‘I really don’t think memory lane is appropriate, do you?’ she said curtly, pulling out some change and dropping it on the table. ‘Considering you’re engaged to be married!’ She had thrown that at him as a timely reminder, in the hope that he would be stung into retreat, but it had the opposite response.
Instead of embarrassment, Gabriel threw his head back and laughed and, when his bout of amusement had subsided, he said softly, ‘You always did look very fetching when annoyed. And, speaking of inappropriate, isn’t it inappropriate to be jealous when you have someone in your life as well?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself!’ Alex said through gritted teeth, red with anger.
‘And there’s no need to pay your way.’
‘There’s every need to pay my way!’ She knew that she was teetering on the edge of sounding childish but her head felt as though it was going to explode. She just wanted to scream to an unkind fate Okay, you win! I give up!
‘Your car!’ She spun round to look at him and was further enraged to see the traces of amusement lingering on his beautiful mouth. What did he have to snigger about? ‘That great big gas-guzzling BMW I spotted outside the office, I take it?’
‘Tsk, tsk. Don’t tell me you’re going to deliver a sermon about global warming.’
‘I wouldn’t waste my breath!’
Gabriel was enjoying this rampant display of fire. The Alex he had known had been outspoken, yes, but her sharp tongue had never been directed at him. Oh, no, in his company she had been all soft and pliant and wonderfully warm and willing. He should have been outraged at most of what she had said to him since their unexpected crossing of paths, but he wasn’t. He was intrigued.
‘Okay. Hands up, in that case. The gas-guzzling monster is mine.’ He beeped it open from a distance and was surprised as she stormed towards it and then stopped dead, with her hand on the passenger door. ‘You’re asking me for a lift?’
‘You offered me one earlier.’
‘And you informed me that the bus was good enough.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘In that case, hop in. Give me your address. I’ll put it into my sat-nav…’ Now he was seriously curious but more than willing to go along for the ride. He wondered if these were delaying tactics before she accepted his wildly generous offer to give her back her job on a silver platter and decided that it probably was. Pride was all well and good, he thought dryly, but it didn’t pay the bills. He was slightly disappointed at this pedestrian conclusion to their little meeting, but she would have been a complete fool to have resisted his offer. Especially if she needed to support a half-baked layabout.
‘Did you own this when I met you? When you were riding around on a motorbike? Was this in storage somewhere? Having a little holiday while you passed the time of day with the hired hand?’
Gabriel’s good mood vanished like dew on a summer’s day and his lips thinned. ‘Don’t put yourself down. I don’t like it.’
Alex hadn’t realised the depth of her bitterness and was shocked by it. Yes, she still thought about him, which was only natural, but she’d really believed that she had come out the other side of the tunnel. Now a little voice whispered that surely she hadn’t. If she had, wouldn’t she have found someone else by now? Moved on? It was what people did after they had learnt their lessons. He had moved on. He was on the threshold of getting married! He had moved on big time!
She gave him her address and watched as he expertly typed it into the gizmo on his dashboard. She noticed that he hadn’t answered her question about whether or not the car had been his when he had been busy pulling the wool over her eyes and decided that it probably hadn’t. Didn’t really rich people change their cars as frequently as most normal people changed their toothbrushes?
‘You were going to go into hotel management,’ Gabriel remarked, pulling away from the kerb and glancing across to where she was as still and as stiff as a marble statue. Why had she asked for a lift if he was going to be treated to the silent treatment? he wondered.
‘Plans changed.’
‘How so?’
Alex twisted so that she was looking at his profile. When he turned and their eyes met, she forced herself not to look away. She was also, she decided, going to make a heroic effort to drop the bitterness, which wasn’t going to get either of them anywhere. She had had her say and now was the time to take a deep breath and move on.
‘You’ll see.’
For the first time, Gabriel felt a twinge of unease. He looked at her but she was staring out of the window. Her neck was long and slender, all the more apparent because her hair was so short, and at this angle the lashes framing her large almond-shaped eyes were long and thick. She had confessed early on in their relationship that she had always been a tomboy, the consequence of having so many brothers. She looked anything but a tomboy, even in her sloppy clothes and the woolly hat which she had stuck back on.
Shockingly, his body kicked in and that shook him so much that he tightened his grip on the steering wheel and applied his mind to the business at hand. The areas through which they drove alternated between cramped and rundown to just cramped until she pointed to a tiny terraced house at the end of the street and instructed him to get parked wherever he could because it was always hell finding an empty slot.
‘So you have a car?’
‘No. I only go on what I see.’
Her heart was beating fast and hard and nerves had kicked in with a vengeance. She literally felt sick and she had to take a few deep breaths before she opened her car door.
‘I’m…I’m really sorry…’ she said in a low voice, glancing at him over her shoulder.
‘Sorry for what?’ Gabriel threw her a sharp look but she was already turning away and slamming the door behind her.
‘Sorry for what?’
She didn’t reply, leaving ample time for him to brood over her enigmatic statement as she yanked off the woolly hat and inserted her key in the lock, pushing open the front door to a flood of light in the small hallway.
Gabriel had a few seconds, during which he took in that it was a bright, welcoming space but small. Much smaller than his place in Chelsea, which was only a two-bedroomed apartment but probably three times the size of her house. There also seemed to be a great deal of clutter. Coats, jackets and various other items of clothing were hung on a coat rack that was groaning under the weight and there was a little collection of shoes which seemed to have started out life in a neat line against the wall but had ended up in a chaotic heap.
Did the guy share the house with her? For some reason, he didn’t like that idea.
‘Wait here.’
‘With the door open? Or am I allowed to shut it?’
‘Just wait here and I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.’
Gabriel discovered that he was too bemused to argue the toss. He closed the door and leaned against it, his hands in his pockets while he idly scanned the space around him. Yellow walls, a small staircase leading up to what could only be one room, surely, and a bathroom. To his right, the door was ajar and he could glimpse pale walls and the edge of a flowered sofa. Ahead was probably the kitchen and some sort of study, he expected. Not much more.
She returned so silently from a door to the side that he didn’t initially register her presence and, when he did, it took him a second or two more before he registered another presence. A kid.
‘You never answered my question. Are you going to reconsider my job offer? It’s pretty generous, if I say so myself. In fact, I can’t think of any other person who would put themselves out to re-hire someone who had walked out of their job for the reasons you gave.’
‘Gabriel…this is Luke…’
Gabriel, forced to acknowledge the child, nodded and re-settled his gaze on Alex.
‘Mum…can I have some ice cream now? Can I? Susie said I could…’
‘Susie said no such thing, you cheeky little monkey!’
From behind him a tiny round g
irl emerged, grinning as she slung her bag over her shoulder and she ruffled Luke’s hair, which produced a little frown before he straightened it.
All of this Gabriel noticed in a daze because his brain had seized upon that one word—Mum—and stuck there. He had straightened and was scarcely aware of the enquiring look that Susie directed to Alex before she bustled out of the house.
‘Luke, say hi to Gabriel…’
‘Only if I get some ice cream.’
‘Out of the question, big boy!’ But Alex was laughing as she lifted him up and walked towards Gabriel. He looked like a man who had opened an envelope only to discover a letter bomb inside. Alex, on the other hand, was aware of a spreading sense of relief. This had been an inevitable meeting from the very first moment she had stepped into his office and realised that her past had finally caught up with her. She had made a half-hearted attempt to tell herself that things would be better left alone. That Gabriel was engaged, due to be married to a woman he loved and on the brink of starting his own family. That she would be doing him a favour in keeping this secret to herself. She had quit her job, prepared, in the heat of the moment, to just do a runner and deal with the fallout when it happened later down the road. But, time and again, her thoughts had returned to the glaring, naked, unavoidable truth: Luke deserved to know his father, even if it would forever be in the context of a less than ideal situation.
‘How was playschool? You’re a messy little grub!’ He was twisting in her arms now, curious to find out who the stranger in the house was.
Without the benefit of direct comparison, she was only now waking up to the startling physical similarity between father and son. The same dark hair, although Luke’s was a curly mop…the same dark eyes…and that olive tint that spoke of his Spanish ancestry. Also that smile and the tiny dimples that came with it. Her heart restricted and she felt a fierce, overwhelming, protective love for her son.
‘I’m going to give him a bath and settle him down,’ she said quietly. ‘You can leave if you want to or you can wait for me in the kitchen. I won’t be much longer than half an hour.’
Gabriel could no sooner leave than he could have grown wings and flown through the window. His brain, while taking in everything and already working out a series of consequences, was not functioning at all on another level. He was a father. In what could only be classified as a complete screw-up, he was a father, because there was no doubting paternity. Yes, he could make a song and dance about dates and times and then request a DNA test because he was nothing if not suspicious by nature, but the proof of his genetic link to the child was glaringly obvious. He could have been looking at a picture of himself aged four and a half.
He remained frozen to the spot for a few minutes after she had disappeared up the tiny staircase. He was aware of noises drifting down. Very slowly, he made his way to the kitchen and this time, when he inspected his surroundings, it was with renewed interest.
He had a child. And his child was being brought up in conditions that were, if not completely basic, then certainly bordering on it.
He felt the slow build of anger and brought all his formidable willpower into play to stamp on it. From where he was sitting, life as he knew it was over but he would still have to deal with the consequences.
All the paraphernalia of a young child imprinted itself in his head like a tattoo. There was some kind of booster seat gadget attached to one of the kitchen chairs and various plastic utensils on the draining board. He walked across to the fridge and examined the infantile drawings randomly spaced under fruit magnets.
Happy family drawings that ostensibly did not include any father figure.
So there was no guy in her life. When she had talked about her involvement with someone else, she had been referring to her son. Their son. He barely deciphered the strangely proportioned pictures he was staring at or the spidery writing underneath. In his head, his eyes were still locked in unwilling fascination on his son’s.
There were a thousand questions pounding through his head. In short, he couldn’t wait for her to return.
CHAPTER THREE
OF COURSE he wasn’t going to leave. Alex had given him the option but she had no doubt that Gabriel would be waiting for her when, after forty minutes, she eventually made her way down the stairs. Luke, sensing tension in the air, had played up, demanding story after story and finally holding her to ransom by extracting a promise of ice cream for the following day before he grudgingly consented to close his eyes.
Without her son as a physical barrier between her and Gabriel, preventing any displays of anger, she felt naked and vulnerable and fairly terrified as she made her way quietly down the stairs to the kitchen.
She reminded herself that she was no longer the impressionable teen she had been years ago when she had fallen under his spell. Then, she would have done anything he asked. She was the puppet and he the puppet master. When he had walked away from her she had fallen to pieces but pregnancy and having a baby, making her way in life as a single mother, moving to London so that she could build a career for herself, which had been nigh on impossible at home, with her family in Ireland, had toughened her up. She might be scared of his reaction but she wasn’t going to cower.
Those bracing sentiments were nearly blown to smithereens as she walked into the kitchen to find him sitting on one of the chairs. There was a half drunk glass of orange juice in front of him and he had swivelled the kitchen chair away from the table so that he was facing the door. Waiting for her like an executioner.
‘Would you like something hot to drink?’ she said, opting for some semblance of politeness before open warfare began. ‘Tea? Coffee? Or more orange juice?’
‘Is that all you have on offer? What about some whisky? Or gin? I think I’m in need of something a little stronger than tea or coffee.’ Faced with the unthinkable, Gabriel could feel himself descending into that unknown territory known as The Emotional Response. It was a route to be avoided at all costs. He had been presented with a problem and the problem would not go away because of his reaction to it.
‘I have some wine. It’s not very good but it’s the best I can do.’ Alex poured them both a glass and suggested they sit in the lounge. His silence as they walked there was even more unnerving than if he had been bellowing in her wake. In fact, it sent shivers racing up and down her spine.
‘So,’ he said once he was seated, ‘when were you going to tell me? Or were you going to bother to tell me at all?’
Alex gulped down some wine and then nursed her glass as she stared with a wildly beating heart at the rug on the floor, given to her courtesy of her parents, who had campaigned against her moving to London but, having finally bitten the bullet, had proceeded to kit her small house out with stuff they vaguely labelled unwanted bits and pieces but which she knew had been bought new. She visibly jumped when he repeated his question in a voice with icy bite.
‘When did you find out?’ Gabriel changed tack, enraged by her silence. Was he supposed to feel sorry for her? Her drawn face and miserable, sagging demeanour suggested it but, having had his foundations rocked to their core, his sympathy levels were non-existent. He had never considered the whole issue of children but, when he had, it had been in an abstract way. They would come along at some point in time, as yet undecided. He was engaged to be married but not once had he considered Cristobel as a mother, although he would have been hard pressed to analyse why. If pushed, he would have said that he just wasn’t into kids. He would be a father because that would have been the expectation.
Now, faced with the reality of his own child, he was outraged that he was five years late in having any input. During that time, had there been any men on the scene? Of course there would have been! She might not be all curves, but she was as sexy as hell. Any guy with two eyes in his head would see that.
‘Well?’ he asked in a clipped voice, keeping his unwanted thoughts about other men well to the back of his mind. ‘Are you going to answer me or are you go
ing to sit there in silence and expect me to mind read?’
‘You’re making me nervous!’
‘You deserve to feel nervous.’
‘Why would that be?’ She raised angry eyes to him and clenched her hands into tense fists. ‘You’re the one who did the vanishing act because you didn’t want to be tied down to a foreigner you met in passing! You’re the one who lied about his identity so that when I found out I was pregnant and tried tracing you I kept running into a brick wall!’ Suddenly the room seemed way too small and she stood up and walked across to the window ledge, perching on it and gripping the wood so tightly that her knuckles were white. She felt as though she had to put a little distance between them because the closer she was to him, the less capable she was of thinking rationally. It was like being eighteen all over again and she didn’t like the feeling. Being held hostage by her emotions once could be called an excusable error of judgement. Being held hostage by her emotions a second time would definitely come under the heading of suicidal.
‘I was nearly four months pregnant when I found out and already back in England. In fact, at university. Thinking that my life could carry on as normal after…after Spain.’ She could remember the shock of finding out as though it had happened only yesterday. The dawning awareness that she hadn’t seen her period, always erratic, in a while. The home testing pregnancy kit. The horrible feeling of the whole world falling away from under her feet when that telltale little line had appeared. And then everything that came afterwards.
Gabriel flushed darkly. Mistakes, he acknowledged, had been made. Not wilfully, but even so. They would have to be rectified. That was life.
‘I tried to contact you.’ With a sigh, she resumed her place on the flowered upholstered chair facing him. She couldn’t quite meet his eyes so instead she stared at the pattern on the sofa, also flowered. Both generous gifts from her parents, who had dug deep into their savings to help her out. They were the ones who had been there for her. Not the guy sitting opposite, who had cleared off with no forwarding address.
A Spanish Birthright aka The Secret Spanish Love-Child Page 4
