style="font-size:15px;"> She could hear Will’s spasmodic sleepy baby babble through the nursery alarm as she retrieved the scattered toys from the kitchen floor and placed them in a toy box. It was a task she performed numerous times each day, and as her hands went into autopilot her mind raced.
What was Gabriel MacAllister up to? Despite the fact she thought Greg was the last person in the world Sophie should marry, she felt a deep sense of indignation that he possibly shared her view! Was he protecting the MacAllister millions from grasping schoolgirls? she wondered, glancing at her reflection in the mirror as she straightened.
Her face was lightly flushed from a combination of the mild exertion and temper. She looked with lack of interest at her features. It was only on the rarest occasions since Oliver’s death and Will’s birth that she looked upon herself as a woman—she was just Will’s mum these days.
Once she’d thought she was quite attractive, and she’d known that the combination of a slim, curvaceous body and pretty—some said beautiful—features attracted a lot of admiring attention.
She glanced down at the faded tee-shirt and old jeans she wore and decided there was little possibility that her visitor would think she was going out of her way to impress him. Take sex out of your life and it cut down on the complications considerably, she decided approvingly.
If Will hadn’t fallen asleep she might have let the doorbell ring, just to emphasise how unimpressed she was by the royal visitation. But she made do with adopting an expression of cool indifference before letting her visitor in.
The world had gone completely mad—or perhaps she had! Fingers pressed to her pounding temples, she shook her head from side to side in denial.
Alice wasn’t even aware she’d been walking steadily backwards until her head made jarring contact with the opposite wall. Her knees folded and she found herself sliding down the wall until she was sitting, knees drawn up to her chest, staring upwards dizzily. The doorway was empty; perhaps she’d been hallucinating.
‘You’re going to pass out if you keep hyperventilating,’ a deep voice observed objectively.
Cancel hallucination! He was kneeling right there beside her. God, he even smelled the same. Shockingly her stomach muscles spasmed hotly in excitement as she registered the light, expensive cologne with musky male undertones.
‘It’s my house and I’ll faint if I want to,’ she snarled.
‘And do you?’
Actually, unconsciousness had a lot to recommend it right now!
‘I never faint,’ she told him emphatically.
Although she had once almost lost consciousness from the sheer unadulterated bliss of being made love to. Did he remember …? Her wide eyes collided with his stunningly sensual dark orbs, spectacular eyes that her mother would have coyly termed ‘bedroom eyes’ … He did.
‘I suppose it’s too late to pretend I’ve never met you before?’ she croaked.
She tried to match her ironic words with a smile, but her facial muscles wouldn’t co-operate. The omnipotent tyrant was wearing a beautifully cut lightweight suit; he looked spectacular. She developed a deep interest in his handmade leather shoes. It was the safest place to look until she regained control of herself.
‘I’ve never actually had a woman fall literally at my feet before.’ The nostrils of his chiselled nose flared as his dark glance moved slowly over her slim jean-clad figure.
The way Alice recalled it that had been about the only thing she’d not done last time. Heat crawled over her skin and her chest felt impossibly tight as she recalled the texture of his dark olive-toned skin slick with sweat.
‘I know I look a complete idiot; there’s no need to dwell on the subject.’ Businesslike, she tucked her jaw-length brown hair behind her ears and, back pressed to the wall, levered herself upright in one supple sinewy motion. ‘You took me by surprise,’ she added defensively.
Gabriel—how strange after three years to be able to put a name to the face, not to mention the body. He automatically extended a steadying hand which she pointedly ignored.
She had thought perhaps delayed shock had exaggerated the memories of that night. No man really had a physical presence that could reach out across a room and turn your stomach inside out. She’d been wrong. It wasn’t just that he was physically just about the most impressive male she’d ever seen, it was more than that—much more. The ‘more’ was in the innately elegant way he moved, the dark intelligence lurking in his deepset eyes and the bone-deep aura of confidence.
She’d sometimes wondered what would happen if their paths crossed again. Would he recognise her? Would she wonder what it was about him that had made her behave so crazily? Now there’s a prime example of wishful thinking! Why is this happening to me?
Superficially he was very like Oliver; that was what had first made her stare that night. But it wasn’t the fleeting similarity to her dead husband that had made her carry on … and on …
Oliver had been nearly six-five too, and broad across the shoulders. But the only exercise Oliver had had the time or inclination for in the last few years of his life had been the occasional round of golf. That combined with the fact he had rarely been without a glass in his hand outside working hours had softened and thickened him around the middle.
There was nothing remotely soft about Gabriel MacAllister, then or now! His belly was washboard-flat and his hips were sleekly lean. Alice raised both hands to her cheeks; they felt inordinately hot.
‘Did you know?’ she asked with terse suspicion.
‘Dark, devious plot time?’ Gabriel suggested with a raspy scornful laugh that made her flush. ‘You mean have I spent the last three years trying to track down the woman who slipped into my bed and slipped out of it just as casually?’ A nerve jumped spasmodically in one lean cheek. ‘If it hadn’t been for the scratches I might even have thought you were a dream.’ The erotic, soul-stealing variety.
‘I tried to get on with my life … Alice.’ His voice was a low, mocking drawl. ‘Such a nice, sweet, innocent little name for a nice, sweet, innocent little housewife.’ He looked at her bare left hand where it lay curled tightly around her right forearm. ‘Still no ring, I see. Tell me, does your husband know about your little escapades?’
The image flashed into her mind of the ugly expression on Oliver’s face when she’d flung her ring at him across the candlelit dining room.
‘Escapade in the singular.’ She hugged her arm even tighter over her breasts but felt no responding surge of security. She’d not noticed that night how uncompromisingly hard his angular jawline was.
Was he asking her to believe that a ring would have protected her from his advances that night? Highly sexed men like Gabriel, used to getting their own way, were not, in her opinion, big respecters of social convention. He’d got what he wanted, so why was he complaining? She’d got something too, to remind her permanently of that night.
Perhaps I ought to have let him think he was one amongst many? Better a trollop than a silly, weak-willed woman … or does a one-night stand qualify a woman for trollop status these days, irrespective of the extenuating circumstances?
‘I
