Chapter Six
JENNIFER FOUGHT OFF a landslide of near-impossible-to-answer questions during the course of the day.
By five in the evening, she was beginning to think that inspecting a vineyard and going through business accounts was definitely the very, very long straw, and what she had drawn was the very, very short one.
On cue, after an amazing breakfast, she and Francesca had headed out to see some of the countryside and visit one of the towns known for its perfectly preserved medieval architecture and breathtaking views.
Luisa knew it well and had rattled off a list of places they could visit and cafés and restaurants where they could stop to drink some of the best coffee in Tuscany and eat some of the best pasta on the planet.
‘You enjoy yourself,’ she had instructed Francesca in a no-nonsense voice.
Jennifer had smiled warmly because she just couldn’t help it.
‘And try the Crostata at the bakery in the piazza.’ She’d kissed her fingers to express just how delicious they would find the tart.
‘Tell Nonna Agostini that Luisa sent you. She will give you an extra one for free!’
If Jennifer had had her way, the entire day would have been spent talking about architecture, gazing at views and eating pastries.
A lot less of a minefield than the barrage of questions she’d found herself trying to field.
The questions, in true Francesca fashion, had been softly spoken and sweetly curious, which had almost been worse than if she had opted for a bare lightbulb, a hard chair and a lie detector machine to eke out whether there were any gaps in the story being told.
By the end of the day, as they’d headed back to the vineyard in the chauffeur-driven car supplied by Gabriel, she felt as though she’d been through the wringer several hundred times.
Now, with Francesca and Luisa in the kitchen catching up over some fresh lemonade and home-baked cake, Jennifer was finally free to head back to the cottage.
It had been a gloriously warm day with just enough of a breeze to make sightseeing comfortable. For all that, though, she still felt weary and mentally drained and then, as she approached the cottage, nervous about seeing Gabriel again.
Memories of their encounter had nudged at the back of her mind throughout the day.
Staving off some of Francesca’s more misty-eyed predictions for a future that definitely wasn’t in the cards had taken up a lot of mental energy, but still…
Underneath the tension of stepping through minefields to try and avoid outright lying, the simmering recollection of Gabriel standing there in the room, looking at her with that veiled, unreadable expression…
With his sheer physical beauty, the leanness of his hips and the breadth of his shoulders…
She couldn’t clear her head of the rousing images.
Then she thought of herself, wearing next to nothing, feeling exposed and on show, and she cringed.
She pushed open the cottage door. As soon as she entered, she spotted Gabriel in the office.
The desk faced out to the small entrance area.
He looked up when she walked in, and their eyes tangled for a few silent seconds.
Suddenly she was no longer tired, sticky and mentally drained.
Rather, she was energised, all senses on full alert.
Looking at her, Gabriel could feel the steady uptick of his heartbeat and the stirring of an arousal that went completely contrary to everything in his head, to every scathing inner talk he had given himself during the course of the day.
This woman was not up for grabs, and it was shameful to even see her in that light—yet he was finding it impossible to forget the impression she had made on him the night before.
Her body had fired him up in a way he hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. Just like that, he had been catapulted back to adolescence and to the horniness of a teenage boy with way too many raging hormones and not enough maturity to control them.
She wasn’t dressed in next to nothing as she hovered in the entranceway now, but he was still fired up. She was in a dress that couldn’t have looked sexier, although it was doing its best to hide her luscious curves.
‘I’m working,’ he said brusquely.
‘I…’
Gabriel immediately felt like a complete bastard. Was it her fault that his body was playing games with him? No. Whether money would change hands or not, she was there as a favour to him. He stood up, pushing back the chair, and swung round it to walk towards her.
‘Sorry, Jen.’
She smelled of sunshine. Her cheeks were pink. Her hair, which had started the day neatly tied back, he presumed, was now tousled around her face. He had an insane urge to push the wayward strands back, tuck them behind her ears and then pull her towards him.
Her blue eyes looked bluer than usual, her lashes darker, her mouth fuller and pinker.
‘Got back a little over an hour ago,’ he expanded in a roughened undertone, ‘and I’m catching up on a couple of thorny issues on the work front.’
‘Okay.’
‘Tell me about your day, or would you rather head for the shower? You look as though you could do with one. It’s hot out there.’
Looking at him, Jennifer could sense his discomfort. He was normally so cool and collected. Utterly immune to nerves. Now, though, there was an edginess to him as he raked his fingers through his hair, his dark eyes skirting away from looking at her directly.
There could only be one reason for the way he was acting.
He was embarrassed. Embarrassed that he had caught her rummaging in the fridge wearing almost nothing.
Mortified on her behalf. He’d seen her practically in the raw, and she wondered whether he had been just a little bit repulsed at the sight.
She didn’t think so, had never been self-conscious in his presence, and it annoyed her that she was now.
Jennifer shuddered to think how he would react if he had the slightest inclination of some of the lascivious thoughts that had flashed through her head ever since she had seen him in nothing but a towel.
She decided that reverting to the easy familiarity they’d always shared would be the best solution to try and recover normality.
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ she teased, finally ungluing her limbs and heading to the kitchen so that she could fetch something cold to drink.
‘That I look really sweaty?’ She laughed gaily with her back to him as she drank some water, then quickly rinsed the glass and stuck it on the draining board by the sink.
When she turned to look at him, she leaned with her back to the sink, hands tucked behind her.
She kept the cheerful smile pinned to her face.
‘We ladies have very fragile egos, you know,’ she chided. ‘But seriously, it was hot out there, although your mum and I did enough sitting in between sightseeing so that she didn’t get too exhausted.’
‘How was it?’
He spun round and strolled towards the sitting room, moving to sit on the deep, comfy sofa and waiting until she followed suit.
This felt a lot better to Jennifer.
She looked at him and did her best to superimpose the friend she was seeing over the hunky semi-naked man who had scrambled her brains.
She sighed and then said honestly, ‘It was bloody stressful, now that you ask.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Jennifer sat on the sofa, swivelled to face him and then drew her knees up and crossed her legs.
‘Put it this way. I figured I would rather have been in your shoes talking business with Roberto, and I don’t even know how to talk business. She asked me loads of questions about…about us. She wanted to talk about feelings and love and when we first realised that we were destined for one another.’
‘Sounds a bit of a nightmare,’ Gabriel agreed, ‘but I’m guessing you swatted away the questions and ducked behind vague answers?’
‘What else could I do? Gabriel, she’s really invested in a future between us. She’s practically planning the wedding. By the end of the week, she’ll have picked names for the grandkids.’
‘Did you give her any reason to think that there might be one or two hurdles along the way?’
‘I tried. I said one or two things about your workaholic tendencies and jet-setting lifestyle, but she wasn’t having it.
Opposites attract, she said, along with birds of a feather.
I think she was going for both options just in case.
I’m surprised she didn’t throw in the one about absence making the heart grow fonder. ’
‘Don’t worry. Once this week is done and dusted and life gets back into its usual routine, she’ll begin to see the cracks.’
‘Maybe.’
‘At any rate, it’s too late to do anything but play a wait-and-see game.
Fact is, though, her mental health is getting better and better by the day.
She actually used that high-end mobile phone I bought for her two months ago and sent me some pictures of the town you visited today.
I thought she’d stuck the damned thing in a drawer and forgotten about it. ’
‘I’m beginning to think that your mum might be a lot shrewder than either of us imagines.’ Jennifer sighed. ‘I mean, you must get that calculating streak in you from someone.’
‘Yes, but perhaps not my mother. My father was essentially a good-looking conman, the sort of bastard who comes for dinner, sizes up your house and leaves with the silver cutlery. Some of us might call that calculating.’
They looked at one another, and she flushed. There had been that hardness, an underlying edge she’d heard before as though he’d allowed her to see a secret part of himself, but only for a moment.
‘What makes you say that, anyway? About my mum being calculating?’ he prodded with a frown.