A Diamond Deal With Her Boss
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‘Your grandmother?’ Abby frowned. She’d taken a surreptitious step back but she was still so close to him that she could feel his heat and the energetic, physical dynamism of his personality. He dwarfed her and very occasionally made her so intensely aware of her femininity that she had to fight to retain her self-control.
It was happening right now as he stared down at her with unfathomable dark eyes.
It never failed to puzzle her how someone could wear the most expensive of business suits yet manage to look nothing like a conventional businessman.
‘My grandmother has suffered a series of mini strokes,’ Gabriel said, as serious as she had ever seen him. ‘They have taken their toll. Despite the fact that she’s been given a clean bill of health, she has become depressed about her future, and vocal about her sadness at not seeing me settled with a nice wife who will bear me nice kids and look after me in my dotage.’
‘Okay...’ Abby was shocked at this admission, which took them veering wildly off the employer-employee road they were accustomed to travelling down. Perhaps this was his vulnerability being exposed, she thought, acknowledging that alongside her surprise was a certain illicit thrill that he was confiding in her. ‘What about your parents, Gabriel?’
‘Both dead.’ He lowered his eyes and kept to himself the recognition that, 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 up pieces while facing the daily humiliation of carrying on in a tiny village where everyone knew everyone else and the story of her broken engagement had been headline news for months. She’d pinned a smile to her face for so long that her jaw had had a permanent ache from the strain of it. And her poor parents, so sympathetic, making sure to avoid talking about that man even though they still saw that man’s parents all the time in the village. She and Jason had been childhood sweethearts before he’d been seduced first by London, then Paris and then a sexy little blonde who’d been thrilled to nab a hot shot banker.
She should have been turned off the whole business of love and marriage for good. Maybe the reason Jason had reared his ugly head out of the blue was because, faced with that very question, Abby had had to concede that there was still a part of her that longed for the fairy tale.
The normal stuff that happened to normal people, even if sometimes it ended up going wrong.
‘Fine.’ Her voice was clipped and she smiled blandly at Gabriel in a manner that suggested that, now that the message had been delivered, it was time for normality to return.
She’d had her heart broken but that had made her so much stronger.
‘My perfect, efficient PA,’ Gabriel murmured appreciatively. ‘Time for work—and there’s a lot to get through. Good to know that we’re on the same wavelength—which is why I say that work goes on as normal when we go to Seville in a few days’ time.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘SO...’ SETTLED IN his seat, Gabriel finally turned his attention to his companion. ‘I feel as though I haven’t spoken to you for days’
‘We had a long conversation yesterday about the two companies we’re going to see outside Seville,’ Abby pointed out. But he had a point. No sooner had he received the shocking news that his fiancée was no longer interested in the role than Gabriel had taken himself abroad for four days.
‘Inconvenient,’ he had told her in passing when she had showed up for work the day after her revelations about Lucy and Rupert. ‘But that’s what happens when you leave a boy to do a man’s job. Reynolds has screwed up with the lawyers in New York and that deal looks as though it’s going to be set back by two months if I don’t get over there and iron things out.’
He’d emailed her the evening before, warning her of his forthcoming absence, but the office had still felt curiously empty once the door had slammed shut behind him. Needless to say, the list of things he wanted her to do was as long as her arm, but exhausted as she was at the end of each evening, she still managed to find time to speculate on his hurried departure from the office.
On the outside, Gabriel was the essence of charm. Physically beautiful, he knew just how to charm whatever he wanted from whoever happened to be withholding it from him—and, if that ploy failed, Abby had seen first-hand how fast that easy charm could give way to steely-eyed menace that left no one in any doubt that when it came to a fight he was prepared to go for it.
But underneath that charm, and underneath all that bluster about being fine with the break-up of his engagement, could Gabriel be hiding a vulnerable side?
Abby found herself wasting far too much time speculating about that. It was as if boundaries had suddenly been breached and now he’d somehow managed to stick his foot in the door and wedge open a part of her she had been keen to keep firmly closed.
Gabriel wasn’t just like any other boss. There was just too much of him for comfort.
‘What’s our schedule going to be?’ She pulled the conversation back into her safe comfort zone and slid calm, grey eyes over to him.
They were on his private jet. She’d been on this jet twice and she knew that there was no relief from the intimacy of the surroundings. No hubbub of other passengers calling flight attendants for drinks, no announcements over the PA system reminding them of which countries they happened to be flying over, no distant wails of discontented toddlers. On the previous two occasions, there had at least been the distraction of several other employees who were being ferried over to work on the same deal but, even if there hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have approached the trip feeling as though she had to be careful.
And with good reason, judging from the amused look on Gabriel’s face.
She hurriedly averted her eyes, only to be swamped by his suffocating masculine appeal as he sprawled in the leather seat, fingers loosely linked on his lap, his dark, spiky hair combed back so that there was nothing to distract from the angular, chiselled perfection of his lean features.
Gabriel could recognise a change of subject when he heard one and he was hearing one now. ‘Well, I have to admit that things have changed slightly, thanks to Lucy’s defection.’
He’d spoken to Lucy, and Abby had been accurate in her retelling of his ex-fiancée’s reasons for returning the engagement ring to him.
‘You’re never around, Gabe,’ she had said, looking at him with such apprehension that he’d had to force himself not to click his tongue with annoyance. Since when had he turned into an intimidating monster who ate innocent young girls for breakfast?
‘I have a business to run,’ he had explained. ‘You’ve seen how that works. Your father is abroad a lot of the time.’
‘And that’s how I know that I don’t want that for myself,’ she had confided, her big, blue eyes wide. ‘Dad was always away when I was growing up and I don’t want that for my kids. I want them to have a Daddy who’s there and not always on the other side of the world. Plus, what’s the point of being married if you never get to see your husband? Gabe, we’ve been going out for seven months and I feel as though I have to book an appointment to see you.’
Since Gabriel couldn’t argue with that, he’d maintained a tactful silence whilst she had gathered momentum and told him all the reasons why she had got cold feet, ending with a suitable apology and some hand wringing.
Lucy had wanted more than he had it in him to give. She had made him feel a hundred years old, jaded and cynical, but that was who he was, and he was never going to change. He’d hurried into something for all the right reasons, as far as he was concerned, but he’d failed to do his homework and now he could only wish her luck, when they parted company, with Rupert the chinless wonder who had, incredibly, become a male model.
‘Your grandmother must have been disappointed,’ Abby said sympathetically and Gabriel tilted his head to one side and shot her a rueful smile.
‘I haven’t broken the news to her just yet,’ he admitted and Abby’s mouth fell open.
‘You haven’t told her?’
‘I thought it made more sense to do something like that face to face. Her health isn’t great. The less time she has to brood over the great-grandchildren that won’t be happening, the better.’
‘So she still thinks that you’re going over there on business and in a week’s time Lucy will be joining you, the happy, radiant bride-to-be?’
‘I never thought you could be so judgemental,’ Gabriel said, unperturbed. He grinned. ‘I’ll be honest.’ He leaned a little towards her and Abby automatically drew back. ‘Ava refuses to go near a computer. I think the top-of-the-range one I bought her a year ago is currently rusting from lack of use, despite the fact that I spent half a day teaching her how to use it and left written instructions on sticky notes at the side. She also can’t get her head around mobile phones and has yet to master text messaging. So, for practical reasons, face to face was always going to be the best method of delivery when it comes to the bad news.’
‘She’ll be shocked,’ Abby murmured, thinking about how shocked her own parents had been when she’d told them the news about her broken engagement. ‘Parents get their hopes up and then, when they’re disappointed, it’s almost worse for them than for...the child on the receiving end of the broken engagement.’ Her eyes misted over and she blinked the memory away.
Addled, she stared down at her tablet and frantically tapped so that she could access the reports she had worked on, anything to focus Gabriel’s attention on work, because she could feel those dark eyes of his boring into her.
‘You’re probably right,’ Gabriel murmured. ‘Parents do get their hopes up. And grandparents as well, of course.’
His shrewd eyes noted the way she was fiddling with the tablet. In a second she was going to shove something in front of him, a timely reminder to keep his distance. But something had changed between them and maybe, because he was a little unsettled by the business with Lucy, he couldn’t help liking the frisson he felt in Abby’s company. Maybe it was the element of distraction but she was occupying his mind in ways she hadn’t done previously.
He was curious about her. He had to admit that it wasn’t for the first time. When she’d first started working for him, he’d been curious about her, curious about that wall of permanent reserve she had around her, as though she’d erected a fortress complete with invisible ‘no trespass’ signs. Innocuous questions were met with bland replies and non-answers but, of course, she’d settled in and he’d quickly realised that he’d found himself the most efficient PA he could ever have hoped for. Given his chequered history when it came to PAs, he’d shelved all curiosity, because a good PA was worth her weight in gold and he wasn’t about to jeopardise his good fortune by being nosy.
But now...
He looked at the sensible dark-grey trouser suit which screamed ‘no nonsense’.
‘Was that what you found?’ he asked and Abby looked at him sharply.
‘Sorry, but I’m not following you.’
Gabriel murmured piously, ‘It’s just that you seemed to be speaking from experience just then. When,’ he elaborated to forestall any puzzled frowns, ‘You said that parents and grandparents were often more upset by this sort of thing than the person actually going through it. So...were you speaking from experience?’
‘Of course not,’ Abby blustered, for once not her usual unflappable self. ‘I just meant,’ she added with a sudden urge to give him a taste of his own medicine, ‘That your grandmother is going be so upset, when you say that she was looking forward to you settling down, and she’ll be even more upset because you really don’t seem that bothered at all.’
Gabriel grinned with open enjoyment which, Abby thought with some frustration, completely defeated the object of the exercise.
‘Yet I’m sure she’ll agree that it’s better to have been ditched at the aisle than ditched post-vows.’
‘I’m sure Lucy would have been a devoted wife if she’d married you.’
The smile faded from Gabriel’s lips at the sincerity in her voice. ‘Doubtless,’ he drawled, half-closing his eyes and affording Abby a bird’s eye view of his lush, dark lashes which would have been the envy of any woman. ‘But, bearing in mind the disappointment she would have found at the end of the rainbow, I very much doubt her devotion would have been long lasting.’
‘Why?’ Abby heard herself ask. She was inviting just the sort of out-of-bounds conversation she had sworn to avoid but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
Gabriel opened his eyes and looked at her lazily, his head tilted to one side as though he was debating the pros and cons of providing her with an answer to her question.
‘Forget I asked,’ Abby said stiffly. ‘I’m not paid to ask personal questions.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Abby...’
‘Well, I’m not!’ Her mild grey eyes glinted.
‘Do you avoid asking me questions because you don’t want me to ask you any?’
‘I avoid asking you questions, Gabriel, because, like I said, it’s not part of my job remit.’
‘Yet you probably know more about me than any other woman,’ he mused. ‘Maybe you know so much that you haven’t got any questions to ask. After all, you have to admit that I’m an open book.’
‘You’re impossible.’ She paused. ‘And you’re not an open book.’
‘You’ve known every single woman I’ve ever dated since you started working for me,’ Gabriel pointed out, enjoying the titillating undercurrent to their conversation, which he suspected she wished she’d never prolonged.
‘I’ve hardly known them,’ Abby said drily. ‘Yes, I’ve made arrangements for the theatre, and restaurants and the opera, and, yes, a couple of them have come into the office at some point or other.’
‘Not at my request.’ Gabriel enjoyed a varied and plentiful love life but he’d always, with the exception of Lucy, disapproved of women dropping in to see him at the office. It was a level of familiarity on a par with doing a food shop together, cooking or watching television. Not to be encouraged.
‘But you’re far from being an open book,’ she finished briskly. ‘You’re happy to be very transparent when it comes to some things but extremely opaque when it comes to others.’
Gabriel thought that she couldn’t have summed him up more accurately if she’d tried, and for a few seconds he frowned, uncomfortable at that.
‘Like I said,’ he drawled, ‘You know me better than anyone else.’
‘That’s because, through necessity, I spend an awful lot of time in your company.’
‘Angling for a pay rise, Abby?’
Abby blushed. He was playing with her and she had to accept that she’d encouraged that by stepping into private territory which was normally out of bounds.
She also had to concede that when he spoke to her like that, his sexy voice deep, rich and velvety, a pleasurable tingle unfurled inside her. Yes, it was inappropriate, but it couldn’t be helped.
No wonder women fell for the guy like ninepins. He oozed easy charm, and when he turned it on thinking straight suddenly became very difficult.
‘Far from it.’ She located the reports waiting to be read and made a show of staring at them. If they hadn’t been flickering on her tablet, she would busied herself rustling paper to get her point across. ‘I’m not at all unhappy with my pay. Everyone in this business sector knows how generous you are when it comes to salaries.’
‘No price too steep for loyalty,’ Gabriel agreed. ‘And in the world of technology, where secrets are begging to be shared with hungry competitors, loyalty is a valuable commodity. You’re tapping your finger on your tablet. Is that your way of telling me that it’s time we started talking about work?’ He laughed softly and the hairs on the back of Abby’s neck curled. ‘Okay, off you go. I can tell you’re dying to tell me what’s in those reports of yours you’re staring so hard at.’
Abby spun to look at him and breathed in deeply. In this mood, he unnerved her, made her forget the boundaries between them, and if she knew that she was partly to blame then that didn’t matter. What mattered was the importance of the lines she had drawn between them from the very first day she’d started working for him.
It wasn’t just because she knew the fate of the PAs who had preceded her, all shot down in flames for overstepping the line because. She’d gathered he’d always enjoyed having a pretty face around, and naturally, in the end, all those pretty faces had not been able to resist the lure of their sexy, charming boss. He had a special way of talking to you, a way that made you feel as though you were the only human being on earth he was interested in.
Abby had seen that in action when she’d been doing something as harmless as reporting on a conversation she might have had about some deal or other, or suggestions she might have had about some of the programmes one of his many companies was developing—because he always encouraged suggestions, which was just one of the many ways he involved his employees and made them feel invaluable.