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
