‘And you’ve been in meetings most of the day.’
‘It doesn’t take me long to sift through the waffle and get to the bits that matter.’ Without further ado, he began talking work. In depth. It was exactly what she had demanded, and she had no idea why she was suddenly disappointed that she’d put an end to their little foray into a less structured relationship.
Did she really want him asking her lots of personal questions? No! Did she want to be hostage to all sort of peculiar, inappropriate sensations because he happened to turn all that lazy male charm onto her? No! Because he was in an odd place didn’t mean that he could entertain himself at her expense because there had been a temporary fissure in their usual rigid working relationship.
Once upon a time, when she’d been young, naïve and planning her happy-ever-after with Jason, she’d been open and trusting, but since then she’d erected more protective barriers than the Bank of England and she wasn’t going to let them be demolished by her boss.
Abby didn’t know why she felt the need to maintain all those barriers, because Gabriel had been right when he’d said that his questions weren’t intrusive. They were just normal conversation between two people who happened to spend the majority of their waking hours together.
It was just that there was a quality of danger that clung to him. She’d sensed it as soon as she’d started working for him—an unpredictable charisma about him that could seduce the unwary, and it went far beyond the killer looks and the sharp intellect.
So she’d built her defence system even though she knew that he would never look at her twice anyway. She’d seen his girlfriends and they weren’t average-looking women in their twenties with brown hair and grey eyes. They were voluptuous sex sirens, with the exception of Lucy, who had been so spectacularly pretty that when they were together it was almost a crime not to take a photo.
Abby surfaced to find him neatly concluding his monologue on the various legal loopholes they would have to look out for when they went to see his client the following day, and telling her to buckle up.
‘I’ll stop by my grandmother,’ he explained as the jet began its descent, and Abby gazed out of the window, then turned to look at him.
‘Fine.’ She nodded. ‘I have the address of the hotel. I’ll get a cab there, shall I? And when we’re not working I’m very happy to busy myself following up with the usual reports on what’s been said so that you have everything to hand fairly immediately.’
‘Very efficient,’ Gabriel murmured. ‘But I think it would be nice for you to meet Ava when we get there. When I disappear for hours on work-related business, she’ll at least know who I’m with.’
‘What else might she think you’re doing?’
Gabriel dealt her a slashing smile. ‘Who knows? She might think that a man with a broken heart might be looking for someone to help fix it.’
Abby reddened. Following on logically from that point, she could only conclude that, once Ava met her, her mind would be set at rest that her grandson was actually disappearing off to work because there was no way he could be doing anything else with someone like Abby.
She was in no doubt that he would certainly be looking for some sticking plaster in the form of his usual glamorous sex bombs just as soon as they returned to London.
‘You must have spoken a great deal about Lucy,’ Abby said conversationally, because they were landing and the silence was begging to be filled. Gabriel shot her a sideways glance.
‘Virtually nothing,’ he confessed. ‘My grandmother disapproves of the women I tend to date.’
‘She’s met them?’
‘One or two. The rest she’s seen in various gossip columns. Her opinion seems to have stuck in a time warp roughly three years ago when I broke up with a glamour model who proceeded to do a kiss-and-tell story to one of the tabloids. I’m afraid she tarred and feathered the women who came after with the same brush as airheads willing to cash in on my name.’
Abby didn’t say anything but she was on his grandmother’s side, even though there had been no kiss-and-tell stories while she’d been working for him.
He stood up and Abby preceded him out of the plane, to be hit by a warm blast of air that momentarily took her breath away. ‘So I thought that the less said, the better.’
He flushed darkly because the truth of the matter was he saw less of his grandmother than he should do, and spoke less to her than he ought to. It honestly hadn’t occurred to him to launch into a lengthy touchy-feely conversation about Lucy, which wasn’t his style anyway. And it was hardly as though the engagement had been a long-standing one. Four and a half weeks ago he had sat back in his chair in one of the top restaurants in central London and watched as she’d opened the box containing the diamond ring and gasped suitably.
She had slipped the six figures’ worth of ring onto her finger, her eyes had grown teary and she had said, as it turned out with complete and utter honesty, that she’d had no idea...
Abby gave him a jaundiced look from under her lashes, and it hit him that she had to be the only woman in the world so openly sceptical of his motivations and so open about expressing it. She might give him long lectures about guidelines being kept and barriers not being breached, but she was kidding herself if she thought that those barriers weren’t breached on a daily basis by that very way she had of looking at him, as she had just then.
‘Did you send her pictures?’ she asked, stepping into the long car waiting for them at the airfield. ‘She surely must have been curious about the woman who was going to be your wife?’
‘I’ve only been engaged for a month or so, Abby. Maybe I should have tasked you with the job of filling my grandmother in on all the details, bearing in mind I’ve been out of the country more than I care to think over the past few weeks.’
‘I would never have done that!’
‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘As it turns out, it’s just as well that there were no photos sent. My grandmother knows about the engagement but that’s about it. No details and, in fairness, her health has been poor, so she’s not been as much on the ball as she usually would be.’
Abby looked at him narrowly and felt her pulses quicken as that illicit, forbidden thrill she’d felt earlier swooped through her in a rush. ‘Are you saying that she has no idea who Lucy is at all?’
‘Like I said,’ Gabriel intoned silkily, ‘I was hoping for a pleasant surprise. I was going to do the introduction with a flourish.’ He looked through the window, frowning. ‘Just as well, in a way, that she never met Lucy, didn’t even know her name and certainly didn’t ask for photos so that she could start picturing what the great-grandchildren would look like.’
He sighed and Abby looked at him, seeing the crack in his self-assurance. He’d said practically nothing to the woman who meant so much to him, She wondered whether, subconsciously, he had been as hesitant about Lucy as Lucy had been about him, in the end. Had he ticked all the right boxes, yet known that no amount of ticking could take the place of love and what it brought to a union?
‘I’m sure she’ll take it on the chin.’ Abby resorted to cheerful optimism and Gabriel turned to her with a grin.
‘We’ll find out soon enough. I, personally, have always found that it’s easy to accept what you can’t change.’
Their eyes tangled and she couldn’t tear her gaze away. She felt suddenly lost, drowning in the deep, dark depths, and when she did manage to look away her nerves were all over the place and she had to inhale deeply, sucking the air in like a drowning man gasping for oxygen.
They were soon in the town and she was relieved when he began talking to her about the city. Her nerves calmed. They had left behind the cool, grey skies of London and the dense, crowded pavements. Here, the sky was milky blue and the sun