homely and heartwarming.
And she really would have, but something was slipped under her door two days later that would blow all her plans to smithereens…
Chapter Ten
THE neatly clipped newspaper page was accompanied by a saccharine note that read: I thought you should see this. Alex had just dropped Luke off to his playgroup and done some shopping; the envelope lying on the mat inside the door must have been hand-delivered. She stared at the picture for ages, during which time life seemed to slow to a standstill.
Gabriel was, as always, distinctive, his proud, arrogant head inclined down towards Cristobel’s uplifted face. Had Cristobel delivered the clipping? Of course she had! Who else? It was from an American tabloid. What had she been doing in New York? Suddenly a host of sickening doubts and misgivings rushed through Alex like a swarm of locusts, devouring everything in its path. She dumped the shopping bags on the floor and sat down so that she could give the picture one hundred per cent of her attention.
Gabriel had spoken to her on the telephone twice since he had left the country and she had spent ages talking to him, chatting about nothing in particular, content to enjoy the rich, lazy drawl of his voice and to hear about what he had been doing. Now she wondered whether Cristobel had been in the hotel room whilst he had made those calls. Maybe she had been tapping her long scarlet nails and looking at her diamond watch as she had impatiently waited for him to wrap it up.
In complete turmoil, Alex found that she couldn’t concentrate at all for the remainder of the day. She had intended to start packing away some of her possessions, boxing up the ones she would take with her to her new house. Her new life! Now, it all seemed pointless. She would have fought tooth and nail to turn her charade of a marriage into something meaningful, but seeing that picture of Cristobel with Gabriel had shown her that there was nothing to fight over and to carry on kidding herself otherwise would have reduced her to the level of a joke.
She wondered if she should just pack her bags and return to Ireland. Should she? What would be the point of that? Gabriel would find her and he wouldn’t be pleased.
It was all too easy to project a scenario in which Gabriel hunted her down and used his mighty power and influence to take Luke away from her. Would he do that? Previously she would have sworn with one hand on the Bible that he would never have been capable of any such thing, but just how well did she know him? Hadn’t her very first meeting with him been based on a lie? Hadn’t he manipulated a situation years ago because it had suited him at the time? He had pretended to be someone he wasn’t and he had told her that it was because anonymity had given him a taste of freedom for a while but couldn’t it equally have been true that he had sussed her within seconds and realised that she wasn’t the kind of girl who found rich, spoiled men attractive? And so he had cleverly dropped the trappings and adopted a different cover?
Alex hated thinking like that, but she couldn’t deny the grainy photo of Gabriel and Cristobel together. The bags of shopping, lots of food items in preparation for the Domestic Goddess she was to become, lay on the floor cruelly mocking her fanciful, pie-in-the-sky dreams.
By seven that evening she was ready for bed and was so spent from her troubled thoughts that she failed to stir when the phone rang at ten. And rang. And rang.
Frustrated, Gabriel raked his fingers through his hair and stared at his mobile. No reply from the landline and her cellphone was switched off. He had never met a woman who was so disorganised when it came to her mobile phone. It was seldom charged and, when it was, it was continually programmed on silent so that phone calls were routinely missed because she couldn’t hear it ring and, when she did hear it, locating the thing in her oversized bag was an accomplishment based solely on luck.
He would have to phone her in the morning. He would never have credited it, but whereas women had always run a poor second to work, Alex seemed to fly in the face of this immutable truth. He thought about