Chapter Two #2
‘I travel a lot with my work.’ He poured a small measure into a glass she hadn’t even noticed him holding.
‘I’d already gathered that, but you must have a place you call home.’
She noticed his jaw clenching. ‘I consider Spain to be my home.’
‘Which part?’
‘Madrid.’
‘I’ve visited Madrid many times. It’s a beautiful city.’
He took a large sip of the bourbon and swirled it in his mouth a long time before swallowing. His throat was as sculpturally perfect as the rest of him.
‘You don’t like me, do you?’ she said after another bout of lengthy silence.
That strong, perfect throat moved before he answered. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘Just a feeling. And you didn’t deny it.’
‘I cannot help how you feel.’ He drank the rest of his bourbon.
‘Do you blame me for the mess between my family and Dominic?’
‘It is not my place to cast blame.’ He poured himself another measure. ‘My role is only to find solutions all parties can live with.’
‘Your role doesn’t prevent you forming opinions.’
‘It prevents me voicing them.’ He extended the bottle to her.
Her fingers brushed against his as she took it from him. The electric shock that flew through her skin was so strong that her eyes widened at the same moment Gabriel yanked his hand back as if he too had felt the burn. It took her a beat to find her voice again. ‘So you do have opinions?’
‘Everyone has opinions. Not everyone has the sense to know when those opinions should not be voiced.’
‘Like when I voiced my opinion on Dominic?’
An extremely thick black eyebrow rose but his answer was a diplomatic, ‘If people only voiced their opinions at appropriate times, I would be out of a job.’
She considered this with a small laugh. ‘Then you should be grateful to me...’ She winced and shook her head. ‘Forget I said that. It was crass of me.’ She sighed. ‘And I owe you an apology too, for the way I spoke to you earlier. My tone was rude. I apologise.’
There was a detectable softening in his stare and in his voice too when he said, ‘You were upset.’
‘There is never an excuse for rudeness.’
‘But there is often a reason for it,’ he countered with the ghost of a smile and a glint in his eye that said far more than would come from his mouth, and she realised that he understood.
To Alessia’s horror, hot tears welled up.
She didn’t want to cry. She had no idea why but the last thing she wanted was to appear weak and fragile in Gabriel’s eyes.
She suspected he had no time for weak and fragile women.
She wasn’t a weak and fragile woman. She wasn’t.
Not normally. Tiny but Mighty, her brother Marcelo used to call her.
But Marcelo wasn’t there: the one member of her family she could usually rely on for support was abroad on his honeymoon, and she’d had to suffer days of everyone else’s anger and disapproval without any respite, so to have this man of all people offer her a crumb of comfort.
.. It only made all the guilt and anguish she’d been suffering, which had diminished in the excitement of Gabriel’s appearance, rise back to the surface.
A tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away and tried desperately to compose herself. In that moment it felt like one more blow could shatter her to pieces. ‘I just feel so responsible about everything. Not just Amadeo’s marriage but everything.’
He gazed at her for the longest time, piercingly intense eyes slightly narrowed, his mouth a straight line, as if he were weighing whether to speak what was on his mind.
And then he closed his eyes briefly and inhaled.
When his eyes snapped back on hers, he leaned a little closer and said in a low timbre, ‘What you said at your brother’s wedding was just one piece of a large jigsaw of enmity between your nation and Dominic’s.
You were not responsible for anything that occurred beforehand.
The structural damage between the two nations had already been done. ’
Alessia had no idea why this attempt at reassurance made her feel worse, but the tears she’d been fighting burst free and tumbled down her face like a waterfall before she could do anything to stop them.
With a sharp tightening in his chest and guts, Gabriel closed his eyes to the sobbing princess.
His sister had been a master at turning on the tears, using them as a weapon to manipulate their warring parents in her favour.
He’d rather admired her for it. Since he’d left home, though, the women he’d chosen to acquaint himself with were women like himself: reserved, stoical and never prone to histrionics.
As a result, he had no idea how he was supposed to handle this situation.
He couldn’t throw money or the promise of clothes or the promise of a specially wanted treat at Alessia as his parents had done when Mariella turned on the waterworks.
So, when he opened his eyes and found her knees brought to her chest and her face buried in them, one hand still clinging tightly to the bottle of bourbon, he did the one thing he really didn’t want to do, and moved closer to her.
First removing the bottle and placing it on the floor, he then patted her heaving shoulders in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. To his consternation, she twisted into him. A slender arm snaked around his waist, and then she sagged against him and wept into his chest.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t want to cry but I just feel so bad. One unthinking comment and now Amadeo has to marry a stranger and an unwilling woman is being forced into marriage with him, and it’s all my fault.’
Gabriel closed his eyes again and gritted his teeth, trying to block out the sensory overload of having this most beautiful of women crying in his arms. It had been a battle he’d fought since Alessia had joined him, uninvited, on his balcony.
He’d never been in a situation like this before.
For sure, there had been women who’d invited themselves into his space through the years—the foreign minister of a Scandinavian country who’d turned up at the door of his hotel room with a bottle of Dom Pérignon came to mind—and he’d been able to disentangle himself from those potentially dangerous situations with no harm done and no hurt feelings.
The difference, he knew, was that he’d not been attracted to any of those women.
Gabriel was select in his choice of lovers.
A celebrity princess who also happened to be a close family member of an existing client—the very reason for his being employed by that client—was as far removed as a choice of lover as he would ever make, and yet there wasn’t a cell in his body that hadn’t attuned itself to her since she’d called out to him from the shadows in that sexy, husky voice.
The rack of her distress, though, wove through his veins to penetrate his heart, and the instinct to comfort overrode the last of his self-preservation. Gabriel wrapped an arm around her and held her tightly to him.
Dios, his heart was thumping.
Nothing was said for the longest time as, slowly, Alessia’s sobs subsided.
He could feel the heat of her breath against the dampness of her tears on his naked chest.
Swallowing hard, knowing that with every second that passed with his arms around her he was dancing with danger, Gabriel rested his chin on her head and quietly said, ‘I know you’re concerned for Amadeo’s bride, but I assure you, she is willing.’
‘How can you know that?’ She squeezed her arm even tighter around him, her husky voice muffled. ‘Dominic doesn’t believe in giving women choices. He held Clara against her will and would have forced her down the aisle if Marcelo hadn’t rescued her.’
‘I know because I spoke to Elsbeth privately to satisfy myself that she was a willing participant. I do have principles and there is no sum of money on earth that would see me be party to a forced marriage.’
Slowly, the princess lifted her face and gazed into his eyes. ‘How can you be so sure? Dominic might have forced her to lie. He might have guessed that you would want to speak with her privately.’
It was staring into those dark, velvet orbs that made it a sudden effort to speak and filled his veins with lava. Just unimaginable depths...
He had to clear his throat to speak. ‘The eyes don’t lie, Princess. You have to take my word that her eyes showed only excitement. She’s glad to be leaving Monte Cleure.’
And his loins were trying to show their excitement.
They were responding to the princess being pressed so tightly against him, the feel of her small breasts jutting into his naked chest..
. The telltale tug of arousal battled for supremacy against his willpower and, for the first time in decades, it was winning.
Her brow furrowed. ‘Excitement?’ she asked doubtfully.
He needed to extract himself from this situation right now. To stay like this would be madness. Was madness.
‘Think about it,’ he murmured roughly, clenching the silk of her pyjama vest top to stop himself from slipping a hand beneath it. ‘Why did your family refuse to entertain the notion of you marrying Dominic, even before he kidnapped Clara?’
Understanding glimmered in the warm depths of her brown eyes. ‘Because he’s a monster,’ she whispered.
Unwilling to incriminate himself verbally, Gabriel inclined his head and, for no good reason, inched his face closer to hers.
Now he could smell the underlying scent of the princess’s skin beneath the soft fruitiness.
It was intoxicating. As intoxicating as the sight of those pretty rosebud lips barely inches from his own.
‘Now put yourself in her shoes,’ he said, his voice so low even he struggled to hear it.
‘If you were a member of the Fernandes royal family living under Dominic’s rule and the opportunity came for you to marry into another royal family with a more.
..’ So many heady feelings were shooting and weaving through him that he had to grope for the word. ‘Benign reputation, what would you do?’
Dominic’s rule over his people was absolute. His rule over his family, especially the female members, was a clenched iron glove.
And this woman, this sexy, beautiful, fragile woman, had wanted to marry him to right the wrong of the mess she’d created.
He could never have been party to negotiations in which Alessia had been the pawn, he realised hazily, soaking in every delicate feature of her face. Not even if she’d been a willing pawn as Amadeo’s bride was.
Alessia had become so spellbound by Gabriel’s eyes that his words had dissolved into nothing but a caress to her senses. She’d thought he had brown eyes like her own but the irises were so transparent that, this close, it was like looking into golden supernovas ringing around pulsating black holes.
To think she’d thought his eyes cold when they contained such life and colour and fired such warmth that their radiation was heating her insides in a way she’d never felt before.
Or was it the warmth of his hard body heating her veins and melting her deep in the secret place no man had touched before?
She supposed she should move her arm from around his waist but right then his solid comfort and the warmth of his flesh seeping through the thin fabric of her pyjamas made her reluctant to do what propriety said she should do.
She’d never been held by a man like this before.
Still staring into his eyes, she whispered, ‘I’m sorry for making a scene.’
A finger dragged gently along her cheekbone. ‘You haven’t.’
She shivered and pressed herself closer.
He was divine, she thought dimly, from the thick black eyebrows to the long straight nose to the angular jaw that had been clean shaven only hours before but was now covered in thick black stubble.
That stubble carried on down to his strong neck until it tapered away leaving bronzed skin so smooth that her hand tugged itself from its hold around his back to skim lightly up the hard planes of his chest to gently palm his throat and feel the smoothness for herself.
If someone had told Gabriel that morning that he would end the day in the battle of his life, he would have laughed disdainfully, but now, trapped in the seductive gaze of this incredibly sexy and enthrallingly beautiful woman, the darts of arousal he’d been fighting had turned into flames and his efforts to remember all the reasons he needed to resist these feelings for her were fading.
Thoughts themselves had become ephemeral clouds, and when the elegant fingers stroked his neck at the same moment the rosebud lips parted, a jolt of electricity struck that vanquished the clouds leaving only the man in his rawest form.