The Secret Spanish Love-Child - By Cathy Williams Page 0,10

BMW tucked away between a scooter and a hatchback. She imagined slipping into the passenger seat of his car, with the door shutting firmly behind her and knowing that there was no escape route unless she chose to hurl herself out of the car at forty miles per hour.

Gabriel shrugged but his levels of irritation were rising steadily. He wasn’t sure what he had hoped to achieve by descending on her at her workplace but it was beginning to rankle that his reception was somewhat less than warm. He had, after all, only traipsed over out of the goodness of his heart because he wasn’t comfortable with the notion that she had quit her job because of him.

‘I can understand that you might be a little upset,’ he began as soon as a cup of black coffee had been placed in front of him. ‘You think that you were lied to…’

‘I was lied to…’

‘You’ve got to get your head around the fact that the world is a different place for the seriously wealthy.’

‘You mean it’s a playground,’ Alex responded bitterly, staring down into her coffee, which had been stirred into a swirling brown whirlpool. If she shifted just a tiny bit, her knees would touch his and, to avoid that happening, she made sure to tuck her legs to one side. ‘You can do whatever you want to do and then sit back and blame the fallout on the fact that you play by a different set of rules.’

‘There’s no point going over all of this,’ Gabriel offered with a slight shrug. ‘You deserve an apology and I’m big enough to provide you with one. Does that make you feel better?’

‘Why did you bother to come here?’

‘To offer you your job back,’ he was surprised to hear himself say, although, once the words had left his mouth, he was pretty happy with the decision. Was it possible, he wondered, for a man to be more generous?

Alex looked up at him in surprise and inwardly flinched because just being so physically close to him was like being hit with a sledgehammer.

‘Why would you do that?’

‘You were being paid twice as much as you’re getting at that hole you’ve thrown yourself back into. Thanks to me—’ he let her think about that for a few seconds, happy to take the credit for his magnanimity ‘—you felt obliged to leave a perfectly good job with excellent prospects and a shed-load of benefits. That situation does not sit well with me.’ He took a sip of his coffee and sat back, eyeing her thoroughly over the rim of his cup.

He had always wondered what he had seen in her because she was so unlike the women he had dated. Not just physically, but mentally and intellectually. He was still wondering. The woolly hat and the fingerless gloves had been secreted in the bowels of her oversized bag, but her face was bare of make-up, aside from a bit of mascara and the remnants of some lip gloss. Her nails were unpolished and, sure enough, she was wearing a pair of trainers, which were eminently practical but hideously unfeminine. She worked in an office but she would have looked right at home in the middle of the countryside mucking out. He caught himself wondering what kind of house in the country would suit her, favouring something small and thatched and totally impractical when it came to mod cons, and he nipped his wandering thoughts in the bud.

‘In fact, I am willing to up your salary as compensation for the headache.’

‘When are you getting married?’

‘Come again?’

‘Your fiancée didn’t mention a date. I think she was too busy being indecisive about the flowers.’

Gabriel frowned. He didn’t particularly want to talk about Cristobel. In fact, she hadn’t once crossed his mind since she had returned to Spain three days ago.

‘March,’ he said abruptly.

‘A spring wedding. How nice.’

‘I didn’t come here to talk about Cristobel.’

‘How did you meet her?’

‘Is it of any importance?’

‘I’m curious.’

‘I met her at…a party. Something arranged by her parents.’ Broadly speaking, it was the truth. He had met Cristobel exactly one year ago and, were he to be brutally frank, he would have described their meeting as contrived, just as he would have described their wedding as arranged. It suited him. His parents were keen for a grandchild and, as his middle thirties loomed, he too felt the time right to get married and settle down. He had played with some of the greatest beauties