Could they? This past week had been absolute hell for Bryn too, her desire for this man taking over her every thought as she remembered how it had been between them that night in Gabriel’s office. The way they had still responded to each other despite both knowing who the other was, before her feelings of guilt had once again made her deny that desire she still felt for him. A desire that Gabriel so obviously reciprocated and refused to dismiss. Refused to allow her to dismiss.
Could the two of them really have a relationship for however long these feelings lasted and simply ignore the pain of the past?
Could she do that?
CHAPTER NINE
‘COME IN AND make yourself at home, Bryn, and I’ll pour us both a glass of wine,’ Gabriel encouraged huskily as she stood hesitantly in the doorway to the sitting room of his apartment.
He had felt an inner sense of relief earlier, when Bryn had finally capitulated to the idea of the two of them meeting up again when she finished work at ten; he might have deliberately given her the impression he was both confident and unyielding in his demand for them to talk this evening, but inwardly he hadn’t been at all sure, until that moment, that Bryn would agree.
Gabriel had been waiting outside in his car for her when she and several of her co-workers left the coffee shop a little after ten o’clock, the two of them not speaking after he climbed out of the car and opened the passenger door for her to get in, or during the short drive to his apartment.
She had lost weight, he realised as Bryn finally entered the sitting room, the black denims she wore not quite as figure-hugging as they had been a week ago, her collarbone visible at the open neck of her black shirt, those grey eyes appearing huge in the paleness of her face. Evidence that she was finding fighting the attraction between them as difficult as he was? Gabriel certainly hoped so, because this past week of not seeing her since the two of them had made love together had been sheer torture.
His expression softened as Bryn sank down wearily into the comfort of one of the brown leather armchairs. ‘Busy evening?’ he prompted as he poured two glasses of pinot grigio.
‘Very.’ Bryn accepted one of the glasses before taking a welcome sip. ‘You have a nice apartment,’ she added with an appreciative glance at the obviously masculine decor and original artwork on the walls.
‘It isn’t mine particularly.’ He shrugged. ‘We all use it whenever we’re in London— Don’t worry, Bryn, Michael and Raphael aren’t in London at the moment,’ he added ruefully as she instantly looked alarmed. ‘Michael is in Paris, Raphael in New York.’
Her frown eased slightly. ‘They really are wonderful names.’
He nodded. ‘The family estate in Berkshire is called Archangel’s Rest—and, I assure you, I’ve heard all the jokes.’
She smiled slightly but it quickly faded. ‘Gabriel, I only came back with you tonight because I agree that we need to dispense with this situation once and for all, and then just move on— What are you doing?’ she gasped as Gabriel put his glass down on the coffee table before kneeling down at her feet and beginning to unfasten the laces on her shoes.
He looked up to quirk a teasing brow. ‘Removing your shoes, obviously.’
‘Why?’ She tried, and failed, to pull her foot from his grasp as he slipped one shoe off before turning his attention to the other.
Gabriel sat back on his heels after removing the second shoe. ‘I’m guessing your feet ache from all that standing?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded. ‘Then a foot massage should be very welcome about now.’
‘A foot— Gabriel, stop that.’ She tried to pull away as he took one of her bare feet into both his hands and began to gently knead the aching flesh. ‘Gabriel!’ Her protest was less convincing this time, and she gave a low sigh of pleasure as his fingers continued to massage the tension from her tired muscles.
‘Good?’ he prompted.
‘Oh, yes.’ Her head fell back against the chair, lashes fanning over her cheeks as her lids closed and Gabriel continued to knead and massage her foot.
She had tiny elegant feet, the nails painted a bright—and defiant—red, Gabriel noted indulgently as he turned his attention to her other foot and continued to massage her aching muscles.
Bryn knew she should stop Gabriel doing what he was doing, that his kneeling at her feet was intimate enough, without the sensuous touch of his long fingers massaging her to add to that dangerous intimacy.
She should stop him.
But she couldn’t.
Because she didn’t want to; she was enjoying this far too much to want Gabriel to ever stop.
She had never thought of her feet as being an erogenous zone before now, but they obviously were, the warmth emanating from Gabriel’s caressing hands now moving to other parts of her body, her nipples becoming hard and full, a familiar warmth between her thighs. ‘You should think about taking this up professionally,’ she murmured appreciatively, eyes still closed. ‘You could make a fortune!’
Gabriel chuckled throatily. ‘I already have a fortune. Besides which,’ he added, fingers moving lightly over her ankles and calves now, ‘I have no interest in massaging anyone else’s feet but yours.’
Bryn raised one lid, her heart beating a loud tattoo in her chest as Gabriel looked back at her, those brown eyes once again as compelling and addictive as chocolate. An addiction Bryn was once again finding hard to resist.
‘I think that’s enough of that, thank you.’ She pulled her feet out of Gabriel’s grasp before bending her knees and drawing her legs up into the chair—well away from Gabriel’s caressing hands. Her pulse raced as he made no effort to get up from kneeling in front of her. ‘It’s getting late, Gabriel,’ she prompted determinedly. ‘I need to leave soon.’
Gabriel sat back on his heels, looking up at her. ‘Did you tell your mother that the two of us had met up again?’
‘Did I—?’ Her eyes had widened. ‘Of course not!’ Bryn protested impatiently.
His eyes narrowed. ‘Why not?’
‘Don’t be obtuse, Gabriel,’ she snapped, glad now that he wasn’t still touching her. Because if he had been he would have been able to feel the way just being this close to him caused her to tremble in awareness. ‘My mother never knew— She didn’t know that we knew each other five years ago. I—I never told anyone about—about that evening you drove me home from the gallery.’
‘The evening I kissed you.’
She grimaced. ‘I’m surprised you even remember that.’
‘It was too memorable to ever forget,’ he assured gruffly.
Bryn looked at him sharply. ‘I somehow doubt that very much.’
Gabriel looked straight back at her with hot, glittering eyes. ‘The timing was all wrong, the circumstances impossible, but even then I wanted to do so much more than kiss you.’
‘I— You did?’ She was totally flustered by his admission.
He shrugged. ‘I was attracted to you then. I’m attracted to you now.’
Bryn gave a scathing snort. ‘Five years ago I was a chubby and gauche teenager wearing heavy-framed glasses.’ And this man had been lean and sophisticated, with the same dark and wicked good looks that still took her breath away.
He nodded. ‘And now you’re sleek and elegant, and I’m guessing you wear contact lenses?’
She nodded distractedly. ‘Except for when I paint, when I prefer to wear the glasses you returned to me last week.’
‘You weren’t chubby five years ago, Bryn, you were voluptuous,’ he assured her earnestly. ‘And your eyes were just as stunningly beautiful behind those glasses as they are tonight.’
She gave a dismissive shake of her head. ‘We’re veering off the subject, Gabriel.’
‘Which is?’
‘That just thinking about the distress
it would cause my mother if I were to tell her I’ve met you again now, let alone this—this attraction, between us, is the very reason why it can’t continue.’
Gabriel looked up. ‘You can’t possibly know how your mother would react.’
Bryn frowned her impatience. ‘Get real, Gabriel, and try to imagine how that conversation would go. “Oh, by the way, Mum, guess who I almost had sex with a couple nights ago. Gabriel D’Angelo. How weird is that?”’
Gabriel drew in a sharp breath before pushing up onto his feet to pick up his glass of wine, taking a sip before answering her, knowing Bryn was now spoiling for a fight—probably as her way of putting an end to this situation. But he wasn’t about to give it to her, wasn’t about to make any of this easy for her after the week of uncertainty he had just suffered through. ‘We didn’t have sex, Bryn, although we came very close, and, as I said, the location could have been a little more...conventional, but I’m pretty sure there was nothing in the least “weird” about anything we did together.’
Those two wings of colour deepened in her cheeks as she looked up at him with overbright eyes. ‘You won’t even try to see this from my point of view, will you?’
His jaw tightened. ‘I’m not inclined to let you walk away from me just because you think your mother might react badly to knowing about the two of us, no.’
‘How about if I walk away because I’m reacting badly to just the idea of the two of us together?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘And are you?’
‘Yes!’
‘Why?’
She gave an exasperated shake of her head. ‘Gabriel, I know you to be an intelligent man—’
‘Thank you,’ he drawled dryly.
‘And as an intelligent man,’ she continued firmly, ‘you must know how impossible this whole situation is. For goodness’ sake, my father went to prison for attempting to defraud you and your family,’ she added impatiently when he made no response.
‘I’m well aware of what happened five years ago.’ He nodded grimly.
‘Then you must also be aware— You must have issues of your own about that situation.’
‘I deeply regret that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he conceded impatiently. ‘But it was sheer coincidence your father chose to bring his painting to Archangel, even more so that I, rather than Michael or Raphael, happened to be in charge of the London gallery when he did.’ Something Gabriel had also long had reason to regret.
Except he would never have met Bryn five years ago if not for her father’s greed.
She blinked long lashes. ‘And you’re saying you don’t have a problem with that? With the fact that I’m William Harper’s daughter?’
‘Of course I have a problem with that.’ Gabriel swallowed the rest of his wine before placing the empty glass down on the coffee table. ‘At the very least it’s inconvenient—’
‘Inconvenient!’ Bryn echoed incredulously.
He nodded. ‘Because the past is affecting how you feel about the two of us now.’
Bryn no longer knew how she felt about the past, let alone the here and now.
Five years ago she had been devastated by her father’s trial and imprisonment. A month ago she had still been resentful of Gabriel D’Angelo’s part in her father’s downfall. Even a week ago she had been disgusted with herself for allowing herself to respond to Gabriel in the way that she had.
But Gabriel was asking how she felt about that now.
She was still devastated by the events of the past, but the talk she’d had with her mother last week, the things Mary had told her about the deterioration of her marriage, her daily uncertainty of her own and her daughter’s future, how she believed William’s get-rich-quick schemes would have eventually caused a complete meltdown in their marriage...
Having spoken with her mother, Bryn now believed that her father, determined to ignore Gabriel’s advice to take his painting and just walk away, had instead informed the press of the painting’s existence, ballooning the situation beyond anyone’s control.
And all of those things put a different slant on that past situation. Bryn had worshipped her father when she was a child, had loved him dearly for the man she had believed him to be. But as an adult she now realised, and was forced to accept, that he had been far from the perfect husband or father.
And, yes, Gabriel had been involved in her father’s being sent to prison, but he hadn’t done it out of spite, had merely, as he had just pointed out, been caught up in the sequence of events created and executed by Bryn’s father, and over which Gabriel himself had no control.
It wasn’t the past, or Gabriel’s involvement in that past, that made a relationship between the two of them so impossible now; it was how Bryn felt about Gabriel.
Five years ago she had been infatuated, utterly mesmerised, by the dark and devastatingly attractive Gabriel D’Angelo. Since meeting him again, sharing intimacies with him that she had never experienced with any other man, she had realised that it hadn’t just been infatuation she had felt for Gabriel five years ago. She had fallen in love with him then, she loved him still, and he—how she felt about him—was why none of the men she had met since had ever held her interest. How could any man compete with Gabriel D’Angelo? Or the fact that Bryn had fallen in love with him all those years ago?
And it was a futile love. Not just because of the past, but because Gabriel, still single at the age of thirty-three, so obviously didn’t do falling in love, let alone for ever.
Oh, he was attracted to her, admitted to desiring her, but that was all he felt, and the only way, the only defence Bryn had left against falling even more in love with Gabriel than she already was, was to continue to use the shield of the events of the past to keep him at arm’s length.
Gabriel watched through narrowed lids as Bryn swung her feet to the carpeted floor before sitting up.
Her expression was one of cool dismissal. ‘I don’t feel anything about the two of us now,’ she told him coldly.
His jaw tightened. ‘That’s not—’
‘Nor do I think it a good idea for us to be alone together like this again,’ she continued firmly. ‘You asked that we talk, Gabriel, and we’ve done that. And I’ve told you exactly how I feel.’ Her chin rose. ‘And if anything I’ve said means you now change your mind about including my paintings in the New Artists Exhibition, then so be it!’ she added challengingly as she stood up.
Gabriel eyed her frustratedly, knowing that Bryn was deliberately shutting him out, but he had no idea how to break through the defences she was deliberately putting up against him. The fact that she felt the need to put up those defences at all was surely telling in itself. In what way, Gabriel couldn’t be sure. And this stubbornly assertive Bryn obviously wasn’t about to enlighten him either.
‘I won’t change my mind, Bryn,’ he assured grimly. ‘About anything.’ He used the same challenging tone she had to him.
She eyed him guardedly. ‘What does that mean?’
Gabriel gave a mocking smile. ‘It means that you don’t know me very well if you think that anything you’ve said tonight means I’m going to just walk away from you. It means,’ he continued firmly as she would have spoken, ‘that, for the two weeks left before the exhibition, I’m going to require that you come to the gallery at least once a day, and that those meetings will be with me, rather than Eric. It means, Bryn, that you can try running away from me, from the attraction between us, but for the next two weeks, at least, I have no intention of allowing you to just ignore me.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ Tears glistened in those dove-grey eyes.
‘Why do you think I’m doing it?’ Gabriel rasped, hating being the cause of those tears, but hating even more the idea of giving up on what he knew was between the two of them. Bryn could fight it all she liked, but her responses
to him told him that she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
She made a dismissive gesture with her hands. ‘Probably because you’re the arrogant Gabriel D’Angelo?’ she accused huskily. ‘Because a D’Angelo doesn’t take no for an answer?’ She gave a disgusted shake of her head. ‘Or possibly because you just enjoy torturing me!’
Gabriel’s hands clenched at his sides even as he bared his teeth in a facsimile of a smile. ‘Nice try, Bryn, but I’ve already warned you I’m not backing off because you deliberately insult me.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Yes, you are, Bryn,’ he rasped. ‘And yes, I’m arrogant. Enough so that I don’t intend taking the answer “no” from the woman I know wants me as much as I want her.’
She drew in a sharp breath.
‘You—’
‘Your lips might be saying no, Bryn,’ he continued remorselessly, ‘but the rest of your body, your aroused nipples especially—’ he deliberately lowered his gaze to where those hardened nubs were pressed so noticeably against her black cotton shirt ‘—are definitely saying yes, please!’
Bryn instinctively crossed her arms over her breasts even as she inwardly acknowledged the truth of Gabriel’s claim; she was aroused from the sensual pleasure of having Gabriel’s hands caressing her feet and calves just a few minutes ago, but also because she seemed to be in a constant state of arousal whenever she was in Gabriel’s company.
She only had to look at him, into those sultry dark eyes, at those sculptured kissable lips, the long, lean lines of his utterly masculine body, for her own body to become achingly aroused.
And now Gabriel was suggesting—no, ordering—that she spend at least part of every day for the two weeks before the exhibition in his company.
Her eyes glittered with anger now rather than tears. ‘I don’t even like you very much at this moment, Gabriel.’
He gave another humourless smile as he crossed the distance between them in soft predatory strides. ‘If this is not liking me then long may it continue,’ he scorned harshly as Bryn took those same steps back, until she could go no farther, her spine pressed flush against the wall as she stared up at him. ‘I believe I could become addicted to the way you hate me, Bryn.’ Gabriel’s expression was grim as he once again held her imprisoned by placing his hands on the wall on either side of her head, his dark gaze deliberately holding hers as his head lowered and his mouth claimed hers.
A Bargain with the Enemy Page 13