LATE.’ GABRIEL pushed himself away from his giant walnut and steel desk to look at the small, dark-haired woman moving briskly to pull out a chair so that she could position herself in front of him.
She was clutching her laptop under her arm and carrying a flat white coffee in her free hand, bought on her way in from a mobile one-man-band seller of excellent coffee who had set up camp outside the towering glass building that housed Gabriel’s headquarters.
So far, so good.
Except it wasn’t eight-thirty, her usual time of arrival. Nor was it nine-thirty. In fact, it was after ten, which was definitely out of the ordinary. Gabriel looked at his watch significantly, catching her eye as she glanced up at him.
‘I know.’ Abby could barely meet his gaze as she carefully rested his coffee on his desk and sat in front of him. On the outside, she was as serene and composed as she always was. It was part and parcel of having to deal with the adrenaline-charged, volatile personality of her boss. Anything less than serene wouldn’t have made it past the six-month mark and she had been his PA now for over two years.
On the inside, however, she was a nervous wreck because she was about to shake the foundations of Gabriel’s carefully composed life and he was not a man who took kindly to having his foundations shaken.
‘So?’ Gabriel vaulted to his feet, eyebrows raised, every sniffer instinct on full alert, because if there was one thing that could be said about his secretary, it was that she was the very essence of efficiency predictability. He couldn’t think of the last time she had arrived late. No, he could, and the answer was never. ‘Don’t leave me in suspense.’ He grinned and approached her in ever-decreasing circles until he was towering right beside her.
‘You know what a crashing bore I am,’ he murmured. ‘I loathe anything out of the ordinary.’
Abby could recognise a back-handed piece of self-congratulation when she heard one because the one thing no one could accuse Gabriel of being was a bore. And he knew it.
Momentarily distracted from the business at hand, she looked at him with a touch of exasperation but, as always, direct contact with Gabriel’s darker-than-night eyes left her feeling a little breathless and frazzled. Abby didn’t belong to that long, long queue of glamour women between the ages of eighteen and eighty who went weak at the knees the second Gabriel looked in their direction, but he still managed to have an effect on her which she had long since learned to ignore.
‘Would you mind sitting down?’ She arched her eyebrows, keeping all outward signs of her lack of composure under wraps. Her boss was eagle-eyed when it came to spotting the tiniest of reactions in other people and he was fond of pouncing. Abby wanted to say what she had to say before any pouncing had a chance to take place. ‘You’re giving me a crick in my neck.’
‘So?’ He perched on the edge of his desk, still too close but at least no longer towering. ‘Why the departure from your usual routine? Unexpected dental appointment? Sick cat in urgent need of a vet? Crashing hangover?’ Gabriel didn’t object to a little unpredictability and variety in his private life although, in fairness, variety was now a thing of the past given the fact that he was a man travelling at speed towards the altar.
However, in his professional life, unpredictability was not something he encouraged and he hoped his trustworthy secretary wasn’t going to start becoming unpredictable. That would pose a number of problems, the main one being that he couldn’t envisage having such a successful working relationship with anyone else. Something about her calm complemented the aggressive energy of his personality, grounded him in ways he had become accustomed to.
He paled because on top of the sick pet, emergency tooth filling and oversleeping her alarm came another, more likely possibility.
‘You’re not...are you?’
‘Not what?’
‘I don’t even know if you have a boyfriend. You’ve worked for me for over two years and I still don’t know whether you have a boyfriend or not.’
‘What has that got to do with anything?’ Abby flushed and bristled.
‘Most bosses know at least some details of their PA’s private lives! You’re so secretive, Abby. Why are you so secretive?’
‘Gabriel, I honestly have no idea where this is going.’
‘If I’d known that there was a man lurking in the background, then I might have braced myself for the inevitable.’
Abby looked at him in open confusion. Gabriel’s brilliant mind had a disconcerting habit of whizzing around in unexpected directions until, hey presto, he got precisely where he wanted to be, leaving the rest of his competition miles behind and breathless, but even for him this line of deduction was bewildering.
‘Inevitable?’
‘Simple process of deduction: you’re never late...so I’m assuming something unexpected has reared its ugly head, or else you’re not well. Yet here you are! So...temporary bout of sickness? Maybe a trip to the doctor? I’m joining the dots here...’
His dark eyes zeroed in on her flat stomach and Abby felt her muscles contract and tense. Then she felt something else, an awareness that made her breathe in sharply, because it crashed through the protective layers she had built around herself, layers that safeguarded her against the dynamism and virility of her impossibly sexy boss.
‘What dots are you joining? I’m not pregnant!’ she exclaimed impatiently. ‘And the reason I don’t talk about my private life isn’t because I’m secretive—it’s because it’s actually none of your business, Gabriel!’
‘That’s called secretive,’ Gabriel pointed out without batting an eye. ‘Women always like to talk about their private lives.’
Abby gritted her teeth with a distinct lack of the cool reserve of which she was so proud.
‘But I can’t say that I’m not relieved.’ He was carrying on now with considerable less tension. ‘And I want to tell you right now that you should never be hesitant about telling me if and when you fall pregnant. I don’t belong to that category of male chauvinists who think that a woman with a child is a liability in the work place.’
‘Equality has come a long way since the Dark Ages.’ Abby had no idea how her simple speech had managed to become so derailed but then she realised that she hadn’t actually been allowed to get a word in.
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Gabriel smirked. ‘Trust me when I tell you that I know otherwise.’ He paused. ‘So, you still haven’t said why you’re late.’
‘I...er... Gabriel, I was out last night...’ This was hardly the crisp speech she had mentally rehearsed on her way to the office, but she hadn’t foreseen a hijacking of her prepared agenda by her unpredictable boss. ‘I went to a club, in actual fact.’
‘A club? On a Thursday?’
‘Yes, Gabriel! It’s actually not that unusual. In fact, the club was packed. Because people do that—they go to clubs. Even on Thursdays!’ But Abby knew that she was red as a beetroot and getting more flustered by the second when she thought about what had taken her out of her comfort zone to the club. An Internet date. Rather, someone she had met on a dating app who had seemed very promising at the start of the evening, when they had been having a tame drink at a very civilised bar in the city. True, she had had to resist glancing at her watch every so often, and had had to keep reminding herself that after two years of celibacy it was high time she jumped back into the dating pool, but even so...
Well, he hadn’t been an ogre. Nice looking, wire-rimmed specs and a suit and a decent job at a large accountancy firm.
There’d been no reason for her not to go to the club with him. How was she to know that after four hours what had started out as nice enough would develop into interminably dull?
Maybe that was why