‘People in a small village are inclined to gossip,’ Alice said weakly as Maggie disappeared towards one of the shops, having given them a cheery wave goodbye. ‘It’s very annoying. Because...er...most of the time, what they say has no basis in truth whatsoever...’ Alice couldn’t bring herself actually to say out loud what the older woman had said. To mention that word ‘wedding’ would open a can of worms and she didn’t know how she would be able to stuff them back in.
Gabriel was ominously silent.
He should have seen this coming. He had warned her off but he should have clocked that there was something intensely vulnerable about her.
‘Vulnerable’ should have hit his radar and generated the automatic ‘no trespassing’ response, but somehow his guard had been down. It was what novelty and lust did when they came together—a lethal combination.
‘What the hell was the woman talking about?’ He beeped open the car and climbed into the driver’s seat, but he didn’t start the engine. Instead, he waited for her to follow suit, and then he turned to her with a cool, unreadable expression.
‘I told you...’ A hint of defiance had crept into her voice. ‘In a village there’s always gossip. Maggie is one of my mother’s friends and somehow she’s managed to get hold of the wrong end of the stick.’
‘Because out of nowhere your mother somehow gleaned, erroneously, that we’re...what Alice? About to tie the knot? Walk up the aisle? Start believing in fairy stories and building castles in the sky?’
‘You’re so bloody cynical!’ she exploded. ‘And no. I haven’t been telling my mother anything. I’m not so stupid that I’d fall into the trap of thinking that you’re there for anything but the short term, Gabriel!’
‘I’m not going to get into a pointless argument with you over this.’ He started the engine and began driving slowly away from the village.
Alice couldn’t credit that they had been making love not so long ago. She couldn’t believe that she had been so stupid to think that, if she blanked out the fact that she was hopelessly in love with him, everything could tick along nicely until such time as...what, exactly? He got bored? Became indifferent?
Was she so desperate that she would abandon all her principles just to steal a bit more time with him?
Was it any wonder that he had become so lazy over the years when women like her allowed him to get away with doing exactly as he wanted?
She had fallen under his spell and been mesmerised. She had slept with him in Paris; had kidded herself that she could walk away and carry on working for him without any repercussions. But there had been repercussions. She had been so aware of him, so acutely sensitive to his presence, that she had scarcely been able to function.
He had found his way to the very essence of her and he had taken up residence there.
She had never been an addict of anything in her life, but she had become addicted to him. Was that why she had fallen right back into bed with him— because he had happened to show up at her house and had told her, in that dark, dangerous, sexy voice of his, that he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head?
Or maybe she had been injected with some sort of crazy, dare-devil urge because her mother—her always hesitant, always careful mother; her mother to whom she had preached the good sense of not getting involved with a man because just look at what she had ended up marrying—had had the courage to embark on a relationship?
Or was it just a combination of things that had galvanised her into the worst choice she had ever made in her entire life?
She could find a million reasons to justify why she had done what she had done, but in the end what it amounted to was that she had climbed onto a roller-coaster ride and now it was time to climb off.
Gabriel Cabrera was the equivalent of an extreme sport and she just didn’t have the constitution for it.
She blanked her mind to the thought of the endless days and nights ahead of her which would not contain him in them. She would have to hand in her notice, find work somewhere else.
‘It would only be a pointless argument,’ Alice half-shouted, ‘because you don’t want to have it! And, just so you know, I’ll be handing in my notice first thing on Tuesday morning.’
‘You’re being ridiculous!’
‘And that being the case,’ she continued as her anger, mostly with herself, spilled over, ‘I might as well tell you that you may think you’re being fair by warning women off you, just in case they get it into their silly little heads that you might actually have a heart buried there somewhere, but you’re not. You’re just taking care of your conscience. You don’t want to have to try at anything that isn’t work. You’ll end up a lonely, sad man with stacks and stacks of money but no one to share it with!’ She was staring at his profile which could have been hewn from rock.