The Secret Spanish Love-Child - By Cathy Williams Page 0,28

they find out the reason why, they’re going to have me hung, drawn and quartered.’ Having never met his parents, she was already imagining them as older versions of Gabriel. Cold hearted, ambitious, fabulously wealthy and one hundred per cent approving of a marriage based on suitability. She didn’t think that they would be falling over themselves to welcome a jeans-wearing foreigner from a humble background who had been silly enough to have a fling with their highly eligible son and get pregnant. She cast her mind around for a punishment that would befit such a crime and could come up with nothing.

Gabriel felt his lips twitch with sudden, unannounced amusement. She had always had a flair for the dramatic.

‘Maybe you could face them on your own,’ she carried on, her voice adopting a wheedling tone. ‘Luke and I could stay somewhere…else and then they could come and visit. For a couple of hours to start with…’

He was already shaking his head before she could get to the end of her sentence and she threw him a baleful, sulky look from under her lashes.

‘You’re being unrealistic. And they won’t have you hung, drawn and quartered. They’re not barbarians. Naturally, they are deeply conventional people and they will find it odd that we have no intention of legalising our union for the sake of our child, but I’m sure I can bring them round to your point of view.’

‘Right.’ Alex was not in the least bit mollified by his reassurances.

‘So, now that you have agreed to this small step, we have to discuss the practicalities. I will get my people to see about selling this place and you can refund any money you borrowed to your parents. You will have to hand in your notice at your job, but that will be a formality because you’ll be leaving for Spain next week. Is your passport in order? Is Luke on it?’

Alex looked at him open-mouthed. She felt as though she had suddenly been tossed inside a washing machine which had been turned to the spin cycle.

‘I can’t sort all this stuff out in a matter of a few days!’ she gasped at the first immediate difficulty staring her in the face.

‘You don’t need to.’ Gabriel paused and looked away for a few seconds before returning his dark, brooding eyes to her face. ‘You were on your own once. You won’t be on your own again.’

His words, low, husky and uttered with driven intensity, brought a flush of colour to Alex’s face. They also gave her an incredibly warm feeling somewhere deep inside her. She had carefully cultivated a spirit of independence, knowing that one small person depended on her, but to know that she was no longer on her own was a seductive thought.

‘I…I will want to meet my son before we head off to Spain,’ Gabriel said abruptly. It had only been a matter of a few days and he hadn’t known whether keeping away had been a good thing or not. Should he have rushed to bond with Luke? No precedent had ever been set in his life for this sort of situation and he had found himself immobilised by indecision, finally falling back on a businesslike approach to the problem. Sort out the details first and then meet his son, get to know him. It was a thought that made him curiously nervous and Gabriel was not a man accustomed to nerves. He cleared his throat and helped himself to another glass of wine. ‘Is there anything I should know?’

‘Anything like what?’ Alex enquired, mystified.

‘Likes? Dislikes?’ He had barely registered the boy when he had last seen him and had serious doubts about his ability to bond with the child, partly because he had been absent for such a long time and partly because children had never figured in his life at any level. They could have belonged to another species. He just didn’t have a natural empathy with kids and he couldn’t see how that was going to change now, whatever the circumstances. He had avoided dwelling on that, choosing instead to focus all of his attention on the nitty-gritty of calling off the wedding and getting his secretary to initiate the process of rearranging all of his forthcoming meetings. Now, however, lay the unknown territory of meeting his son. It was a terrain charged with unseen landmines. What if the kid hated him? What then?

‘He likes all the usual things a four-year-old boy likes,’ Alex said