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Gaby gritted her teeth on an acerbic retort, which would be all too revealing to a guy as shrewd as Angel. What he didn’t know about women hadn’t yet been written. He was the biggest playboy in Europe, a living legend of a womaniser. She had her pride, of course she had, and the last thing she wanted him to suspect was that she was still prickly about what had happened between them when they were both students... For goodness’ sake, how juvenile would that be? she scolded herself frantically, desperate to take control of the encounter. It was not even as though they had had an actual relationship back then. They had shared a couple of dates and it had been over before it even properly began between them.
‘Why not?’ she agreed without looking at him, belatedly recalling that he was a prince and that even when he was a student his circle of friends had made a point of always addressing him with the very proper title ‘Your Highness’ or ‘sir’, and that they had visibly winced for her every time she’d neglected to employ the same honorific. It hadn’t been a deliberate omission, though. The reminders of his true status had always come as a surprise to her because, when they were alone together, he had told her to call him Angel and she would always forget who he really was.
She had forgotten because she needed to forget who he was to be with him inanyway. A royal prince when she was ordinary. A very rich young man when she lived from hand to mouth, a perennially broke student. A sexual sophisticate when she was still a virgin. But she had closed her eyes to reality because she had wanted desperately tobewith him, only she had not been quite desperate enough to sign away her legal rights at his request! And when she had told himno, a word Angel had had very little experience of hearing and no prayer of ever accepting, he had gone off in search of a more accessible and accommodating woman, keen to do whatever it took to be with him, even if the resulting fling would only last a couple of weeks. The longevity of Angel’s interest in a woman lasted about as long as a snowflake falling in summer.
Quieting those turbulent memories while struggling to recover her composure, Gaby accompanied Angel up the stairs in the corner. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked.
‘My suite is on the floor above.’
Asuite, well, that was only to be expected given his status in comparison to her own. ‘I’m surprised we’re in the same wing,’ she confided. ‘This seems to be a rather out-of-the-way corner of the palace and I understand whyIwas put here because children can be noisy.’
‘I was a last-minute guest and a late arrival,’ Angel slotted in, his explanation smooth as glass.
He was lying. Gaby didn’t know why he was lying about something so trivial, but five years earlier she had worked out that Angel was at his most smooth and lazy in tone when he wasn’t telling the whole truth, when he was probably bending it for her benefit or his own. He was coldly logical, manipulative, indeed far too clever for his own good, and yet his flaws had inexplicably fascinated her far more than they had repelled her. He had tried to run rings around her and impress her with his wealth and she had stood back watching, involuntarily intrigued by that Machiavellian intellect of his as he tried to discover her weakness and use it against her.
‘What do children have to do with your presence here in Alharia?’ Angel enquired, pressing open a door that mercifully led not into a bedroom as she had feared, but into a spacious sitting room.
‘I work as a nanny. This was a short booking.’
‘You surprise me.’
‘I’m extremely well paid and I enjoy the travel,’ she said lightly, determined to reveal nothing private. ‘Where are your bodyguards? I thought you never travelled without them.’
‘I have no need of bodyguards in a palace as well guarded as this one.’ Angel had left his security team behind in a city hotel because an entourage would only have drawn more attention to him. ‘What would you like to drink?’
‘I thought alcohol was forbidden here?’
‘No, it’s not. The Emir merely disapproves but he doesn’t limit his guests. There are chilled wines available,’ Angel murmured, studying her with narrowed eyes of appreciation, well aware that she would slap him if she knew that he was looking at her when her thin cotton dress was transparent against the light.
She wasn’t wearing a bra and he could see everything from the colour of her white panties to the lush swell of small full breasts crowned with prominent pink nipples. He very much enjoyed that view. As a dulled throb pulsed at his groin he dragged his attention from her again, mocking himself for being so very easily aroused. As a man accustomed to topless-bathing beauties, why was he getting hard as a rock at the shadowy glimpse of a nipple? He marvelled at his lack of discipline and wondered if he could put it down to the complete shock of seeing Gabriella again. She unsettled him and he didn’t like that.
‘Rosé...or white wine. Either will do,’ Gaby declared, walking across the room because she felt very self-conscious standing there like a statue. She settled down on a satin-covered gilded sofa that was not conducive to relaxation and lifted her chin, striving to appear composed and uninterested at the same time. ‘So, catching up?’
Keen to avoid the pitfalls of a too-personal conversation with Gabriella, Angel rolled his memory back several years. ‘Whatever happened to those two best friends of yours? The blonde twins?’
It was a winning question, marvellously uncontroversial, he registered as a sudden smile of surprise chased the tension from her plump pink lips. Most women he knew became competitive and curt if he enquired after any other female, convinced that only they should have his attention, but Gabriella was remarkably generous in that line. ‘Liz and Laurie?’ she queried. ‘They both trained as teachers and now they’re married.’
‘Married?’Angel stressed in astonishment. ‘At your age?’
‘And Liz has already had her first child,’ Gaby completed calmly. ‘A little boy. He’s so cute.’
Angel winced as if such fond talk of children were in some way embarrassing. ‘You always liked kids, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you decided to work with them, but there is so much more in the world.’
‘Wine, men and song aren’t really my style,’ Gaby said drily, her attention locked to him in spite of her efforts to look away.
But there Angel stood, a living, breathing magnet for female attention. It was as if he sucked all the oxygen out of a room when she looked at him because she could barely swallow, and her mouth was dry. She still struggled to credit that a man could be as breathtakingly handsome as he was without being excessively vain or making the smallest effort to impress. She remembered the extraordinary efforts other women had made to grab his attention at university and reminded herself that she had not been one of them.
Angel flashed a sizzling smile at her as he uncorked a bottle of wine and poured it. ‘I wondered how long it would take you to make an insulting remark about my reputation.’
Gaby went pink and lifted her chin as he crossed the room to extend a wine glass to her. ‘You’re reading something into my response that wasn’t intended.’
Angel grinned as if she was hugely amusing him. ‘You’re so full of prejudice that you don’t even see it. Instead of acknowledging the attraction between us, you look for an excuse to write me off. It was always like that. You never gave me a fair chance.’
Infuriated by that condemnation, Gaby leapt upright. ‘I—’
‘And now you’re going to shout loudly at me and throw things to make sure that you can’thearanything that you don’t want to hear,’ Angel forecast, smooth as glass.
Gaby could feel temper mushrooming up inside her like an explosion and she swallowed it back while her hands closed into tight fists of restraint. Angel gazed back at her, dark eyes flaming like golden torches of challenge, and she sat down again abruptly, refusing to fulfil his low expectations of her.
