Alice sat and gave him a little run-down of how she had spent her afternoon. Had he been staring at her as she had walked towards him? Or had he only been just looking to make sure that she could pass muster? His expression had been unreadable and she had a fierce longing for him to tell her that she looked beautiful.
He, of course, looked as stunning as he always did. He was dressed semi-formally in a charcoal-grey suit that looked hand-tailored and lovingly accentuated his physique.
‘Your hair...’ he murmured. ‘Very effective.’
Alice blushed, no longer feeling like his secretary but feeling, weirdly, like his date, even though she recognised the foolishness of letting herself get swept away by such a silly notion.
‘I had it dyed,’ she confessed self-consciously. ‘I hope it’s not too much.’
‘It’s...’ Gabriel was momentarily lost for words. ‘It’s... It suits you.’ He fought the temptation to reach out and run his fingers through its silky length.
‘Should we perhaps run through what sort of questions we might get asked about this buy-out?’
Gabriel found that he couldn’t care less about the buy-out. For once, business could not have been further from his mind. Those little snippets of wayward thoughts that had flitted through his mind now and again—little snapshots of her released from her armour of the perfect little secretary—coalesced into one powerful image of her without that dress on, naked and sprawled on his bed...
And where was he going with that thought, exactly? He had always made it his business never to mix work with pleasure—that was a sure-fire recipe for problems. The sexy little thing in the accounts department might display her wares but those were offers he had always avoided like the plague.
But this woman...
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘We should do that—discuss potential problems; try and cut them off at the pass...’ He drained his glass and poured himself another. Potential problems? Who cared? He had it covered. His mind wanted to think about other intriguing possibilities...
He half-listened as she launched into a summary of the company and the technicalities of buying something that was rooted in a family.
‘Especially when there are...how many children did you say...? Three? All involved in the decision-making process...?’
‘Three children, yes,’ Gabriel murmured, sitting back and sipping his wine. It took extreme will power not to let his eyes rove over her pert breasts. She was so unlike the women he’d dated who had all been universally proud of the fact that they spilled out of bras. Since when, he mused, was that such a great selling point anyway? ‘Two boys and a girl,’ he added, because she seemed to expect him to expand on that succinct statement. ‘And I gather the daughter doesn’t really care one way or another. She travels, it would seem, spreading peace and love and playing at being a trust-fund hippy. What about you? Any siblings?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘We’re sitting here, having a drink. We don’t have to spend our time discussing work.’ He topped up her glass, gently pushing aside her hand which she had raised to stop him. ‘Tell me about your family. Brothers? Sisters? Usual assortment of nieces and nephews, cousins and aunts and uncles wheeled out on high days and holidays?’
Alice felt the little pulse at the side of her neck beating steadily. Her mother was an only child and her father had a brother in Australia whom, he had always been very proud to say, he loathed. When she had been younger, she had longed for a brother or a sister. As time had gone by, she had ditched those dreams. What if a brother had turned out like her father? No, theirs had always been an unhappy little family unit, marooned on open water without the benefit of a neighbouring craft to help pick up the pieces should anything happen. As it had.
He was simply being polite, and she was hardly confessing to state secrets, but it still felt awkward to start talking to him about her private life. She needed those boundaries between them to be kept in place or else it would be so much more difficult to keep the attraction she felt towards him at bay.
Hadn’t she already fluttered like a girl on her first date? Hadn’t she wanted him to notice her, and not just as his efficient secretary? She was in dangerous territory and control came from not forgetting their respective roles.
But if she dodged his question she’d stir his curiosity and he was tenacious, a dog with a bone, when it came to finding out things he wanted to find out.
‘I’m—I’m an only child,’ she told him haltingly. ‘My father’s dead. A car accident.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Though the way she had said that... ‘And your mother?’