The Italian Boss's Secretary Mistress

by Cathy Williams

  She pushed open the connecting door.

  Gabriel didn’t bother to look up. He was frowning heavily at his computer screen and, for a few seconds, Rose took the opportunity to just look at him.

  His masculine beauty, as it always had, jumped out at her, making the breath catch in her throat, although he looked more gaunt than when she had last seen him on that fateful night before she’d walked out of his life. For good. Or so she had planned at the time.

  ‘Gabriel!’ Her voice seemed over loud in the confines of the room but it had the desired effect. Gabriel’s head shot up and his expression was one of utter shock, very quickly replaced by one of unreadable stillness.

  They stared at one another. To Rose, it felt like hours. Her legs felt weaker and weaker but no way was she going to make her way to the chair, that chair facing him that she used to sit on every time she entered his office to take notes. He was the first to break the silence.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Gabriel pushed himself away from his desk so that he could cross his legs and survey the woman standing in front of him, as nervous as a kitten. The fact that he was still raw from thinking about her only a few minutes ago left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  Suddenly Rose found that the speech she had rehearsed wouldn’t emerge from her dry, stricken throat.

  ‘Sit down. Although I have to tell you…’he glanced at his watch, then back at her face ‘…I don’t have much time to chew the fat with you. I’m out on a date and I don’t think the lady in question would appreciate being kept waiting because of some ex-fling.’ There was no date in point of fact. He had cancelled the redhead a few days ago, preferring the option of a bit of solitude and the company of his faithful laptop computer but he didn’t flinch at lying. He also knew that dismissing her as little more than an ex-fling would cut and, sure enough, he saw her wince, although, to her credit, she didn’t take her eyes off his face.

  ‘So. What do you want?’

  ‘I…I…’

  ‘…you were in the area and thought that you’d just pop in and see how I was doing?’ Gabriel raised his eyebrows in patent disbelief. ‘Now, why do I find that hard to believe?’

  ‘I know you were probably surprised when you got back to London…and found…found that I had left…’This wasn’t exactly how she had planned on broaching the conversation, but just looking at him had thrown her off balance.

  ‘Now, what would give you that idea?’ Gabriel asked, with blistering sarcasm. ‘Is it because, the night before you left, we had made lingering, passionate love? I was obviously deluded into imagining that you might have wanted to prolong our affair.’

  ‘Things change.’

  ‘When did you decide that clearing off was a good idea?’ Gabriel found that he was compelled to hear the answers to questions he hadn’t even known existed in his head but obviously did. ‘Was it when you made it back to the UK?’ He digested the barely discernible flicker of hesitation on her face and pounced with deadly accuracy. ‘You’d made your mind up before, hadn’t you…?’Gabriel intoned slowly. She neither denied it nor did she confirm it and her silence was answer in itself. He had been used. Gabriel felt as though he had been hit in the gut with a sledgehammer.

  ‘You don’t understand, Gabriel…’Rose could feel herself descending into a quagmire of ugly accusations.

  ‘Oh, I understand all right. Shall I tell you how I see things…?’

  ‘No!’

  Rose tried to control her shaking hands but she was mesmerised by his cruel, handsome face. She would hear him out. She didn’t have much choice anyway because Gabriel, when the mood took him, was an unstoppable force.

  ‘You became my lover because you were frustrated by the boyfriend you left behind here…Don’t ask me why—maybe you found that he couldn’t satisfy you.’

  Rose gaped at him incredulously. She would have burst out laughing if he hadn’t been so absorbed in own ridiculous theory.

  ‘And, as fate would have it, we ended up in bed. Although…maybe fate played less of a part than I think. After all, it was you who came running into my bed at the first sound of thunder and it was you who fled out of the bathroom from a spider, just coincidentally happening to land on top of me…’

  ‘If you recall, I was also the one who told you that I didn’t want anything…to happen between us!’

  ‘An impossibility and you knew it!’ Gabriel dismissed. ‘You must have known that we would have ended up making love. Tell me, did you give your boyfriend the benefit of what you learnt from me?’

  Rose clenched her fists tightly. If she had been within hitting distance, she would have struck him across his sexy, sneering face. How dared he jump to his horrendous conclusions and reduce her in the process? And why bother to tell him that Joe was no more? The man who’d lasted one date! It was a joke but she had known, beyond the shadow of a doubt, when she’d returned, that there could be no one for her but Gabriel. At least not for a while. It just wouldn’t have been fair to have any man suffer the humiliation of comparison.

  ‘How could you think that of me, Gabriel? How could you think that I would be…calculating enough to jump into bed with one man just so that I could practise?’

  ‘Then when did you make the decision to leave and why?’ Gabriel loathed himself for his weakness in wanting to know and he gave her a look of cold contempt that she could show up and extract the shameful admission from him.

  ‘I did you a favour, Gabriel.’ She looked at him steadily, even though inside she felt as though her nerves were being twisted into knots. ‘I knew that you would tire of me sooner or later. I spared you the embarrassment of knowing that you wanted to get rid of me and I spared myself the pain of…’

  ‘The pain of what?’

  ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with why I’m here. None of it has.’

  In her head she had played around with all the various possible outcomes of her visit. None of them were very comforting.

  When he didn’t say anything, she frowned and asked unsteadily, ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m here?’

  ‘I already do.’

  Rose’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t! How could you?’

  ‘It’s easy.’ Gabriel gave an elegant shrug. ‘When you cut through all the nonsense, the only thing that speaks volumes is money.’

  ‘But…’

  He raised one imperious hand. ‘How are you doing on your course?’

  ‘I haven’t actually…started it, as a matter of fact. But what does that have to do with anything?’

  Gabriel couldn’t contain the grim stab of disappointment. Had he really thought her to be any different from the rest of the human race?

  ‘How much?’

  ‘How much what?’ Rose asked, dazed.

  ‘How much money are you after to fund your course?’ He stood up and strolled over to the window so that he could perch against the ledge and give her the full benefit of his contemptuous stare. ‘I wondered how long it would take before you realised just what a good financial deal you gave up here. I guess I could be heartless and tell you to clear off, but hell, what’s a bit of money in recognition of your…effort?’

  ‘Forget it, Gabriel.’ Rose stood up on trembling legs and turned blindly for the door.

  It had been a huge mistake coming here, but she had talked it over with her sister, had seen it as the right and decent thing to do. Now, she could only ask herself what aspect of right and decent Gabriel Gessi would understand when his whole world was ruled by the concept of money.

  ‘Sit back down!’ he commanded, but she was already heading for the door.

  She didn’t get far. In fact, she hadn’t even made it to the outer door when he was by her side, spinning her around so that she was forced to look at him.

  The touch of his hand on her was like the heat of a branding iron and nor did he release her. He just stared down at her, his fingers digging into her skin, until she finally pulled away.

&nb
sp; ‘I didn’t come here to listen to your accusations!’ she said in a rush. ‘I didn’t come here to be accused of being some kind of gold-digger or anything else, for that matter!’

  ‘Oh, why did you come, then? To check and make sure the secretary you procured for me was doing all right? She is. You need have no worries on that front.’

  ‘I came to tell you that I’m pregnant!’

  The silence that reverberated around the room was deafening and, for the first time since she had known him, Rose was treated to the one-off sight of her boss rendered utterly speechless. The colour drained from his face and he stared at her for a few seconds, during which she would have sworn that her heart stopped beating.

  But he rallied fast. Shock gave way to suspicion. ‘That’s impossible. We were careful.’

  ‘We were careful most of the time, Gabriel. But we weren’t careful on that first night…Do you mind if I sit back down?’ If she didn’t, she might fall down because her legs felt as unsteady as rubber. She sat on the chair and for a while he remained standing behind her, as if locked in one spot. Rose refused to twist around and face him. She couldn’t imagine what was going through his head but she was pretty sure that she wouldn’t like any of it. Fatherhood was a high price to pay for a couple of weeks of sex with a woman who was destined to be yet another one of his ships that passed in the night. She would never have featured on his agenda at all if she hadn’t returned from Australia several pounds lighter, several shades darker and more in keeping with what he considered attractive!

  She daredn’t look at the horror that would be stamped across his beautiful face.

  Eventually she heard him walk towards her, past her, towards the window, through which he stared in complete and telling silence.

  Most of all, she wanted to tell him that she was sorry but it had never occurred to her, not for a minute, that she would fall pregnant because of a single slip-up. She had stupidly allowed passion to overwhelm the simple matter of taking precautions. Gabriel, mistakenly, had assumed that she was on the pill and the following day, having been assured by her that no, she wasn’t protected, but that they had been absolutely safe the night before, he had taken the issue of contraception into his own hands.

  She hadn’t guessed that, by then, it was too late.

  It had taken her sister six months of trying to conceive!

  ‘When did you find out?’ Gabriel asked coolly, turning to look at her.

  ‘Ten days ago.’ Her eyes fluttered away from his cold, shuttered expression. ‘I…I didn’t think about my periods until I had to go to the dentist and she asked whether I could possibly be pregnant because I needed an x-ray to be done. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t had one for ages.’ She knew that her words were tripping over one another but that look in his eyes…

  When she had rehearsed what she would say, the scene had never unfolded in her head like this. Yes, she had anticipated being nervous, but she had her speech all down pat. She was pregnant. She took full responsibility for what had happened. She felt it only right that he should be aware of the situation but she wasn’t about to impose on him, either emotionally or financially. In her head she emerged from the messy situation as proudly independent, open and willing to negotiate whatever visiting rights he might want, but also open and willing to accept that he might want very little. After all, a child had never been part of his game plan and she should know because, in a weird way, she knew him like the back of her hand.

  ‘What makes you think that I believe you?’ Gabriel asked.

  Rose looked at him, startled out of her gut-wrenching apprehension. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ he said, his tone of voice implying that what he was about to say would be logical beyond all dispute, ‘I suddenly discover that you find me irresistible. You’ve worked for me for years and yet, five seconds after arriving on the island, I’ve suddenly turned into the man of your dreams. Odd, wouldn’t you say?’

  To refute this sweeping, inaccurate observation would have left her wide open and vulnerable, so Rose remained silent, waiting for him to develop what he meant.

  ‘Particularly odd,’ Gabriel continued, ‘considering you’d just got yourself a boyfriend…’He thought of the way she had run out on him and his fiercely wounded male pride was like the sharp edge of a knife, goading him into accusations which her changing expression was making a nonsense of. He couldn’t help himself. He particularly couldn’t help himself when he thought about what’s-his-name and the possibility that she might, actually, be seeing him again, sleeping with him. Who was to say differently?

  ‘Now you swan in here, months after you’ve walked out on your job, with some story about being pregnant.’ His mouth twisted into a cynical sneer. ‘If you are, and I’m not even willing to admit to that, who’s to say that you weren’t already pregnant when you came with me on that trip? Who’s to say that your sudden, overwhelming need to hop in the sack with me wasn’t a ruse for you and your lover to con me out of money?’

  Rose’s shock showed in her white, disbelieving face, sufficient for Gabriel to feel a morsel of guilt at his casual shredding of her character.

  She made to stand but he was in front of her before she was halfway to her feet and she fell back into the chair, wincing away from his dark, oppressive anger as he leant over her, his arms on either side of the chair like steel bars.

  ‘Don’t even think about it!’ he grated. ‘Don’t even think that you can come in here and tell me that you’re pregnant with my child and then leave!’

  ‘And don’t you think that you can accuse me of being a gold-digger or of using you! That’s the most insulting thing anyone has ever told me! How dare you think that I had some kind of ulterior motive for sleeping with you? It says a lot about you, Gabriel Gessi, that you could have such a…vile opinion of another human being!’

  Gabriel shot to his feet and walked away, hands shoved deep in his pockets. He raked his fingers through his hair and swung round to look at her.

  ‘What can you expect?’ he muttered. ‘You’ve come in here with a bomb and detonated it at my desk.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ An icy calm had settled over her. Yes, he would be in shock, but his extreme reaction was somehow easier to bear than if he had offered help or compassion or even money. She wasn’t even sure why she was so surprised and wounded at his raw accusations. Gabriel was filthy rich and he had the instinctively suspicious mind of someone who was filthy rich. And she could concede—just—that pregnancy was the fastest way to a man’s wallet. The hurtful part wasn’t his cold, detached approach to what she had said, it was that he had thought it in the first place, that he had allowed his flawed intellect to take precedence over what he must surely know about her by now.

  ‘I know you’re in a state of shock,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I debated whether I should come and tell you or not but in the end I felt you should know. And, before you leap in with any more accusations, let me tell you straight away that I’m not after your money. This wasn’t part of some elaborate plot to rip you off. I can’t go back in time and take back what happened between us on that island but I didn’t connive for it to happen.’ She risked a glance at him and felt a sharp stab of compassion. ‘And it’s yours, Gabriel. I haven’t seen Joe since I got back to England and, anyway, I never slept with him.’

  She suddenly felt desperately weary. The past ten days had been a struggle. In fact, the past two and a half months had been a struggle. She had returned to London, jobless, and had immediately found herself a decent enough temp job. But it was uninspiring and left her ample time to mourn what she had abandoned. She was tormented by the thought that she should have stayed, had the affair he had offered, waited to see what happened. She had salvaged her pride, saved herself the eventual let-down, but her bed was cold and lonely at night and her mind chattered ceaselessly with argument and counter-argument.

  She had also dropped her plans to go on her business course. Somehow she didn’t feel
herself to be in a positive enough frame of mind.

  So she had drifted miserably from one day to the next until, ten days ago, when two bright blue lines on a home pregnancy testing kit had galvanised her out of her depressed torpor.

  Now here she was, having done the right thing, facing down a barrage of accusations. She gritted her teeth against the desire to cry.

  ‘Okay, let’s just say I believe you…’He did. The truth was written all over her face. Nor had he really believed for a second that she would have wilfully slept with him so that she could later spring a pregnancy tale of woe on his shoulders. Nor did he know what had compelled him to lay into her with such force. But he believed her. She was carrying his baby.

  Gabriel, who had never once contemplated the reality of fatherhood except as some distant situation that might or might not arise in the fullness of time, was shocked to realise that his initial feelings were ones of pure, virile satisfaction.

  He felt as though he had triumphed.

  ‘Yes…?’ Rose was treading warily.

  ‘Which isn’t to say,’ he added, ‘that I won’t demand a DNA test somewhere along the line…’ He wouldn’t.

  ‘I’m not lying to you, Gabriel. Would you believe me any quicker if I told you that I didn’t come here today to try and get money out of you? That I came because I thought it was the right, moral thing to do?’

  ‘You must know that there’s no way I would let any son of mine go without…’

  ‘Son? Hang on a minute…’

  ‘Or daughter, of course.’ He gave an elegant shrug and then began prowling the room, forcing her to turn around to keep up with his progress. ‘Whatever. No child of mine will be allowed to go without.’

  ‘Naturally it will be up to you, whatever you decide to contribute to his or her welfare.’

  ‘Contribute?’ He gave a bark of laughter and paused to look at her with incredulity. ‘Contribute? You speak as though my own flesh and blood would be on the receiving end of the occasional donation! No, my involvement will be much more far reaching than a cheque sent out once a month…’