It was almost challenging to think that what he had missed first time round could now be his.
Dark, speculative eyes drifted down to the shape of Lucy’s small, high breasts, and Gabriel’s arousal was as fierce as it was sudden.
Lucy was disconcerted by that lazy appraisal in Gabriel’s roving dark eyes. It made her feel uncomfortable. She suppressed the crazy notion that buried beneath that discomfort a slow swirl of excitement was eddying in her veins, making her breasts tingle and sending a shooting, melting warmth between her legs.
‘And what do you have in mind?’
‘You. I have you in mind.’
About the Author
CATHY WILLIAMS is originally from Trinidad, but has lived in England for a number of years. She currently has a house in Warwickshire, which she shares with her husband Richard, her three daughters, Charlotte, Olivia and Emma, and their pet cat, Salem. She adores writing romantic fiction, and would love one of her girls to become a writer—although at the moment she is happy enough if they do their homework and agree not to bicker with one another!
Recent titles by the same author:
A TEMPESTUOUS TEMPTATION
THE GIRL HE’D OVERLOOKED THE TRUTH BEHIND HIS TOUCH THE SECRET SINCLAIR
Did you know these are also available as eBooks?
Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk
The Notorious
Gabriel Diaz
Cathy Williams
CHAPTER ONE
‘WHAT DO YOU mean? Explain again. I’m not getting it.’ Lucy Robins looked between her parents, buying time while her brain tried to catch up with what she had just been told. Running round and round at her feet, Freddy, the pug she had adopted three years ago, now made a stab at grabbing her attention by flipping over on his back and playing dead.
‘Not now, Freddy!’ she said, patting her lap. With that small show of encouragement, the brown and black dog scrambled onto her lap and proceeded to gaze adoringly up at her.
The second Lucy had got her mother’s phone call she had known something was wrong. Celia Robins never called her daughter at work, even though Lucy had repeatedly told her that it really didn’t matter—that it wasn’t as though she worked in an office where there was a big, bad boss keeping a watchful eye over employees and punishing anyone caught using their mobile.
The huge garden centre, set within the grounds of botanical gardens, which drew visitors from the across the country, was the most relaxed of environments. There, Lucy was part-gardener, helping with the landscaping team, and part-artist, using her newly gained degree in graphic art to draw exquisite detailed illustrations of flowers for a comprehensive book of the flora and fauna at the centre.
Her mother’s call had come just as she had been about to start replanting a batch of delicate orchids that had been meticulously cared for since their arrival at the centre six months previously. She had heard the words, ‘Honey, could you possibly come home? There’s something of an emergency…’ and had flown to her car, pausing only to tell Victor where she was going and to scoop up Freddy, who was allowed free rein in the outdoor space.
Now she stared in dismay at her father’s drooping figure. ‘What do you mean you’re in trouble with the company finances?’
Nicholas Robins, as small and round as his wife was tall and slender, raised apologetic eyes to his daughter. ‘I borrowed some money a few years ago, Luce. Not much. When your mother had her stroke…things just got a little crazy… I thought we were going to lose her… I wanted to give her her dream of a cruise… I wasn’t thinking rationally…’
On her lap, Freddy had nodded off and was snoring. Lucy stroked his fat tummy. Her skin was clammy. When her father had announced that he and her mother were going on a cruise—a lifetime dream, a wonderful opportunity that might be their last—he had told her he had received an unexpected bonus at work. The company had just been taken over by an electronics giant and Lucy had believed him—had been over the moon at his unexpected good luck.
‘When she recovered—’ her father’s voice was laboured, heavy ‘—I wanted to take her somewhere special. I thought if I borrowed a little bit more I could repay it before it was missed. I can’t believe I was that stupid.’
Lucy glanced worriedly towards her mother. Celia Robins was a frail woman who would be unable to cope with the distressing catastrophe unfolding in front of her. The stroke she had suffered had sapped her of her energy, and both Lucy and her father lived in constant fear that she would suffer another.
‘I didn’t think that anything would change after GGD took us over,’ her father continued in a shaking voice. ‘Before the takeover, I was the only bookkeeper there. They brought in a team of financial whiz kids. I managed to keep things under wraps for as long as I could, and I’d started repaying the money, but this morning I was called in and told they had found some discrepancies and that it might be an idea if I took a little leave until it gets sorted out….’
Appalled, Lucy didn’t know what to say. Her father was by no means a crook, and yet she knew with a sinking heart that no lawyer in the land would see it that way. He had helped himself to company funds and that was where the story would end. There would be no room for sob stories or excuses. That wasn’t how big organisations operated. Especially that would not be how GGD would operate.
Gabriel Garcia Diaz was the guy who had founded GGD. Ruthless, cold and brilliant, he had risen to dominate the field of electronics in the space of a mere eight years, consuming smaller companies and growing more and more powerful in the process. Gabriel Garcia Diaz was the shark in the pond, and a shark wouldn’t look at small minnows like her father and weep tears of sympathy for his plight.
A wash of nervous perspiration broke out over her. For the past two years she had contrived to put Gabriel Diaz out of her mind, but now the past galloped towards her, stampeding into the present and crashing through the flimsy defences she had erected to keep the unsettling memory of him at bay.
She had met him quite by accident. For weeks the talk of the town had been the takeover of Sims Electronics by GGD. The big guns were rolling into town and would be rescuing the ailing company where her father worked, transforming it into a mega-sized giant and in the process creating hundreds of jobs.
Lucy hadn’t been able to get worked up over it. She’d been pleased that the rampant unemployment that afflicted their little slice of Somerset would be brought to an end, but big business didn’t interest her. She had just got her job at the garden centre and all her excitement had been saved for that. She loved plants, she loved working outdoors, and she’d also had something else to celebrate. She had been called in and offered the task of illustrating the centre’s first documented book of all the rare and exotic species of flowers being cultivated in the massive greenhouses.
Indeed, she had forgotten that the big boss of GGD would be rolling into town. Excited to tell her father about her new area of responsibility, for both her parents knew how keen she was to utilise her art degree, she had hopped on her bike in her lunch hour and cycled like the wind to where he worked.
It had only been when she had spotted the sleek black limo and the convoy of similarly grand cars in the parking lot that she’d belatedly remembered that it was the big day.
In the glittering summer sun, all the employees of Sims had gathered outside the building while, dominating