Chapter Three
‘BEFORE YOU SAY a word—’ Gabriel was the first to break the frozen silence ‘—life is full of unexpected developments, and that was one of them. I did not see that coming. Drink? Let’s decamp to the kitchen.’
‘Unexpected developments? Drink? Kitchen? Gabriel, this is a nightmare!’
Jennifer looked at him with appalled eyes. In the space of half an hour, life as she knew it had been turned on its head. He was lounging against the wall, cool as a cucumber and if not whistling a merry tune, then certainly not looking as though the sky had fallen.
Which, she thought furiously, it hadn’t.
Not as far as he was concerned. He’d sought her out with a mission to woo her into agreeing with his harebrained scheme to pretend they had a relationship.
Now, despite the fact that she had dug her heels in and adamantly refused to do any such thing, he would be thinking that Fate had stepped in at just the right moment and lent him a helping hand.
She decided she needed a drink after all.
‘Gabriel,’ she hissed, falling in alongside him as he headed towards the kitchen, ‘you’re going to put this right. I mean that!’
She sneaked a sideways glance at him and sighed with frustration.
‘I mean it, Gabriel. I know you didn’t plan on your mother overhearing our conversation and jumping to all the wrong conclusions, but this is your mess, and you’re going to have to deal with it.’
‘You could have said something back there, Jen. Why didn’t you?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘You didn’t because you could see how happy my mother was, how much her spirits were lifted, and you couldn’t bring yourself to be the one to break her heart.
No one wants to be the bearer of bad news, but after spending the past hour telling me that there was no way you could bring yourself to tell a few white lies for the sake of my mother’s mental and physical well-being, you had the perfect opportunity to derail her hopes at the source. ’
‘A few white lies?’
‘What would you like to drink? Tea? Coffee? Wine? Spirits?’
‘It’s late.’
‘Not that late.’
They were in the kitchen. It was a wonderful space, huge with flagstone floors and a four-oven AGA in deep British racing green.
Over the years, Gabriel had made sure that much of the vast manor was updated, with no expense spared.
Pale wood and marble had gradually replaced ageing tiles and worn woodwork.
Dated wallpaper had been stripped off walls and given way to a canvas of muted creams and pale pastel shades.
Old paintings which had been in the family for decades remained but alongside them, a collection of modern masterpieces had slowly been built up over the years.
Only the kitchen remained as it always had been, because Francesca had refused to have it ripped out and modernised.
A central island dominated the space in the middle. To one end, a sturdy oak table stretched almost the width of the room. She could remember occasionally sitting here way back when, doing her homework, with Gabriel opposite her and her mother somewhere in the bowels of the mansion, cleaning.
Beyond the table, a sprawling, comfortable conservatory overlooked the acres of fields with a distant view of the castle just about visible beyond the stretches of land.
‘I suppose I’ll have a glass of wine,’ Jennifer huffed. She went to sit on the comfy patterned sofa in the conservatory and thought about what he’d said.
Yes, she could have told Francesca that there had been a misunderstanding, that there was no engagement. She? Gabriel? Engaged? She could have laughed the whole thing off, but Gabriel was right.
She hadn’t done that because she’d seen just how happy Francesca had been, and in a flash had also seen just how unhappy and fragile she’d been during the weeks of her recuperation. It was like realising just how awful the before shot was as soon as you saw the after one.
She’d thought Francesca had been doing just fine because the consultant had said that physically, at least, she was on the mend and doing very well. She hadn’t looked beyond that to the older woman’s mental state, which had been doing, she could see now, a lot less fine.
Discomforted, Jennifer looked at Gabriel warily from under her lashes as he sat next to her on the sofa holding two glasses of wine, handing her one.
‘She was putting on a brave face,’ Gabriel said flatly, ‘until she could no longer do it and everything came pouring out. You’ve seen the remarkable turnaround this evening when she overheard our conversation. She’s now a woman with a new lease on life.’
‘You should have just got in touch with me. We could have had a nice, friendly, adult conversation about the situation instead of jumping in at the deep end and coming up with your own crazy solution to the problem.’
‘I’ve always been solution-oriented. Tell me, what would have been your nice, friendly, adult conversation about the situation?’
Jennifer gave it some thought. ‘Therapy.’
‘Therapy?’
‘Don’t be such a dinosaur, Gabriel.’
‘Tell me how you see a couple of sessions with a shrink doing the job.’
‘She would have realised that there are reasons for being happy, for being grateful that she’s recovering so wonderfully well. She would have seen that she didn’t have to rely on her workaholic son finding a mate and settling down to give her a purpose for living.’
Gabriel looked at her with a pensive expression.
‘Isn’t it a natural desire for a parent to see her one and only child settled?
You’re an only child as well. I’ll bet your mother can’t wait to see her daughter married off to a nice young man who bears no resemblance to all the losers she’s spent the past few years dating and getting rid of because they didn’t live up to expectation. ’
‘Don’t make this about me! And I don’t date losers, Gabriel Garcia!’ She swallowed half the glass of wine in one gulp and nearly choked.
‘It’ll work, Jen. It’ll get my mother out of the doldrums and give her something to look forward to.
No well--intentioned therapist would be able to do that.
If not believing in all that kumbaya nonsense makes me a dinosaur, then I’m a dinosaur.
To the best of my knowledge, my mother is of the same opinion.
Don’t forget the generation she comes from and the type of woman she’s always been.
Proud and self-contained. I don’t see her pouring her soul out and weeping on a therapist’s couch, do you? ’
Put like that, Jennifer had to grudgingly agree with him. Francesca was a proud and self-contained woman. ‘And then what happens once your mother’s out of the doldrums?’ She arched her eyebrows and looked at him steadily. ‘Do we then break it to her that it was all a big fat lie?’
‘That’s a very dramatic way of putting it. We very carefully break it to her that we’ve discovered we make better friends than we do lovers.’
The breath caught in Jennifer’s throat. Lovers? It was something she couldn’t get her head round, but all at once that disturbing notion was planted. Her mind was suddenly unleashed and roaming free into all sorts of crazy alien territory.
Forbidden territory, because on any level other than the friendship one, Gabriel Garcia was not her type.
‘Easy as that, is it?’ Yet Jennifer’s voice was tart as she tried to conceal the jump in her nervous system and the dangerous disobedience of her thoughts.
‘Very easy.’
‘Why are men so simplistic?’ she scoffed with dripping sarcasm.
‘Are you casting your mind back to the biker I rescued you from? I’m being serious, Jen.
It would be easy for my mother to understand that in the end we couldn’t take our very deep friendship to the next level.
It would also make her realise that the mere fact that I contemplated settling down with you was an indication I’m finally in the right place.
I’m finally realising it’s time for the next chapter in my life. ’
‘You’re so clever with words, and I’m not saying that as a good thing.’
‘I’ll still take it as a compliment.’ He flashed her a winning grin, but then his expression turned serious.
‘She’ll be in a much happier place,’ he said with genuine feeling.
‘That’s the most important thing. I don’t want to think that every day brings the possibility of my mother entering a depressed world from which she might not return, and I know you love her.
I know you wouldn’t wish that on her either. ’
‘I feel I’m being railroaded into doing something that goes against all my principles.’ And oh, how she did. His proposition sounded so simple, and yet it stuck in her throat because it somehow made a mockery of the very real relationship she’d spent a lifetime craving.
But how happy Francesca had looked…wasn’t that worth everything?
‘I know.’
His voice was low and serious as he reached out and covered her hand with his and squeezed it.
Gabriel could see the concern on her face and knew that he was putting her in a difficult position, but surely she could see where he was coming from? That there were times when only the bigger picture mattered, and this was one of those times? When a small sacrifice was worth the greater gain?
‘Life’s not black and white, Jen. Trust me, this is a harmless piece of fiction for us that could make an enormous difference to my mother.
’ He frowned thoughtfully. ‘And now that I think about it, it’s possible I really might be getting to a place where I’m willing to indulge the prospect of settling down.
Maybe my mother’s open desire to see me married has made me seriously consider it for the first time. ’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘What don’t you get?’
‘Your aversion to settling down.’
‘I don’t have an aversion to settling down. I have an aversion to the expectation most women have that settling down involves all that starry-eyed love nonsense.’