CHAPTER TWO
GABRIEL SAUNTERED INTO his office and closed the door behind him. He felt energised, pleased with his decision to hire the new woman on the spot. Normally, something as trivial as this would be left to his Personnel department but the impulse had felt right.
On the spur of the moment, he telephoned the company where she had last worked and spoke for five minutes to the boss, who gave her a glowing reference.
So, he had had an interminable string of relatively competent secretaries. They had all looked good, and why shouldn’t he have gone for that? Some of them could even have been brought up to the standard he wanted had they not ended up becoming inconvenient. Lingering looks, offers to work as much overtime as he wanted, skirts that seemed to get shorter and tops more plunging as the days went on... All in all, pretty annoying in the end.
He wondered how this new one was dealing with the latest woman to have been dispatched from his life and he half-smiled when he imagined her tight disapproval.
Georgia had been exciting at the beginning. She had been enthusiastic and innovative in bed and, more importantly, had seemed to really take on board the ground rules for any relationship with him—namely, forget about looking for long-term commitment. So why had he got bored with her? She had certainly been eager to please and what man didn’t want a woman willing to bend over backwards for him? He wondered whether there were just too many women willing to bend over backwards for him: gorgeous, sexy, voluptuous women whose vocabulary largely centred on the word ‘yes’. In his high-octane, high-pressured life, the word ‘yes’ had always been a soothing counterpoint. Although of late...
He scrolled through the report in front of him and acknowledged another successful takeover that would allow him to expand certain aspects of one of his technology companies into Europe. In a rare moment of introspection, he grimly congratulated himself on the distance he had travelled from the foster-home kid with zero prospects to a man who ruled the world. He was sure he had felt more pleasure in the past when he had occasionally contemplated his achievements.
He had started on the trading floor, a sixteen-year-old gofer with an uncanny ability to read markets and predict trends. His first real kick had come when he had realised that the guys with the cut-glass accents and the country estates had begun to take him seriously when he spoke. They had started seeking him out and, with the instincts born of someone from the wrong side of the tracks who was hungry and ambitious, he had learnt how to ruthlessly use and eventually channel his talents. He had learnt when to share information and when to withhold it. He had learnt that money was power and power brought immunity from ever having to do what anyone else told him to do.
He became the man who gave the orders and he liked it that way. Thirty-two years old and he was untouchable.
The firm knock on the door snapped him out of his thoughts and he sat back in his chair and summoned her in.
This, Alice was thinking as she walked into his office, was why she could never like this guy. He had dialled a number and then left her to it and, from what she had gleaned during that conversation with Georgia of the husky voice, he was just the sort of inveterate playboy she despised.
But the job was going to be hers and she wasn’t going to let this type of challenge kill her chances. He seemed to have accepted her request for her weekends to remain sacrosanct and had hired her without the usual bank of interviews. She got the feeling that this was a departure for him. So she could bend a little in this area...
Her face, however, was rigid with disapproval as she sat in the chair indicated.
‘I assume,’ she began stiffly, ‘that you would want to see me to find out how my conversation went with your...girlfriend...’
‘Ex—ex-girlfriend. Hence the point of the conversation. So that she could be left in no doubt as to where matters stood.’ The waves of disapproval emanating from her were palpable. She looked as though she’d swallowed a lime and was painfully having to digest it. ‘I spoke to your ex-boss. Sounds like a nice man. I’m thinking you were never required to step up to the plate and have any awkward conversations with his ex-lovers...’
Was he being deliberately provocative? The lazy intensity of his gaze and the suggestion of a smile on his lips sent the blood rushing to her head and she tightened her jacket around her and sat up a little straighter. Her crossed legs felt as stiff as planks of wood, yet there was a curling sensation low down in her pelvis that she chose to ignore. Top of her mind right now was counting the ways she disliked her new boss. Good-looking he might be...staggeringly good-looking...but she decided on the spot that his personality left her cold.
In a way, it would make for an excellent working relationship. She had already gleaned from her phone call with the unfortunate Georgia that the problem with his past few secretaries, apparently, had been with them all developing inappropriate crushes on him.
‘I can’t believe he’s got one of his secretaries to do the dirty work for him!’ Georgia had wailed down the line. ‘Well, if you’re like the other one...’ she had sobbed, ‘Showing off your boobs and thinking you can snap him up, then you’re making a mistake! He’s never going to go there! He doesn’t like to mix work and play. He told me! So you can forget it!’
Georgia had lasted a mere two months, one week and three days. Was that the average duration of his relationships with women—a handful of months before he got bored and moved on to the next toy?
Thoughts that were usually deeply buried rose swiftly to the surface and she thought about her father—the years spent watching from the sidelines as he’d failed to return home, failed to pretend that he hadn’t been playing away, failed to pay lip service to a marriage he’d wanted to ditch but couldn’t afford to. She killed that pernicious, toxic trip down memory lane and dragged her wayward mind back to the present.
‘Tom was and is a very happily married man,’ Alice intoned. ‘So, no, there were no awkward phone calls to women.’ And you should make your own phone calls, she wanted to snap.
‘I gather from your expression that I’m not winning a popularity contest at this moment in time?’ Did he care one way or another? No. But if they were going to work together then there was no point in pretending to be a saint. Soon enough she would come into contact with the women who entered and left his life, barely producing a ripple. She would have to get used to fending off the occasional uncomfortable phone call and, if her moral high ground didn’t allow for that, then he needed to know right now.
‘She was very upset,’ Alice informed him, trying hard to avoid the trap of sounding judgemental, because what he got up to in his private life was none of her business. If he didn’t care who he shared it with, then that was up to him.
And yet, she couldn’t help feeling that there were sides to him that he shared with no one, and she couldn’t quite work out what gave her that impression—something veiled in his eyes that belied the image of a man who laid all his cards on the table. He didn’t give a damn whether she knew about his women or not but, yes, he did give a damn about other things, things she suspected he kept to himself.
Of course, it was fanciful thinking, because it didn’t take a genius to work out that a man who had reached the meteoric heights that he had would not be the open, transparent type. He would be the type who revealed only what he wanted to and only when it served his purposes.
‘I have no idea why,’ Gabriel said wryly. ‘I’d already informed her that I was pulling the plug on our relationship. Unfortunately, I think Georgia found it harder than she thought to accept the breakup.’
‘Do you usually farm difficult conversations out to your secretaries?’
The edge of criticism in her voice should have got on his nerves but Gabriel found that it didn’t. For once, he was in the company of a woman who seemed in no danger of developing a crush on him. Nor was she his type. He liked t
hem small and curvy with an abundance of obvious charm. Prickly and challenging didn’t work for him. Prickly and challenging smacked of an effort he had no enthusiasm for giving.
‘I can’t say the opportunity has arisen in the past few months,’ Gabriel drawled.
And it wouldn’t have happened now, Alice deduced, except for the fact that he had wanted to put her to the test. Maybe he thought that she would not be up to the task—too prim and proper. She didn’t have to hear him say that to know that it was what he had been thinking and she bristled even though a part of her knew that, yes, she took life seriously. She had always had to. There had not been much scope to develop a frivolous side when she had spent so much of her youth supporting her mother through the innumerable bouts of her father’s indiscretions.
Pamela Morgan had never seemed to have the strength to stand up to her bullying, philandering husband, so she had turned to Alice for moral support. By the time Rex Morgan had died, in a car accident, his wife had become a shadow of the girl who had married him in the false expectation of living happily ever after.
Alice’s dreams had been put on hold and, when she looked back, she could see that she had spent her teenage years laying down the foundations for the person she would later become: reserved, cautious, lacking in the carefree gaiety that might have been her due, given a different set of circumstances.
Her one experience with the opposite sex had merely served to drive home to her that it never paid to think that anything good was a foregone conclusion.
‘Is there anything else you’d like me to do now, and what time might I expect you to be in tomorrow morning? I don’t know what your diary is.’ The diary he never used.
‘I keep my diary on my phone. I’ll email you the contents. And tomorrow? I expect I’ll be in...at my usual time. Then I’m away for the next three days. Think you can handle being on your own?’
‘As I said, Mr Cabrera, I will do my utmost to deal with anything you can throw at me...’
* * *
Disgorged from the jumble of people on the tube three weeks later, it occurred to Alice that whatever had been thrown at her had obviously been full of all the right vitamins and proteins because she was enjoying her job. No, more than enjoying it. She got up early with a spring in her step, looking forward to the workload ahead of her and the slow creeping of responsibilities that were landing on her plate.
Her brain was being challenged in all sorts of ways. She was personally responsible for three large accounts. She had enrolled for her accountancy studies. And, by her standards, she was being paid a small fortune.
It was amazing, given the fact that she disapproved of much of what Gabriel stood for. She disapproved of his blatant womanising; she disapproved of the way he picked up lovers and then discarded them. He made no secret of the fact that he was as ruthless in his private life as he was in his working one. She disapproved of his supreme certainty that whatever he wanted would be his. She disapproved of the way every female employee, almost without exception, practically went down on bended knee whenever he deigned to address them. She disapproved of his ego.
On a daily basis, she fielded calls from women who wanted to talk to him and she could gauge from their hopeful, breathless voices that talking was not the only thing they wanted.
She disapproved of all of that.
The guy clearly didn’t have to try when it came to the opposite sex, so he didn’t. He was pursued and presumably, when he felt like it, he took one of his pursuers up on her offer and established something that couldn’t even really be called a relationship.
He was lazy.
But so beautiful, a little voice in her head absently pointed out, and Alice halted for a second so that the crowds parted around her, some of them muttering impatiently under their breath.
She wouldn’t deny that he had looks. The strong, aggressive lines of his lean, dark face were imprinted in her head with the force of a branding iron. She thought about him in passing more than she liked, then justified her lapses by telling herself that of course she would think of him—he was an exciting person to work for and she was only new to the job, hadn’t had time to get used to him yet.
Which was why she knew just how long his dark lashes were and the way they could conceal the expression in his eyes... Which was how she knew that the second he entered the office, bringing all that force and vitality behind him, he would roll up the sleeves of his shirt, walk past her and immediately ask for his coffee.
She doubted that he even really noticed her. She was his über-efficient secretary who did as she was told faster than the speed of light. For long periods of time, he barely glanced in her direction at all.
She picked up speed, suddenly irritated for allowing her thoughts to stray down forbidden paths. He didn’t notice her because she wasn’t his type.
His type was...
No, she wasn’t going to let her mind start speculating.
By now familiar with the impressive entrance foyer and well used to the hordes of workers and, later in the day, the tourists who were always milling about, Alice blanked everyone out as she strode purposefully towards the lift.
It was not yet eight. The three floors occupied by his company would only be partly peopled. She liked the relative quiet as she was transported upwards...and upwards and upwards...
She felt a curl of excitement as she exited the lift. She barely recognised the emotion. Her head was full of what she had to do that day. The last thing she was expecting was to enter her office to the sight of two figures having an argument in Gabriel’s office.
Through the slender panes of glass, Gabriel’s face was dark with anger. She couldn’t make out what was being said but his voice was low and deadly. The woman’s, on the other hand...
She should interrupt. She should try to manage this situation because it was just the glorified version of what she occasionally had to do on the phone.
He didn’t seem to care whether women chased him or not, or even whether they threw hissy fits down the end of the line, but he kept sharp dividing lines between work and play.
Obviously some poor woman had failed to pay attention to that dividing line and was paying the price.
And doesn’t it serve him right?
The thought sprang from nowhere but, once it took hold, it couldn’t be budged.
She had no idea who this woman was but why shouldn’t he sort this situation out himself? Just because he had all the money and power in the world, it didn’t mean that he could take the easy way out when it came to the situations he engendered with his women!
She calmly removed her lightweight coat and hung it up in the sliding cupboard. Then she made herself a cup of coffee and, with mug in hand, she sat at her desk and switched on her computer.
But she couldn’t focus. Her eyes kept sliding from her computer screen to the sketch being enacted behind Gabriel’s closed door. That said, she was still shocked when the closed door was banged open and out flew a woman with waist-length dark hair and a porcelain-white complexion. Her red dress was skin-tight, her heels were five inches high at the very least and she was trailing a pink-and-black-checked summer coat over her shoulder.
She looked furious. Furious and upset. She paused just long enough to glare at Alice through tear-filled eyes.
‘He’s a pig!’ She glared over her shoulder to where an impassive Gabriel was watching them both with steely-eyed coldness, then fixing enraged dark eyes on Alice. ‘But at least he hasn’t got one of those dolly birds working for him this time!’
‘Georgia...’ Gabriel’s voice silenced what promised to be a tirade. He spoke very quietly and with such contained menace that Alice felt sorry for the poor woman. ‘If you don’t leave my premises immediately, I will call security and have you thrown out. And you...’ He directed this at Alice who tilted her head to on
e side in perfect secretarial mode. ‘Kindly escort Georgia out of the building and then come into my office...’
She was barely aware of Georgia talking non-stop on the way down in the lift. The diminutive brunette was angry, bitter and, reading between the lines, humiliated because she had never been dumped in her life before. Men chased her and she was the one responsible for doing any dumping.
Alice could have told her that she had taken on far more than she could ever have hoped to chew with a man like Gabriel.
‘Well, at least you’ll be safe as houses,’ the other woman sniped as her parting shot. ‘Gabriel would never look twice at someone like you. And tell him from me—I hope he rots in hell!’
The spurt of courage that had prompted her to stay put in her office twenty minutes earlier had evaporated by the time Alice returned there, having successfully deposited Georgia on the street outside. Still, there was no way that she intended to apologise for not having interrupted the scene in his office.
With any luck, he would simply brush over the whole incident and the day would commence as it always did, at full tilt.
‘What the hell do you think you were playing at?’ were his opening words as she walked into his office with her tablet in her hand, ready for the day to begin.
‘I beg your pardon?’ She started as he swooped round his desk to perch on the edge so that he was looming over her, face as dark as thunder.
‘And don’t give me that “butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth” look! I saw the way you sneaked into the office and hid behind your computer!’
‘I did not sneak into my office, Gabriel...’ It always felt odd to call him by his Christian name but after three days of ‘sir’ and ‘Mr Cabrera’ and ‘Mr Cabrera, sir’ he had impatiently insisted that she drop the titles and call him Gabriel. It was one of those names that did not happily roll off the tongue. It was just too...sexy...
‘Nor,’ she asserted firmly, ‘did I hide behind my computer!’
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