‘Then let’s forget about it and stroll back down to the village,’ Alice teased as she stroked his cheek and watched the fire blaze in his dark eyes. ‘We could have that scone and that cup of tea. Tea can be very refreshing...might cool us down...’
‘You’re a witch,’ Gabriel said in an unsteady voice he barely recognised. He tugged down the jeans, told her to step out of them.
She kept the jumper on. Being half-naked like this, with her bottom half-exposed, felt decadent.
‘Now, legs apart,’ he commanded.
Having him down there, standing perfectly still when she wanted to collapse because her legs felt as wobbly as jelly, was exquisite agony.
He explored her, taking his time. It surprised him that he’d never made love outdoors and he thought that next time he would make sure they brought a rug with them.
Next time? Yes, there would be a next time, because he couldn’t get enough of her...
Their love-making was basic, wild and hard. He hoisted her up so that her legs were wrapped around him. She could have been as light as a feather.
The sensation was intense. Her buttocks clenched as he drove her down on him and she came over and over, splintering into a thousand glorious pieces.
Afterwards, the walk into the village was languorous. Sated, Alice had never felt happier. It was almost as though they were a normal couple—ducking into shops, laughing at some of the souvenirs on sale, stopping to buy ice-creams. Mr and Mrs Average on a day out.
What a joke! She reminded herself that they certainly were not Mr and Mrs Average, or Mr and Mrs Anything.
He certainly wasn’t average! In fact, he cut an impressive and madly exotic figure next to his paler counterparts as they dipped in and out of the shops. People stared. He didn’t seem to notice, but she did. Women of all ages stole glances; wondered; maybe thought that he might be someone famous.
For the first time in her life, Alice felt as though she had stepped out of the shadows and become a person in her own right, someone who wasn’t so surrounded by barriers, that she could be free to just...be.
They had a very long lunch in one of the three pubs in the village and it was only when they were emerging that she bumped into one of the ladies whom she knew visited her mother on a regular basis.
Alice had never socialised with Maggie Fray, but they had met on a couple of occasions, and now the older woman stopped and looked at Gabriel with twinkling, knowing eyes.
‘So this is the young man your mother says you talk so much about.’ She held out her hand with a smile while, mortified, Alice tried to shrink away from the grey, inquisitive eyes.
‘My boss...’ Alice said in a thin, high voice, but minutes before they had been holding hands and that begged the question of what exactly the relationship between boss and secretary was.
The older woman’s smiling eyes seemed to be making all the right assumptions.
‘Well,’ she said comfortably, ‘you two seem to make a very good match. And I know your mother would love to hear the sound of wedding bells in the not too distant future!’
On a scale of one to ten of hideous conversations, Alice rated this one at somewhere around twelve. She barely heard the rest of whatever Maggie was chattering about.
How much had she told her mother over the many weeks that she had been working for Gabriel?
A lot. They were accustomed to sharing. Even if she had made a big effort to play down the way she felt about Gabriel, she unknowingly would have given the game away because her mother could read her the way no one else could. Her mother would have been able to interpret her hitched silences, the expression on her face whenever she mentioned his name, the number of times she talked about him and the number of times she didn’t...
Her arrogant, self-centred, infuriating, egotistic boss who was also brilliant, inspiring, unbelievably smart, charismatic and funny. And the fact that Gabriel had shown up at the house, uninvited, unannounced and apparently with no other purpose but to see her, would have given credence to whatever fairy stories her mother had been concocting in her head.
‘People in a small village are inclined to gossip,’ Alice said weakly as Maggie disappeared towards one of the shops, having given them a cheery wave goodbye. ‘It’s very annoying. Because...er...most of the time, what they say has no basis in truth whatsoever...’ Alice couldn’t bring herself actually to say out loud what the older woman had said. To mention that word ‘wedding’ would open a can of worms and she didn’t know how she would be able to stuff them back in.
Gabriel was ominously silent.
He should have seen this coming. He had warned her off but he should have clocked that there was something intensely vulnerable about her.
‘Vulnerable’ should have hit his radar and generated the automatic ‘no trespassing’ response, but somehow his guard had been down. It was what novelty and lust did when they came together—a lethal combination.
‘What the hell was the woman talking about?’ He beeped open the car and climbed into the driver’s seat, but he didn’t start the engine. Instead, he waited for her to follow suit, and then he turned to her with a cool, unreadable expression.
‘I told you...’ A hint of defiance had crept into her voice. ‘In a village there’s always gossip. Maggie is one of my mother’s friends and somehow she’s managed to get hold of the wrong end of the stick.’
‘Because out of nowhere your mother somehow gleaned, erroneously, that we’re...what Alice? About to tie the knot? Walk up the aisle? Start believing in fairy stories and building castles in the sky?’
‘You’re so bloody cynical!’ she exploded. ‘And no. I haven’t been telling my mother anything. I’m not so stupid that I’d fall into the trap of thinking that you’re there for anything but the short term, Gabriel!’
‘I’m not going to get into a pointless argument with you over this.’ He started the engine and began driving slowly away from the village.
Alice couldn’t credit that they had been making love not so long ago. She couldn’t believe that she had been so stupid to think that, if she blanked out the fact that she was hopelessly in love with him, everything could tick along nicely until such time as...what, exactly? He got bored? Became indifferent?
Was she so desperate that she would abandon all her principles just to steal a bit more time with him?
Was it any wonder that he had become so lazy over the years when women like her allowed him to get away with doing exactly as he wanted?
She had fallen under his spell and been mesmerised. She had slept with him in Paris; had kidded herself that she could walk away and carry on working for him without any repercussions. But there had been repercussions. She had been so aware of him, so acutely sensitive to his presence, that she had scarcely been able to function.
He had found his way to the very essence of her and he had taken up residence there.
She had never been an addict of anything in her life, but she had become addicted to him. Was that why she had fallen right back into bed with him— because he had happened to show up at her house and had told her, in that dark, dangerous, sexy voice of his, that he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head?
Or maybe she had been injected with some sort of crazy, dare-devil urge because her mother—her always hesitant, always careful mother; her mother to whom she had preached the good sense of not getting involved with a man because just look at what she had ended up marrying—had had the courage to embark on a relationship?
Or was it just a combination of things that had galvanised her into the worst choice she had ever made in her entire life?
She could find a million reasons to justify why she had done what she had done, but in the end what it amounted to was that she had climbed onto a roller-coaster ride and now it was time to climb off.
Gabr
iel Cabrera was the equivalent of an extreme sport and she just didn’t have the constitution for it.
She blanked her mind to the thought of the endless days and nights ahead of her which would not contain him in them. She would have to hand in her notice, find work somewhere else.
‘It would only be a pointless argument,’ Alice half-shouted, ‘because you don’t want to have it! And, just so you know, I’ll be handing in my notice first thing on Tuesday morning.’
‘You’re being ridiculous!’
‘And that being the case,’ she continued as her anger, mostly with herself, spilled over, ‘I might as well tell you that you may think you’re being fair by warning women off you, just in case they get it into their silly little heads that you might actually have a heart buried there somewhere, but you’re not. You’re just taking care of your conscience. You don’t want to have to try at anything that isn’t work. You’ll end up a lonely, sad man with stacks and stacks of money but no one to share it with!’ She was staring at his profile which could have been hewn from rock.
There was no getting through to him. Why hadn’t she been strong enough to wise up to that before? Dig deep below the charm, the looks, the charisma and the formidable intelligence and there was...nothing.
Those glimpses of gentleness, tenderness, vulnerability had all been an illusion. She shut the door on any other interpretation. She was shaking like a leaf and kept herself as rigid as a plank of wood to control emotions that threatened to burst their fragile containment.
‘And on that note,’ Gabriel drawled, ‘I’ll drop you back to your house. There will be no need for you to return to work. You can consider that little speech of yours a suitable letter of resignation.’
They were at the house. She hadn’t even been aware that he was driving.
He reached across to click open her door and she drew back, horrified at how her body reacted even now, when everything was falling apart.
‘If there’s anything personal that you need to take from your office,’ he said coolly, ‘then you can get in touch with Personnel. They can forward it to you.’ Their eyes tangled and Alice was the first to look away.
She couldn’t find room in her head to accommodate everything she was feeling: the horror of the end; an overwhelming sadness; self-recrimination.
‘There’s nothing I want to take with me.’ Her voice betrayed nothing of what she was feeling. She stepped out of the car, walked towards the house and she didn’t look back.
CHAPTER TEN
FROM WORKING IN one of London’s landmark buildings, Alice’s life returned to normality with a deafening thud.
One month after she had walked away from Gabriel, she was now back in employment, working as a legal secretary in a small solicitor’s firm in the outskirts of London. She had gone from towering views of the city to the nondescript view of the back of a local supermarket car park. She had moved from the most exciting man on the planet to a middle-aged chap who handled small cases and apparently took himself off to play golf twice a week.
The highlights had grown out of her hair and Paris and everything else seemed like a dream.
She had not heard a word from Gabriel and, much as she had not expected to, the hope with which she awoke each morning turned into the sour disappointment that went to sleep with her each night.
Walking back to her house, her mobile phone rang and, when she picked up the call, it was from her mother.
Pamela Morgan’s recovery was coming along in leaps and bounds. In fact, treatment with the therapist had been reduced to once a month. Now that her love affair was out in the open, it seemed to be all she could talk about, and Alice, having met the man in question, had to concede that her mother was in safe hands.
Time had moved on, her mother had told her; she was in a different place from the one she had been in when she had married.
The implication was that Alice should have reached a similar conclusion—that time had moved on and she was no longer the girl growing up in a scary, dysfunctional family or the girl who had had a brief fling with someone who’d turned out not to be Mr Right.
The implication was that there was a time and a place to be careful and Alice was young enough to take life by the scruff of the neck and take chances...
Alice had not become bogged down in discussing her situation. She could have told her mother that she had taken enough chances with Gabriel to last a lifetime, but she kept quiet.
Now, her mother was talking to her about a holiday she planned to go on and marvelling that her life had been turned around so dramatically.
Alice listened, contributing here and there as she stepped off the bus and headed back to the house.
It was an overcast, muggy day and although it wasn’t dark, far from it, she was still surprised that the lights in the house were all off because she knew that Lucy would be in, getting herself ready for a hot weekend in Venice with the guy she had been seeing for the past few months.
It was a little after eight. Overtime was not expected but she had stayed on until just after six and had then gone out for a quick drink with two of the other girls from the office, who had a Friday-night routine in which she had been immediately included.
She was exhausted.
She let herself into the house, dropping her bag by the door, and heading for the kitchen whilst removing her lightweight summer jacket at the same time.
With the lights all switched off, the downstairs of the house was bathed in a grey twilight that Alice found rather soothing, so she didn’t bother turning on any lights, instead carolling up the stairs to let her house mate know that she was home.
The last time she had arrived home unexpectedly without loudly announcing her arrival, she had discovered Lucy and her loved-up guy in the sitting room about to embark on a compromising position, and Alice had been horribly embarrassed. Since then, entries were always as noisy as possible.
The last person in the world she’d expected to see was in the kitchen chair and he’d been there for the past hour.
Gabriel had been driven to seek her out. The past month had been hellish, his worst possible nightmare. He had been unfocused, unable to concentrate and in a permanently foul mood. People had scuttled in the opposite direction the second they had heard him striding through the office, on the hunt for someone on whom he could vent.
He had even broken his own personal record by dating six women, none of whom had progressed beyond polite conversation over dinner. In their company, he had spent an inordinate amount of time checking his watch.
He had refused to give in.
Hell, the woman had burned him off not once, but twice!
It hadn’t helped that he had not managed to find a suitable replacement for her. He was on secretary number three and the omens were not good.
He had cursed himself on more than one occasion that he had been lenient enough to let her leave without duly working out her notice. On reflection, he should have made her do the two weeks required.
His nights had been no better than his days. Work had failed to do what it should have done, distracted him from thoughts he neither liked nor invited.
He missed her.
He missed everything about her. He missed the way she spoke her mind; the way she laughed; the way she looked at him. He even missed the way she smelled. And all that was why he was now where he was—sitting in her kitchen, having despatched her friend, who had allowed him entry only after a questioning the likes of which hadn’t been seen since The Spanish Inquisition.
‘I thought you’d never get back. Where the hell have you been anyway?’ Casual voice to mask his far from casual emotions. Controlled but barely breathing.
About to reach for a bottle of water from the fridge, something to quench her thirst after three glasses of wine, Alice nearly fainted in
shock at the sound of that voice which had haunted her for the past month.
She spun round and stared at the figure in the chair, speechless.
Her legs turned to jelly; she collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs facing him and just stared, unable to believe the evidence of her eyes.
‘I’ve been waiting for over an hour.’ Had she been out with a guy? No. If she had, she surely wouldn’t have returned home so early. Maybe she’d been on a date which had been a disaster. He enjoyed the thought of that. He had been on enough disaster dates himself.
‘Gabriel...’ It was the only thing she could find to say. Her mouth was dry and her heart was pumping so hard that it felt as though it would burst.
‘Your house mate let me in.’
‘Lucy.’ This was a surreal conversation. She couldn’t peel her eyes away from him. He looked...haggard. He was still in his suit but he had disposed of his tie and the top two buttons of his white shirt were undone. For a man who always managed to look carelessly elegant, he was dishevelled.
‘Right.’
‘Why are you here?’ Alice knew that she should sound firmer, angrier, more resolute. Her voice was thin and reedy and she cleared her throat and continued to look at him in the half-light: beautiful. Even drawn as he was, he was still the beautiful guy who had lodged like a burr under her skin and refused to budge.
And suddenly the anger that should have been there rose to the surface—because, she thought, she must not forget that this was the same emotionally lazy man who had walked away from her without a backward glance because he had got it into his head that she might, just might, be interested in more than just a romp in the sack!
This was the same guy who had nothing to give.
‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘Let me guess why you’re here. You can’t get to grips with any of the secretaries you’ve had to replace me. Well, if you think that I’m going to come along and do a good deed by handing over, then you’re wrong. I’m not going to be doing that. You’ve wasted your time, so you can leave. You know where the front door is.’ She was trembling and she wrapped her arms around her to steady her nerves.
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