up her spine. She couldn’t bear the stomach knots a moment longer.
“I was features editor for a teen magazine,” she got out, clenching the napkin beside her plate. “I was retrenched along with others. I needed a job, but there was nothing available in publishing. It was all I knew.”
All she was.
“That was your crisis?” he surmised, and she nodded. His napkin patted one corner of his mouth. “How did you get a job here?”
“A friend’s father knew the owner. The former owner.” Or so it seemed.
“You had no experience?”
“Next to none.”
His short laugh was abrasive. “No wonder the place is sinking.”
She set her teeth, but continued, “Alice said the hours would be long but the money was good. I could make my mortgage repayments.” Blindly studying her plate, she leaned back. “I didn’t want to lose my house.”
When she levelled her gaze at him, something almost human flashed across his face. But then he took a mouthful of champagne and placed the glass down heavily.
“And yesterday?”
“Was my first afternoon off in what seemed like for ever,” she said. “I was physically and emotionally drained. Most of the staff don’t like me, you see. And it’s true I have a lot to learn. They have every right to feel undervalued. That doesn’t help the way I feel.” Lonely. Very nearly hopeless. “Yesterday I wanted to get as far away from the resort as I could. I started walking, collecting shells to send to my baby nephew back in Sydney.”
“Nephew?”
“My sister’s baby. Codie’s six months old. Jill’s a single mum. She deferred her Masters in Biology to look after him for the first couple of years and—” She stopped, sighed. “You’re really not interested in any of that, are you?”
Gabriel held his impassive face. She was a consummate manipulator, trying to find his vulnerable spot even now. Years had passed, but nothing had changed. Nina was used to getting what she wanted, and it seemed she wanted his sympathy. Wanted him to bail her out.
This afternoon, when he’d uncovered her game, his chest had filled with rage. Having known the princess fourteen-year-old Nina Petrelle had been, he’d easily joined the dots. He had no idea where the Petrelle fortune had gone, but the woman sitting across from him, trying to tug at his heartstrings, needed money badly enough to don an apron. She’d lucked out when he’d come bounding along yesterday to save her. She’d played her cards well and he’d fallen for her.
To a degree.
He didn’t like to be deceived. He’d envisaged sacking her on the spot, throwing her out of her lodgings. He’d imagined the crocodile tears, her pleas, those attempts to use her femme fatale skills to get her way. In hindsight he believed only one thing she’d said.
She wanted to find herself—aka needed to have, to hold, real money again.
His money.
His lips stretched over his teeth.
Time for Act II.
“You might recall I said I’d known a Nina once.” He collected his cutlery again and cut into firm asparagus. “Tell me, have you ever known anyone else called Gabriel?”
His comment pulled Nina up. Her nape prickled with a different kind of awareness as she nodded. “A friend of my brother’s. Gabe Turner.”
“What else do you remember?”
“He was a stuffed-shirt geek who my brother, for some reason, adored.” That horrid gnawing in her gut deepened. She studied the man sitting opposite and instinctively sat back. “Why do you want to know?”
His ice-blue gaze held hers for an endless moment before he announced, “Because that Gabe is this Gabe. Gabriel Turner is me.”
Nina wanted to throw back her head and laugh. She’d never heard anything so ridiculous. Instead she paused to consider the statement more deeply.
“No,” she groaned, slowly shaking her head. “You said … your name is Steele.”
But from the start hadn’t there been a distant whisper of this? Seeing him standing on that cliff a second before she’d passed out … even then he’d seemed somehow familiar. This man—the man she’d shared a bed with—he couldn’t possibly be that stiff, zero taste, no personality dweeb she remembered from all those years ago.
Could he?
“Turner was my mother’s name,” he said. “My aunt’s name. When I made amends with my father in my late teens, I took his name. Steele.”
She snapped shut her hanging jaw. “But those ugly sun-sensitive glasses?”
“Laser surgery.”
“Your hair?”
“Comb-overs were never in.”
“You look … taller.”
“I grew.”
“You’re rich.”
He grinned. “Yes, I am.”
She studied his face again, and every molecule of oxygen seeped from her lungs.
Oh, God. It was true.
Her fingers started to tingle and her heart began to pound. She needed a paper bag before she hyperventilated and passed out.
“Faith, my aunt, passed away five years ago from a stroke,” he said, colouring in the rest. “My father died from a coronary not long after we met.”
Her vision clouded and tunnelled in. Aunt Faith … yes, she remembered. His story fitted, but her brain was too overloaded to offer condolences.
As a thousand memories rained down in a battering gale, she peered into Gabe’s hard gaze and somehow managed to set her priorities straight. Not having seen her for well over a decade, Gabe Turner had shown up out of the blue and saved her life?
It was magical thinking, but she wondered whether her brother had had a hand in his buddy being in the right place at the right time. Anthony had always looked out for her in a cool, big-brother kind of way. She only wished someone had been there to look out for him when he’d needed it.
Her brow tingled.
Last night Gabriel had said he’d lost someone close. Someone who’d had faith in him when he’d had little in himself. Anthony.
An image dawned—a clear snapshot of her brother’s face—and despite the situation Nina’s mouth twitched. The image zoomed in to show Anthony’s confounded expression and a smile twitched again.
Gabriel pushed his plate aside. “You think this is funny?”
“Can
