‘What are you doing here?’ Gabriel pushed himself away from his desk so that he could cross his legs and survey the woman standing in front of him, as nervous as a kitten. The fact that he was still raw from thinking about her only a few minutes ago left a bitter taste in his mouth.
Suddenly Rose found that the speech she had rehearsed wouldn’t emerge from her dry, stricken throat.
‘Sit down. Although I have to tell you…’he glanced at his watch, then back at her face ‘…I don’t have much time to chew the fat with you. I’m out on a date and I don’t think the lady in question would appreciate being kept waiting because of some ex-fling.’ There was no date in point of fact. He had cancelled the redhead a few days ago, preferring the option of a bit of solitude and the company of his faithful laptop computer but he didn’t flinch at lying. He also knew that dismissing her as little more than an ex-fling would cut and, sure enough, he saw her wince, although, to her credit, she didn’t take her eyes off his face.
‘So. What do you want?’
‘I…I…’
‘…you were in the area and thought that you’d just pop in and see how I was doing?’ Gabriel raised his eyebrows in patent disbelief. ‘Now, why do I find that hard to believe?’
‘I know you were probably surprised when you got back to London…and found…found that I had left…’This wasn’t exactly how she had planned on broaching the conversation, but just looking at him had thrown her off balance.
‘Now, what would give you that idea?’ Gabriel asked, with blistering sarcasm. ‘Is it because, the night before you left, we had made lingering, passionate love? I was obviously deluded into imagining that you might have wanted to prolong our affair.’
‘Things change.’
‘When did you decide that clearing off was a good idea?’ Gabriel found that he was compelled to hear the answers to questions he hadn’t even known existed in his head but obviously did. ‘Was it when you made it back to the UK?’ He digested the barely discernible flicker of hesitation on her face and pounced with deadly accuracy. ‘You’d made your mind up before, hadn’t you…?’Gabriel intoned slowly. She neither denied it nor did she confirm it and her silence was answer in itself. He had been used. Gabriel felt as though he had been hit in the gut with a sledgehammer.
‘You don’t understand, Gabriel…’Rose could feel herself descending into a quagmire of ugly accusations.
‘Oh, I understand all right. Shall I tell you how I see things…?’
‘No!’
Rose tried to control her shaking hands but she was mesmerised by his cruel, handsome face. She would hear him out. She didn’t have much choice anyway because Gabriel, when the mood took him, was an unstoppable force.
‘You became my lover because you were frustrated by the boyfriend you left behind here…Don’t ask me why—maybe you found that he couldn’t satisfy you.’
Rose gaped at him incredulously. She would have burst out laughing if he hadn’t been so absorbed in own ridiculous theory.
‘And, as fate would have it, we ended up in bed. Although…maybe fate played less of a part than I think. After all, it was you who came running into my bed at the first sound of thunder and it was you who fled out of the bathroom from a spider, just coincidentally happening to land on top of me…’
‘If you recall, I was also the one who told you that I didn’t want anything…to happen between us!’
‘An impossibility and you knew it!’ Gabriel dismissed. ‘You must have known that we would have ended up making love. Tell me, did you give your boyfriend the benefit of what you learnt from me?’
Rose clenched her fists tightly. If she had been within hitting distance, she would have struck him across his sexy, sneering face. How dared he jump to his horrendous conclusions and reduce her in the process? And why bother to tell him that Joe was no more? The man who’d lasted one date! It was a joke but she had known, beyond the shadow of a doubt, when she’d returned, that there could be no one for her but Gabriel. At least not for a while. It just wouldn’t have been fair to have any man suffer the humiliation of comparison.
‘How could you think that of me, Gabriel? How could you think that I would be…calculating enough to jump into bed with one man just so that I could practise?’
‘Then when did you make the decision to leave and why?’ Gabriel loathed himself for his weakness in wanting to know and he gave her a look of cold contempt that she could show up and extract the shameful admission from him.
‘I did you a favour, Gabriel.’ She looked at him steadily, even though inside she felt as though her nerves were being twisted into knots. ‘I knew that you would tire of me sooner or later. I spared you the embarrassment of knowing that you wanted to get rid of me and I spared myself the pain of…’
‘The pain of what?’
‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with why I’m here. None of it has.’
In her head she had played around with all the various possible outcomes of her visit. None of them were very comforting.
When he didn’t say anything, she frowned and asked unsteadily, ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m here?’
‘I already do.’
Rose’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t! How could you?’
‘It’s easy.’ Gabriel gave an elegant shrug. ‘When you cut through all the nonsense, the only thing that speaks volumes is money.’
‘But…’
He raised one imperious hand. ‘How are you doing on your course?’
‘I haven’t actually…started it, as a matter of fact. But what does that have to do with anything?’
Gabriel couldn’t contain the grim stab of disappointment. Had he really thought her to be any different from the rest of the human race?
‘How much?’
‘How much what?’ Rose asked, dazed.
‘How much money are you after to fund your course?’ He stood up and strolled over to the window so that he could perch against the ledge and give her the full benefit of his contemptuous stare. ‘I wondered how long it would take before you realised just what a good financial deal you gave up here. I guess I could be heartless and tell you to clear off, but hell, what’s a bit of money in recognition of your…effort?’
‘Forget it, Gabriel.’ Rose stood up on trembling legs and turned blindly for the door.
It had been a huge mistake coming here, but she had talked it over with her sister, had seen it as the right and decent thing to do. Now, she could only ask herself what aspect of right and decent Gabriel Gessi would understand when his whole world was ruled by the concept of money.
‘Sit back down!’ he commanded, but she was already heading for the door.
She didn’t get far. In fact, she hadn’t even made it to the outer door when he was by her side, spinning her around so that she was forced to look at him.
The touch of his hand on her was like the heat of a branding iron and nor did he release her. He just stared down at her, his fingers digging into her skin, until she finally pulled away.
‘I didn’t come here to listen to your accusations!’ she said in a rush. ‘I didn’t come here to be accused of being some kind of gold-digger or anything else, for that matter!’
‘Oh, why did you come, then? To check and make sure the secretary you procured for me was doing