misunderstand. Disruption is inevitable for both of us,’ Gabriel drawled. ‘However, it will be lessened by your being out of the country until after the story breaks and the fuss dies down.’
‘Out of the country?’
‘Out of the country.’
‘You’re going to shuffle us off to some remote place in the middle of nowhere, hide us away for an indefinite period of time…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Gabriel stood up and Alex watched him in confusion. ‘The casserole. I can smell it.’
Alex leapt to her feet with a little shriek of alarm, temporarily distracted by the prospect of eating the charred remains of chicken and peas.
‘I’m not being ridiculous!’ She reverted to his sweeping solution to the problem of unwelcome publicity as she dished out two plates of extremely well cooked chicken and rice.
‘I’m not going to shuffle you off to any remote place. Frankly, I can’t think of one woman who would be less amenable to being shuffled off anywhere than you.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning that you’re like a Rottweiler off the leash.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’ She wondered how they had reached the point where insults were being traded back and forth like two combatants fighting in a ring. A belated sense of fair play made her realise that perhaps, and only a very small perhaps, she wasn’t being quite as helpful as she could.
His life had been a lot more disrupted than hers and he was trying to deal with it without drama. A pack of reporters in front of her house, she reluctantly acknowledged, would be hellish. If he resented her sudden, disastrous reappearance in his life and all the chaos it had brought in its wake, then how much more was he resenting her now, when she stubbornly refused to listen to a word he had to say because she was just too busy shouting at him?
‘But point taken,’ she muttered, sliding her eyes to him and then just as quickly sliding them away again. She reacted against every single thing he said because he just seemed to rouse frightening, primitive feelings in her that made a nonsense of her normally phlegmatic, upbeat personality. Hadn’t she coped with the fear when she’d discovered that she was pregnant and the loneliness of having her child without the support of the father around? Yes. So that surely pointed to an inner strength, even though one look at that darkly handsome face made her feel weak and panicky. But if he could be an adult about the situation, then she could as well.
‘Finally. We’re getting somewhere.’ He pushed aside his empty plate and angled his long body back from the table so that he could cross his legs. ‘My parents have yet to find out what’s really happening. I have only told them about breaking off the engagement.’
‘I bet they were overjoyed at that,’ Alex mumbled with a sinking feeling. Just when their son was about to tie the knot with the perfect woman, along came a serpent in the garden of Eden to wreck the whole plan.
‘They have accepted it. But I wanted to tell them about Luke face to face. Which is where you come in. I will arrange for us to have a little…holiday in Spain. We can break the news to them together and introduce them to their grandson. It will also allow me time to…get to know Luke. Undiluted time. As a bonus, we will be out of the country and away from media speculation.’
From a detached point of view, it certainly sounded like a brilliant idea. However, Alex felt far from detached when she considered the suffocating prospect of her and Luke spending undiluted time with Gabriel.
‘What about your work?’ she asked, drifting off with sickening ease into all sorts of scenarios that would prove a constant, unremitting threat to her mental health. Gabriel eating meals with them, lounging around a beach with a towel slung over his broad shoulders, laughing and relaxed and horribly, horribly disturbing. ‘You have an empire to run!’ she blurted out, fighting against the image of the old Lucio slotting neatly into this new Gabriel, thereby blurring the lines of hostility that were so useful.
‘Needs must.’ He shrugged, coolly polite as he detected the horror in her voice. ‘Sacrifices must be made. I am prepared to make them.’
‘Your parents will hate me!’ She speared a piece of chicken with her fork and looked at it miserably. ‘They must be so disappointed at how things turned out between you and Cristobel and, when