‘No,’ Laura jeered, ‘because you’re bigger and stronger and infinitely richer. Am I on the right track here?’
‘Pretty much.’ He shrugged.
‘You can set up bank accounts, snap your fingers and make me do your bidding, force me to part with just about the only thing I possess to my name now that the house has gone.’
‘The house but not the contents,’ he reminded her. ‘And you still have the clothes you wear.’
‘Which you will doubtless decide to make me get rid of somewhere along the way?’ His failure to answer, in fact to look as though her jabbing attack had even remotely dented his formidable self-composure, was added fuel to the fire. ‘I may obey you,’ Laura said through gritted teeth, ‘and I may be grateful for everything you’ve done, but I’ll never like you.’
His only reaction was the tiny pulsing muscle in his jaw, an indication that her words were getting to him.
He would not rise to her bait. She could glower until the cows came home, Gabriel thought, but to no purpose because he was not going to indulge in a heated argument with her.
Besides, in a strange way, he knew how she was feeling.
He knew that her anger stemmed from her helplessness, from her sudden vulnerability. When she’d still had the house and the land and the decrepit sign announcing the riding stables that were no more, she’d still felt, psychologically, that she’d still had something. That ownership had passed to him, of all people, was therefore more than galling.
The sudden, startling insight into the woman fulminating not five inches away from him aroused a compassion he had no time for.
‘Let us go to the bank,’ he said in a tight voice, I want to go home.’
‘I know you do,’ Gabriel said gently. But then his face hardened. ‘And you will. Just as soon as we have sorted out our finances.’
An implacable wall, Laura thought. She could rail and storm and beat her lists against it, but it would never budge. Her shoulders drooped and she nodded in resignation.
‘And then,’ he announced with supreme arrogance as they walked the short distance to the bank, ‘we will go and buy you a car.’
The bank manager, who miraculously seemed to have a huge window in his day in order to jump to Gabriel’s commands, was as fawning and beaming as Phillip had been.
‘You,’ Laura said sarcastically, during the five-minute pause in the conversation during which the impressionable and youthful bank manager had seen fit to rush off and order his secretary to halt all his calls until otherwise told, ‘are obviously the most exciting thing that has happened to Tony Jenkins this year. If he bends over backwards any more, I think the back of his head will touch the ground.’ Gabriel looked at her appreciatively and grinned. He had forgotten how damned funny she could be when she tried. ‘Perhaps he is impressed by my good looks and winning personality,’ he commented drily.#p#分页标题#e#
‘Perhaps he’s even more impressed by all those numbers you’re giving him.’
‘Shallow man,’ Gabriel murmured in a low voice, his dark eyes making her go hot all over. ‘Someone should tell him that money is not everything.’
I hate it when people quote me.’ But she looked away quickly and was inordinately relieved when the subject of their discussion reappeared.
‘And now,’ Gabriel said as soon as they had stepped outside, Laura now in possession of so much money with which to commence this venture that her head was spinning, ‘for the car.’
‘There’s no need for that just yet, is there?’ she said, trailing powerlessly along behind him, reluctantly impressed by the awesome business acumen he had displayed over the past few hours, I mean,’ she continued breathlessly as she walked’ quickly to keep up with his easy, purposeful stride, I can sort of look around in the next few weeks...’
I have always found that it is best to strike whilst the iron is hot.’
‘And what if I don’t want to strike!’
Gabriel paused to look at her. God, but he was enjoying himself. In fact, he didn’t think that he had enjoyed a morning’s work quite as much as he had today. He had almost forgotten his long-term plan, the stakes he had begun planting that would reap their own reward, namely her acquiescence. When she stopped fighting him, he could almost begin to recapture that heady, pleasurable and utterly treacherous attraction he had felt for her. An attraction that went far beyond the physical.
It was a mistake he was not about to make. ‘Then, naturally, I will respect your wishes,’ he said smoothly.