me to find out how my conversation went with your...girlfriend...’
‘Ex—ex-girlfriend. Hence the point of the conversation. So that she could be left in no doubt as to where matters stood.’ The waves of disapproval emanating from her were palpable. She looked as though she’d swallowed a lime and was painfully having to digest it. ‘I spoke to your ex-boss. Sounds like a nice man. I’m thinking you were never required to step up to the plate and have any awkward conversations with his ex-lovers...’
Was he being deliberately provocative? The lazy intensity of his gaze and the suggestion of a smile on his lips sent the blood rushing to her head and she tightened her jacket around her and sat up a little straighter. Her crossed legs felt as stiff as planks of wood, yet there was a curling sensation low down in her pelvis that she chose to ignore. Top of her mind right now was counting the ways she disliked her new boss. Good-looking he might be...staggeringly good-looking...but she decided on the spot that his personality left her cold.
In a way, it would make for an excellent working relationship. She had already gleaned from her phone call with the unfortunate Georgia that the problem with his past few secretaries, apparently, had been with them all developing inappropriate crushes on him.
‘I can’t believe he’s got one of his secretaries to do the dirty work for him!’ Georgia had wailed down the line. ‘Well, if you’re like the other one...’ she had sobbed, ‘Showing off your boobs and thinking you can snap him up, then you’re making a mistake! He’s never going to go there! He doesn’t like to mix work and play. He told me! So you can forget it!’
Georgia had lasted a mere two months, one week and three days. Was that the average duration of his relationships with women—a handful of months before he got bored and moved on to the next toy?
Thoughts that were usually deeply buried rose swiftly to the surface and she thought about her father—the years spent watching from the sidelines as he’d failed to return home, failed to pretend that he hadn’t been playing away, failed to pay lip service to a marriage he’d wanted to ditch but couldn’t afford to. She killed that pernicious, toxic trip down memory lane and dragged her wayward mind back to the present.
‘Tom was and is a very happily married man,’ Alice intoned. ‘So, no, there were no awkward phone calls to women.’ And you should make your own phone calls, she wanted to snap.
‘I gather from your expression that I’m not winning a popularity contest at this moment in time?’ Did he care one way or another? No. But if they were going to work together then there was no point in pretending to be a saint. Soon enough she would come into contact with the women who entered and left his life, barely producing a ripple. She would have to get used to fending off the occasional uncomfortable phone call and, if her moral high ground didn’t allow for that, then he needed to know right now.
‘She was very upset,’ Alice informed him, trying hard to avoid the trap of sounding judgemental, because what he got up to in his private life was none of her business. If he didn’t care who he shared it with, then that was up to him.
And yet, she couldn’t help feeling that there were sides to him that he shared with no one, and she couldn’t quite work out what gave her that impression—something veiled in his eyes that belied the image of a man who laid all his cards on the table. He didn’t give a damn whether she knew about his women or not but, yes, he did give a damn about other things, things she suspected he kept to himself.
Of course, it was fanciful thinking, because it didn’t take a genius to work out that a man who had reached the meteoric heights that he had would not be the open, transparent type. He would be the type who revealed only what he wanted to and only when it served his purposes.
‘I have no idea why,’ Gabriel said wryly. ‘I’d already informed her that I was pulling the plug on our relationship. Unfortunately, I think Georgia found it harder than she thought to accept the breakup.’
‘Do you usually farm difficult conversations out to your secretaries?’
The edge of criticism in her voice should have got on his nerves but Gabriel found that it didn’t. For once, he was in the company of a woman who seemed in no danger of developing a crush on him. Nor was she his type. He liked them small and curvy with an abundance of obvious charm. Prickly and challenging didn’t work for him. Prickly and challenging smacked of an effort he had no enthusiasm for giving.
‘I can’t say the opportunity has arisen in the past few months,’ Gabriel drawled.
And it wouldn’t have happened now, Alice deduced, except for the fact that he had wanted to put her to the test. Maybe he thought that she would not be up to the task—too prim and proper. She didn’t have to hear him say that to know that it was what he had been thinking and she bristled even though a part of her knew that, yes, she took life seriously. She had always had to. There had not been much scope to develop a frivolous side when she had spent so much of her youth supporting her mother through the innumerable bouts of her father’s indiscretions.
Pamela Morgan had never seemed to have the strength to stand up to her bullying, philandering husband, so she had turned to Alice for moral support. By the time Rex Morgan had died, in a car accident, his wife had become a shadow of the girl who had married him in the false expectation of living happily ever after.
Alice’s dreams had been put on hold and, when she looked back, she could see that she had spent her teenage years laying down the foundations for the person she would later become: reserved, cautious, lacking in the carefree gaiety that might have been her due, given a different set of circumstances.
Her one experience with the opposite sex had merely served to drive home to her that it never paid to think that anything good was a foregone conclusion.
‘Is there anything else you’d like me to do now, and what time might I expect you to be in tomorrow morning? I don’t know what your diary is.’ The diary he never used.
‘I keep my diary on my phone. I’ll email you the contents. And tomorrow? I expect I’ll be in...at my usual time. Then I’m away for the next three days. Think you can handle being on your own?’
‘As I said, Mr Cabrera, I will do my utmost to deal with anything you can throw at me...’
* * *
Disgorged from the jumble of people on the tube three weeks later, it occurred to Alice that whatever had been thrown at her had obviously been full of all the right vitamins and proteins because she was enjoying her job. No, more than enjoying it. She got up early with a spring in her step, looking forward to the workload ahead of her and the slow creeping of responsibilities that were landing on her plate.
Her brain was being challenged in all sorts of ways. She was personally responsible for three large accounts. She had enrolled for her accountancy studies. And, by her standards, she was being paid a small fortune.
It was amazing, given the fact that she disapproved of much of what Gabriel stood for. She disapproved of his blatant womanising; she disapproved of the way he picked up lovers and then discarded them. He made no secret of the fact that he was as ruthless in his private life as he was in his working one. She disapproved of his supreme certainty that whatever he wanted would be his. She disapproved of the way every female employee, almost without exception, practically went down on bended knee whenever he deigned to address them. She disapproved of his ego.
On a daily basis, she fielded calls from women who wanted to talk to him and she could gauge from their hopeful, breathless voices that talking was not the only thing they wanted.
She disapproved of all of that.
The guy clearly didn’t have to try when it came to the opposite sex, so he didn’t. He was pursued and presumably, when he felt like it, he took one of his pursuers up on her offer and established something that couldn’t even really be called a relationship.
He was lazy.
But so beautiful, a little voice in her head absently pointed out, and Alice halted for a second so