The room was big. In fact, vast by any standard. But not so vast that she could possibly direct her eyes to a safe spot. She reluctantly turned around and looked at him and her skin tingled and her pulses raced and she had to fight down the inappropriate desire to swoon. She wished he would just put something on but there was no way that she was going to repeat that simple request for fear of him jumping to the conclusion that she was affected by the sight of him. Which he would, in a heartbeat. Gabriel was anything but dim when it came to reading female responses.
Then another thought struck her. Did he even possess pyjamas? He never had when she had known him. Of course she had loved nothing more than that, back in those heady times, but, in their current situation, she could think of nothing worse for her peace of mind.
‘You’re staring,’ Gabriel drawled. ‘Should I feel flattered?’
Alex bristled. His behaviour had been exemplary over the past few days. She had demanded a businesslike approach to their situation and he had obliged. But this was his home turf and she suddenly felt very vulnerable.
‘I hope you brought something…decent…with you…’
‘Something decent?’ Gabriel’s brows knitted together in a perplexed frown. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Pyjamas. Long johns. Something of that nature.’
‘Why would I have done that? It’s not as though I was actually expecting my parents to put us in the same room.’
‘Which they wouldn’t have done if you had had the common sense to explain the situation to them.’
‘Old ground, Alex. We’ve been put in the same bedroom. Get over it.’
‘Fine!’ She folded her arms and glared at him belligerently. The naked torso was really getting under her skin. As was the way he was deliberately making no effort to conceal it. ‘But, just so that you understand the ground rules, I didn’t have to come here and sharing a room with you wasn’t my choice! I have no option but…but…’
‘But I’m to keep my wandering hands to myself. Is that it?’ Gabriel asked in a cool, amused voice. He strolled very slowly towards her and felt her exerting every ounce of willpower in her body not to cringe back. Cringe back in what?…he wondered. Fear? Repulsion? Did she think that he was going to do something to her against her will? He had had the foundations of his entire world thrown into chaos and yet he had risen to the occasion and done his utmost to make life easy for her. And his thanks? This.
Her silence confirmed her mute agreement with his question.
‘Let’s get one thing straight, Alex. I am not in the habit of making a nuisance of myself as far as women are concerned.’
‘I never said that…’
Gabriel held up one peremptory hand. ‘What gives you the idea that you are so fantastically irresistible that I wouldn’t be able to pass a few hours in the same bed as you without trying to make a pass?’
‘Nothing,’ Alex muttered, turning scarlet. ‘I just thought I should put down some boundaries.’
‘Have I given you any reason to think that I am not a man of honour?’
‘No, but…’
‘You presented me with a son years after the event. I did not question paternity. Nor did I threaten to take you to court to win custody. In fact, I did the opposite. I offered to legitimise our relationship for Luke’s sake. You turned me down because you felt your own needs and desires overrule the well-being of our child. Fine. You want a detached, amicable relationship. I have granted your request. Moreover, I have done my very best to protect you from aggressive and unwanted paparazzi by bringing you both over here, where I can offer seclusion of the highest order until our news becomes tomorrow’s fish and chips newspaper. My parents have not censured you. They have not asked questions. They, too, have accepted the fact of Luke’s appearance with grace and dignity and have welcomed him to their hearts. And assuming, mistakenly, that this is more than just a simple business arrangement for us, they have overcome their own natural prudishness and stuck us in the same bedroom, thinking no doubt that they were doing us both a favour. And, bearing all that in mind, you have the cheek to stand there and treat me like a sex-starved teenager who can’t wait to jump you.’
Alex felt as though she had been assaulted by a mental battering ram. His choice of words was contrived to demolish her defences. He had been nothing but reasonable, fair and frankly second to none, his little speech implied, and yet she persisted in treating him like a common criminal.
He had managed to take the wind out of her sails as effectively as a pin applied to a balloon, even silencing the little voice in her head that reminded her just what Gabriel was like. One hundred per cent red-blooded male with more than his fair share of an enthusiastic libido. But, hard on the heels of that little voice, came another, telling her that perhaps she was no longer the target for that enthusiastic libido.
Now she felt an utter fool. He was probably repelled at the thought of sharing a bed with her but had been big enough not to make a deal of it. He respected and loved his parents and wouldn’t throw their good intentions back in their faces.
She opened her mouth to tell him that they should set the matter straight with his parents so that they didn’t have to endure a full two weeks in the same room, but knew that he would see no point in doing any such thing. At least not when they were obviously in their honeymoon period of misguided delusions. After all, resisting her would prove no problem for him, so why bother with the fuss?
‘What do your parents think…um…our relationship is?’ Alex enquired tightly.
‘Naturally, they imagine that their son would have done the honourable thing and offered marriage.’
‘They said that?’
Gabriel gave an eloquent shrug of assent. Not in so many words, he thought to himself, but they had jumped to that conclusion. He was sure of it. They would not have conceived a situation of shared custody and visiting rights. How he disillusioned them of their fanciful notions remained to be seen.
‘What on earth are we going to do about that?’ Alex asked aloud and Gabriel frowned. It still angered him that she found it so outrageous that he had asked her to marry him. Five years ago she would have leapt at the idea.
‘We are going to do nothing about it at the moment,’ he told her baldly. ‘They’re old. They deserve one or two illusions, at least for the time being. So get your head around the shared bedroom scenario and rest assured that your body is safe as houses with me.’
‘Okay.’ Alex lowered her eyes because he was just too much in her face for comfort. ‘I’m going to have a bath.’ She hoped that by the time she finished he would be asleep, and preferably would have done the decent thing and removed himself to the sofa. It might be uncomfortable and his feet might have to dangle a bit over the side, but needs must.
Gabriel watched as she flounced off to the adjoining bathroom and he heard the meaningful click of the door being locked behind her.
She would take as long as she possibly could in there. Hours, if she could pull it off. Anything to avoid the darkened room and the intimate silence. But face both she would have to and, outraged as he was that she would think him loser enough to try it on when she was a reluctant recipient, he was still in a pleasantly contented frame of mind as he unpacked his suitcases, whistling as he went and then, eventually, chucking the towel over a chair and slipping under the duvet.
With true gentlemanly consideration, he switched off the overhead light so that when she finally emerged from a bath that could go down in the record books as the longest ever, she was obliged to feel her way to the bed.
Having not foreseen a scenario in which she would be forced to share a room with Gabriel, Alex had given absolutely no thought to her sleepwear or else she would have bought something suitably hideous. As it stood, she was in her normal garb of a pair of small shorts, which left an awful lot of leg exposed, and a vest.
But at least Gabriel appeared to be asleep. She slipped into the bed, huddling as far to the side as she could witho
ut falling off and when, after fifteen minutes of barely being able to breathe for fear of waking him, she was still wide awake, she discreetly got out, found her way to the cushions on the sofa and quietly began stacking them on the bed into an impromptu partition format.
Watching her from under his lashes, Gabriel wondered how long he should remain silent and motionless before he got rid of the ridiculous barrier between them.
No time, he thought, like the present.
Without warning, he heaved himself onto one elbow and, with his free hand, he casually tossed every single carefully arranged cushion on to the floor and focused his eyes on her appalled face. His eyes had long adjusted to the silvery darkness in the room and he had fully appreciated the spectacular view of her fumbling her way to the bed clad only in the briefest of nightwear imaginable. It was the sort of nightwear that would have sent a shudder of horror racing down Cristobel’s spine. No lace, no ribbons, no silk. The sort of nightwear that he would have considered highly unsexy on any other woman on the face of the planet, but on her rangy, leggy body looked amazing. She might not have had the long swinging hair or the drop dead good looks, but there had always been something curiously appealing about her and his body reacted to that something with knee-jerking intensity.
‘Forget it,’ he drawled. ‘I’m not having my space restricted by a pile of cushions.’
Having thought him to be safely ensconced in the land of nod, Alex could only stare at the beautiful angles of his face as he looked at her. The super-king-sized bed was suddenly reduced to the suffocating dimensions of a carrycot. He was propped on one elbow and the duvet left her in some doubt as to whether the towel had been replaced by anything suitable. Or anything at all, for that matter. She could spy the sleek, muscular curve where his waist dipped to his hip, even though her eyes were strenuously averted.
‘Why aren’t you asleep?’ she snapped accusingly.
‘Is this another of your crazy rules?’
‘My rules are not crazy!’ Which was more than she could say for her misbehaving body!
‘Are you telling me that erecting a foot high barrier of cushions is the behaviour of a sane woman?’
‘I just thought,’ Alex replied grittily, ‘that it would be helpful…’
‘Why? I’ve told you I’m not going to ravish you. Besides, it’s not as though we haven’t shared a bed in the past.’
‘That was different!’
Gabriel was finding that hard to concede, considering that his body was reacting in exactly the same way as it had done years ago.
‘I want those cushions back!’ Alex was almost weeping from sheer frustration.
‘Okay.’ Gabriel gave an elaborate sigh and began to slide out of the bed, which elicited just the response he had predicted. A high squeak of alarm as soon as she realised that he was completely naked.
‘Forget it!’
‘Sure?’ He turned to look at her over his shoulder, his face a study in earnestness. She could have thrown her pillow at him. Instead, she made a low, inarticulate sound under her breath and he subsided back into the bed.
‘It’s stupid,’ he said in a seductively unthreatening tone, ‘to make such a big deal about this…’ In the process of getting back under the covers, he had managed to gain a few inches closer to her. She smelled good. Clean and fresh and soapy. She never had liked perfume of any sort.
Alex looked at him suspiciously. It was hard to read the expression on his face because of the darkness but she didn’t trust him an inch and she didn’t want to. It was hitting her hard that she couldn’t afford to trust him. Her anger and her wariness and her distrust were the only weapons she had against the power of his personality. If she abandoned those, where would she be? She shivered whenever he was around and the sound of his voice was enough to induce a maddening melt-down of her nervous system. At least when she was spitting fire, she was keeping him—and herself—at bay.
‘And, while I’m about it…’ He lowered his voice a couple of notches and reached out to idly play with her splayed fingers. Alex was barely aware of the gesture. She was mesmerised by the honeyed gentleness of his voice. The silvery moon was touching light fingers across his face and the shadows and angles heightened the beauty that had always had her in thrall. ‘You’re right.’
‘I am? Right about what?’ Her voice sounded pathetically feeble. And he was still doing that playing thing with her fingers although she pretended not to notice because she liked it. It was dangerous but she liked it.
‘Maybe I should have told my parents the whole unvarnished truth. Told them what you want and that they would have no choice but to accept it, but I was…’ for a minute, he almost used the word weak but that would have been going too far; weak was a word that could not possibly be associated with him and she would never have fallen for that ‘…concerned about their mental welfare. Coping with the wedding being called off and then plunged into what they might have considered an unbearably stressful situation…’
‘Understood.’
‘You have no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that…’
‘You are?’
‘Of course I am. I can’t think of anything worse than fighting with you.’
Alex had no idea how he had managed to get so close to her. She felt the heat from his body and, when he shifted, the brush of his thigh against hers. Her head was telling her to briskly wind the conversation up but, instead, with a frightening recklessness, she angled her own leg and the shock of nudging him and knowing the extent of his arousal was like being hit with a power surge of live electricity.
Gabriel made no effort to move. Instead, he smiled and murmured ruefully, ‘Just ignore me.’ By which he meant just ignore my unruly body and the fact that I’m unbelievably hot for you. How likely was it that she was going to do that? When she had pressed herself closer to him? When she was staring at him with hot, dark eyes and those slightly parted lips that were begging to be thoroughly kissed?
The ice queen with her issues about their past and her high moral principles about their future was melting fast but Gabriel wasn’t going to be the one to make the first move. But he did wonder what he would do if she took him at his word, rolled over to her side and fell asleep. He had discovered a streak of stubbornness in her that had not been apparent the first time round, when she had been gloriously his for the taking.
The prospect of a cold shower was not pleasant.
‘And, while I’m in the mood for wholesale contrition,’ he continued in a voice that whispered over her like a caress, ‘I think it’s important to know that I would have stood by you had I known about the pregnancy…’ Gabriel realised that he would have and they would have married and there would have been none of this ongoing nonsense about her asserting her independence and not wanting to sacrifice her life for the sake of their child. Five years ago, there was no way that she would have turned down an offer of marriage. He could remember her youthful, adoring enthusiasm for him as though it was yesterday.
‘It would never have worked in a million years,’ Alex mumbled, thrillingly tuned in to his proximity even though she was fully aware of the health hazard it presented. ‘Look at Cristobel.’
‘Cristobel?’ Gabriel was beginning to wonder how he could ever have conceived of marrying Cristobel. She seemed like a distant figure belonging to a different and somehow irrelevant life. Still, he didn’t care for her name cropping up in conversation.
‘You would always have wanted someone who fitted the role.’ Alex felt a stab of self-pity and her eyes blurred. ‘I was your time out and you would have gone mad if you’d ended up stuck with me for the rest of your life.’
‘You’re being ridiculous. And don’t put yourself down like that. That time out, as you call it…’ this whole confidence exchanging thing was crazy…but still ‘…it felt good.’
‘I’m just being truthful. But it’s sweet of you to say it anyway…’
‘Sweet? Since when have I ever been describ
ed as sweet?’
There was such genuine outrage in his voice that Alex’s lips twitched and she eventually laughed.
‘I would have wanted to have seen you growing inch by inch with my baby inside you,’ Gabriel told her huskily. ‘I would have wanted to have seen the changes in you…’
With that powerful admission, Alex felt that danger alert sign flashing frantically in her head go completely off the scales and she drew in a trembling breath.
‘You wouldn’t have liked them,’ she whispered, assuming that if there was one thing certain to put him off, it would be the thought of her getting fatter and fatter by the day until she resembled a beached whale.
‘Did your breasts get bigger?’
Alex stifled a choking gasp. She had edged her leg back but just a couple of centimetres and she knew that he would be hard as steel against her and the thought was an impossible turn on.
‘We…you…shouldn’t be saying stuff like that…’
‘Why not? I wasn’t there with you at the time. It’s only natural that I would be curious about what I missed.’
He made it sound so reasonable but there was nothing reasonable about the way her body was on fire.
‘So…’ he prompted, enjoying the exquisite physical ache of his throbbing erection and his erotic fantasies of her ripe, pregnant body. ‘Did they?’
‘Of course they did,’ Alex mumbled.
‘I have an image in my head…’
Alex moaned softly and her eyelids fluttered.
‘Did you say something?’ Gabriel enquired in a concerned voice.
‘It’s time for us to get some sleep. This arrangement…it’s just not going to work…’
Gabriel ignored that half-hearted protest. ‘Not that your breasts aren’t exquisite the size they are now. Small but beautifully formed.’
‘Please don’t…’
‘Don’t what…? Turn you on…? Because you are turned on, aren’t you? I know I am…but I also know that I gave you my word that I wouldn’t touch you and I’m a man of my word… So, if you want to be touched, then you just have to reach out…’
A Spanish Birthright aka The Secret Spanish Love-Child Page 10
