necessary to have a serious partner before a woman takes a step like that.’
In that one sentence Gabriel had more insight into Rose than he had ever had. He had always assumed that there was no man on the scene but only because she had never mentioned one and women generally couldn’t help mentioning the men in their lives. Now it was confirmed and he was quietly pleased.
‘And there’s no man in your life at the moment?’ he risked, pressing on in the face of her obvious reluctance to prolong the subject.
Rose flushed and wanted to kick herself for the revealing crack in her armour. She had managed to keep their relationship on a strictly business level by making sure never to reveal anything about herself. She had instinctively known that the more he knew about her, the more dangerous her silly infatuation with him became. He could charm the birds from the trees and without really trying he could easily have sussed how she felt about him had he known anything about her private thoughts.
Of course it no longer mattered. She was forgetting that in the heat of the moment. The realisation gave her the strength she needed and she smiled nonchalantly.
‘They come and go,’ she said airily. ‘You know how it is. I’m between chaps at the moment.’ The small white lie was worth every penny just to see the incredulity in his eyes and she smiled demurely, daring him to voice his shock that she might actually have a life outside his corporation. ‘Anyway…’ she fingered the letter nervously ‘…now that I’ve told you all about my trip to Australia, there’s something I need to give you…’ She stretched forward and placed the white envelope on his desk and a sudden rush of sickening nerves flooded through her in a tidal sweep.
But she reminded herself that she was absolutely doing the right thing. She had talked it over with Grace and just voicing her thoughts had been sufficient to make her realise what she needed to do, how badly she needed to escape the powerful net Gabriel had spread around her over the years to the point where he was always somewhere in her head, whatever the time of day or night, whoever she might or might not be with. It was dangerous and getting more so with each passing day. In another four years’ time her emotions would be so tethered to him that she might well find herself crippled by her own inability to find a suitable mate without resorting to unfavourable comparisons.
He was looking at the letter warily, but he eventually took it, ripped it open and quickly scanned the contents. Several times. Obviously thinking that he had misread something. Finally, when her nerves were on the point of totally shredding, he said, very softly, ‘What’s going on here, Rose?’ Shock and disbelief flared in his deep blue eyes and Rose automatically cringed back, her normal assertive crispness abandoning her in the face of his concentrated, focused energy.
‘It’s my letter…of…of resignation…’
‘I know what it is! I can read perfectly well! What I don’t understand is why it’s staring me in the face!’ The pleasant anticipation with which his day had optimistically dawned, when he had contemplated the satisfaction of his life being returned to normal, now seemed like a distant thing of the past.
First of all, she had strolled in way later than she normally would have, sporting a changed look that would have had every man’s head reeling in appreciation as she strode through the office and, as if that hadn’t been bad enough, she had flung a resignation note down on his desk with all the preliminaries of someone who could not give a damn.
Gabriel, in addition to feeling rage and bewilderment, was assailed by a sense of bitter betrayal.
‘I just feel…’
‘I mean, no warning!’ he said, interrupting her harshly, waving the sheet of paper about in an accusatory fashion. ‘You stroll in here at God only knows what time…’
‘Eight-forty-five!’ Rose objected. ‘Fifteen minutes before I’m technically due to start the working day!’
Gabriel chose to ignore her input. ‘And suddenly you’re telling me that you’re walking out on me!’
‘I’m not walking out on you.’ Rose cleared her throat and willed herself to meet his eye. ‘You’re being melodramatic…’
‘Don’t you dare accuse me of being melodramatic!’ Gabriel bellowed, leading her to fear that in a minute the rest of the office would come hurtling through the outside door to see what the commotion was all about. He stood up and placed both his hands squarely on his desk, every muscle in his body rigid with threat. He couldn’t have felt more shocked by her resignation than if he had walked into his office only to find a gaping hole waiting for him instead.
‘I let you go to Australia,’ he thundered, ‘at massive inconvenience to myself…’
Rose, unwilling as she was to wave any red flags in front of charging bulls, was not about to let Gabriel get away with implying that she had cleared off for three months and left him in the lurch. In fact, she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had not been available for him. She had worked late more evenings than she cared to remember, had eaten takeaway food in front of her desk way after the rest of the workforce had departed, had cancelled friends at short notice so as not to let him down.
‘I arranged a perfectly good stand-in for you in my absence,’ she pointed out quietly.
‘You arranged to have an emotional wreck take over! A woman who spent the duration of her appointment to me on the brink of a nervous breakdown! Not my idea of a perfectly good stand-in!’
‘And the rest of them?’ Rose hung on to her temper with difficulty.
‘Useless. Surprised they could find jobs anywhere. Can’t imagine what that agency was thinking, having them on their books.’
‘Maybe you should have looked at the pattern,’ Rose murmured under her breath but not so softly that Gabriel didn’t hear exactly what she said.
‘What are you trying to say?’ he roared and Rose jumped and glanced nervously over her shoulder.
‘Nothing!’ she said placatingly.
Wrong move. If anything, her attempts to soothe had stoked his anger even further and he shot out of his chair and moved round the desk to where she was sitting, pressed back against the soft tan leather, hands clenched on her lap.
‘Well!’ He leaned over the chair until his face was thrust aggressively into her line of vision. Rose flinched.
She had known that her letter of resignation would not meet with a favourable response. She was good at her job and over the years Gabriel had become accustomed to her. They worked together in perfect harmony, often barely needing to verbally communicate in order to understand what the other meant. Unlike the secretaries he had had in the past, Rose had never been afraid of him. She had witnessed his rage at some piece of incompetence or other presented to him by one of his employees and had always managed to deflate it, usually by ignoring it altogether.
Her unflappability, she knew, meant a lot to him. And Gabriel would not appreciate the huge change to his routines which her resignation would engender. His private life might be colourful and ever changing but he liked his working life to be ruthlessly ordered and part of the order, she knew, was her predictable presence.
‘I’m waiting!’
‘I’m not going to say a word until you…stop leaning over me, Gabriel. You’re making me feel…threatened…’
