Elena clamped her lips together and turned her head to look out of the window, staring at the pillowy clouds beneath them.
To her chagrin, when she next looked at him, Gabriele had fallen asleep.
She was surprised his conscience allowed him to sleep.
But then, she supposed one must have a conscience in the first place, which he absolutely did not.
She ran her hand over her face then tilted her chair back and curled into it, breathing deeply to quell the rising nausea in her belly.
She could go and have a sleep in the bedroom as Gabriele had offered when they’d boarded but she wasn’t yet prepared to get under the covers of any bed belonging to him. Not voluntarily. Not until she had to.
With the cabin crew undertaking their duties quietly, bringing her a fresh supply of coffee and a plate of delicious sandwiches, the most her ragged stomach could handle, she couldn’t stop her gaze flitting to the sleeping form opposite her.
It was the first time she’d really had the chance to study him unobserved.
They said the devil took beguiling forms to trap people. In Gabriele’s case this was true. He really was handsome. Sinfully handsome.
Sleeping, arms crossed loosely over his chest, his head tilted to the right, his dark hair touching his shoulder, his top lip covering the bottom, he looked as if he should be in a Caravaggio picture; a chiselled, handsome man emerging from an impenetrable darkness that not only surrounded him but lived within him.
* * *
Gabriele stepped into the penthouse apartment he’d bought a year ago on his release from prison. Spacious—for Manhattan proportions—and full of light, it was the perfect antidote to the cramped cell he’d slept in for two years. He considered himself lucky that Milo and his legal team had managed to get him into the minimum security camp and that his roommate had been an elderly ‘white collar’ criminal. Like himself.
But it had still been a prison. He’d still been locked away, his liberty taken from him.
Elena followed him inside, through the galley and into the living room, her head turning in all directions. She stood at the walled window that overlooked Central Park. ‘This must have cost you a fortune.’
‘It did.’ Manhattan prices were extortionate by anyone’s standards. Of all his properties this had cost him the most. He would pay it tenfold. New York had an energy to it he’d never found anywhere else, and here he was only an hour from his mother.
‘Come, I’ll show you around.’
With obvious reluctance, she stepped away from the window and followed him back into the galley.
‘Kitchen,’ he said, throwing open the door on the other side of the elevator. ‘My housekeepers have the weekend off so you’ll be able to settle in with privacy, but this is normally Michael and Lisa’s domain. That room through there is their staff room.’
‘You cook?’ she asked.
‘Badly. You?’
‘Badly.’
Their eyes met and for a moment he was certain her lips were trying to smile.
‘I’ve made reservations at Ramones for us, so we won’t starve in their absence.’
‘We’re eating out tonight?’
‘The sooner we’re seen in public, the better. Ramones is the perfect place—there’s always a paparazzo camped there.’
‘I should call my father.’
‘Call him tomorrow.’
‘I don’t want him to see the pictures before I’ve told him about...us.’
‘You decided to take a last-minute trip to New York. We bumped into each other and decided to go for a meal to bury the hatchet,’ he said, reminding her of the agreed script they had come to after signing the contract. ‘You can tell him this tomorrow.’
‘I can’t believe I’m going to lie to my own father.’
‘This has to be believable, Elena. Any hint that what we have isn’t real then the deal is off and I take the evidence to the FBI.’
He led her out of the kitchen and back into the galley, ignoring the laser burn of her glare in his back.
‘Guest room, guest room, guest room...our room.’ He stepped inside and opened a door. ‘En suite.’ He opened another. ‘My dressing room.’ And another. ‘Your dressing room.’
Elena peered inside and nodded, but didn’t say anything.
‘I’m going to take a shower. All the guest rooms have their own en suites if you want to freshen up. I’m afraid when I bought this property it wasn’t with a future wife in mind or I would have had adjoining en suites put in. Can you be ready to leave in a couple of hours?’
She nodded curtly.
‘Good. If you need anything, let me know.’
Her green eyes met his. ‘The only thing I need is for you to admit you were wrong about me and wrong about my father and let me go.’
‘You were right—you do have a warped sense of humour.’
* * *
Elena got ready in the guest room the furthest from the master suite, trying not to imagine that Gabriele was, at that very moment, naked in the shower.
Surely, any minute now, she would awake on her Oslo office sofa and find the past couple of days had been nothing but a bad dream.
She’d been tied up and threatened with kidnapping and, worse, rescued by the man who hated her entire family. She’d been forced to sign a contract for a marriage that would save her father from prison but would result in a baby, and been installed in a luxury Manhattan apartment. All in twenty-four hours.
Who knew what tomorrow would bring? Maybe she would wake up on the moon.
She was ready before Gabriele and took the opportunity to explore his apartment further.
Having grown up with wealth, she wasn’t fazed by its opulence but had to admit he had exquisite taste. The high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows cried out for majestic furniture to match and he had stepped up to the mark. White walls, thick cream carpets her toes sank into and plush soft brown leather sofas that managed to be exquisite and comfortable all at the same time...it was like being in a homely art gallery with some very surreal paintings.
One particular framed painting caught her eye, a portrait of a man whose features were, upon closer inspection, painted entirely with fruits and vegetables; a pear for a nose, mange tout for the upper eyelids...and was that a husk of corn used as an ear...?
‘Do you like it?’
So absorbed had she been in the painting that she hadn’t heard Gabriele enter the room.
‘It’s
