The Secret Spanish Love-Child (2 page)

When she finally knocked on his door, he found that he was looking forward to their little chat.

‘You wanted to see me.’ Alex could feel her stomach churning as she hovered indecisively by the door, ready for flight.

‘I did.’ Gabriel didn’t stand. Instead, he sat back and devoted one hundred per cent of his attention to acknowledging how little she had changed. Remarkable. She must be what now…? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? And she still hadn’t succumbed to the polish and finesse to which most young people in the capital seemed to aspire. ‘Come in.’ He gestured expansively to one of the chairs positioned in front of his desk. ‘Have a seat. I would offer you coffee but Janet, my personal assistant, has already left.’ He shrugged and offered an apologetic smile.

Alex wondered whether a man of his importance was incapable of working a coffee machine. ‘I…I really can’t stay…’

Gabriel frowned. ‘Maybe you didn’t quite understand me when I told you that I don’t tolerate clock-watching in my employees.’

‘I know. And I’m more than happy to work overtime, but I need a day’s notice. As it is, I’m already really late for…’

Gabriel raised one imperious hand. ‘Not interested. Whatever date you’ve got lined up will have to wait. There are a few things we need to discuss.’ He thought that he had swept all traces of her from his mind but he must have been mistaken because there was a familiarity about her that was strangely disconcerting and he was aware that the faintest colour scored his slashing cheekbones. Déjà vu slammed into him with pulsating intensity and suddenly he could remember everything about her, right down to the smallest details, the tiny freckles across her shoulder blades, the way she always smelt of the pine soap she liked to use, the sounds she used to make when he ran his hands all over her body.

The memories stole into his head like destructive gremlins and he banished them without conscience.

‘What things?’

‘You said that I reminded you of someone you used to know. Tell me.’

‘Wh…what?’

‘And stop clinging to that door knob as though you’re on the verge of collapse! I told you to sit down!’

Alex could barely hear herself think. The blood was rushing through her and, even though she could see a precipice yawning open at her feet, she was still desperately happy to kid herself that everything was fine. She was having an inconvenient conversation but that was the extent of it.

‘I…I really have to go, Mr Cruz. I have…obligations. I know you hate clock-watchers but…’

‘I told you. Cancel your date. It’ll be a lot easier than you think.’

Alex tried not to look resentful in the face of his implacable smile. In fact, she was trying hard not to look at him at all.

‘Okay.’ She angled her body away from him and spoke in a low, hurried voice, explaining the situation and lacing her request with a thousand apologies. Then, feeling a bit calmer, she turned to face him.

‘So.’ Gabriel watched as she gingerly sat down. Her body language was shrieking discomfort. ‘This guy you tell me that I remind you of.’

‘It’s not important. I thought you called me here to find out how my day with your fiancée went.’

‘Okay. Shall we use that as our starting point? How did the day go? Feel free to speak your mind. It’s something I encourage in all my employees.’

Alex refrained from pointing out that he hadn’t much liked it when she had spoken her mind and told him that she had to leave the office. ‘The day went very well. She’s demanding but I think she got a few things accomplished.’

‘Yes,’ Gabriel mused thoughtfully, ‘I can imagine that you might have found Cristobel a little challenging. What else did you think of her?’

‘I don’t think it’s my place to say, sir.’

‘There’s no need to keep repeating
sir
at the end of every sentence. So I take it that you two didn’t get along…’

‘I think she found my translating skills very useful.’

‘I’m beginning to get the drift.’

‘She’s a very…a very…
polished
woman…’ She had broken out in a film of perspiration because she suspected that traps were being laid, except she had no idea where the traps were. If she inadvertently stepped on one, would it signal
the end of her career? Women, apparently, had a great deal of influence over their men, or so she had read somewhere, and if the mind-numbingly empty-headed socialite Cristobel decided to blacken her name, then she might very well find herself out of a job before she had had a chance to even get her feet under the table. But there was no way that she could pretend a rapport where none had existed. Nor was she finding it comfortable to look at him, which meant that she was addressing her answers to her feet. Hardly the sign of an efficient rising executive in his dynamic company.

An uncomfortable silence lengthened between them until Alex was eventually driven to look up at him and, as their eyes tangled, she felt her skin begin to prickle. The thread of reason that had held sway throughout the course of the day, the notion that there was no way that this man was the same one who had invaded her life and turned it upside down, began to fray at the edges.

When he said softly, ‘Would that guy you remember have gone by the name of Lucio…?’ Alex barely heard him. His words floated around her head and then, like laser-guided torpedoes, shattered through her protective barriers and her eyes widened in shock and dawning horror.

‘How…how did you know?’ The truth had already sunk in but, in her determination to block it out, she had subconsciously created all sorts of pointless justifications in her head as to why the guy sitting in front of her, oozing sex appeal and power, couldn’t possibly be the Lucio she remembered from years ago. Lucio had been broke. He hadn’t descended from the Spanish hierarchy. And surely he hadn’t been as tall or aggressive or dangerously masculine as this man?

‘I’m surprised you don’t recognise me, Alex. I recognised you the second you walked through my door. You know, in a way, I’m a little offended but I’ll rise above that.’

‘But…but your name’s not Lucio…it’s…it’s…’ A great chasm was opening up at her feet and she tried not to stare down into its dark abyss.

‘Lucio is my middle name.’

Having laboured to avoid looking at him at all, Alex now felt driven to stare as her memory of Lucio overlapped and merged with the reality of Gabriel Cruz, one and the same person, and of course she had been a complete fool to have thought otherwise. His was not a face to be forgotten, even with the benefit of some serious wishful thinking, and if she had found him good-looking back then, he was scarily sexy now. Time had taken the guy of twenty-six and honed him into staggering perfection.

And he was engaged.

‘I don’t understand,’ Alex stammered in complete confusion.

‘What don’t you understand?’

‘You lied to me? All those years ago? When I saw you in this office, I just thought you resembled the guy I used to know. Why would I think that you had lied to me? I knew someone who didn’t have much money and liked the simple things in life. Who
were
you?’

Gabriel’s lips thinned and he flushed darkly at the wounded accusation in her voice. She had always been upfront and honest. It had been one of the things he had enjoyed about her. No games, no subterfuge, no hidden agendas. No way was she going to understand his harmless pretence and now he felt like a bastard, which didn’t sit well with him because he was someone accustomed to always feeling pretty good about himself.

‘I indulged in a piece of innocent fiction,’ he drawled with a shrug of his broad shoulders. And it
had
been innocent. Saddled with the weight of responsibility from a young age and already prematurely jaded by the nature of women and the
lengths they would go to in order to fall into the bed of a man with money and power, the lure of allowing Alex to believe that he was no more than an ordinary guy who happened to be working at a nearby fancy hotel, had been irresistible. For the first time in his life, he had left his gilded cage and tasted a certain freedom. The vague, nebulous feeling that somewhere, buried deep inside, he had protected that memory, was something that Gabriel barely registered on a conscious level. He was not one of those weak men who wasted time indulging in a load of pointless introspection. He certainly wasn’t going to start now.

‘
A piece of innocent fiction?
What’s so innocent about lying to someone?’ She was momentarily distracted by the shocking concept of having been wilfully duped. She had fallen head over heels with a guy who had thought so little of her that he had found it okay to spin her a bunch of lies about himself. How big an idiot had
she
been? ‘I believed every word you told me about yourself!’

‘Your memory’s playing tricks on you. I never told you anything about myself.’

‘You allowed me to believe that you were an ordinary guy! You took walks on the beach with me and we ate out at cheap and cheerful restaurants and you sympathised with the fact that I was broke and all the time you were actually Gabriel Cruz, mega-rich and mega-powerful! You played with the truth and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the same as lying! You weren’t really working at the Tivoli, were you?’ On the fringes of her mind, she knew that this was all irrelevant but she shied away from confronting her truly ugly dilemma. It was easier to postpone that by taking refuge in the details of his deception.

‘I was, in a manner of speaking.’

‘What manner of speaking would that be?’

‘I own the Tivoli Hotel. At least, I do now. At the time, I was in the process of acquiring it.’

Alex’s mind reeled. How was it that she had never questioned his self-assurance? His confident charm? The effortless way he seemed to command the space around him? She had just found it unbelievably thrilling. So different from the boys she had known who had seemed like toddlers in comparison.

She wondered whether they had gone to cheap places because he would have been safe from recognition. Rich people wouldn’t have been seen dead in cheap tapas bars frequented by local fishermen so the chance of him inconveniently bumping into a fellow millionaire acquaintance would have been nil.

And, hard on the heels of that thought, came another, even more sickening one. She had committed the grave error of telling him that she loved him and he had scarpered. Sure, he hadn’t done a midnight flit, but as good as. He had let her down gently, explained that she was young, that they had had fun, that she had her whole life in front of her. He had been immune to her distraught expression and had kindly set her aside when she had clung to him. It had been a sobering experience but over time she had managed to persuade herself that she had had the misfortune to have invested all her youthful love in someone who hadn’t felt the same towards her. These things happened. The music charts were littered with singers crooning on about broken hearts and unrequited love.

She was working out now that, even if he
had
been madly in love with her, which he hadn’t been, he
still
would have walked out of her life because he was Gabriel Cruz and there was no way he would ever have hitched his wagon to a nobody.

Hadn’t she met his fiancée first-hand? Hadn’t she seen for herself what he was all about? Rich men needed all the right trappings and that applied to everything, from houses to cars to fiancées. On every level she was waking up to the fact that she had been an even bigger fool than she could ever have imagined possible.

‘So,’ she said slowly, very, very angry now, ‘let me get this straight. Five years ago, you pretended to be someone you weren’t
for a bit of fun
. I’m right about that, aren’t I? Were you bored with fawning rich girls? Was that it? So you decided that you’d take a bit of time out and pretend to be just like everybody else and I just happened to be the poor schmuck who landed up in your path.’

‘You’re overreacting!’

‘I am
not
overreacting! You may be rich and powerful but that’s no excuse to manipulate other people! I
trusted
you!’

‘I didn’t
manipulate you
,’ Gabriel muttered, ‘and I didn’t do anything with you that you didn’t enjoy!’ He raked restless fingers through his black hair and Alex followed that graceful movement with a compulsion that terrified her. She didn’t want to think about exactly how much she had enjoyed all those things he had done with her.

‘That’s not the point! The point is, I might have liked having an idea of the person I was dealing with!’

‘Why? Would you have behaved differently? Expected a bit more? Five-star hotels, perhaps? Four-poster feather beds and my limo to ferry you everywhere?’

‘That’s a horrible thing to say!’

‘Why is it horrible? Call me cynical, but I’ve noticed that a healthy bank balance brings out all sorts of predictable behaviour patterns in women.’ From the unusual position of self-defence, Gabriel fell back on the dispassionate air of someone delivering self-evident truths.

‘Yes, well, believe it or not, there are some women who would run a mile from a man with a
healthy bank balance
.’

Gabriel gave a roar of incredulous laughter, which made her even more furious. ‘Really? Let me think about that…No-o-o…don’t think I’ve ever met that particular species…’

‘Would you mind telling me why you summoned me here?’

‘Why do you think, Alex?’ He linked his fingers behind his head and leaned back. ‘You don’t seriously imagine that you can carry on working for me and kidding yourself that you don’t know who I am, do you?’

Alex steeled herself to meet his gaze levelly, without flinching. She was thinking fast now, thinking about all the different ways his reappearance might jeopardize the life she now led, thinking that the last thing she wanted was for him to start picking her out from the herd. It wasn’t likely. He was almost a married man. But what if he decided to play catch up games, just for the heck of it? There was too much at stake.

‘You’re right,’ she conceded quietly. ‘I shouldn’t have…have let my feelings run away with me. It’s been a bit of a shock but I’m over it now. You caused me a lot of sleepless nights when you walked out of my life…’ she forced herself to smile wryly at him ‘…but that was a long time ago. It was just an eye-opener hearing the truth about who you were. If I reacted a little over the top, then I apologise…’