‘I’ve learnt…to…I prefer to give Luke home-cooked food,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I can manage a casserole but anything fancier than that is out of the question.’
‘So he’s yet to sample a soufflé…’
Alex dipped past him towards the sitting room at the front of the house. She knew that this polite banter was his way of making the best of a bad situation and she would have to go along for the ride or else make life a constant battleground for them both, and inevitably for Luke. She couldn’t do that. But dredging up memories of their brief shared past was more than she felt she could handle. Yet where was the common ground between them now? They were operating in an unreal space, where the normal rules of social engagement were suspended.
‘What happens now?’ she asked abruptly, as soon as they were sitting. Gabriel on the sofa, she on the comfy chair by the fireplace. Her half finished glass of wine was still there and she took a sip but it had gone warm.
‘I didn’t see any mention of Luke in that article…’ she carried on, drawing up her long legs and then resting her chin on her knee.
‘Because I didn’t mention him. There was no point getting into the nitty-gritty and, besides, I have little respect for reporters. The world will find out about you both when I’m good and ready.’
‘You mean you haven’t told your fiancée the truth?’
‘Ex-fiancée. And no. Time enough for that.’
‘What on earth did you tell her?’
Gabriel shrugged. ‘I told her that ours was not a relationship that was destined to last the course and, as such, we should break it off before we both made a mistake.’
‘That little speech should have come easy to you, Gabriel. You must have had years to practise it.’
Gabriel looked at her broodingly. There would be no profit in taking up this futile conversational thread. His mission was to get her on board and the only way he could do that was via dialogue. ‘Cristobel will have no trouble in finding my replacement.’
‘That’s not as easy as you think!’ The words were out before she could do something useful, like swallow them back and give herself a stern reprimand for even going there. There was a thick, pulsating silence, during which Alex could feel the slow crawl of embarrassed colour into her face.
‘What are you trying to say?’ he murmured in the sort of lethally sexy undertone that had always been able to send her pulses skyrocketing into the stratosphere. ‘That I’m still on your mind?’
‘Of course not!’ Alex shot back wildly. Their eyes met and, for a brief moment, she could feel her senses go into agonised, melting free fall. With a sense of deep mortification, she was aware of a dull ache between her legs and the tickle of dampness that proved the effect he was having on her.
‘Because it’s nothing to be ashamed of…I still happen to find you a very attractive woman…’
‘How can you sit there and say something like that when you’ve only just broken off your engagement? How fickle are you?’
In the space of a heartbeat, Gabriel could feel the tables turn on him. She seemed to have developed a talent for doing that. From nowhere, she could generate an argument of ridiculous proportions. ‘I was never in love with Cristobel,’ he heard himself say and then immediately wondered why the hell he had felt the need to justify himself. Since when did he ever do that?
‘You weren’t in love with her?’ Her heart skipped a beat and she put that down to her surprise at his flat, unvarnished statement. She also had a moment of pure elation and she put that down to the fact that, without love in the equation, there would be a lot less to feel guilty about. And wasn’t that cause for elation? Her life had suddenly become so complicated that any help in reducing her stress levels was a reason to celebrate!
‘No, I wasn’t in love with her, Alex,’ Gabriel said heavily, frowning at her disapproving expression. ‘You should feel better because of that,’ he pointed out through gritted teeth because he seemed to have lost the reins of the conversation, which had been going very nicely. ‘You weren’t responsible for destroying the love match of the century.’
‘Why were you going to marry her?’
‘Why is any of this relevant?’
‘You should never answer a question with a question.’ Alex smirked. ‘I distinctly remember you telling me that once.’
Gabriel threw his arms up in a gesture that was exotically foreign and muttered an oath under his breath. ‘It was a union that made sense,’ he offered.
Obviously the wrong choice of words because she looked at him squarely and then mused, ‘A union that made sense. A bit like what you had in mind for us…’
Gabriel opened his mouth to correct her on using the past tense when it was very much still his current intention to settle upon his son the mantle of legitimacy, whether she liked it or not, but he decided to steer clear of reminding her of that.
‘I hope you appreciate the fact that, as yet, neither you nor Luke have been mentioned…’
‘Remind me why I should appreciate that?’
‘Because I don’t suppose you’d want the paparazzi camping on your doorstep.’
Alex could feel her brain lagging behind. She was still caught up in the fact that he would have approached marriage as a sensible business arrangement. Proof that there was a block of ice where his heart should be, was fairly piling up.
‘You never used to be so cold,’ she said, thinking aloud. ‘I mean, unless you hid it really well.’
‘You’ve lost me.’ Gabriel flushed darkly and scowled. Thinking back to those heady times with her was like remembering a different person. He hadn’t strolled on a promenade eating an ice cream cone since he had been with her. Incognito. Being Lucio had been a far cry from being Gabriel Cruz. Unfortunately, this was his life. Promenade strolls eating ice cream and pretending the world as he knew it didn’t exist had been enjoyable but it was a thing of the past. And being reminded of that served no purpose. Nor did he care for the implication that he was some kind of soulless monster because he happened to take his responsibilities seriously.
Nor, for that matter, did he care for the expression she was wearing on her face, which seemed to be a combination of incomprehension and pity.
‘Have I?’ Alex asked, staring off into the distance before settling her thoughtful gaze on his face.
‘But all this is by the by. I haven’t come here for a character assessment, Alex.’
‘No. Well, I’m hoping you haven’t come here to repeat your offer of marriage because I haven’t changed my mind. Cristobel,’ she added for good measure, ‘might be prepared to enter into a loveless business arrangement with you because the perks are good, but I’m not.’
‘Whoever mentioned anything about marriage?’ Gabriel shrugged. ‘I offered to do the decent thing; you turned me down because you’d prefer to occupy the moral high ground.’
Alex was disconcerted to discover that she was vaguely disappointed at his rapid retraction of his marriage offer. ‘I’m not occupying any moral high ground.’ Her voice had risen fractionally and she took a deep breath.
‘No importa. It doesn’t matter.’
‘No. No, it doesn’t. So…thank you for sparing me the paparazzi camping on the front lawn, although if the world is dying to know the details of your broken engagement, then I guess it’s just a matter of time before it all comes out in the wash and the paparazzi get here. I can handle it. I’m very good at saying no comment and, believe me, I don’t want my life disrupted any more than you do.’
‘You misunderstand. Disruption is inevitable for both of us,’ Gabriel drawled. ‘However, it will be lessened by your being out of the country until after the story breaks and the fuss dies down.’
‘Out of the country?’
‘Out of the country.’
‘You’re going to shuffle us off to some remote place in the middle of nowhere, hide us away for an indefinite period of time…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Gabriel stood up
and Alex watched him in confusion. ‘The casserole. I can smell it.’
Alex leapt to her feet with a little shriek of alarm, temporarily distracted by the prospect of eating the charred remains of chicken and peas.
‘I’m not being ridiculous!’ She reverted to his sweeping solution to the problem of unwelcome publicity as she dished out two plates of extremely well cooked chicken and rice.
‘I’m not going to shuffle you off to any remote place. Frankly, I can’t think of one woman who would be less amenable to being shuffled off anywhere than you.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning that you’re like a Rottweiler off the leash.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’ She wondered how they had reached the point where insults were being traded back and forth like two combatants fighting in a ring. A belated sense of fair play made her realise that perhaps, and only a very small perhaps, she wasn’t being quite as helpful as she could.
His life had been a lot more disrupted than hers and he was trying to deal with it without drama. A pack of reporters in front of her house, she reluctantly acknowledged, would be hellish. If he resented her sudden, disastrous reappearance in his life and all the chaos it had brought in its wake, then how much more was he resenting her now, when she stubbornly refused to listen to a word he had to say because she was just too busy shouting at him?
‘But point taken,’ she muttered, sliding her eyes to him and then just as quickly sliding them away again. She reacted against every single thing he said because he just seemed to rouse frightening, primitive feelings in her that made a nonsense of her normally phlegmatic, upbeat personality. Hadn’t she coped with the fear when she’d discovered that she was pregnant and the loneliness of having her child without the support of the father around? Yes. So that surely pointed to an inner strength, even though one look at that darkly handsome face made her feel weak and panicky. But if he could be an adult about the situation, then she could as well.
‘Finally. We’re getting somewhere.’ He pushed aside his empty plate and angled his long body back from the table so that he could cross his legs. ‘My parents have yet to find out what’s really happening. I have only told them about breaking off the engagement.’
‘I bet they were overjoyed at that,’ Alex mumbled with a sinking feeling. Just when their son was about to tie the knot with the perfect woman, along came a serpent in the garden of Eden to wreck the whole plan.
‘They have accepted it. But I wanted to tell them about Luke face to face. Which is where you come in. I will arrange for us to have a little…holiday in Spain. We can break the news to them together and introduce them to their grandson. It will also allow me time to…get to know Luke. Undiluted time. As a bonus, we will be out of the country and away from media speculation.’
From a detached point of view, it certainly sounded like a brilliant idea. However, Alex felt far from detached when she considered the suffocating prospect of her and Luke spending undiluted time with Gabriel.
‘What about your work?’ she asked, drifting off with sickening ease into all sorts of scenarios that would prove a constant, unremitting threat to her mental health. Gabriel eating meals with them, lounging around a beach with a towel slung over his broad shoulders, laughing and relaxed and horribly, horribly disturbing. ‘You have an empire to run!’ she blurted out, fighting against the image of the old Lucio slotting neatly into this new Gabriel, thereby blurring the lines of hostility that were so useful.
‘Needs must.’ He shrugged, coolly polite as he detected the horror in her voice. ‘Sacrifices must be made. I am prepared to make them.’
‘Your parents will hate me!’ She speared a piece of chicken with her fork and looked at it miserably. ‘They must be so disappointed at how things turned out between you and Cristobel and, when they find out the reason why, they’re going to have me hung, drawn and quartered.’ Having never met his parents, she was already imagining them as older versions of Gabriel. Cold hearted, ambitious, fabulously wealthy and one hundred per cent approving of a marriage based on suitability. She didn’t think that they would be falling over themselves to welcome a jeans-wearing foreigner from a humble background who had been silly enough to have a fling with their highly eligible son and get pregnant. She cast her mind around for a punishment that would befit such a crime and could come up with nothing.
Gabriel felt his lips twitch with sudden, unannounced amusement. She had always had a flair for the dramatic.
‘Maybe you could face them on your own,’ she carried on, her voice adopting a wheedling tone. ‘Luke and I could stay somewhere…else and then they could come and visit. For a couple of hours to start with…’
He was already shaking his head before she could get to the end of her sentence and she threw him a baleful, sulky look from under her lashes.
‘You’re being unrealistic. And they won’t have you hung, drawn and quartered. They’re not barbarians. Naturally, they are deeply conventional people and they will find it odd that we have no intention of legalising our union for the sake of our child, but I’m sure I can bring them round to your point of view.’
‘Right.’ Alex was not in the least bit mollified by his reassurances.
‘So, now that you have agreed to this small step, we have to discuss the practicalities. I will get my people to see about selling this place and you can refund any money you borrowed to your parents. You will have to hand in your notice at your job, but that will be a formality because you’ll be leaving for Spain next week. Is your passport in order? Is Luke on it?’
Alex looked at him open-mouthed. She felt as though she had suddenly been tossed inside a washing machine which had been turned to the spin cycle.
‘I can’t sort all this stuff out in a matter of a few days!’ she gasped at the first immediate difficulty staring her in the face.
‘You don’t need to.’ Gabriel paused and looked away for a few seconds before returning his dark, brooding eyes to her face. ‘You were on your own once. You won’t be on your own again.’
His words, low, husky and uttered with driven intensity, brought a flush of colour to Alex’s face. They also gave her an incredibly warm feeling somewhere deep inside her. She had carefully cultivated a spirit of independence, knowing that one small person depended on her, but to know that she was no longer on her own was a seductive thought.
‘I…I will want to meet my son before we head off to Spain,’ Gabriel said abruptly. It had only been a matter of a few days and he hadn’t known whether keeping away had been a good thing or not. Should he have rushed to bond with Luke? No precedent had ever been set in his life for this sort of situation and he had found himself immobilised by indecision, finally falling back on a businesslike approach to the problem. Sort out the details first and then meet his son, get to know him. It was a thought that made him curiously nervous and Gabriel was not a man accustomed to nerves. He cleared his throat and helped himself to another glass of wine. ‘Is there anything I should know?’
‘Anything like what?’ Alex enquired, mystified.
‘Likes? Dislikes?’ He had barely registered the boy when he had last seen him and had serious doubts about his ability to bond with the child, partly because he had been absent for such a long time and partly because children had never figured in his life at any level. They could have belonged to another species. He just didn’t have a natural empathy with kids and he couldn’t see how that was going to change now, whatever the circumstances. He had avoided dwelling on that, choosing instead to focus all of his attention on the nitty-gritty of calling off the wedding and getting his secretary to initiate the process of rearranging all of his forthcoming meetings. Now, however, lay the unknown territory of meeting his son. It was a terrain charged with unseen landmines. What if the kid hated him? What then?
‘He likes all the usual things a four-year-old boy likes,’ Alex said slowly. ‘You know…’
‘Well, actually, no. I don’t.’
/> ‘Are you nervous?’
‘Of course I’m not nervous!’ Gabriel thought it right that he should dispel any such hint of weakness. ‘He must be into certain things, though. Trains? Cars?’ Or was he too young for things like that? Gabriel didn’t know. He was an only child. There were no nieces or nephews clamouring for presents and interaction on birthdays and Christmas. He had friends and a couple of them had young children but they had always been safely out of sight whenever he had been around.
‘He likes planes,’ Alex told him. ‘He has a collection of them.’
‘Good. We already have something in common. I own two.’
‘Which is something we have to talk about,’ Alex told him, laying down her ground rules before she discovered that each and every one of them was being broken. ‘I have tried to bring Luke up to be grateful and happy for small things. I don’t want him growing up to be a spoiled brat. So don’t think that you can swan in here and shower him with expensive stuff.’
Gabriel frowned. For a start, he didn’t like being told what to do. He also didn’t care for her questioning his parenting methods before he’d even met his son properly.
‘Don’t expect me to sit back and watch my own child live in poverty…’
‘Of course I expect that you want to contribute financially to his well-being! I’m just saying…’
‘You’re just saying that you have a right to lay down whatever laws you want. For the past four years, you’ve had it your way. Now I’m here and things are going to change. I have offered you marriage. You turned that down. Fine. But the alternative will not be constant warfare. We will present a civil and united front to my parents. And when we return from Spain, you will move out of this house into something I deem suitable for my son.’
‘What do you deem suitable?’ Alex asked in genuine curiosity because a guy who owned a couple of planes probably had a very different idea of suitable to most other normal human beings.
A Spanish Birthright aka The Secret Spanish Love-Child Page 7
