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 resettled 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 girl 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 screwup, 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