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There was no getting through to him. Why hadn’t she been strong enough to wise up to that before? Dig deep below the charm, the looks, the charisma and the formidable intelligence and there was...nothing.
Those glimpses of gentleness, tenderness, vulnerability had all been an illusion. She shut the door on any other interpretation. She was shaking like a leaf and kept herself as rigid as a plank of wood to control emotions that threatened to burst their fragile containment.
‘And on that note,’ Gabriel drawled, ‘I’ll drop you back to your house. There will be no need for you to return to work. You can consider that little speech of yours a suitable letter of resignation.’
They were at the house. She hadn’t even been aware that he was driving.
He reached across to click open her door and she drew back, horrified at how her body reacted even now, when everything was falling apart.
‘If there’s anything personal that you need to take from your office,’ he said coolly, ‘then you can get in touch with Personnel. They can forward it to you.’ Their eyes tangled and Alice was the first to look away.
She couldn’t find room in her head to accommodate everything she was feeling: the horror of the end; an overwhelming sadness; self-recrimination.
‘There’s nothing I want to take with me.’ Her voice betrayed nothing of what she was feeling. She stepped out of the car, walked towards the house and she didn’t look back.
CHAPTER TEN
FROM WORKING IN one of London’s landmark buildings, Alice’s life returned to normality with a deafening thud.
One month after she had walked away from Gabriel, she was now back in employment, working as a legal secretary in a small solicitor’s firm in the outskirts of London. She had gone from towering views of the city to the nondescript view of the back of a local supermarket car park. She had moved from the most exciting man on the planet to a middle-aged chap who handled small cases and apparently took himself off to play golf twice a week.
The highlights had grown out of her hair and Paris and everything else seemed like a dream.
She had not heard a word from Gabriel and, much as she had not expected to, the hope with which she awoke each morning turned into the sour disappointment that went to sleep with her each night.
Walking back to her house, her mobile phone rang and, when she picked up the call, it was from her mother.
Pamela Morgan’s recovery was coming along in leaps and bounds. In fact, treatment with the therapist had been reduced to once a month. Now that her love affair was out in the open, it seemed to be all she could talk about, and Alice, having met the man in question, had to concede that her mother was in safe hands.
Time had moved on, her mother had told her; she was in a different place from the one she had been in when she had married.
The implication was that Alice should have reached a similar conclusion—that time had moved on and she was no longer the girl growing up in a scary, dysfunctional family or the girl who had had a brief fling with someone who’d turned out not to be Mr Right.
The implication was that there was a time and a place to be careful and Alice was young enough to take life by the scruff of the neck and take chances...
Alice had not become bogged down in discussing her situation. She could have told her mother that she had taken enough chances with Gabriel to last a lifetime, but she kept quiet.
Now, her mother was talking to her about a holiday she planned to go on and marvelling that her life had been turned around so dramatically.
Alice listened, contributing here and there as she stepped off the bus and headed back to the house.
It was an overcast, muggy day and although it wasn’t dark, far from it, she was still surprised that the lights in the house were all off because she knew that Lucy would be in, getting herself ready for a hot weekend in Venice with the guy she had been seeing for the past few months.
It was a little after eight. Overtime was not expected but she had stayed on until just after six and had then gone out for a quick drink with two of the other girls from the office, who had a Friday-night routine in which she had been immediately included.
She was exhausted.
She let herself into the house, dropping her bag by the door, and heading for the kitchen whilst removing her lightweight summer jacket at the same time.
With the lights all switched off, the downstairs of the house was bathed in a grey twilight that Alice found rather soothing, so she didn’t bother turning on any lights, instead carolling up the stairs to let her house mate know that she was home.
The last time she had arrived home unexpectedly without loudly announcing her arrival, she had discovered Lucy and her loved-up guy in the sitting room about to embark on a compromising position, and Alice had been horribly embarrassed. Since then, entries were always as noisy as possible.
