Which was good. In fact, it was great. They were having a no-strings-attached affair. She hadn’t mentioned what exactly her type of guy was but he wasn’t it. Admittedly, it irked him...
‘Amazing.’ Alice laughed. ‘You must pick things up fast.’
‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ Gabriel said drily. If only she knew...
Without the benefit of an expensive education, with his formative years spent either getting into trouble or else avoiding it, he had had to learn fast to compete once he’d got out into the big, bad world. His natural ability, talent and sheer untapped intellect had propelled him forward, but he had known from very early on he would need an edge, and that edge would be a second language. He had befriended a native Frenchman as soon as he’d hit the trading floor and had trained himself to speak only in French when they were in each other’s company. He had learned to understand finance in another language, had learned the dialect of the stock exchange in French. He had earned his edge and it had come in very handy over the years.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning it’s time for us to get back to the hotel. Looking at you is doing some very active things to my libido.’ He drained his cup and stood up, and Alice followed suit.
This was what they were all about. She knew that just as she knew that she had done exactly what she had set out not to do: she had fallen under his spell. In London, she had seen the brilliant, inspired businessman, the man with formidable levels of energy who poured that energy into work.
But here she had seen the other man. The witty, charming, highly informative, sexy guy and she had fallen under his spell.
No, worse. With painful honesty, she knew that she had fallen in love with him. For her, this wasn’t just a simple case of lust. No, this was the vast, unchartered territory of absolute love, the one-hundred percent absorption in another human being; the yearning and craving and not being able to envisage a life without them. In a perfect world, this was the sort of intense, soaring feeling that would be reciprocated. In her imperfect world, however, this was the nightmare that couldn’t be contained and couldn’t be ignored. Just thinking about her stupidity made her feel sick.
She had had searing sex with a guy who found her attractive but that was the end of it. She had launched herself down a one way street, had given her heart to a guy who certainly wouldn’t be returning the favour, and it hurt. Gabriel Cabrera didn’t do love. In fact, he didn’t even do anything that remotely bordered on intimacy, or at least what she understood by intimacy. She hadn’t failed to notice that when she asked questions he didn’t want to answer, he abruptly, smilingly but very firmly, changed the subject.
The essence of the man remained hidden. That was the way he liked it, and that was something that was never going to change. How much more foolish could she have been? Against all the odds, against every scrap of common sense she possessed, she had handed over the most precious of emotions into the care of a man who would have run a mile had he but known. A wave of dizziness washed over her and she had to fight her way back to some semblance of normality.
They made it back to the hotel in record time. Dinner was going to be at one of Gabriel’s favourite restaurants in Montmartre, somewhere chilled with an eclectic crowd.
It left them a couple of hours and she knew how those hours would be spent.
In his bedroom, in his bed...
She always made sure to return to her own bedroom, even in the early hours of the morning, but they always made love in his bedroom.
‘I can’t seem to keep my hands off you.’ He pushed her back against the closed door. ‘Touch me,’ he groaned. He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled down the zip to relieve the throbbing in his groin.
The touch of her cool hand as it wormed its way into his boxers was bliss, enough almost to send him over the edge.
‘Let’s make use of the bath...’ He broke away to lead her into the bathroom, which was the last word in indulgence. A ridiculously large bath took centre stage with a walk-in shower to one side and twin sinks on the other side rested on black granite with a huge mirror behind.
He ran the bath, flinging in bath salts, and Alice watched him. He was poetry in motion and she couldn’t get enough of him. He had stripped off her protective layer and the only one blessing was that he didn’t realise that he had done so.
She had made sure to reveal as little about herself as he had revealed about himself, although he knew her thoughts on so many things. They had discussed literature, art, the paintings and sculptures they had seen, the food they had eaten and the wine they had drunk. They had talked about the people they watched, sitting outside and sipping coffee. They had compared notes on music. They had even talked about work and about the accountancy course she was due to embark upon.