Chapter Two
JENNIFER’S JAW DROPPED. About to stick a piece of yummy calamari into her mouth, she paused and stared at him with incredulity.
She was still staring in gaping silence as he gently lifted the fork with the calamari out of her startled grasp and returned it to the bowl.
‘You look like you might need to take a minute or two to digest what I just said. No problem. I’ll just continue with the rabbit food on my plate until you regain your power of speech. By the way, I get it that you might be a little surprised at my solution.’
Jennifer finally found her voice. Her head was whirling. Yes, she’d heard what he’d just said, and yes, she knew from the expression on his face that he wasn’t kidding, but she still feverishly wondered whether she had missed something in translation.
She looked at him narrowly.
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘You know I’m not, Jen.’
‘How can you think that it would be a good idea to actually lie to your mother about something as big as this?’
‘Lie is a very contentious word.’
‘There’s only one definition for lie, Gabriel, and it’s not telling the truth. You want me to agree to lie to your mother, who is someone I love!’
‘But look at it this way…it would be for the greater good.’
Jennifer returned to the calamari, but her appetite had disappeared, and her thoughts were all over the place.
Suddenly, the easy course of their friendship seemed to have nosedived into unknown territory.
Compared to Gabriel, she knew that she was very straightforward.
No broken family background to deal with, although millions of children were the products of a divorce.
Until her father had died, her parents had been blissfully happy.
She wanted the uncomplicated things in life—a man she loved who loved her right back, marriage, kids.
No drama, no chaos, no ups and downs. She might not have found the right guy just yet, but she would get there.
She wasn’t riven with doubts about what she was looking for or eaten up with pointless worries about whether she would ever find him. She knew she would.
Gabriel, with his chequered love life, his disinterest in settling down, his crazy prioritising of work, represented a lifestyle she could roll her eyes at, whilst also disapproving of it—insofar as it went against everything she held dear.
But she loved him as a friend. She knew him and she never judged him, because none of his choices had ever affected her personally.
But now? There was the distinct whiff of danger, of lines being crossed. Pretend to a relationship that didn’t exist? Everything inside her fought against that idea because it was so much the polar opposite of the kind of relationship she craved. It would feel like a travesty.
No way.
‘For the greater good? That’s a stupid reason,’ she said flatly.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you say, I’m not going to lie to your mother about us and pretend that we’re some kind of item.
’ She glowered and carried on with her calamari.
He nabbed a piece from her plate but continued to look at her in silence.
‘She’s really not in a good place, Jen.’
‘I know what you’re trying to do, Gabriel. You’re trying to guilt-trip me into going along with some insane idea that wouldn’t work in a million years.’
‘Of course it’ll work.’
‘Look, I understand that you’re worried about your mother. We’re all worried about her! And I also understand that she might be in an anxious place, keen to see you happily settled with someone before she…goes, which she won’t be doing for Heaven’s sake, but your idea is preposterous.’
‘Is it really?’
‘If you’re that desperate to convince your mum that you’ve suddenly become the guy who can’t wait to settle down, then good luck to you. Like I said, you can head straight to your little black book and get one of your many women to fill the role.’
‘That’s not going to work.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I have no intention of settling down, and if I get in touch with anyone else, I run the risk of them…’ He hesitated, and Jennifer raised both eyebrows.
‘Ah…say no more, Gabriel. I get the picture.’
Gabriel raked his fingers through his dark hair and flushed.
‘I’ll rescue you from your discomfort, shall I? You run the risk of whoever is on board with your scheme actually thinking that it’s the real deal, that you might actually put a ring on her finger and start planning a big white wedding. I already feel sorry for the poor woman.’
‘Big white weddings aren’t my thing, as you know.
Nor are little off-white ones. I’m allergic to the thought of any weddings at all, actually.
’ Gabriel scowled. Jennifer looked at him calmly and continued eating her calamari, which had now gone tepid.
She gave up and pushed the plate to one side, folding her hands on the table.
‘Have you thought,’ she mused, ‘that you might actually use this opportunity to really think about settling down? I mean, I’m sure your mother wouldn’t expect you to produce a fiancée from thin air like a rabbit from a hat, but she would be so happy if you simply told her that you intended to finally settle down. ’
Deafening silence greeted this.
‘Then there would be no having to lie, no having to pretend anything.’
Gabriel met Jennifer’s bright blue eyes in stony silence. She was the only woman on earth who would ever be allowed to ask him that question, serene in the knowledge that he wasn’t going to completely shut her down and sever the relationship forever.
Intensely private when it came to anything personal, Gabriel thought, just for a second, about a past he had never been able to escape and the way it had dictated the course of his entire future.
His father walking out on him and his mother had been the start of a long journey towards the disillusionment that had sealed him off from the possibility of ever taking a chance on love.
His mother had loved her husband. The small, beautiful, blonde English rose had been infatuated with the tall, dark, handsome Italian. Gabriel had gleaned that over the years, seeing the faraway look in her eyes whenever his name had been mentioned.
She’d lost her heart to a guy who’d turned out to be a complete bastard, and she’d never quite managed to get that heart of hers back, which was probably why she’d never had another man in her life.
He’d been aware she was hiding something, which was why, at the age of thirteen, Gabriel had bunked off school and taken a train to visit his father.
If he was the good guy his mum never complained about, wouldn’t he want to see his son?
The need to find out had been overwhelming.
His mother’s silence had left a void that had demanded filling.
Finding out where Vincenzo Garcia lived had been a case of ingenuity and downright breaking and entering.
He had fiddled with the lock on one of the drawers in the study his mother used for her admin.
There, at the bottom of a stack of paperwork, he had found the divorce papers and the address where his father lived.
Would he still be there?
Gabriel hadn’t given that a passing thought.
He had worked out the trains and gone to his dad’s house when he should have been at school.
There he had found a half brother two years older than he was, who had been at home studying for exams and had barely raised his head to look at him, and a father who had been coldly unwelcoming.
‘Didn’t she tell you?’ he had asked with malice.
‘Still playing the saint, is she? You upper-class English people with your stiff upper lips. No wonder I couldn’t stick it out with your cold-as-ice mother. ’
And there the conversation had ended.
Why had he gone?
It was a question he had asked himself over the years.
Because he had carried the weight of guilt that he, as a toddler, had somehow been responsible for the break-up of their marriage?
Or had he wanted to find out if, after all those years, there might have been a father/son bond there waiting to be explored?
He had returned home to a desperately worried mother, but had kept his visit to Vincenzo and his second family a secret.
And then, several years later, the truth about the wrecked finances had emerged. A man who had married for money and then betrayed his wife in the worst possible way.
Love, for Gabriel, resided in a place where only pain was the eventual outcome.
Love, marriage and pointless fairy tales about happy-ever-afters were for other people. Not for him.
He would never allow himself to be vulnerable enough to be hurt by anyone.
Jennifer was sucked into the dragging silence as she watched him disappear into a place where she couldn’t follow, and for the first time, she knew that she had been locked out.
‘Okay,’ she said as the silence continued to stretch between them with an electric charge that brought her out in goose bumps.
‘I get it. No to the settling down.’ She shrugged.
‘I still won’t be taking part in any charade, Gabriel.
I’m sorry to let you down, but I just…couldn’t do that to your mother.
’ She didn’t add how, in some weird way, she would have felt as though she might be betraying her own principles, her own dreams, by claiming a love that wasn’t real.
For a couple of seconds, Jennifer wondered whether he was hearing her at all or whether he was still lost in the place to which he had retreated.
A place whose existence she had known nothing about. Hard on the heels of that realisation came something else—a stirring curiosity to find out what had commandeered his attention to the point where he had completely shut her out.
She knew so much about him.
She’d always smugly thought she knew everything. She was the one woman in his life who occupied a special place because she knew him much more deeply than any of the women he’d dated who flitted in and out of his life, never staying long enough to make a mark.
On a platonic level, she was his soulmate.