Page 25 of A Wedding Negotiation with Her Boss

‘I like a woman who doesn’t have regrets.’

‘Have you had a lot of experience with ones that do?’

‘Enough.’ He ran his fingers through his hair and looked at her steadily, seriously. ‘But only with women who ended up wanting more than was on the table, than was ever going to be on the table.’

‘Like Fifi?’

Gabriel grimaced. ‘Correct.’

‘What happened there?’ She never asked him anything truly personal, but this was personal, and it felt exciting and alarming to have this conversation.

‘Like I said...’ his dark eyes were lazy, yet focused ‘...didn’t work out.’ He sighed. ‘She decided that it might be a good time to explore other options between us—options that might involve rings and jewellery shopping in the not-too-distant future. I was astonished and then I made the mistake of bursting out laughing.’

‘Poor woman.’

‘Why?’

‘She just wanted a serious situation.’

‘And she deserves one. Just not with me.’ Gabriel paused. ‘Although...’

‘Although?’ Helen broke eye contact, sipped some of the wine and dipped into the tapas which had been brought to them. Her voice was light but she was tense with the realisation of just how far out of both their comfort zones this conversation was taking them.

‘Although,’ he said smoothly, ‘those tapas won’t stay hot for ever.’

Helen blinked. He’d closed the conversation and that was a relief, she told herself. Trample over the boundary lines too much, and how on earth would they be able to put them back up? It was a sobering thought. He had come close to saying...what?

She’d told Arturio that she and Gabriel were an item. Had he been about to stress his lack of availability just in case she’d got it into her head that the fiction she’d concocted might turn into reality?

She took a deep breath and decided that she might as well address the elephant in the room and get things back on as even a keel as she could. If he got it into his head that she might become another Fifi—unlikely, but who knew?—then her continued presence around him at work would end up wrecking their working relationship and her job, which she loved and which was so well paid.

‘About what I told Arturio...’

‘That we were involved in a hot, clandestine affair?’

‘That’s not what I said.’

‘He’s traditional and he’s a romantic. The family fortune was split several ways when various members died. It wasn’t a sprawling family. Arturio got the vineyards, and of course all the land and estates that went with it. My father got the shipping business, which ran itself, and of course coincidentally married a girl whose family fortune made his own pale in comparison. Where Arturio worked from dawn to dusk to make the most of his unpredictable inheritance, my parents washed their hands of Italy and were happy to tour the world and live off an income that dropped into their bank accounts without having to do the graft to put it there.’

‘You admire him a lot, don’t you?’

‘He’s more of an example than my own father ever was,’ Gabriel admitted. He grinned and looked at her with his head tilted to one side. ‘His wife’s father worked for him, but he said that it was love at first sight, despite the fact that they came from wildly different backgrounds. Passion, love...heady mix. I fancy that’s what’s going through his head at the thought of the boss and his secretary—a couple of lovebirds who just couldn’t resist the heady mix.’

‘That’s ridiculous...’

‘Who knows what scenarios he’s concocting in his head?’ Gabriel was still grinning with wicked amusement. ‘I don’t have a romantic bone in my body, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to work out what he must be thinking.’

‘Well, he’s way off-target with that one,’ Helen said briskly.

‘Yet you can’t blame him. He caught us red-handed, after all. He was probably tickled pink.’

Patches of bright colour stained her cheeks.

‘Well, isn’t it just as well that I’m leaving to head back to London tomorrow?’ she said. She focused on London, the office, his desk, her work outfits—she focused on remembering that those were the things that mattered. His words were so evocative, made her feel so hot and bothered. She thought that, however much she made a deal of being in charge of her emotions and in control of what was happening between them, she really lacked the experience to deal with a man like Gabriel. It was important he didn’t realise that but it was hard to meet those lazy, penetrating dark eyes without breaking out in nervous perspiration and giving in to the temptation to dab her forehead with the linen napkin by her plate.

‘Isn’t it?’

The wretched man was still smiling. She cleared her throat and angled her head haughtily. ‘I shall head into town first thing. When you see him, you can say that that was always the plan—which it was—and that I wanted to get some last-minute shopping in before I left for the airport. Because he thinks we’re some kind of old-fashioned, romantic couple doesn’t mean that he’ll expect us to be glued to one another’s sides.’

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