Actually, all he felt was a certain amount of disappointment. The best laid plans, he thought.
He felt Abby touch him gently on his shoulder and he spun round to register the concern on her smooth, oval face.
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I think Lucy was anxious that you would be angry with her.’
‘So she thought she would use you as the middle man to diffuse some of my anger?’
‘I guess so. She really does like you, Gabriel. She just isn’t sure that you’re the one for her, or at least that was what she told me. I wouldn’t normally have this conversation but she was desperate for me to pass on the message.’
‘How thoughtful of her. Since I appear to be having a break-up by proxy, what reasons did she give?’
Abby marvelled at how well he was managing to rein in all emotion. His personality was so forceful, so unapologetically alpha male, that his composure at a time when he should have been tearing down the office was disconcerting to say the least. Not that she wasn’t relieved, because she was.
Relieved and suddenly curious.
Curiosity, however, wasn’t part of the package when it came to being Gabriel’s PA. Abby liked to keep her working life in one box and her private life, what little there was of it, in another.
‘I don’t think she liked the thought of marrying someone who spends most of his time working.’
‘Understandable.’
‘I guess in her profession, she goes out a lot, to parties and so on and so forth, and she couldn’t envisage you accompanying her to them.’
‘Definite point there.’
‘I guess she thinks she might end up with someone who isn’t fun.’
‘No one can deny that I enjoy work,’ Gabriel murmured, ‘Although I’m hurt that I’m seen as someone who can’t have fun.’
‘Gabriel, you don’t seem too...too...upset by this. She’s your fiancée! You must be breaking up inside.’
‘I like to imagine that I’m a resilient sort of guy, and it has to be said that it’s better that doubts cast their long shadow before the vows are taken rather than the other way around. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Yes, but...’
‘You want to see me weeping?’ he questioned coolly and with such self-control that Abby blushed.
She was no romantic. She’d been through the mill and had emerged with a healthy amount of scepticism when it came to flowers, chocolates and fairy-tale endings, but she now realised that she might have downplayed her own fundamental belief that happy-ever-afters existed.
‘It’s none of my business how you react or don’t react.’ She shrugged, back to her normal cool. ‘I didn’t want to do this but Lucy left me very little choice. I’m sure you’ll want to get in touch with her yourself and pass the message on. I just thought that... Of course, I didn’t expect you to weep...’
‘My grandmother,’ he said succinctly, surprising himself, because for all his outwardly easy banter he, like the woman standing in front of him, was intensely private and was seldom lured into revealing more than he wanted to. Yet here he was...
‘Your grandmother?’ Abby frowned. She’d taken a surreptitious step back but she was still so close to him that she could feel his heat and the energetic, physical dynamism of his personality. He dwarfed her and very occasionally made her so intensely aware of her femininity that she had to fight to retain her self-control.
It was happening right now as he stared down at her with unfathomable dark eyes.
It never failed to puzzle her how someone could wear the most expensive of business suits yet manage to look nothing like a conventional businessman.
‘My grandmother has suffered a series of mini strokes,’ Gabriel said, as serious as she had ever seen him. ‘They have taken their toll. Despite the fact that she’s been given a clean bill of health, she has become depressed about her future, and vocal about her sadness at not seeing me settled with a nice wife who will bear me nice kids and look after me in my dotage.’
‘Okay...’ Abby was shocked at this admission, which took them veering wildly off the employer-employee road they were accustomed to travelling down. Perhaps this was his vulnerability being exposed, she thought, acknowledging that alongside her surprise was a certain illicit thrill that he was confiding in her. ‘What about your parents, Gabriel?’
‘Both dead.’ He lowered his eyes and kept to himself the recognition that, like his grandmother, his father and mother, who had enjoyed a wonderful, close marriage, likewise had been disappointed in him. First his mother, who had died leaving his father bereft, and then his father who, Gabriel often thought, had died from a broken heart, unable to cope with the fact that sudden illness had stripped him of his childhood sweetheart.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It was a long time ago. The fact is that I was effectively raised by my grandmother. It pains me that her one wish, to see me settled, has gone unfulfilled.’
‘Hence you decided to get married to Lucy.’ There was no need for her to add before it’s too late. ‘But what about love?’
Gabriel looked at her with brooding amusement, the handsome lines of his lean face sending a rush of awareness through her body. This was the most personal conversation they had ever had and, whilst Abby told herself that she couldn’t wait to return to the business of work, she was alarmed at how much she was enjoying this rare insight into her boss’s thought processes.
She’d met a number of his girlfriends in the past. Sexy, confident women who knew what effect they had on the opposite sex and enjoyed playing to an audience. So why Lucy out of all of them? Abby was ashamed at the pull of curiosity and she looked away.
‘I am no great believer in that particular emotion,’ Gabriel drawled, then he grinned and murmured in a low, silky voice, ‘But I’m beginning to think that you might be.’
‘Then you’d be wrong,’ Abby blurted out.
For a few seconds time stood still as their eyes tangled and a slow drumbeat pounded inside her, drying out her mouth and scrambling her thoughts.
‘Poor Lucy,’ she snapped, pulling back and giving herself time to get her act together under a show of antagonism.
‘Because she had the misfortune to have worn my diamond on her finger?’ Gabriel was amused and vaguely aware that he was picking up vibes that were quite unlike anything he had felt before in his PA’s presence. ‘Many women would have been delighted.’
‘Perhaps you should have chosen one of them.’
‘Wouldn’t have worked.’ He grinned, inviting her to ask the inevitable, but of course she stubbornly refused to, so he added, anyway, ‘Lucy and I go back a little way and there’s one thing compelling in her favour: she comes from just the right background.’
Abby wondered why that felt like a slap in the face. ‘I had no idea that sort of thing mattered to you, although of course it’s none of my business.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Gabriel purred in agreement. ‘But now that the door’s been opened, so to speak, I’d rather you’re not left with any stones unturned. Naturally, I’ll get in touch with Lucy, but she’s mistaken if she imagines I’m going to give her a hard time. She’ll get enough of that from her parents. No, I shall give her my blessing for her future life with the chinless wonder, Rupert. And, to satisfy your curiosity, I don’t care what anyone has or doesn’t have but, when