Undertaking Love Page 0,81
shiver with lust. She just had to face it. He must have had a good old laugh at her show of resistance, at her protestations that it had to be a one-night stand. She’d played right into his hands. Gabe must have thought it was his birthday, not hers.
Of course, none of this should matter to her. She was the one who had insisted on a grown up, civilised one night stand, so why did this feel so much like a betrayal?
It concerned her even more that her judgment had turned out to be so poor, just like her mother’s had so many times before now. She slammed the dishwasher shut with a harder than necessary swish and threw her shoulders back. She needed to draw a line in the sand. Gabriel Ryan had turned her over once with his charm and flattery.
He wouldn’t get the chance to do it again.
Gabe opened the biscuit cupboard in the funeral parlour kitchen and sighed with resignation. Empty. Not a jammy dodger in the building.
It wasn’t his unsatisfied sweet tooth that bothered him so much as tumbling so spectacularly from grace in Dora’s eyes. She’d never failed to see to it that his addiction was satiated. Her opinion mattered to him, and the fact that she’d so readily believed the rubbish being peddled by the local rag cut deep. Not that she was alone in her conclusions; the majority of the locals had been failing to quite meet his eye over the last couple of days, too. Gabe had no doubt at all that it would have a knock-on effect on his business. Reputation was everything in his line of work. Who was going to put their trust in the services of a disreputable, womanising young undertaker?
Rupert’s article had been a real hatchet job, a sensationalist exposé of a sleazy, sex-mad drug addict that Gabe would never recognise as himself.
Was that really what people around here saw when then they looked at him?
He had no idea how the hell photos from the strip club had even come to exist, and they certainly didn’t paint a true picture of what had happened that evening.
But then, who cared about truth in all of this?
What did it matter that innocent people had been dragged into this mess?
Gabe hadn’t seen his ex-wife Simone since a rainy Friday morning on the steps of a Dublin divorce court more than ten years ago, and yet she’d ended up with her face splashed across a Sunday paper right next to some stripper.
Bad news travelled fast.
He’d had his mother, her mother, and two of her older brothers on the phone from Dublin over the last couple of weeks. His mother had tried to insist he come home, and Simone’s family had all warned him in no uncertain terms to stay the hell away.
Gabe banged the kitchen cupboard shut. Rupert had been out for his blood, and he’d managed to bury the axe right in the back of his head.
He heard the front door open and looked down the hall to see Melanie dash in from the rain, her sopping umbrella held out in front of her in distaste.
‘Morning,’ he called, and she glanced up with a frown on her face. Dark shadows ringed her eyes, but Gabe bit down on the urge to ask if she’d had a heavy weekend. He’d learned over the months that Melanie always sidestepped questions about her home life, and he respected her enough not to pry.
She peeled off her coat and hung it on the coat stand to dry, then headed through to the kitchen with a crammed carrier bag in her hand.
‘Morning.’ She finally favoured him with a smile as she opened the biscuit cupboard.
‘No point. The cupboards are bare.’ Gabe muttered.
‘Yeah, I noticed. I thought you could probably use these.’
She unloaded at least half-a-dozen packets of biscuits onto the side. Gabe noticed with a pang that she seemed to have brought every possible variety apart from jammy dodgers. The sooner Dora decided to speak to him again the better.
‘What would I do without you?’ he said with a diplomatic smile.
Melanie was good at her job, and right now she was one of a handful of people in the village not treating him as if he were the Peter Stringfellow of the undertaking world. Dan had practically cried with laughter at the idea of Gabe as the village lothario and smacked him on the back with pride, but otherwise, only the people he actually