A Bargain with the Enemy

‘The evening I kissed you.’

She grimaced. ‘I’m surprised you even remember that.’

‘It was too memorable to ever forget,’ he assured gruffly.

Bryn looked at him sharply. ‘I somehow doubt that very much.’

Gabriel looked straight back at her with hot, glittering eyes. ‘The timing was all wrong, the circumstances impossible, but even then I wanted to do so much more than kiss you.’

‘I— You did?’ She was totally flustered by his admission.

He shrugged. ‘I was attracted to you then. I’m attracted to you now.’

Bryn gave a scathing snort. ‘Five years ago I was a chubby and gauche teenager wearing heavy-framed glasses.’ And this man had been lean and sophisticated, with the same dark and wicked good looks that still took her breath away.

He nodded. ‘And now you’re sleek and elegant, and I’m guessing you wear contact lenses?’

She nodded distractedly. ‘Except for when I paint, when I prefer to wear the glasses you returned to me last week.’

‘You weren’t chubby five years ago, Bryn, you were voluptuous,’ he assured her earnestly. ‘And your eyes were just as stunningly beautiful behind those glasses as they are tonight.’

She gave a dismissive shake of her head. ‘We’re veering off the subject, Gabriel.’

‘Which is?’

‘That just thinking about the distress it would cause my mother if I were to tell her I’ve met you again now, let alone this—this attraction, between us, is the very reason why it can’t continue.’

Gabriel looked up. ‘You can’t possibly know how your mother would react.’

Bryn frowned her impatience. ‘Get real, Gabriel, and try to imagine how that conversation would go. “Oh, by the way, Mum, guess who I almost had sex with a couple nights ago. Gabriel D’Angelo. How weird is that?”’

Gabriel drew in a sharp breath before pushing up onto his feet to pick up his glass of wine, taking a sip before answering her, knowing Bryn was now spoiling for a fight—probably as her way of putting an end to this situation. But he wasn’t about to give it to her, wasn’t about to make any of this easy for her after the week of uncertainty he had just suffered through. ‘We didn’t have sex, Bryn, although we came very close, and, as I said, the location could have been a little more...conventional, but I’m pretty sure there was nothing in the least “weird” about anything we did together.’

Those two wings of colour deepened in her cheeks as she looked up at him with overbright eyes. ‘You won’t even try to see this from my point of view, will you?’

His jaw tightened. ‘I’m not inclined to let you walk away from me just because you think your mother might react badly to knowing about the two of us, no.’

‘How about if I walk away because I’m reacting badly to just the idea of the two of us together?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘And are you?’

‘Yes!’

‘Why?’

She gave an exasperated shake of her head. ‘Gabriel, I know you to be an intelligent man—’

‘Thank you,’ he drawled dryly.

‘And as an intelligent man,’ she continued firmly, ‘you must know how impossible this whole situation is. For goodness’ sake, my father went to prison for attempting to defraud you and your family,’ she added impatiently when he made no response.

‘I’m well aware of what happened five years ago.’ He nodded grimly.

‘Then you must also be aware— You must have issues of your own about that situation.’

‘I deeply regret that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he conceded impatiently. ‘But it was sheer coincidence your father chose to bring his painting to Archangel, even more so that I, rather than Michael or Raphael, happened to be in charge of the London gallery when he did.’ Something Gabriel had also long had reason to regret.

Except he would never have met Bryn five years ago if not for her father’s greed.

She blinked long lashes. ‘And you’re saying you don’t have a problem with that? With the fact that I’m William Harper’s daughter?’

‘Of course I have a problem with that.’ Gabriel swallowed the rest of his wine before placing the empty glass down on the coffee table. ‘At the very least it’s inconvenient—’

‘Inconvenient!’ Bryn echoed incredulously.

He nodded. ‘Because the past is affecting how you feel about the two of us now.’

Bryn no longer knew how she felt about the past, let alone the here and now.

Five years ago she had been devastated by her father’s trial and imprisonment. A month ago she had still been resentful of Gabriel D’Angelo’s part in her father’s downfall. Even a week ago she had been disgusted with herself for allowing herself to respond to Gabriel in the way that she had.

But Gabriel was asking how she felt about that now.

She was still devastated by the events of the past, but the talk she’d had with her mother last week, the things Mary had told her about the deterioration of her marriage, her daily uncertainty of her own and her daughter’s future, how she believed William’s get-rich-quick schemes would have eventually caused a complete meltdown in their marriage...

Having spoken with her mother, Bryn now believed that her father, determined to ignore Gabriel’s advice to take his painting and just walk away, had instead informed the press of the painting’s existence, ballooning the situation beyond anyone’s control.

And all of those things put a different slant on that past situation. Bryn had worshipped her father when she was a child, had loved him dearly for the man she had believed him to be. But as an adult she now realised, and was forced to accept, that he had been far from the perfect husband or father.

And, yes, Gabriel had been involved in her father’s being sent to prison, but he hadn’t done it out of spite, had merely, as he had just pointed out, been caught up in the sequence of events created and executed by Bryn’s father, and over which Gabriel himself had no control.

It wasn’t the past, or Gabriel’s involvement in that past, that made a relationship between the two of them so impossible now; it was how Bryn felt about Gabriel.

Five years ago she had been infatuated, utterly mesmerised, by the dark and devastatingly attractive Gabriel D’Angelo. Since meeting him again, sharing intimacies with him that she had never experienced with any other man, she had realised that it hadn’t just been infatuation she had felt for Gabriel five years ago. She had fallen in love with him then, she loved him still, and he—how she felt about him—was why none of the men she had met since had ever held her interest. How could any man compete with Gabriel D’Angelo? Or the fact that Bryn had fallen in love with him all those years ago?

And it was a futile love. Not just because of the past, but because Gabriel, still single at the age of thirty-three, so obviously didn’t do falling in love, let alone for ever.

Oh, he was attracted to her, admitted to desiring her, but that was all he felt, and the only way, the only defence Bryn had left against falling even more in love with Gabriel than she already was, was to continue to use the shield of the events of the past to keep him at arm’s length.

Gabriel watched through narrowed lids as Bryn swung her feet to the carpeted floor before sitting up.

Her expression was one of cool dismissal. ‘I don’t feel anything about the two of us now,’ she told him coldly.

His jaw tightened. ‘That’s not—’

‘Nor do I think it a good idea for us to be alone together like this again,’ she continued firmly. ‘You asked that we talk, Gabriel, and we’ve done that. And I’ve told you exactly how I feel.’ Her chin rose. ‘And if anything I’ve said means you now change your mind about including my paintings in the New Artists Exhibition, then so be it!’ she added challengingly as she stood up.

Gabriel eyed her frustratedly, knowing that Bryn was deliberately shutting him out, but he had no idea how to break through the defences she was deliberately putting up against him. The fact that she felt the need to put up those defences at all was surely telling in itself. In what way, Gabriel couldn’t be sure. And this stubbornly assertive Bryn obviously wasn’t about to enlighten him either.

‘I won’t change my mind, Bryn,’ he assured grimly. ‘About anything.’ He used the same challenging tone she had to him.

She eyed him guardedly. ‘What does that mean?’

Gabriel gave a mocking smile. ‘It means that you don’t know me very well if you think that anything you’ve said tonight means I’m going to just walk away from you. It means,’ he continued firmly as she would have spoken, ‘that, for the two weeks left before the exhibition, I’m going to require that you come to the gallery at least once a day, and that those meetings will be with me, rather than Eric. It means, Bryn, that you can try running away from me, from the attraction between us, but for the next two weeks, at least, I have no intention of allowing you to just ignore me.’