The Secret Spanish Love-Child - By Cathy Williams Page 0,66

her way too much when she wasn’t around and especially now, when Cristobel had appeared on the scene because she just happened to be doing some shopping in New York and had heard that he was around from his secretary. Out of a misplaced sense of good manners and residual guilt, he had taken her to dinner and had had a first hand opportunity to see for himself just how inconsequential Cristobel had been to him. It astounded him that he had ever found himself drifting into an engagement to her. For someone who prided himself on his astute judgement and razor-sharp acumen, he realised that he had very nearly sleep-walked himself into the worst situation of his life.

He had been struck by a strong sense of gratitude that he now had Alex and Luke in his life. Frankly, he found it difficult to remember a time when he didn’t, which was weirdly comforting and confusing at the same time.

When, the following day, he tried calling again, this time at six in the morning, when she surely could be nowhere else but in the house, and received no answer, a sense of foreboding edged its way past his initial concern.

He had a series of meetings lined up and he did his best to concentrate on the business of sealing this deal, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

Had she decided to go and visit her parents in Ireland? On the spur of the moment, he dialled the landline number she had given him and the phone was answered by a woman who confirmed that her parents were away and wouldn’t be back for another week. He had to cut short a rambling description of where they had gone and how long overdue the holiday had been.

Never again would Gabriel underestimate the power of his imagination. Unable to get through to her, he could only think that a disaster had occurred. His palms grew clammy and he began to feel sick as he thought of various scenarios involving hospitals and emergency rooms. Had Luke been taken ill? Surely Alex would have called him immediately if that had been the case? The answer to that was yes. With lightning speed, his thoughts veered off that train of thought to a more likely one: Alex had had an accident of some sort and had been unable to get through to him.

Once planted in his head, he was unable to shake the feeling that something was disastrously wrong.

Gabriel was not of the temperament to sit around twiddling his thumbs and stressing and he was honest enough to admit that no amount of high level meetings had the power to distract. He was a man of action and, in a move that would have shocked anyone who knew him well, he delegated the remainder of what needed doing to the members of the board who had accompanied him on the trip to New York. He had always been pivotal in any talks of strategic importance but he had to concede that if the deal fell through, then the deal fell through. No amount of success in this matter was worth the way his mind was going off the rails.

Not for the first time, he missed the availability of Concorde for transatlantic speed. However, his name carried sufficient weight to ensure that he was sitting in the next available first class cabin leaving New York.

He would have had a very hard time admitting it to anyone, but he felt out of control and he breathed a sigh of relief when the plane finally landed at Heathrow.

In possession of hand luggage only, he was out of the airport in record time and heading for her house without bothering to detour past his apartment.

Three loud bangs on the door had Alex almost spilling the cup of coffee she had made, her first for the day. In an effort to conceal her terrible frame of mind, she had spent the past day and a half over-compensating with Luke and had had a hellish time trying to settle him in bed after two bowls of ice cream and a chocolate bar. She knew that Gabriel had been trying to get hold of her and she had taken care to ignore his persistent ringing because she just didn’t trust herself not to lash out at him. He had also tried her mobile. She had seen the missed calls and had erased them, furious with herself for having got herself all tangled up again,