been more or less on eye level with him.
‘I’m not changing my life for you,’ Gabriel ground out. ‘I’m changing my life for my son.’
You mean nothing to me. That was the implied, unspoken rider to his statement, Alex thought. He intended to do the right thing for his son and in the process she would be dragged along, whether she liked it or not. He couldn’t have reminded her more forcibly of his take on events than if he had printed a sign saying you’re someone I happen to be stuck with and shoved it in her face.
She took a deep breath. ‘Maybe we should talk in the sitting room. I…I haven’t eaten dinner yet. There’s a casserole in the oven. It could just about stretch to two.’
It was an olive branch of sorts and Gabriel knew better than to snap it in two. But her stubbornness did things to his normally cool head that he wouldn’t have thought possible.
‘I thought you hated cooking.’ She had worked in a hotel to practise her Spanish but she had once confessed that kitchens made her dizzy. All those items of food and ingredients in bottles baffled her. He wanted to smile at the memory.
‘I’ve learnt…to…I prefer to give Luke home-cooked food,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I can manage a casserole but anything fancier than that is out of the question.’
‘So he’s yet to sample a soufflé…’
Alex dipped past him towards the sitting room at the front of the house. She knew that this polite banter was his way of making the best of a bad situation and she would have to go along for the ride or else make life a constant battleground for them both, and inevitably for Luke. She couldn’t do that. But dredging up memories of their brief shared past was more than she felt she could handle. Yet where was the common ground between them now? They were operating in an unreal space, where the normal rules of social engagement were suspended.
‘What happens now?’ she asked abruptly, as soon as they were sitting. Gabriel on the sofa, she on the comfy chair by the fireplace. Her half finished glass of wine was still there and she took a sip but it had gone warm.
‘I didn’t see any mention of Luke in that article…’ she carried on, drawing up her long legs and then resting her chin on her knee.
‘Because I didn’t mention him. There was no point getting into the nitty-gritty and, besides, I have little respect for reporters. The world will find out about you both when I’m good and ready.’
‘You mean you haven’t told your fiancée the truth?’
‘Ex-fiancée. And no. Time enough for that.’
‘What on earth did you tell her?’
Gabriel shrugged. ‘I told her that ours was not a relationship that was destined to last the course and, as such, we should break it off before we both made a mistake.’
‘That little speech should have come easy to you, Gabriel. You must have had years to practise it.’
Gabriel looked at her broodingly. There would be no profit in taking up this futile conversational thread. His mission was to get her on board and the only way he could do that was via dialogue. ‘Cristobel will have no trouble in finding my replacement.’
‘That’s not as easy as you think!’ The words were out before she could do something useful, like swallow them back and give herself a stern reprimand for even going there. There was a thick, pulsating silence, during which Alex could feel the slow crawl of embarrassed colour into her face.
‘What are you trying to say?’ he murmured in the sort of lethally sexy undertone that had always been able to send her pulses skyrocketing into the stratosphere. ‘That I’m still on your mind?’
‘Of course not!’ Alex shot back wildly. Their eyes met and, for a brief moment, she could feel her senses go into agonised, melting free fall. With a sense of deep mortification, she was aware of a dull ache between her legs and the tickle of dampness that proved the effect he was having on her.
‘Because it’s nothing to be ashamed of…I still happen to find you a very attractive woman…’
‘How can you sit there and say something like that when you’ve only just broken off your engagement? How fickle are you?’
In the space of a heartbeat, Gabriel could feel the tables turn on him. She seemed to have developed a talent for doing that. From nowhere, she could generate an argument