‘What do you want?’ She glanced at her watch as they walked out into the fading light.
‘I want to know why you quit your job.’
‘Why do you think?’ Alex raised mutinous eyes to his, remembering her old self and how much she had moved on from that place. How much she had been forced by circumstances to move on.
‘I have no idea. Do I still get to you that much?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself, Lucio! Or whatever you choose to call yourself!’ She turned on her heel and his hand shot out, catching her by her wrist.
‘The name is Gabriel. Use it!’
‘You’re hurting me!’
Gabriel dropped her hand and she rubbed her wrist with her fingers, making a production out of nothing. He hadn’t hurt her. Far from it. That feel of his flesh against hers was like having a branding iron planted on her skin. Her whole body was on fire and trembling and tingling. Under her jumper and her fleece, she could feel her nipples tighten and begin to throb as they rasped against her lacy bra. It was an appalling reaction.
‘So tell me why you quit. Did you have a nostalgic yearning to return to an office where the central heating’s obviously broken and the dodgy fluorescent lighting is enough to induce seizures?’
‘What does it matter?’ But there was resigned weariness in her voice now and she had stopped walking.
As if sensing the shift in atmosphere, Gabriel remained silent and stared down at her upturned face. It was nearly five and the pavements were busy with the usual trawl of workers leaving their offices and kids heading back from after-school activities. He pulled her out of the weaving crowd.
‘You were pretty upset the last time we met.’
‘Can you blame me?’
‘It’s been a long time.’
And I can still get under your skin. Alex read that wryly accurate postscript to his baldly spoken statement and blushed, although she didn’t say anything, just started walking again, heading towards the bus stop.
‘Where are you going? I’ll drive you.’
More silence and Gabriel clicked his tongue impatiently. Always alert to the nuances of other people’s reactions, he was picking something up now, something unspoken and unsettling. He quickly dismissed that airy-fairy notion as his imagination and instead chose to focus on the surprising fact that this woman from his past, whose image must have been floating really close to the surface of his memory banks because three seconds in her company and he could recall every detail about her, was still affected by him. Why else would she have quit her job? He had done a bit of checking, found out how much more money she had been offered for the post in his company. Walking out on it would not have been the response of someone who had relegated him to the past.
He was only human to have felt a kick of satisfaction at that idea.
‘Could you give me a minute, please?’ She made a hurried phone call and then turned back to face him.
‘Who the hell do you keep calling?’ Gabriel demanded irritably.
‘Why do you ask? Is it forbidden for someone to make a phone call when they’re with you?’
‘I don’t remember you being so stroppy.’
‘There’s a café just around the corner. If you can’t talk in an office, then I can’t talk in the middle of the street.’ And talking was something they had to do except there was no way that she was going to do, that in his car. It didn’t take the intelligence of a genius to figure out which one was his. The office was located in a fairly busy side street but it was by no means a classy area. The parked cars were uniformly serviceable, except for the gleaming black top-of-the-range BMW tucked away between a scooter and a hatchback. She imagined slipping into the passenger seat of his car, with the door shutting firmly behind her and knowing that there was no escape route unless she chose to hurl herself out of the car at forty miles per hour.
Gabriel shrugged but his levels of irritation were rising steadily. He wasn’t sure what he had hoped to achieve by descending on her at her workplace but it was beginning to rankle that his reception was somewhat less than warm. He had, after all, only traipsed over out of the goodness of his heart because he wasn’t comfortable with the notion that she had quit her job because of him.
‘I can understand that you might be a little upset,’ he began as soon as a cup of black coffee had been placed in front of him. ‘You think that you were lied to…’
‘I was lied to…’
‘You’ve got to get your head around the fact that the world is a different place for the seriously wealthy.’
‘You mean it’s a playground,’ Alex responded bitterly, staring down into her coffee, which had been stirred into a swirling brown whirlpool. If she shifted just a tiny bit, her knees would touch his and, to avoid that happening, she made sure to tuck her legs to one side. ‘You can do whatever you want to do and then sit back and blame the fallout on the fact that you play by a different set of rules.’
‘There’s no point going over all of this,’ Gabriel offered with a slight shrug. ‘You deserve an apology and I’m big enough to provide you with one. Does that make you feel better?’
‘Why did you bother to come here?’
‘To offer you your job back,’ he was surprised to hear himself say, although, once the words had left his mouth, he was pretty happy with the decision. Was it possible, he wondered, for a man to be more generous?
Alex looked up at him in surprise and inwardly flinched because just being so physically close to him was like being hit with a sledgehammer.
‘Why would you do that?’
‘You were being paid twice as much as you’re getting at that hole you’ve thrown yourself back into. Thanks to me—’ he let her think about that for a few seconds, happy to take the credit for his magnanimity ‘—you felt obliged to leave a perfectly good job with excellent prospects and a shed-load of benefits. That situation does not sit well with me.’ He took a sip of his coffee and sat back, eyeing her thoroughly over the rim of his cup.
He had always wondered what he had seen in her because she was so unlike the women he had dated. Not just physically, but mentally and intellectually. He was still wondering. The woolly hat and the fingerless gloves had been secreted in the bowels of her oversized bag, but her face was bare of make-up, aside from a bit of mascara and the remnants of some lip gloss. Her nails were unpolished and, sure enough, she was wearing a pair of trainers, which were eminently practical but hideously unfeminine. She worked in an office but she would have looked right at home in the middle of the countryside mucking out. He caught himself wondering what kind of house in the country would suit her, favouring something small and thatched and totally impractical when it came to mod cons, and he nipped his wandering thoughts in the bud.
‘In fact, I am willing to up your salary as compensation for the headache.’
‘When are you getting married?’
‘Come again?’
‘Your fiancée didn’t mention a date. I think she was too busy being indecisive about the flowers.’
Gabriel frowned. He didn’t particularly want to talk about Cristobel. In fact, she hadn’t once crossed his mind since she had returned to Spain three days ago.
‘March,’