‘I didn’t realise that I sermonised,’ Alice said truthfully. She had her thoughts, but those she kept very much to herself.
‘You don’t have to! I know exactly what goes on in that head of yours whether you voice your opinions or not!’
Alice didn’t say anything. His proximity was having a weird effect on her. If she looked directly at him, the glittering intensity of his dark eyes was unnerving. But if she looked a little lower, then she was confronted by his thigh, the taut pull of fine fabric over muscular legs, and that was even more unnerving. She could almost hear the steady drum roll of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears. He rarely invaded her space like this and she didn’t have the resources to withstand the impact he had on her nervous system.
‘Explain that remark.’
Alice had subtly pressed herself into the back of her chair. She wished he would let this conversation go because she could feel it teetering on the brink of getting too personal, and getting personal was something he had studiously avoided over the past three weeks. He never even asked her how she had spent her weekends.
‘What remark?’ she asked warily and he gave her another of those piercing looks that seemed to imply that he was perfectly aware that she was trying to dodge the conversation.
‘You should try to avoid doing that as much as you can, you know,’ he murmured softly.
It was like having her skin lightly brushed with a feather; the lazy speculation in his voice was even more disconcerting than the full-body impact of his towering presence so close to her.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I mean by that?’ Gabriel continued into the lengthening silence, and Alice tried her best to dismiss the prickles of sensation racing through her body like tiny sparks of fire. ‘No, of course you won’t, but I’ll tell you anyway. You should never try and wriggle away from a direct question. It makes me all the more determined to prise a suitable answer from you. The rule of thumb is that there’s nothing more challenging to a man like me than a gauntlet that’s been thrown down—and your silences count as gauntlets.’ He didn’t normally like challenges when it came to women but, hell, he liked this one...
A man like him?
Alice steeled herself to look him squarely in the face. ‘I don’t think it’s very nice of you to throw your ex-lover out of the building because she happened to be upset with you.’ There was a lot more she could have said on the subject but she chose to keep that to herself.
‘It wasn’t,’ Gabriel grated, ‘very nice of my ex-lover to descend on me, in my office, so that she could throw a tantrum.’ He vaulted upright and prowled through the office which she had somehow managed to make her own in the handful of weeks she had been working for him. There were two plants on the bookshelf, another on her desk and a discreet Buddha figurine which she kept next to the telephone. Having circled the room, he returned to stare down at her, hands thrust into his pockets.
‘I don’t suppose that was her intention,’ Alice told him calmly. ‘I don’t think she came here planning to have a yelling fit at you. I think if she’d planned on screaming she could have done it down the telephone rather than come here and risk the humiliation of being ushered out of the building like a common criminal.’
‘But then, if she’d used the telephone, she would have had to get past my faithful and extremely proficient secretary, wouldn’t she?’
Alice blushed and wondered how two perfectly flattering adjectives could end up sounding so unappealing.
‘Maybe,’ he mused, leaning down, palms of his hands on her desk, ‘she was overcome with a pressing need to vent. Do you think that might be it?’
Alice shrugged and for a few seconds their eyes tangled. Her mouth went dry and her brain seemed to seize up completely so that she had to suck in air and force herself to breathe evenly.
‘Have you ever experienced that before, Alice?’
‘Experienced what?’ Alice asked in a hoarse whisper, and he laughed under his breath.
‘The grip of passion that makes you behave irrationally...’
‘I prefer to trust reasoning and logic,’ she managed to say.
‘So that’s a no...’
‘If you recall...’ She was close to snapping because not only was he making her feel uncomfortable but he was enjoying himself. ‘I did say to you when I took this job that I didn’t want to talk about my private life!’
‘Was that what we were doing? Talking about your private life?’ He stood up, flexed his muscles, debated whether to let this conversation go and just as quickly decided not to. Georgia’s untimely visit had dented his concentration and he was finding it strangely enjoyable to offload on his secretary. Offloading was not something he normally did. In his formidably controlled life, there was seldom any reason to, and he had to concede that, had Alice not been there, not been his secretary, he wouldn’t have felt tempted.