Assignment: Baby

The phone continued to ring insistently, impossible to ignore. ‘Oh, all right, I’ll get it,’ snapped Gabriel.

He leant over the desk and picked up the phone. ‘Yes?’ he snarled. ‘Oh…Greg…yes, I did get your message…no, there’s nothing you can do,’ he said brusquely, adding as an afterthought, ‘unless you happen to know where I can find a croupier called Leanne?’

Tess couldn’t hear what Greg was saying, but it was obviously not what Gabriel was expecting. She saw his face change, and he shot her a quick glance. ‘Hold on a second,’ he interrupted his brother, ‘I think I’d better call you back. Give me two minutes.’

‘That was my brother,’ he said unnecessarily as he put down the phone. For once he seemed at a loss.

‘Your brother? What’s he got to do with Harry’s mother?’ asked Tess, bewildered by the unexpected turn of events.

‘That’s what I’m going to find out.’ Gabriel sounded terse. Shrugging off his coat, he headed for his office.

There was something going on, thought Tess, aggrieved, and he clearly had no intention of telling her what it was! ‘What am I supposed to do in the meantime?’ she said crossly.

‘Just…’ he gestured vaguely ‘…keep the baby quiet.’

‘Great, thanks a lot!’ she muttered as the door shut firmly behind him.

She shifted Harry onto her other arm. He might be small, but he was surprisingly heavy, and she flexed the arm that had been supporting him with a grimace. He was grizzling into her neck, small, sniffling little sobs as if he wanted to cry but was too tired to make the effort.

Tess knew just how he felt. She looked at the clock again, and was amazed to find that it was less than an hour since she had looked up to see the pram being pushed into the office.

Not knowing what else to do with him, Tess walked around the office, patting Harry awkwardly on the back, the way she had seen her friends do with their babies. She wished Gabriel would hurry up. It was all very well for him to tell her to keep Harry quiet, but she couldn’t walk up and down like this all night.

The sound of the door opening made her swing round, and Gabriel emerged in his shirt sleeves, looking grimmer than ever.

‘Well?’ she demanded.

Gabriel loosened his tie as if it felt too tight. ‘Greg was on a Caribbean cruise last year,’ he told her after a moment. ‘He told me that he met a croupier called Leanne, and they had an affair while he was on the ship but, typically of Greg, he can’t remember her surname, so we can’t track down her mother that way. That doesn’t mean that Greg is Harry’s father,’ he added quickly, ‘but at least we know why your visitor picked on me.’

‘She definitely said Gabriel Stearne,’ objected Tess. ‘It’s not that easy to muddle up Gabriel and Greg.’

The suspicion in her voice made Gabriel grit his teeth. ‘Look, you wanted to know what the situation was, and I’m telling you,’ he said tautly. He didn’t really want to tell Tess about Greg, and give her yet another reason to look down her snooty little nose at him, but she was obviously going to go on asking questions until she had some satisfactory answers. Briefly, Gabriel let himself think longingly of Janette, his PA back in the States, who accepted everything he said unquestioningly.

But Janette wasn’t here, and Tess was.

‘It turns out that Greg sometimes uses my name when it suits him to let people believe that the G in his name stands for Gabriel and not Gregory,’ he told her, resigned. ‘He says it gets him better tables in restaurants and seats on overbooked planes and, in the case of the cruise, he upgraded his cabin on the strength of my reputation. Having booked as Gabriel Stearne, he carried on using my name, and it was too late to change it when he met Leanne. Anyway, Greg didn’t think it would matter. He knew I would never go on a cruise and it was very unlikely that Leanne would ever read the business pages and see my picture.’

‘So it might not just be Leanne who thinks that she has had an affair with you? There could be girls all round the world who believe that you’re incredibly handsome, a fantastic lover and great fun to be with?’

Gabriel shot Tess a suspicious look. Her face was quite straight, but there was glint in her eyes and a distinct undercurrent of sarcasm in her voice. Why didn’t she come right out and say that the idea of anyone associating him with fun or believing him to be a wonderful lover was absolutely hilarious?

He scowled. ‘Right now, we’re only concerned with Leanne,’ he said quellingly. Not that Tess seemed very quelled.

‘And Leanne thinks that Greg is Harry’s father?’

‘Yes.’

‘That would make Harry your nephew,’ she said slowly, looking from one to the other as if looking for a resemblance.

‘It’s a possibility,’ Gabriel admitted grudgingly, evidently less than thrilled at the prospect of a new addition to the family.

‘Did Greg think that he might be Harry’s father?’

Gabriel sat on the edge of her desk and rubbed the back of his neck a little wearily. ‘I didn’t tell him about Harry,’ he said after a moment.

Tess was taken aback. Surely that had been the point of ringing Greg? ‘Why not?’

‘Because for once in his life, Greg is where he ought to be,’ said Gabriel flatly. ‘He’s in Florida, with my mother. His father—my stepfather—is having open-heart surgery and my mother can’t cope on her own. She’s not strong at the best of times, and I’d rather he stayed and supported her than came haring over here. It’s not as if he knows anything about babies.’

‘Oh, unlike us?’ said Tess, not even bothering to hide her sarcasm this time.

Gabriel ignored her. Straightening from the desk, he began to pace around the office. ‘This is the last thing we need tonight,’ he said, muttering under his breath. ‘All the figures in our proposal are going to have to be checked, and I want to rewrite the section on our design policy. I haven’t got time to run around London looking for an unnamed grandmother who’s just dumped a baby here.’

‘Why don’t you ring the police?’

‘I can’t risk the story getting into the papers. If Greg does turn out to be the father, and my mother got to hear of it, she’d be devastated. She dotes on Greg and she’s got enough to deal with at the moment with Ray so ill.’

Tess’s arm was aching and she decided to try putting Harry back in his pram. How odd, she thought, as she rocked the pram tentatively, terrified that the baby would start crying again. She wouldn’t have had Gabriel Stearne down as a devoted son, but he seemed to be making a lot of effort to spare his mother any trouble. Perhaps deep down he was human, after all? He certainly did a good job of hiding it most of the time!

Oblivious to her thoughts, Gabriel was contemplating his options. Thrusting his hands into his pockets, he hunched his shoulders and continued his pacing, up and down, up and down, until Tess longed to stick out a foot and trip him up.

‘I could hire private investigators to track down the baby’s mother,’ he decided after a little while, frowning at the floor. ‘There can’t be that many croupiers called Leanne. Make a note to get onto them first thing tomorrow morning,’ he added in an aside.

Tess refrained from leaping for her notebook. ‘Even if they can find Leanne, she’s still got to get back to this country,’ she pointed out unhelpfully. ‘What are you going to do with him until then?’

‘That’s what nannies are for.’ Having made up his mind what needed to be done, Gabriel was already moving onto thinking about the proposal they had to submit the next day. His shoulders straightened. ‘You’d better get hold of an agency now. Say I’ll need a nanny for a week initially. With any luck, we’ll have been able to track down his mother by then.’

Ready to dismiss the matter from his mind, he turned back towards his office. Tess looked at him in disbelief. ‘It’s almost seven o’clock,’ she said, speaking very slowly and clearly so that he would be sure to understand. ‘All the agencies will be closed. I won’t be able to contact anyone until tomorrow morning at the earliest.’

Exasperated, Gabriel glowered at her, his jaw working in frustration. Logically, he knew that it wasn’t Tess’s fault, but her objections seemed designed to prevent him from getting on with more important things. He simply didn’t have the time to deal with all this.

‘What do you suggest, in that case?’ he asked her through gritted teeth.

Tess smiled sweetly at him. ‘You’ll have to look after him yourself.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you!’ she said, savouring the expression on his face. He looked so aghast that she nearly laughed. ‘It seems that Harry is your responsibility, after all.’

‘But I don’t know one end of a baby from another!’

‘It’s only for a night,’ she told him briskly. ‘I’m sure it’s just a matter of common sense.’

Gabriel eyed her with acute dislike. A matter of common sense, was it? She hadn’t looked quite so confident when she’d been holding the baby, had she? He set his jaw.

‘I can’t do it on my own,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to help me.’

‘Sorry,’ said Tess, not sounding the slightest bit apologetic. ‘I’m going out tonight.’

‘On a date?’

He stared at her with unflattering surprise. It had obviously never occurred to him before that she might actually have a life outside the office, let alone be attractive enough to have a date.

‘Yes, a date,’ she said, peeved, although it wasn’t strictly true. She was only meeting some friends, but she didn’t feel like telling him that. She was tired of being treated like a cardboard cut-out who got propped in the corner of the office every night!

‘Couldn’t you break it?’

Silently, Gabriel cursed his absent brother. It went against the grain to beg a favour from anyone, let alone from Tess Gordon with her frosty Scottish voice and her disapproving expression, but he was desperate. There was no way he was going to be left alone with that baby.

‘Look, I know it’s a lot to ask,’ he went on, forcing the words out, ‘but I need help. I can’t manage Harry on my own. I’ve never even held a baby before.’

The edge of desperation in his voice couldn’t help but strike a chord with Tess, but she hardened her heart, remembering how quick he had been to disclaim any responsibility for Harry at first. He hadn’t exactly been supportive then, had he?

‘You must have friends who could help you,’ she said.

‘I don’t know anyone else in London,’ said Gabriel. ‘I’ve only been here a month.’

‘Oh?’ Tess thought of the newspaper in the bin under her desk. ‘I did hear somewhere that you knew Fionnula Jenkins,’ she said pointedly.

‘Not well enough to ask her to give up her evening and a whole night to take care of a strange baby.’

‘You don’t know me very well, but you’re asking me to do it.’

‘That’s different.’ Gabriel glowered at her lack of logic. ‘You work for me.’

‘I’m your personal assistant, not a nanny!’

‘Yes, and it would assist me personally if you helped me look after this baby tonight.’

Tess put up her chin. She wasn’t going to be bullied into this! ‘I’m sorry,’ she said firmly, ‘but I—’

‘I’ll pay you overtime, of course,’ Gabriel interrupted her, switching tactics. ‘Double the usual rate,’ he added cunningly.

It was a masterly stroke. Fatally, Tess hesitated. She had been wondering how she was going to find the money to help Andrew out of his difficulties, and now here was an opportunity to earn some extra cash, without the need to grovel to Gabriel for a pay rise that he would almost certainly refuse.

Could she really afford to turn it down?

‘I don’t know any more about babies than you do,’ she said, but Gabriel could tell she was weakening and he pressed home his advantage.

‘You can’t know less,’ he said. ‘Come on, Tess, you can’t leave me on my own with him.’

When she thought about how prepared he had been to leave her on her own with Harry, Tess longed to be able to tell him that she most certainly could, but then she made the mistake of looking down at the baby. His face was puckering with misery, and she bent instinctively to pick him up. The poor wee mite had already been abandoned once today. She couldn’t walk away and abandon him again.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE sighed. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll help you—but help is the operative word.’ Lifting her chin, she met Gabriel’s gaze with a challenging expression in her clear brown eyes. ‘I’m not looking after him all by myself. You’re going to have to do your share.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Gabriel, too relieved to object to any conditions. Anything was better than being left on his own with the baby. ‘We’ll take him to my apartment,’ he went on quickly, before she had a chance to change her mind. ‘I can drive you home to get whatever you need for the night, and then we can go straight on.’

He was all set to hustle her off there and then, but things were happening a bit too quickly for Tess’s liking. ‘We could do with some advice first,’ she prevaricated, not sure she was ready to be swept off to Gabriel’s apartment just yet. She might have agreed to help him, but there seemed to be a lot of things they hadn’t discussed yet, and she wanted to be clear just what it was she had agreed to do.

‘I thought you said all the agencies would be closed?’ said Gabriel, frowning.

‘I’m not talking about ringing an agency. I’ve got a friend who had a baby earlier this year. Since neither of us know what we’re doing, I think it would be worth giving her a ring—if that’s OK with you, of course,’ she couldn’t resist adding with an innocent look that didn’t fool Gabriel for a moment. ‘I know you don’t like us making personal phone calls,’ she reminded him virtuously.

‘Yes, yes, get on with it!’ snapped Gabriel, thinking that staff phone calls were the least of his problems right now.

To his horror, he found the baby thrust into his arms as Tess reached across the desk to twist the phone round to face her. She had Bella’s number on the phone’s memory, but since she had just reminded Gabriel about his threatened crack-down on personal calls, she decided it would be wiser not to draw attention to it. That meant looking it up in her diary, which was something she rarely had to do with all the technology at her fingertips, and laboriously dialling the number in full.

Not that Gabriel was likely to have noticed. He had followed her to the desk, clearly in case he had to hand Harry quickly back, and was holding him awkwardly at arm’s length, eyeing him with a mixture of trepidation and appalled fascination. Tess wouldn’t have believed that anyone could look more uncomfortable with a baby than her, but Gabriel managed it easily.

The ruthless arrogance had been wiped from his face now he’d been presented with a baby, she noticed with some amusement. In his shirt sleeves, with his tie askew where he had been tugging at it in frustration, he seemed younger and much more approachable all of a sudden.

That had to be an illusion, thought Tess sourly. She had never met anyone less approachable than Gabriel Stearne. He was cold, unscrupulous, and completely out of touch with the people who worked for him, whom he treated with a blend of indifference and contempt.

And this was the man she was going to spend the evening with, she reminded herself with a sinking heart.

Oh, well, she thought, she would just have to keep thinking of the money.

Perching on the front of her desk, she listened to the busy beeping in her ear as the phone connected and watched Gabriel jiggle the baby nervously up and down. For a moment, Harry looked unsure whether he liked it or not and, as his face screwed up, Tess held her breath, waiting for the outraged wail that she was sure would follow.

But Harry didn’t cry. He dissolved without warning into a gummy and quite irresistible smile which left Gabriel completely nonplussed. Tess saw astonishment, relief and perplexity chasing themselves across his face, swiftly succeeded by a kind of baffled pride at the baby’s unexpected reaction to his handling, before he smiled instinctively back at Harry.

Tess nearly fell off the desk. It was like running up to someone you thought you knew and finding yourself face to face with a perfect stranger. She had never seen Gabriel smile before—she had never even imagined him smiling—and she was caught off guard by the way the cold eyes lit with humour and the stern mouth relaxed, creasing his cheeks and revealing teeth that were strong and very white against his dark features.

Her heart jerked suddenly in her chest. If Gabriel had been taken aback by Harry’s smile, it was nothing to her own reaction to his, and she hoped her own expression wasn’t as easy to read. She felt jarred and breathless, and it was some moments before she realised that a puzzled voice was speaking in her ear.

‘Hello…? Hello? Who is this?’

‘Bella!’ Tess jerked her gaze away from Gabriel and recollected herself with an effort. ‘It’s Tess.’

‘Tess!’ cried Bella in carrying tones. ‘I haven’t heard from you for ages! How’s the boss from hell?’

‘Standing right beside me,’ said Tess thinly. She didn’t dare look at Gabriel. Had he heard Bella or not?

As succinctly as she could, she explained the situation to her friend, but it wasn’t easy with Bella exclaiming and interposing irrelevant questions, and it took Tess some time to get her to the point. Once, she risked a glance at Gabriel, who raised a sardonic eyebrow. He had heard all right.

‘Just tell us what to do, Bella,’ she said hastily. ‘Harry’s grandmother said that we would have everything we needed under the pram, but I might as well be looking under the bonnet of a car. There’s a whole lot of stuff there, but I’ve got no idea how any of it works.’

Responding to her frantic gesture, Gabriel pushed the pram nearer, so Tess could describe the various packets and bits of equipment that had been packed onto the lower rack.

‘Hmm.’ Bella considered. ‘How old is this baby?’

Tess covered the receiver with her hand, although since Gabriel had clearly already heard both sides of the conversation it seemed a little late for discretion. ‘How old is Harry?’ she asked him.

‘How do I know?’ he replied unhelpfully.

The ‘boss from hell’ jibe was still rankling, and he was annoyed to find that he had been distracted by the way Tess was leaning against her desk. She was wearing the same discreetly elegant grey suit she always wore, the same sensible court shoes, but she looked somehow different. Had she always had legs like that? Gabriel wondered. And, if so, how was it that he had never noticed them before?

‘A baby is a baby, isn’t it?’ he added crossly, hoping that Tess hadn’t noticed him staring.

‘Apparently not,’ she said, holding onto her own temper with an effort. It wasn’t easy to concentrate on what Bella was saying when she could feel him frowning at her. Obviously Bella’s comment hadn’t gone down well.

Tough. Tess tried to convince herself that she didn’t care. It wouldn’t do Gabriel any harm to realise what they all thought of him, although the timing was less than ideal, she had to admit. If he had to learn how much she disliked him, it might have been better if it hadn’t been just before they had to spend the entire night together!

Pushing the prospect to the back of her mind, Tess turned back to the problem of Harry’s age. ‘Did your brother mention when he was on this famous cruise?’ she tried again.

‘Some time last summer…August, I think he said.’ Gabriel calculated quickly. ‘That would make Harry about five months now.’

Tess, still trying to add nine months onto August, abandoned her attempts at mental arithmetic and uncovered the receiver once more. ‘Five months, we think,’ she told Bella.

‘Hmm…And where exactly are you proposing to take this baby?’

‘To Mr Stearne’s apartment.’

‘Oh?’ Bella managed to invest two letters with at least sixteen syllables. ‘You mean you’re going to spend the night with him?’

Tess hadn’t wanted to think about that aspect of the situation. Of course, she and Gabriel weren’t going to be spending the night together in the way Bella meant, but still, there was something uncomfortably intimate about the thought of being alone with him in his flat.

Involuntarily, she glanced at Gabriel, who had heard both the words and the intonation. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. The faint lift of his brows spoke volumes. A man who went out with the likes of Fionnula Jenkins was hardly likely to have any problems keeping his hands off her.

Suddenly acutely aware of the wet patch on her blouse where Harry had pressed his face miserably into her shoulder, and of the wisps of hair escaping around her face, Tess turned her back on him and told Bella crisply not to be silly. ‘It’s simply a matter of looking after the baby until we can get hold of a nanny tomorrow. If you could just explain what we give him to eat, Bella…’

It took some time, but eventually Tess managed to extract instructions about sterilising bottles, heating milk, washing, winding and sleeping positions, all of which she scribbled down frantically, wishing that Bella wouldn’t be quite so vague about exactly what to do and when.

When Bella had finished, Tess cast an eye over her notes and discovered that there was one thing missing.

‘What about changing his nappy?’ she asked at last, bracing herself.

‘What about it?’

‘Well, you know…how do we know when to do it?’

Bella laughed. ‘Have you tried smelling him?’

Without being told, Gabriel lifted Harry nearer and sniffed cautiously. He wrinkled his nose and the downward turn of his mouth told Tess all she needed to know.

‘Ah,’ she said, her heart sinking. ‘It looks as if we might have to tackle that now. What should we do?’

‘Tess, I cannot believe that you’ve got to thirty-four without changing a nappy!’ Bella scolded. ‘If you took a more hands-on interest in your goddaughter, you’d know all this by now. And what’s all this “we” business?’ she went on before Tess had a chance to object. ‘Since when did you get quite so cosy with Gabriel Stearne?’

Tess avoided looking at Gabriel, although she could feel him listening. ‘Bella,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘could we just stick to the nappy changing?’

‘Oh, all right, but you’d better ring me tomorrow and tell me everything!’

Noting down Bella’s sarcastically simplistic instructions, Tess had the feeling she wasn’t going to enjoy the next few minutes very much. ‘Thanks, Bella,’ she said dryly. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘Good luck,’ said Bella, and then raised her voice wickedly to make sure that Gabriel would hear her. ‘And tell that boss of yours that I’ve always thought he sounded very sexy, whatever you say!’

Tess put the phone down hastily. She would kill Bella next time she saw her! Faint colour tinged her cheeks as she pretended to read over the instructions that Bella had given her.

What exactly did she say? Gabriel wondered darkly. Nothing very flattering, that was for sure!

‘I didn’t realise that you were in the habit of discussing me with your friends,’ he said with a cold look.

‘I didn’t realise that you were in the habit of listening in to private conversations!’ Tess snapped back, provoked, and they glared at each other.

Tired of being dangled from outstretched arms, Harry had begun to grizzle. Remembering just in time that he needed Tess’s help that evening, Gabriel swallowed the savage retort on the tip of his tongue with an effort.

‘Look, let’s get this nappy changing over and done with,’ he growled. ‘We’ll do it together, since it’s obviously not going to be a very pleasant job.’

‘All right.’ Tess took the opportunity to back down too. The presence of Harry seemed to have a dangerously dis-inhibiting effect on both of them, and if she wasn’t careful she would find herself out of a job altogether.

The extra money she would earn on overtime tonight might be useful, but her salary was essential, Tess reminded herself guiltily. She had been looking for another job ever since Gabriel had arrived at SpaceWorks, but all those she could have applied for would have meant taking a drop in salary that she simply couldn’t afford at the moment. Standing up to Gabriel was one thing, provoking him into sacking her was another. It might be an idea to keep her mouth shut and keep her job, she reflected ruefully.