like his grandmother, his father and mother, who had enjoyed a wonderful, close marriage, likewise had been disappointed in him. First his mother, who had died leaving his father bereft, and then his father who, Gabriel often thought, had died from a broken heart, unable to cope with the fact that sudden illness had stripped him of his childhood sweetheart.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It was a long time ago. The fact is that I was effectively raised by my grandmother. It pains me that her one wish, to see me settled, has gone unfulfilled.’
‘Hence you decided to get married to Lucy.’ There was no need for her to add before it’s too late. ‘But what about love?’
Gabriel looked at her with brooding amusement, the handsome lines of his lean face sending a rush of awareness through her body. This was the most personal conversation they had ever had and, whilst Abby told herself that she couldn’t wait to return to the business of work, she was alarmed at how much she was enjoying this rare insight into her boss’s thought processes.
She’d met a number of his girlfriends in the past. Sexy, confident women who knew what effect they had on the opposite sex and enjoyed playing to an audience. So why Lucy out of all of them? Abby was ashamed at the pull of curiosity and she looked away.
‘I am no great believer in that particular emotion,’ Gabriel drawled, then he grinned and murmured in a low, silky voice, ‘But I’m beginning to think that you might be.’
‘Then you’d be wrong,’ Abby blurted out.
For a few seconds time stood still as their eyes tangled and a slow drumbeat pounded inside her, drying out her mouth and scrambling her thoughts.
‘Poor Lucy,’ she snapped, pulling back and giving herself time to get her act together under a show of antagonism.
‘Because she had the misfortune to have worn my diamond on her finger?’ Gabriel was amused and vaguely aware that he was picking up vibes that were quite unlike anything he had felt before in his PA’s presence. ‘Many women would have been delighted.’
‘Perhaps you should have chosen one of them.’
‘Wouldn’t have worked.’ He grinned, inviting her to ask the inevitable, but of course she stubbornly refused to, so he added, anyway, ‘Lucy and I go back a little way and there’s one thing compelling in her favour: she comes from just the right background.’
Abby wondered why that felt like a slap in the face. ‘I had no idea that sort of thing mattered to you, although of course it’s none of my business.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Gabriel purred in agreement. ‘But now that the door’s been opened, so to speak, I’d rather you’re not left with any stones unturned. Naturally, I’ll get in touch with Lucy, but she’s mistaken if she imagines I’m going to give her a hard time. She’ll get enough of that from her parents. No, I shall give her my blessing for her future life with the chinless wonder, Rupert. And, to satisfy your curiosity, I don’t care what anyone has or doesn’t have but, when it comes to the business of marriage, it makes sense to tie the knot with a woman who isn’t in it for the money.’
Abby thought of some of the women she had met—flamboyant, seductive and definitely not out of the top drawer.
He had said that he’d wanted to satisfy her curiosity but she discovered that, instead, he had awakened it and that dismayed her.
‘Now,’ he drawled, pacing the spacious office to take up residence in front of his desk, all business now in record time, ‘Down to work.’ He paused and looked at Abby as she slowly made her way to her usual position at her desk in front of him, ready for the day to begin, albeit later than was customary. ‘She should not have put you in the position she did,’ he said seriously.
‘She’s young.’
‘Which is something I failed to take into account,’ Gabriel conceded wryly. ‘That, along with the fact that she expected rather more than was on offer, even though by anyone’s standards what was on offer was a pretty good deal.’ He stared thoughtfully off into the distance. ‘Now there’s just the business of breaking it to my grandmother that the marriage of the century is off.’
His face remained impassive but he recognised that, whilst he would fast recover from the business of his broken engagement, it would be different for his grandmother. Depression was taking its toll. She refused to leave the house and travel to London, where he could keep a watchful eye on her, but she was distancing herself from her friends, going out less and less, and it worried him.
Gabriel’s love for his independent and strong grandmother was his one weakness. She had never understood why he couldn’t settle down.
‘You work too hard.’ She used to nag away at him as she bustled around, bringing him little delicacies she had cooked and treating him like the kid he no longer was. ‘You need a wife, Gabriel, children—something to come home to at the end of the day.’
She would never understand that his father had had all that and had crumbled like a hollowed out shell the day it had been snatched away from him. She would never understand how Gabriel had watched from the sidelines and seen how love could destroy as much as it could nourish. His father had never recovered after his wife had died and that wasn’t going to be Gabriel. He was never going to position himself in the firing line, open to hurt and devastation because he’d given his body and soul to someone else.
For him, marriage would be an arrangement, and he’d been happy to get engaged to Lucy and embark on just such an arrangement. He was thirty-four years old and the timing had been good. And, most importantly, it would have made his grandmother happy and, more than anything, Gabriel would have liked that.
His parents had died without the grandchildren they might have expected and he was determined that his grandmother wouldn’t follow suit—he had a chance to provide great-grandchildren at least.
But love? No. He would happily leave that to other misguided souls.
‘You were going to introduce her to Lucy, weren’t you?’
‘It’s a shame. I think they would have got along.’
‘What about the week we had planned there before that? Shall I cancel it?’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Won’t you want to spend some quality time with your grandmother on your own? I know you were staying with her while I went to the hotel, but won’t work be a distraction you could do without?’
‘And I thought you knew me,’ Gabriel murmured.
‘So we go as usual?’
‘I will stay on after you’ve returned to London. That will please my grandmother.’
Abby thought that it might please her but it certainly wasn’t going to make up for a broken engagement and saying goodbye to the pitter patter of little feet in due course.
All that normal stuff that happened to normal people.
For the first time, feelings carefully submerged burst their banks and came raging through. Memories of how her own heart had been broken, mangled and walked over, by an ex to whom she had been engaged. Memories of picking
