A Diamond Deal With Her Boss

But now this...

This was different and it felt dangerous because he wasn’t talking to her about work.

Abby had no intention of dropping her guard any more than she already had and, the sooner she filled him in on that, the better.

Because she’d always privately maintained that she was immune to his charm. She’d been jettisoned by a guy who’d been cute and charming and she knew better than to be taken in by someone like that again. Especially when she’d seen first-hand how many women were suckers for a man like Gabriel. She’d done far too much end-of-relationship flower-buying on his behalf, thank you very much!

But he was in a strange place, even if he wouldn’t admit it, and it would seem, the devil was working on idle hands because that low-level teasing disturbed her. It was like having a feather brushed against her skin, giving her goose bumps, tickling her in places that made her blush.

Of course, he would return to normal soon enough, but just in case he decided that breaching the boundaries could become a permanent thing she felt that it was up to her to speak her mind.

She cleared her throat and looked him squarely in the eye.

‘I feel uncomfortable saying this.’ She hesitated, unsettled by his eyes which, now that she was staring into their depths, she noticed were the deepest and darkest of navy blue. ‘But since we’re going to be working with one another for the next week...’

‘Nothing new there, Abby.’

‘Yes, I know, but this is a little different. I realise I won’t be staying with you in a hotel because you’ll be at your grandmother’s place, but we won’t be in our...our...’

‘Usual territory?’ Gabriel inserted helpfully, intrigued by where this was leading.

‘So things seem to have altered a little between us and I get that. I have never been involved in your private life before, not really, but I have been recently, through no fault of my own.’ She glanced away because the intensity of his gaze was making her hot and bothered. She wished he’d say something but, perversely, he was silent, waiting for her to carry on or maybe, she thought, waiting for her to trip up with the tangled speech she’d begun without thinking through first.

‘And for that I apologise,’ Gabriel said seriously, eventually.

Their eyes met and there was a moment of perfect understanding between them. Beneath that grave tone, he was amused, and she knew it. She shot him a fulminating look of frustration and his lips twitched but he looked away, the thick fringe of his lashes concealing his expression.

‘Apology accepted,’ Abby said. ‘But what I feel I must say is that I don’t feel comfortable...er...er...’

Gabriel raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question and she gritted her teeth.

‘I don’t enjoy talking about my private life,’ she finished lamely.

‘I didn’t think we were, Abby.’

‘I have every sympathy for you, and I really feel for you having to break the news about Lucy to your grandmother, but I think we should move on and re-establish our...our...’

‘Why are you so scared about opening up?’ Gabriel asked softly and Abby was rattled enough to glare at him.

‘That’s exactly what I mean!’ she cried. She was shocked when she slammed down the leather lid of her tablet.

Gabriel was fascinated. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he’d registered that she was attractive enough but her whole face right now was alive with emotion. Her grey eyes had darkened, her full mouth was downturned in a pout of frustration and her cheeks were flushed.

Just like that, he wondered what she would look like naked. Naked on a bed, flushed from making love.

His mouth tightened and he shifted. ‘Message received loud and clear, Abby,’ he told her tightly. ‘Strangely, what you call an infringement of your privacy, most normal people call good manners and polite curiosity. But, if you’d rather we stick exclusively to work-related issues, then that’s fine with me.’

‘Thank you,’ she said tautly.

‘I’ve already read all those reports you want to get through.’

‘You have?’

‘You emailed them to me yesterday.’

‘And you’ve been in meetings most of the day.’

‘It doesn’t take me long to sift through the waffle and get to the bits that matter.’ Without further ado, he began talking work. In depth. It was exactly what she had demanded, and she had no idea why she was suddenly disappointed that she’d put an end to their little foray into a less structured relationship.

Did she really want him asking her lots of personal questions? No! Did she want to be hostage to all sort of peculiar, inappropriate sensations because he happened to turn all that lazy male charm onto her? No! Because he was in an odd place didn’t mean that he could entertain himself at her expense because there had been a temporary fissure in their usual rigid working relationship.

Once upon a time, when she’d been young, naïve and planning her happy-ever-after with Jason, she’d been open and trusting, but since then she’d erected more protective barriers than the Bank of England and she wasn’t going to let them be demolished by her boss.

Abby didn’t know why she felt the need to maintain all those barriers, because Gabriel had been right when he’d said that his questions weren’t intrusive. They were just normal conversation between two people who happened to spend the majority of their waking hours together.

It was just that there was a quality of danger that clung to him. She’d sensed it as soon as she’d started working for him—an unpredictable charisma about him that could seduce the unwary, and it went far beyond the killer looks and the sharp intellect.

So she’d built her defence system even though she knew that he would never look at her twice anyway. She’d seen his girlfriends and they weren’t average-looking women in their twenties with brown hair and grey eyes. They were voluptuous sex sirens, with the exception of Lucy, who had been so spectacularly pretty that when they were together it was almost a crime not to take a photo.

Abby surfaced to find him neatly concluding his monologue on the various legal loopholes they would have to look out for when they went to see his client the following day, and telling her to buckle up.

‘I’ll stop by my grandmother,’ he explained as the jet began its descent, and Abby gazed out of the window, then turned to look at him.

‘Fine.’ She nodded. ‘I have the address of the hotel. I’ll get a cab there, shall I? And when we’re not working I’m very happy to busy myself following up with the usual reports on what’s been said so that you have everything to hand fairly immediately.’

‘Very efficient,’ Gabriel murmured. ‘But I think it would be nice for you to meet Ava when we get there. When I disappear for hours on work-related business, she’ll at least know who I’m with.’

‘What else might she think you’re doing?’

Gabriel dealt her a slashing smile. ‘Who knows? She might think that a man with a broken heart might be looking for someone to help fix it.’

Abby reddened. Following on logically from that point, she could only conclude that, once Ava met her, her mind would be set at rest that her grandson was actually disappearing off to work because there was no way he could be doing anything else with someone like Abby.

She was in no doubt that he would certainly be looking for some sticking plaster in the form of his usual glamorous sex bombs just as soon as they returned to London.

‘You must have spoken a great deal about Lucy,’ Abby said conversationally, because they were landing and the silence was begging to be filled. Gabriel shot her a sideways glance.

‘Virtually nothing,’ he confessed. ‘My grandmother disapproves of the women I tend to date.’

‘She’s met them?’

‘One or two. The rest she’s seen in various gossip columns. Her opinion seems to have stuck in a time warp roughly three years ago when I broke up with a glamour model who proceeded to do a kiss-and-tell story to one of the tabloids. I’m afraid she tarred and feathered the women who came after with the same brush as airheads willing to cash in on my name.’

Abby didn’t say anything but she was on his grandmother’s side, even though there had been no kiss-and-tell stories while she’d been working for him.

He stood up and Abby preceded him out of the plane, to be hit by a warm blast of air that momentarily took her breath away. ‘So I thought that the less said, the better.’

He flushed darkly because the truth of the matter was he saw less of his grandmother than he should do, and spoke less to her than he ought to. It honestly hadn’t occurred to him to launch into a lengthy touchy-feely conversation about Lucy, which wasn’t his style anyway. And it was hardly as though the engagement had been a long-standing one. Four and a half weeks ago he had sat back in his chair in one of the top restaurants in central London and watched as she’d opened the box containing the diamond ring and gasped suitably.

She had slipped the six figures’ worth of ring onto her finger, her eyes had grown teary and she had said, as it turned out with complete and utter honesty, that she’d had no idea...

Abby gave him a jaundiced look from under her lashes, and it hit him that she had to be the only woman in the world so openly sceptical of his motivations and so open about expressing it. She might give him long lectures about guidelines being kept and barriers not being breached, but she was kidding herself if she thought that those barriers weren’t breached on a daily basis by that very way she had of looking at him, as she had just then.

‘Did you send her pictures?’ she asked, stepping into the long car waiting for them at the airfield. ‘She surely must have been curious about the woman who was going to be your wife?’

‘I’ve only been engaged for a month or so, Abby. Maybe I should have tasked you with the job of filling my grandmother in on all the details, bearing in mind I’ve been out of the country more than I care to think over the past few weeks.’

‘I would never have done that!’

‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘As it turns out, it’s just as well that there were no photos sent. My grandmother knows about the engagement but that’s about it. No details and, in fairness, her health has been poor, so she’s not been as much on the ball as she usually would be.’

Abby looked at him narrowly and felt her pulses quicken as that illicit, forbidden thrill she’d felt earlier swooped through her in a rush. ‘Are you saying that she has no idea who Lucy is at all?’

‘Like I said,’ Gabriel intoned silkily, ‘I was hoping for a pleasant surprise. I was going to do the introduction with a flourish.’ He looked through the window, frowning. ‘Just as well, in a way, that she never met Lucy, didn’t even know her name and certainly didn’t ask for photos so that she could start picturing what the great-grandchildren would look like.’

He sighed and Abby looked at him, seeing the crack in his self-assurance. He’d said practically nothing to the woman who meant so much to him, She wondered whether, subconsciously, he had been as hesitant about Lucy as Lucy had been about him, in the end. Had he ticked all the right boxes, yet known that no amount of ticking could take the place of love and what it brought to a union?

‘I’m sure she’ll take it on the chin.’ Abby resorted to cheerful optimism and Gabriel turned to her with a grin.

‘We’ll find out soon enough. I, personally, have always found that it’s easy to accept what you can’t change.’

Their eyes tangled and she couldn’t tear her gaze away. She felt suddenly lost, drowning in the deep, dark depths, and when she did manage to look away her nerves were all over the place and she had to inhale deeply, sucking the air in like a drowning man gasping for oxygen.

They were soon in the town and she was relieved when he began talking to her about the city. Her nerves calmed. They had left behind the cool, grey skies of London and the dense, crowded pavements. Here, the sky was milky blue and the sun was bright but with the pleasant coolness of a fine spring day. There were people everywhere as the sleek, black car navigated the picturesque roads of the town but no sense of claustrophobia. The buildings were beautiful, faded sepia and yellow, the architecture graceful. It was a town that was conducive to meandering.

‘Will your driver wait to take me to the hotel?’ she asked when he informed her that they would be at his grandmother’s house in under fifteen minutes.

‘He’ll do what I tell him to,’ Gabriel responded with the sort of casual arrogance that she found annoying and weirdly endearing in equal measure. A short while later, he announced, ‘And here we are.’

The city had been left behind, replaced by tall trees and a cool, forested area speckled with houses, each standing in its own grounds.

‘The residents here enjoy their privacy,’ Gabriel said with satisfaction. ‘And they’ve been prepared to pay for it. It’s designed with interesting short cuts between the properties so that the neighbours can visit one another, and there’s a golf course surrounding the entire compound like a bracelet. All in all, this has been a great investment.’

‘It belongs to you?’

‘Are you impressed?’

‘I thought you concentrated on buying and selling companies and in technology and communication,’ she said frankly.

‘I’m a man of varied interests,’ he said smoothly, in response. ‘There’s nothing I won’t try my hand at.’ With rare introspection he wondered if that was why he had guiltily plunged into an ill-fated engagement to please his grandmother and was now facing the prospect of letting her down without warning.

Because he would try his hand at anything in business, the riskier the venture the better, but that was where his thirst for adventure stopped. Maybe now it was time to admit to his grandmother that he was never going to give her the fairy story she’d always wanted for him.

CHAPTER THREE

ABBY DIDN’T KNOW what to expect when the car finally pulled up in front of a low, sprawling villa with a plantation-style feel. Shallow steps led up to a wide veranda, on which was an arrangement of chairs and tables. On either side of the house, manicured lawns gave way to thick, colourful foliage and sweeping trees that cast shadows over the courtyard.

Gabriel’s hand was poised to ring the doorbell when the door was pulled open, and he looked down at his grandmother who was in her Sunday best and had obviously been glued to the window, waiting for his arrival.

Behind him, he knew that Abby was hovering.

Gabriel knew that he should have tackled the business of his broken engagement earlier, flown over as soon as he’d known that there was not going to be a wedding, sat down and explained it to her. She was thinner than he remembered, and she was smiling broadly, tugging him inside, but there was a frailty about her that was a little alarming.

How was she going to take what he had to say?

He’d been in weekly contact with her doctor, although she was unaware of that, and he knew that stress was something she had to avoid.

‘And depression,’ her consultant had said to him. Gabriel had never known his grandmother to be depressed but now he wasn’t so sure.

‘Here at last!’ Ava was doing her best to peer round her grandson. ‘I’ve been counting down, nipote caro.’

‘I have been busy.’ Gabriel immediately launched into a guilty apology. ‘My feet have barely touched the ground in the past couple of months...’

‘Well, I’m sure that young lady of yours is going to do something about that,’ Ava chided, finally circling Gabriel and inquisitively looking at Abby, who had not followed her boss in but was sticking close to the courtyard because she didn’t foresee a protracted visit. ‘Won’t you, mio caro?’

Abby’s mouth opened. Ava was tiny, her dark eyes bright and curious, her grey hair cut into a short, sharp bob which should have made her seem severe, but didn’t, because she had a face that was creased with laughter lines. She had greeted Gabriel in Italian but now switched to English, which was heavily accented but excellent.

‘Are you going to do the introductions?’ Ava half-turned to Gabriel, who towered over her. ‘I’ve never known you to be rude, Gabriel!’

‘Abby.’ Gabriel obliged, half-occupied with something on his phone so that he glanced up but briefly. ‘This is Ava, my indomitable grandmother, who runs rings round me every time I come here to visit.’

‘Which isn’t nearly often enough.’ Ava reached to take Abby’s hand, tugging her into the hallway. ‘Even as a little boy,’ she confided, leading the way into the house as Abby cast a backward glance at the sleek car which should have been driving her to her hotel. The driver was standing in the sun, leaning against the car, scrolling through his phone.

‘He was always in a hurry.’

‘Who? Sorry, what?’ The front door had closed. Abby met Gabriel’s eyes over Ava’s head and recognised instantly that there would be little assistance coming from that direction because he was still frowning at his phone—which was downright rude, all things considered.

‘Gabriel, dear. I expect you know my husband and I brought him up after his parents, God rest their souls, died prematurely. It was never a burden. He was a joy.’

‘He’s hardly a joy now,’ Abby was tempted to say with a rebellious streak of wickedness. ‘Picking up a phone call when he has so much he wants to say to you.’

Gabriel grinned and raised his eyebrows. ‘You sound like a wife,’ he drawled. ‘And a shrewish one at that.’

Ava clapped her hands and burst out laughing, delighted at this exchange because, Abby thought, huffing at the amused glint in Gabriel’s eyes, she was unaware of the undercurrent.

Gabriel picked up where he had left off, moving to lean into her, his mouth close to her ear, which made her shiver and go hot. ‘Maybe that’s what happens when two people spend so much time together. Think that’s it?’

‘I’m tired,’ Abby whispered back pointedly. ‘Isn’t it about time I get to the hotel? You can email me whatever work you want me to do tonight.’

‘No rush.’ Gabriel’s deep, dark eyes met hers and Abby thought with a little frisson of panic that the quicker she got to her hotel, the better. But Ava was leading the way into a sitting room and a maid had appeared from nowhere with a tray of little nibbles and an ornate silver pot of coffee.

‘I have a selection of teas as well.’ Ava patted a sofa and Abby somehow found herself sinking into it. ‘And cold drinks. Or would you be happy with coffee?’

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