‘She was very upset,’ Alice informed him, trying hard to avoid the trap of sounding judgemental, because what he got up to in his private life was none of her business. If he didn’t care who he shared it with, then that was up to him.
And yet, she couldn’t help feeling that there were sides to him that he shared with no one, and she couldn’t quite work out what gave her that impression—something veiled in his eyes that belied the image of a man who laid all his cards on the table. He didn’t give a damn whether she knew about his women or not but, yes, he did give a damn about other things, things she suspected he kept to himself.
Of course, it was fanciful thinking, because it didn’t take a genius to work out that a man who had reached the meteoric heights that he had would not be the open, transparent type. He would be the type who revealed only what he wanted to and only when it served his purposes.
‘I have no idea why,’ Gabriel said wryly. ‘I’d already informed her that I was pulling the plug on our relationship. Unfortunately, I think Georgia found it harder than she thought to accept the breakup.’
‘Do you usually farm difficult conversations out to your secretaries?’
The edge of criticism in her voice should have got on his nerves but Gabriel found that it didn’t. For once, he was in the company of a woman who seemed in no danger of developing a crush on him. Nor was she his type. He liked them small and curvy with an abundance of obvious charm. Prickly and challenging didn’t work for him. Prickly and challenging smacked of an effort he had no enthusiasm for giving.
‘I can’t say the opportunity has arisen in the past few months,’ Gabriel drawled.
And it wouldn’t have happened now, Alice deduced, except for the fact that he had wanted to put her to the test. Maybe he thought that she would not be up to the task—too prim and proper. She didn’t have to hear him say that to know that it was what he had been thinking and she bristled even though a part of her knew that, yes, she took life seriously. She had always had to. There had not been much scope to develop a frivolous side when she had spent so much of her youth supporting her mother through the innumerable bouts of her father’s indiscretions.
Pamela Morgan had never seemed to have the strength to stand up to her bullying, philandering husband, so she had turned to Alice for moral support. By the time Rex Morgan had died, in a car accident, his wife had become a shadow of the girl who had married him in the false expectation of living happily ever after.
Alice’s dreams had been put on hold and, when she looked back, she could see that she had spent her teenage years laying down the foundations for the person she would later become: reserved, cautious, lacking in the carefree gaiety that might have been her due, given a different set of circumstances.
Her one experience with the opposite sex had merely served to drive home to her that it never paid to think that anything good was a foregone conclusion.
‘Is there anything else you’d like me to do now, and what time might I expect you to be in tomorrow morning? I don’t know what your diary is.’ The diary he never used.
‘I keep my diary on my phone. I’ll email you the contents. And tomorrow? I expect I’ll be in...at my usual time. Then I’m away for the next three days. Think you can handle being on your own?’
‘As I said, Mr Cabrera, I will do my utmost to deal with anything you can throw at me...’
* * *
Disgorged from the jumble of people on the tube three weeks later, it occurred to Alice that whatever had been thrown at her had obviously been full of all the right vitamins and proteins because she was enjoying her job. No, more than enjoying it. She got up early with a spring in her step, looking forward to the workload ahead of her and the slow creeping of responsibilities that were landing on her plate.
Her brain was being challenged in all sorts of ways. She was personally responsible for three large accounts. She had enrolled for her accountancy studies. And, by her standards, she was being paid a small fortune.
It was amazing, given the fact that she disapproved of much of what Gabriel stood for. She disapproved of his blatant womanising; she disapproved of the way he picked up lovers and then discarded them. He made no secret of the fact that he was as ruthless in his private life as he was in his working one. She disapproved of his supreme certainty that whatever he wanted would be his. She disapproved of the way every female employee, almost without exception, practically went down on bended knee whenever he deigned to address them. She disapproved of his ego.
On a daily basis, she fielded calls from women who wanted to talk to him and she could gauge from their hopeful, breathless voices that talking was not the only thing they wanted.