The Secret Spanish Love-Child - By Cathy Williams Page 0,67

just like she had before, hopelessly loving a guy who was so bad for her.

Her whole body tensed with shock as she pulled open the door to find Gabriel standing in front of her, the lines of his strong face tense.

‘Gabriel! What are you doing here? You’re not due back for a couple of days…’ Her voice trailed off as he strode past her into the small hallway, turning at the bottom of the stairs to look at her with a dark, shuttered expression.

Alex quietly shut the door and leaned against it. She hadn’t had time to brace herself to face him. Now, she was all over the place. Her heart was hammering inside her and she had broken out in a fine film of nervous perspiration. Why had he returned early? Surely it had something to do with Cristobel. The coincidence was just too uncanny otherwise.

‘I’ve been trying to get through to you,’ Gabriel said tightly. He stared at her across the width of the hall, his keen dark eyes taking in her nerves and wondering what the hell was going on.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘You knew but you chose not to take my calls?’

‘Have you come straight from the airport? Why?’

Relief that she was all right, as was Luke, or she would have said something, mingled now with anger and a certain amount of confusion.

‘I…was worried about you both,’ Gabriel said heavily. ‘Can you blame me? I was thousands of miles away, with no idea what was going on over here.’

‘Sorry,’ Alex mumbled, looking down at her silly bedroom slippers. Even with her mind doing crazy loops in her head and her heart splintering into a thousand pieces, she was still aware of the fact that she would have changed into something a little more attractive had she known that he was going to descend on her. Instead, she was wearing her oldest track pants and a T-shirt with a comical motif that had faded to the point of obscurity after a million washes.

‘So?’ he prompted harshly, because she appeared to have frozen into immobility. ‘Care to tell me what’s going on? I dropped everything to get over here.’

Alex thought of him abandoning his meetings and his conferences so that he could fly back to London and fought against that desperate treacherous tendency to read something significant into his behaviour.

‘Maybe we should go into the sitting room,’ she mumbled, edging away from the front door with her arms firmly folded in front of her.

‘Not until you tell me what’s going on. I worked out it couldn’t be Luke or you would have picked up my calls. Which led me to think that something might have happened to you.’

‘Something like what?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! What do you think? Some kind of…of accident…’

‘And don’t pretend you would have cared one jot!’ Alex blurted out, tears springing to her eyes so that she had to stare back down at the ground again and gather herself.

The silence bristled between them. Gabriel had the strangest now or never feeling. What was he supposed to do with that?

‘There’s something you need to see,’ Alex continued in a shaky, driven voice and she walked quickly past him, towards the sitting room and her handbag, where that wretched newspaper clipping had taken up residence in her wallet and had been steadily burning a hole in it for the past few interminable days.

Gabriel watched, mystified and irrationally panic stricken as she rummaged in her oversized sack and finally withdrew a piece of paper which she handed silently over to him.

It took him a few seconds to recognise Cristobel, staring up at him for all the world as though they were lovers. He hadn’t even been aware of any paparazzi around at the time. He could just remember feeling impatient and keen to see the back of her. Unfortunately, that had not been transmitted in the shot, artfully snapped to fabricate a story out of nothing.

‘She came to see me after you had left the island. I didn’t tell you. She said that she would have you back, but I didn’t want to believe her…’

Gabriel tore his eyes away from the newspaper clipping and then he quietly scrunched it between his fingers and tossed it on to the table between them. He shoved his hands in his pockets and reluctantly raised his eyes to hers.

‘You wanted me to marry you because of Luke and the second I accepted, you resumed your…your…’ Her head ached with the effort of not crying