Page 12 of Cinderella's One-Night Baby

Her nose wrinkled. ‘It doesn’t smell offensive.’

‘I should hope not,’ he observed, smothering another laugh. Raising his glass, he held it out to her.‘Salud.’

She tapped her glass to it.‘Santé.’

Her lips pulled in as she swirled the red liquid around her mouth before taking another, larger, drink.

‘More palatable than the drain cleaner?’ he asked, even though the wonder in her eyes already told him the answer.

She swallowed another sip and shook her head. ‘That is...’ She put her glass on the table and pinched her forefingers and thumbs together into circles.

Gabrielle’s tongue was rhapsodising. She’d never known wine could be so smooth. It was easily the most delicious thing she had ever tasted...right up until the scallops with crispy pancetta were served...and then a lemon sorbet palate cleanser...

She was in heaven! She demolished every last morsel, delighted to have her attention and senses filled with the wonderful aroma and taste of food rather than Andrés. Not that she’d tasted him of course, and she quickly drank some wine to counter the thrill that zinged through her to wonder what his lips tasted of.

By enthusiastically concentrating on the fabulous food, Gabrielle was able to push any Andrés effect away and just enjoy herself as she’d already determined to do, and she quickly relaxed into the meal and her surroundings. She would have been happy to just listen in on the conversations washing around her but Andrés made sure to include her in it all. It didn’t escape her attention that he instinctively seemed to know which subjects, like the German stock market, meant nothing to her and leaned his head close to hers to give a quick, discreet summary under his breath. While those discreet summaries kept recharging the Andrés effect, she was touched and grateful for his consideration. Her short time working at the casino that boasted the highest percentage of the world’s billionaires in its membership had taught her that many men in his situation wouldn’t care if their date could keep up with the conversation, never mind go out of their way to include her in it. They’d be too puffed up with the sound of their own voices to even care.

‘So what is it you do?’ the forty-something white-blonde lady sitting on the other side of Andrés asked Gabrielle in English after the third course had been cleared away and the table conversation had come to a natural break.

Gabrielle, who’d just dropped the velvet place setting with her name embroidered in gold thread into her clutch bag and was pondering how to pilfer her personalised place menu, shot her gaze to Andrés with a sinking dread in her stomach.

How did he want her to handle this? She didn’t want to lie—she’d told so many lies since the pregnancy that if heaven existed she’d be barred from entering—but she didn’t want to embarrass him either.

His eyes caught hers before the faintest of smiles played on his lips and he said in perfect English, ‘Gabrielle is a border guard.’

Only by the skin of her teeth did she stop her mouth dropping open. The last thing she’d expected was for Andrés to tell the truth, not because she assumed he was a natural born liar but because she’d assumed he would think it beneath him to admit he’d brought along a nobody to an event with the world’s elite.

Another assumption she’d got wrong.

The woman slapped his arm. ‘You are such a tease, Andrés.’

‘I’m not teasing. Gabrielle stopped my car at the Spanish border earlier and searched it for drugs.’ He lifted his glass to his mouth. ‘Gabrielle will confirm it,’ he added before dropping her a wink that made her stomach dip.

‘It is true,’ she piped up, speaking carefully as her English wasn’t as fluent as her Spanish. ‘I work as border guard. Andrés fitted the...’ She grasped for the translation ofprofilebut came up blank. ‘...details we were given of a drug smuggler bringing cocaine over the border. I am here only because Sophia fell ill. I am the substitute.’

The woman pouted. ‘Oh, you’re as bad as he is.’

Gabrielle met Andrés’s stare. The conspiratorial crinkling of his eyes and flash of perfect teeth made her stomach dip again even more powerfully, as did the frankly shocking realisation that she could perfectly read in his expression that he found the blonde woman ridiculous.

He moved a touch closer to her and, switching back to Spanish, murmured, ‘You wait, Lucida will spend the rest of the evening trying to get to the bottom of who you really are.’

‘Lucida? She was named after afont?’

Surprise lit his face and then he gave such a deep throated rumble of laughter that everyone surrounding them whipped their stares to him.

It was laughter that, despite the tight control she was keeping over her reactions to him, made Gabrielle’s heart swell.

He moved his face even closer and dropped his voice even lower. ‘Legend has it that she changed it from Lucinda. Someone told her it sounded classier.’

‘I take it that someone was having a joke?’

‘I believe that is a fair assumption.’

Luckily their next course arrived, saving either of them from having to explain what it was that had them both laughing and saving Gabrielle from the effects of Andrés’s breath whispering against her temple.

A large sip of wine in an attempt to mute the awareness whooshing around her body, and then she popped a crispy potato ball with the fluffiest inside into her mouth. That was better, even if she was acutely aware of the closeness of his thigh under the table. Still, she told herself, a bit of internal discomfort was nothing when she was eating food fit for a princess and drinking wine that Zeus himself would have declared all the superlatives. And thinking of Zeus, Gabrielle was starting to understand that there was far more to Andrés than his devastating looks. He wore his arrogance like a cloak but he wasn’t a snob and actually had a sense of humour, something she would never have believed five hours ago. With the crispiest pork crackling in the whole world dissolving on her tongue, all she could think was that for this one night, she was the luckiest woman in the world. To think she’d thought the highlight of her evening would be a bath!

‘Can I ask you something personal?’ he asked as the last of the crackling dissolved into nothing.

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