Page 43 of A Wedding Negotiation with Her Boss

There was privacy glass on the windows but even so the brightness of the sunlight pouring into the back seat of the car left nothing to the imagination.

This was passion at its most powerful and he wished, for a split second, that he could capture it for ever in his head, never to let it go, never to allow it to be become diluted over time.

‘There now,’ he murmured in a shaky, husky voice. ‘Don’t you feel a lot better after that?’ He removed his hand, which smelled of her musky fragrance, and neatened her skirt.

Helen shuffled back into something resembling an upright position.

She’d never done anything like this in her life before, but then there was so much she’d done with this man that she’d never done before.

And every experience was backlit with something wild, soft, powerful and tender.

She looked at him, eyes widening, and then just as quickly she looked away, but her heart was beating madly inside her.

How had things crept up on her like this? How had she found herself accepting the cards that had been dealt whilst desperately longing for them to be shuffled and re-dealt? He had got under her skin in ways that had been small and subtle but devastatingly significant.

And of course, she had noticed it. She wasn’t a fool. She’d known that she was developing feelings for him, but it had been convenient to pretend that she could control those feelings and make sure they stuck to the plan. If she didn’t actually give those feelings aname, if she didn’t call itlove, then she could tell herself that she was still in control, even when she felt out of her depth.

She’d done a good job at trying to kid herself.

He touched her and she went up in flames but, oh, it was so much worse than that. He smiled and her heart skipped a beat. He looked and she wanted to faint. He talked and she yearned for him to talk some more, to tell her what she wanted to hear—that he had feelings for her too. That this was more than just a dalliance that had happened out of the blue and taken wings because of circumstances neither of them could have predicted.

She’d been brought up never to take risks and, whilst she had felt protected by that mantra, she had failed to recognise how vulnerable it had left her—vulnerable to a guy like Gabriel, who was so far removed from anyone she could ever have imagined getting to her.

She was in love with the guy and as she sat, mouth dry, thoughts in a panic, she didn’t know what to do with that.

She surfaced to find that they were nearing the small town where they would spend the next few days. Not actually in the city, as it happened, but in one of the picturesque little towns close to it, a base from which they could discover the city and its surrounds.

‘You okay?’

Helen met Gabriel’s confident, amused grin with a watery smile of her own.

‘Perfect.’ She aimed for crisp and light. She ended up with something of a sickly croak.

‘Is it the drive?’

‘Huh?’ He had the deepest, darkest eyes, Helen though as she stared back at him. A person could drown in them. As she had—she and a million others.

‘Some people can get travel sick.’

‘Yes.’ Helen clung to that excuse with the tenacity of a drowning person hanging onto an unexpected piece of passing driftwood. ‘It’s—it’s my inner ear. It’s always given me problems ever since I was a kid. Long drives, planes, boats and stuff.’

‘I didn’t think you’d done a lot of travelling,’ Gabriel said with a frown.

‘By car,’ Helen answered quickly. ‘Cornwall is far from everywhere.’ She laughed weakly. ‘Even going for a weekly shop could involve miles and miles of, um, travel sickness in my dad’s car.’

‘Must have been uncomfortable. And I suppose our little bout of activity didn’t help matters...’ He sent her a wolfish smile that made her toes curl and she heard herself mutter something and nothing before launching into a series of frantic questions about the area. At least when his attention was somewhere other than lasered to her face she could begin to get her thoughts in order.

What was she going to do? How could she have been so smug as to think that she could do as she wished without being affected? How could she have simultaneously spotted warning signs of emotional attachment while failing to take any safety measures to protect herself, to safeguard her heart?

She thought back to the way she had opened up to him, gone from zero to full-blown rocket speed, in no time at all. A little sharing because they had got themselves in a charade; a few confidences so that they could pull off a relationship that wasn’t there; then a few more...and now? Now every bit of her had blossomed and opened up, and she was as raw and helpless as a snail without its shell.

And Gabriel? Yes, he had shared stuff with her too, but he hadn’t given any more than he could get back; hadn’t gone and given her his heart while she had thrown hers at him, knowing he wasn’t going to catch it and take care of it.

She was here for a just a couple more days and then they would return to England.

What next after that?

It was a blessing that he had no idea how she felt. She’d always been his calm, unflappable secretary and this arrangement, in his eyes, didn’t change who she was. She was still calm. Not someone who was going to make waves that would require her dismissal, as had happened with Fifi.

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