Page 31 of Cinderella's One-Night Baby

It was blood.

A shiny, futuristic car approached the border. Gabrielle’s heart jumped. It was an automatic reaction that had occurred every time a car that vaguely looked the same as Andrés’s arrived at the principality over the last five days. None of them had been his and nor was this one. The system that registered every non-domiciled person in the principality, and which she had access to as part of her job, showed he’d left Monte Cleure late on Sunday evening.

She wondered where he was. What he was doing...

An idle fantasy drifted into her vision of riding her bicycle in a floaty summer dress and a huge shiny car pulling to a stop beside her, and the window rolling down and...

‘Gabrielle?’

Her colleague’s voice pulled her out of her daydream.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘I was miles away.’

Remi peered closely at her. ‘Who is he?’

‘What?’

‘It’s got to be a man. You’ve been smiling to yourself and falling away into your own little world all week.’

Mortified, aware she was blushing, Gabrielle shook her head. ‘It’s no one.’

Mercifully, three cars joined the manual passport check line and she was able to escape Remi’s prying, but even as she made a concerted effort to get on with the job, her colleague’s words rang continually in her ears.

Gabrielle had known all those years ago from the way Eloise kept smiling to herself that her sister had fallen for someone. It seemed that no time passed from those early dreamy smiles before she fell into the pure, deep love that would destroy her.

She wasn’t Eloise, Gabrielle reminded herself. Of course she’d fallen for Andrés, but it was a chemical thing, a lust thing involving the body and not the heart. One precious night of hedonism. It was over and now she needed to gently push him into the treasured memories part of her mind and stop his occupancy of it.

The Thursday morning traffic rush was over when Andrés left his Barcelona office complex and got straight into the waiting car. A short drive and he’d be in his helicopter and on his way to Monte Cleure. That was the plan until he stepped out of the car at his airfield and the hot mid-morning sun beamed down on him. The last few months had been so busy that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d fed vitamin D straight into his flesh.

‘You take the helicopter, I’m going to drive,’ he impulsively told his entourage. He’d only driven the newest addition to his fleet of cars once and as it was currently being stored in the hangar here and he had the rest of the day free from meetings, why not take advantage of the freedom?

The shocked eyes of his PA, bodyguard and lawyer zipped to him before they all bustled into the helicopter. He could imagine what they’d be saying. Andrés hadn’t driven himself on a working day in a decade. His trip to Monte Cleure was business. He had an early morning meeting with Nathaniel and the lawyers the next day to thrash out the final details of their latest joint business venture.

The roads to Monte Cleure were clearer than the last time he’d made this journey and, shades on and the music turned up loud, he put the roof down to enjoy the feel of warm air flying through his hair.

He thought back to the last time he’d made this journey, almost three weeks ago, and how his preoccupation with the paternity case had ruined what could have been a fun drive with his sister. Sophia had called him the evening after the party brimming with excitement and curiosity about how things had gone with Gabrielle. Andrés had taken great delight in not satisfying any of it other than to confirm that no, he hadn’t made plans to see her again. His sister’s disappointment at this had been palpable. She couldn’t understand that the night with Gabrielle had been as perfect for its ending as it had been for the night itself. He had no wish to pursue a short-term fling with her and ruin that perfection with an inevitably bitter end and he’d sensed it was the same for Gabrielle. Their night together had been one of a kind, a memory to be treasured.

Traffic slowed to a crawl. He’d reached the queue for the border.

He wondered if Gabrielle was working. It was a thought that had floated in and out of his mind since getting in the car, although obviously had played no part at all in his impulsive decision to drive.

Smoothing his hair back, he cruised into the facial recognition line. As he inched forwards, he noted a car being searched but none of the staff undertaking it were Gabrielle.

Now at the front of the queue, he looked into the camera. A light went green, the barrier lifted and he crossed the border.

Gabrielle logged onto the system. Quickly checking that no one in the administration office was paying her any attention, she clicked the link that listed all the cars and every non-domiciled visitor currently in the principality. Having spent yesterday afternoon processing a drug-trafficker caught with methamphetamines in his wheel hubs, liaising with the police and then hurrying off to collect Lucas from nursery, this was her first opportunity to check since early yesterday morning. She had twenty-four hours’ worth of data to scroll through and exactly ten minutes until her shift started to do it in.

It took two minutes until the name she’d been both praying and dreading to see appeared.

He was here. Finally. After four days of diligently checking the system whenever she could for his name, Andrés had passed the border at around the time she’d been in the processing unit carefully testing, weighing and recording the drug stash. Unless he’d since left the principality by helicopter, which the system was always a little slower to update, he was still here.

The nausea that had been rolling in her stomach for days on end rose up her throat. She covered her mouth and closed her eyes, willing it to pass.

‘Is everything okay, Gabrielle?’

She opened her eyes to the concerned gaze of the shift manager. ‘I’m sorry, I know this is terrible timing but I need to go.’

Her manager’s stare became meditative as she waited for an explanation.

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