
Alex quietly shut the door and leaned against it. She hadn’t had time to brace herself to face him. Now, she was all over the place. Her heart was hammering inside her and she had broken out in a fine film of nervous perspiration. Why had he returned early? Surely it had something to do with Cristobel. The coincidence was just too uncanny otherwise.
‘I’ve been trying to get through to you,’ Gabriel said tightly. He stared at her across the width of the hall, his keen dark eyes taking in her nerves and wondering what the hell was going on.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘You knew but you chose not to take my calls?’
‘Have you come straight from the airport? Why?’
Relief that she was all right, as was Luke, or she would have said something, mingled now with anger and a certain amount of confusion.
‘I…was worried about you both,’ Gabriel said heavily. ‘Can you blame me? I was thousands of miles away, with no idea what was going on over here.’
‘Sorry,’ Alex mumbled, looking down at her silly bedroom slippers. Even with her mind doing crazy loops in her head and her heart splintering into a thousand pieces, she was still aware of the fact that she would have changed into something a little more attractive had she known that he was going to descend on her. Instead, she was wearing her oldest track pants and a T-shirt with a comical motif that had faded to the point of obscurity after a million washes.
‘So?’ he prompted harshly, because she appeared to have frozen into immobility. ‘Care to tell me what’s going on? I dropped everything to get over here.’
Alex thought of him abandoning his meetings and his conferences so that he could fly back to London and fought against that desperate treacherous tendency to read something significant into his behaviour.
‘Maybe we should go into the sitting room,’ she mumbled, edging away from the front door with her arms firmly folded in front of her.
‘Not until you tell me what’s going on. I worked out it couldn’t be Luke or you would have picked up my calls. Which led me to think that something might have happened to you.’
‘Something like what?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! What do you think? Some kind of…of accident…’
‘And don’t pretend you would have cared one jot!’ Alex blurted out, tears springing to her eyes so that she had to stare back down at the ground again and gather herself.
The silence bristled between them. Gabriel had the strangest now or never feeling. What was he supposed to do with that?
‘There’s something you need to see,’ Alex continued in a shaky, driven voice and she walked quickly past him, towards the sitting room and her handbag, where that wretched newspaper clipping had taken up residence in her wallet and had been steadily burning a hole in it for the past few interminable days.
Gabriel watched, mystified and irrationally panic stricken as she rummaged in her oversized sack and finally withdrew a piece of paper which she handed silently over to him.
It took him a few seconds to recognise Cristobel, staring up at him for all the world as though they were lovers. He hadn’t even been aware of any paparazzi around at the time. He could just remember feeling impatient and keen to see the back of her. Unfortunately, that had not been transmitted in the shot, artfully snapped to fabricate a story out of nothing.
‘She came to see me after you had left the island. I didn’t tell you. She said that she would have you back, but I didn’t want to believe her…’
Gabriel tore his eyes away from the newspaper clipping and then he quietly scrunched it between his fingers and tossed it on to the table between them. He shoved his hands in his pockets and reluctantly raised his eyes to hers.
‘You wanted me to marry you because of Lu
ke and the second I accepted, you resumed your…your…’ Her head ached with the effort of not crying but her voice was unsteady and, since she couldn’t look at him, she looked instead at the crumpled piece of evidence on the table. ‘Would you ever have told me that you’d met Cristobel in New York if she hadn’t been kind enough to provide proof of it?’
‘There was nothing to tell.’
‘Nothing to you, maybe.’
‘I’m not…in the habit of explaining my actions to anyone. Well…I never was…’
‘I can’t be married to a man who doesn’t think that he’s accountable at all to his wife. I know that appearances for you are everything, but how do you think it makes me feel to realise that you’re happy to take up where you left off with your ex-fiancée? Cristobel would have no problem sneaking around with you behind my back. Apparently that’s the Spanish way. Whatever that’s supposed to mean. I guess she just meant that that’s your way. Marry because you have an overdeveloped sense of obligation but then just carry on doing exactly what you want!’
‘She must have set the whole thing up…’
‘Is that all you have to say, Gabriel? That she must have set the whole thing up?’ Alex clenched her fists tightly and tears of bitter disappointment and frustration pricked the backs of her eyes. The cold, sickening realisation that this would be the soundtrack of her marriage, were she to marry him, swept over her with torrential force. Building crazy fantasies in her head and nursing girlish dreams of getting him to love her were frankly delusional. She would be entering into a contract, one that would see her financially secure for life, but that was it. No more, no less.
‘No.’
‘No what? Why can’t you at least be honest with me?’
‘Talking about feelings doesn’t come easy for me. I’ve never been one of those touchy-feely kind of guys…’
‘Okay.’ Alex turned away, defeated, and walked towards the window, away from him.
A Spanish Birthright aka The Secret Spanish Love-Child Page 16