The Secret Spanish Love-Child - By Cathy Williams Page 0,68

but her voice was unsteady and, since she couldn’t look at him, she looked instead at the crumpled piece of evidence on the table. ‘Would you ever have told me that you’d met Cristobel in New York if she hadn’t been kind enough to provide proof of it?’

‘There was nothing to tell.’

‘Nothing to you, maybe.’

‘I’m not…in the habit of explaining my actions to anyone. Well…I never was…’

‘I can’t be married to a man who doesn’t think that he’s accountable at all to his wife. I know that appearances for you are everything, but how do you think it makes me feel to realise that you’re happy to take up where you left off with your ex-fiancée? Cristobel would have no problem sneaking around with you behind my back. Apparently that’s the Spanish way. Whatever that’s supposed to mean. I guess she just meant that that’s your way. Marry because you have an overdeveloped sense of obligation but then just carry on doing exactly what you want!’

‘She must have set the whole thing up…’

‘Is that all you have to say, Gabriel? That she must have set the whole thing up?’ Alex clenched her fists tightly and tears of bitter disappointment and frustration pricked the backs of her eyes. The cold, sickening realisation that this would be the soundtrack of her marriage, were she to marry him, swept over her with torrential force. Building crazy fantasies in her head and nursing girlish dreams of getting him to love her were frankly delusional. She would be entering into a contract, one that would see her financially secure for life, but that was it. No more, no less.

‘No.’

‘No what? Why can’t you at least be honest with me?’

‘Talking about feelings doesn’t come easy for me. I’ve never been one of those touchy-feely kind of guys…’

‘Okay.’ Alex turned away, defeated, and walked towards the window, away from him.

‘No, it’s not okay.’ Gabriel raked his fingers through his hair and was gripped with sudden indecision. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring through the window at nothing in particular and he couldn’t blame her. If Cristobel had sat and plotted for a thousand years, she couldn’t have come up with a better way of getting her own back on him for her ruined marriage plans. And how had he reacted when that horrendous picture had been thrust at him? With virtual silence. Was it any wonder that she couldn’t bear to set eyes on him?

‘I…’ he began hesitantly. He shook his head, impatient with himself, and strode towards her, ignoring the way she shied back as she spun around and watched him descending on her.

‘I had no idea that Cristobel was going to be in New York,’ he said slowly. ‘She got me on my mobile, claimed that she just wanted to talk to me, that I owed her that much at least, so I reluctantly agreed to take her out to dinner.’

‘Yes, well, I could see reluctance brimming over in that snapshot of the two of you.’

This close to her, he could breathe in her clean soapy scent and the elusive apple and honey fragrance of her recently washed hair.

‘Whatever you see in that photo,’ he murmured, ‘you’re way off target. The dinner was only successful in so far as it made me see what a damn fool I had been to have ever became engaged to Cristobel. Not only is she a vain, shallow person, but there was a spitefulness there that repelled me.’

‘You’re just saying that,’ Alex whispered.

‘She must have planned the whole thing, right down to making sure that someone would be there to capture us on camera. She knows that there’s no hope in hell that I’ll ever have anything more to do with her, but a woman scorned is still a woman scorned.’

Alex folded her arms and stared at the right sleeve of his shirt.

‘You…you do things to me, Alex…’

‘Oh, really.’

‘Yes, really.’ He tilted her head so that she could look at him and she jerked back. Her eyes were glazed and damp and he felt his heart constrict. ‘You do the same things to me that I do to you.’

‘What’s that?’ Alex flung at him, rubbing her leaking eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Turn you on?’

‘Make me cry.’

At that, Alex looked up at him. Her mouth was parted, ready for attack, but her brain had seized up. She made a soft choking sound and blinked.

‘I was an arrogant sod the first time you met me. Too