And then every nerve in his body froze. His very clever, always fast-functioning mind, seemed to shut down. His skin crawled with a growing onslaught of ugly suspicion that coalesced into white-hot fury.
A lifetime’s worth of discipline slammed into place. He reached out and caught her fluttering hand in his.
‘What’s this?’
‘Nothing!’ She hadn’t even thought about the wretched fake engagement ring. She had been so busy trying not to fall apart at the seams that she had completely forgotten about it, but now she stared down at it, scarcely able to breathe.
‘Speaking to no one on the telephone and wearing nothing on your finger? Incredible.’
‘Gabriel, let me explain…’
‘Why bother? I already know what’s going on. The last thing I need is a bunch of nasty little lies from you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve played me for a fool, and no one does that.’
‘How? How have I played you for a fool?’ Lucy’s eyes were round with incomprehension.
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘Gabriel, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘When did you decide that it would be an idea to use me to get the sexual experience you were lacking? That boyfriend of yours walked out on you because you wouldn’t go the final distance with him…’
Lucy stared at him in horror. She was mesmerised as much by the seething fury in his black-as-midnight eyes as by the incredible ability of his agile brain to jump to all the wrong conclusions.
Belatedly she realised that the fictitious boyfriend was yet again rising to the surface—which just proved how one small, innocently spoken fib could end up landing you in a lot of trouble.
‘You don’t understa—’
‘Did you think that you could use me as a practice run for…’ his voice was wintry cold as he lifted her hand with its gleaming fake engagement ring ‘…boyfriend number two? It makes sense now, why the virginal maiden didn’t take the escape route I offered and chose instead to jump into the sack with me….’
‘You’ve got it all wrong!’
‘Was the other man on the scene then? Or did he appear later on? When you had all the confidence you needed to go out into the big, bad world and hook some other poor sap?’
‘How dare you?’ Shock was giving way to anger. ‘Do you know how insulting you’re being, Gabriel? Do you really think that I’m the kind of girl who could have two men at the same time?’
‘How the hell do I know who you are? Did I think that you were the sort of girl to walk out without bothering to leave a note? No. So let’s just say that I got it all wrong when it came to sussing you out!’
Where had his cool gone? And how dare she look at him with those big, accusing green eyes as though he was the one in the wrong? And how dare his body, his disciplined body, react to those big green eyes with a disobedient surge of uncontrollable craving?
‘Was I worth it?’ he ground out hoarsely. ‘I must have been if you’ve managed to bag an engagement ring!’
‘Oh, why don’t you take a closer look at this stupid ring?’ Lucy cried.
This wasn’t what Gabriel had been expecting. Insincere excuses, out-and-out lies, maybe a robust defence and some heated counter-attack—but why on earth would she be asking him to look at the damned ring?
‘Come again?’
‘Take a close look at the ring, Gabriel! And tell me what you think!’
Gabriel caught her hand and frowned at the glitzy bauble on her finger.
‘I think you could have done better,’ he growled.
He flung her hand away and walked to the French doors, through which he stared at the darkened shadows in the garden. He was dimly aware of a dog yapping merrily away from the direction of what he assumed was the kitchen.
‘Surely,’ he said, turning to look at her coldly, ‘I primed you for more than some cheapskate guy who can’t even run to a real diamond?’
He could breathe now that she wasn’t right there in front of him, close enough for him to give in to the tawdry temptation to reach out and pull her to him and demand whether his competition was better in the sack than he was.
‘Are you going to tell me who he is?’ Gabriel thought that the second he was in possession of a name he would make sure to hunt the guy out and physically teach him a thing or two. ‘Does he know about us?’
‘How can you be so thick…?’ Tears shimmered on her eyelashes and she chewed her lip to hold them back from spilling. ‘And what sort of opinion do you have of me?’ She glared at him angrily. How could a guy who was so smart be so stupid? ‘I thought you might know me well enough by now! I’m not bloody engaged to someone else! And I haven’t been sleeping with anyone behind your back! How could you think that I would ever use you as…as practice…?’
She walked on unsteady legs towards him. She was distantly aware of Freddy yapping from where she had shut him in the kitchen. She was also aware of her telephone ringing and knew that it would be her parents.
‘I bought this…this…idiotic ring for myself!’
‘What? I’m not following you.’
In any other situation Lucy would have burst out laughing, because she had wrong-footed him and it showed in the uncustomary bewilderment on his face.
‘I’m engaged to you!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘Before you start panicking, it’s not a real engagement. I know that! It’s a stupid, stupid phoney engagement—just like this stupid, stupid phoney ring!’ She twisted it round and round on her finger.
Gabriel shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. He wasn’t getting this. On the other hand, he was strangely relieved that there was no other guy on the scene. The relief, indeed, was far greater than the new conundrum facing him.
‘I was about to go and have dinner with my parents when you showed up,’ Lucy continued grudgingly. ‘To tell them that the engagement’s off. So you’ll have to leave. If I’m not with Mum and Dad in the next half an hour they’ll probably fly over here to find out if I’m still alive. They’re like that.’
‘I’m not going anywhere until I know what the hell is going on, Lucy.’
‘Gabriel, please…’
‘Why would you lie to your parents? Is deception something that runs in your family?’
‘Oh, shut up!’ She turned away. Her eyes were blurred with tears. She just couldn’t speak. Everything was so wrong. She felt as helpless as if she had suddenly been caught in a riptide without warning and without a life belt.
Gabriel found that the sight of her crying was the equivalent of having a shard of glass driven through his chest. He loathed the feeling.
‘So you’re going to see your parents? Fine. I’ll come with you. You can explain on the way. And we’ll take my car. I don’t like the look of that pile of rusting tin in your drive.’
‘You can’t come with me!’ Lucy clenched her fists by her sides and glared up fiercely at him. ‘Didn’t you hear a word I’ve just been telling you? I’m going over there to tell them that it’s all over between us! That the engagement’s off! You can’t just show up with me!’
‘As the wounded party, I have every right.’ He began moving towards the door. He still didn’t know what the hell was going on, but one thing he did know. The questions in his head needed answering, and he had no intention of leaving until they were all answered.
Lucy stared at him and hated the familiar stirrings in her body. ‘I hate you right now,’ she breathed.
‘We’re wasting time. You don’t want your mum and dad racing over here, do you? Far better for us to drive there and talk on the way….’ He reached for his car keys and tossed them casually in his hand.
Any qualms he might have had about embarking on this trip—and there had been very few—had all been neatly laid to rest. In fact, he was congratulating himself on a decision well made. Whatever transpired, he would certainly be returning
to London without that unsettling shadow lurking over his life, making it impossible for him to function.
‘What about the dog?’ he asked as she followed him out of the house and slammed the door behind her.
‘I stick him in the kitchen when I’m going out,’ Lucy replied. ‘He’s got plenty of food and water and not much he can chew on.’
‘So…’ Car started, engine purring, Gabriel turned to her, cool as a cucumber. ‘I’m all ears…’
Lucy stared stonily ahead of her, but continuing silence wasn’t going to work. Gabriel was as persistent as a dog with a bone. He wasn’t going to give up until he had squeezed every ounce of her miserable story out of her and she just refused to care any longer.
Maybe it would be a good thing if he met her parents anyway. Maybe he would see, then, that her father wasn’t a dedicated criminal who had escaped the hands of justice by the skin of his teeth. And maybe her parents would be able to see why she and Gabriel, sadly but inevitably, had had to break off their ‘engagement’! They had asked so many times to meet the lucky guy dating their daughter. Now they would see just how far apart she and the ‘lucky guy’ really were. They would understand first hand how two people from two different planets could never make a relationship work!
‘My parents are very old-fashioned people…’ she began wearily.
Gabriel stifled a hoot of derisive laughter. If she wanted to introduce her story via a sob story that no one in their right mind would believe, then so be it.
‘I never told them about…that you had blackmailed me into a deal…that you wanted sex for money…’
‘Just as well,’ Gabriel inserted smoothly, ‘because you would likewise have had to confess that you threw yourself at me even when I was prepared to fulfil my side of the bargain and release you from your dirty deal—no sex, just lovely money….’
Lucy blushed furiously, but there was no denying the truth behind that infuriatingly barbed statement of fact.
‘I gave them the impression that we were…dating. After a while they began asking questions. They wanted to meet you.’
‘They must have been over the moon at the development,’ Gabriel murmured mildly. ‘The king of bail-outs sleeping with their daughter. I bet they thought that their boat had really docked…’
‘You make me so angry, Gabriel. You think you know everything.’
‘I’ve always been good at judging human nature. But, hey, let’s not get sidetracked. I’m curious to see where all this is leading.’
‘They wanted to know if what we had was going anywhere. I could have told them that it wasn’t…’ Lucy thought she might expand on this point, just in case he got it into his arrogant head that she had nurtured dreams beyond her reach. She didn’t think she could bear the humiliation of him thinking that she had done just that. ‘Which would have been the truth. But my mother’s health isn’t brilliant. She suffered a massive stroke a while back and she’s been left with heart problems ever since. Dad and I have done all we can to protect her from stress, and I knew it would stress her out if she thought that we were sleeping together but weren’t in any kind of serious relationship…’
‘So you decided that you’d better have us engaged and on the road to a happy-ever-after wedding?’ He marvelled that she could make her parents sound like two characters from a Disney movie. ‘How long have we been engaged?’
‘Not long. A week.’
‘And now you’re about to call the whole thing off…’ He was following her directions to her parents’ house on autopilot. As tales went, this was the most far-fetched one he had ever heard in his life.
‘I just couldn’t carry on with us any longer, Gabriel. I’m sorry I didn’t leave you a letter, or something, but I honestly didn’t see what difference it would make. I’d made my mind up and I didn’t think you’d really mind anyway… I know you have a casual approach to relationships…’
‘Are we going to hark back to the non-existent sex I was supposed to have with a random stranger who followed me around an art exhibition I didn’t want to go to?’
‘No,’ Lucy interjected hurriedly. ‘I’m just saying that I have to break off the fake engagement because I won’t be travelling to London every weekend….’
The absence of those visits swamped her. She was staring into a deep, black, bottomless void with no sign of light. It was a suffocating feeling. Maybe if Gabriel wasn’t sitting right next to her she would be taking the first steps to recovery, but his presence was overwhelming—a horrible reminder of the empty future awaiting her.
‘So what are you going to tell them?’ Gabriel asked with interest. He slid his eyes across to her profile. She was the most unpredictable person he had ever known. Maybe that had been part of her fascination. ‘I won’t be amused if I’m painted as the bad guy.’
‘I intend to tell them that we’re poles apart and that it’s an amicable separation. Take the next left and then the first right and we’re there. You don’t have to come in with me.’ She turned to him impulsively. Forget about her parents meeting him first-hand. Lucy just couldn’t envisage Gabriel in her parents’ little detached cottage, judging them, believing her father to be a crook despite what she might tell him to the contrary. ‘In fact, I’d rather you didn’t. You could just drop me at the end of the street and I can make my way there….’
‘Won’t it be difficult to explain why you’ve walked to their house? At night? Down these remarkably unlit side roads?’
Lucy leaned back and closed her eyes. She felt thoroughly defeated. How had life become so complicated? The good old days of the garden centre, gossip with her friends, the occasional cinema trip and absolutely no Gabriel on the scene seemed like a lifetime ago.
‘So you’re going to come in, are you?’ She looked at him and her breath caught in her throat. He was just so beautiful. Beautiful, she reminded herself, and dangerous.
‘I feel I should, don’t you? Considering I’m part of this ongoing drama. Even though I didn’t apply for the position.’ He slowed the car right down and pulled over, leaving the engine to idle.
‘What are you doing?’ She was suddenly inexplicably panicked.
‘You’re as jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof. Is that because you’re scared at how your parents are going to take the bad news?’
Lucy could have told him that next to his being in the car here the drama with her parents and her concern over how they would take the news ran a very poor second. The minute Gabriel was around everything and everyone faded into the background, and it was no different now, even though she had broken up with him. Developing a tough shell to protect herself felt as hopelessly out of reach as a trip to the moon.
‘Of course I am!’ she agreed quickly. ‘You would be too if you knew them. They’re not what you think they are. But I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you this when I know you won’t listen to a word I have to say anyway.’
‘Well, soon I’ll find out for myself what they’re like, won’t I?’
The house he pulled up in front of moments later was a comfortable detached bungalow, not in the least flashy—but then the man had been caught before he’d had had time to really dip his hands in the till.
This was a slice of Lucy’s life he had deliberately sealed off into a closed compartment. She had attempted on several occasions to open up a dialogue on the subject of her father and he had very quickly terminated the conversation. He had felt no necessity to remind himself of her highly questionable background. After a while she had given up. Now, he felt as though the missing bits of her were quietly slotting into place to form a complete picture. Did he want that? Well, he certainly didn’t have much of a choice, because he wasn’t about to drive off into the distant horizon, which was what she wanted.
Gabriel killed the engine and turned as he felt her small hand lightly rest on his arm.
‘This was such bad timing,’ Lucy murmured. ‘One day later and you would never have known about…any of this….’
‘True…but then perhaps fate decreed that I shouldn’t miss my own engagement….’
‘Promise me you won’t say anything?’ Lucy pleaded in an urgent undertone. ‘I mean, just take the lead from me. I’ll get us out of this, and then you can get back to London and forget any of this ever happened.’
Gabriel refrained from saying that that seemed a very tall order.
‘And please try and…be kind to my dad….’
Gabriel wouldn’t dream of being kind to anyone who had stolen from him. He looked at her anxious face and shrugged. ‘What your father did is history, and I have no intention of dredging up the past. Besides…’ he shot her a slow smile that made her suddenly breathless ‘…I’d be the first to admit that I got more than my money’s worth….’
Lucy knew that he was going to kiss her. It was as if somewhere deep inside her she could connect to him on an unspoken, elemental level. She gave a soft little moan of protest and surrender and was ashamed to find herself clinging to him as his lips covered hers savagely, fiercely demanding. She was leaning over to him and the familiar heat was making her giddy….
She pulled back when sanity reasserted itself and he looked at her sardonically.
‘Okay,’ Lucy blurted out before he could say anything, ‘so you’re an attractive man…’ She could hardly breathe, and every bit of her body wanted this forbidden experience to carry on. ‘But it still doesn’t work for me. I…let’s just get this over with and then you can leave and we can both get on with our lives….’
CHAPTER EIGHT
NICHOLAS AND CELIA ROBINS opened the door on the first ring of the bell and Lucy beamed so broadly at them that her jaw began to ache. She would be calm, relaxed, in control and cheerful at this amicable end to a relationship that wasn’t meant to be. She had instructed Gabriel to lurk to one side, out of sight, to give her an opportunity to announce his entrance.
She was still smarting from his kiss. Her lips felt swollen. She prayed that her parents wouldn’t spot that when, very shortly, she would be breaking the sad news that their dreams of marrying her off were at an end. The demise of an engagement was never preceded by the fiancé kissing his woman until her skin burned.
The Notorious Gabriel DiazRuthless Tycoon, Inexperienced Mistress Page 12
