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‘How sordid,’ Angel pronounced with slashing distaste.
‘You know what?’ Gaby elevated a dark coppery brow. ‘Sordid or not, I’m belatedly very glad to have the proof of that conversation when evidently I married a guy yesterday who doesn’t believe a word I say,’ she condemned as she walked away again.
‘Gabriella—?’
Gaby spun back, blue eyes flashing as bright as the sapphires she had worn the day before. ‘I’ve said all I want to say for now. But when you return, I will be getting some things out in the open for your benefit,’ she warned him curtly before she walked back outside again.
She was shaking like a leaf from the amount of emotion she was holding inside herself. She reached for her coffee again, but it was cold. Viola appeared with a fresh pot and began to clear the table, occasionally shooting troubled glances at Gaby’s pale set visage.
‘He was a very unhappy little boy, ignored and neglected by his mother,’ Viola whispered in Italian. ‘And a temper like...like a firework display!’
‘I can imagine that,’ Gaby commented, striving to relax sufficiently to smile reassuringly at the older woman while tucking away those nuggets of information. He must have been so hurt and damaged by that maternal negative response, she thought unhappily. The same woman who had abandoned Saif as a baby had been no warmer a mother to Angel and yet she had had every opportunity to be a parent to Angel. The first woman who should have loved and nurtured him had refused to do so. Was that why he found it so hard to trust people?
Evenher? His new bride? Angel had blindsided Gaby and plunged her into shock. He didn’t trust her. He might have married her, but he didn’t have any more faith in her word than he might have had in a stranger passing him on the street and thathurt. In addition, he only trusted Cassia more because he had known the woman for years.
That was a moment of revelation for Gaby. She thought about that non-disclosure agreement she had refused to sign at university even though it had meant that she’d lost any chance of being with Angel. Why hadn’t she recognised then just how deep Angel’s distrust went? There it had been, a blatant signpost, and yet she hadn’t seen his fatal flaw. How stupid and naive was she?
He trusted Cassia more because he had known her from childhood and had presumably never witnessed Cassia’s less attractive flipside. For that reason, when he heard that recording, he would be abashed, she reflected without pleasure. But regrettably for Angel it would only figure as one more piece of proof thatnowoman in his life could be trusted...
Angel drove up to the mountaintop viewpoint and parked. He was in a rage because he had believed that Gabriella was superior to the other women he had known, too honest to malign an employee who had once offended her, too decent to use her newly acquired status against someone who could not fight back. When would he learn? he asked himself angrily as he climbed out of the car with the phone, ignoring the bodyguards spreading round the car park to protect him. He had worked out when he was very young that the only person he could fully rely on and trust was himself.
He hit the play button on the phone, lean dark features tense and dark and brooding. He listened and the angry flush on his cheekbones slowly drained away. His lush black lashes hit his cheekbones as his lips parted on an unspoken but vicious curse. The whole truth and nothing but the truth...even if it was anuglytruth? He knew he had dug himself into a very deep hole. A taxi hummed at the entrance to the car park, doubtless eying the flag on the SUV that signalled Angel’s presence. He sprang upright and swung back into the SUV to drive down the mountain again.
Back at the house, he strode into his grandfather’s library, needing the familiar warmth of its seclusion and the aged whiskey in the crystal decanter. He poured himself a drink and knocked it back with unusual enthusiasm. It still didn’t wipe out the image he kept on seeing of the dead look in Gabriella’s beautiful eyes and her pallor. He breathed in slow and deep while the heat of the alcohol burned the chill from his chest. He had screwed up. Why did he always, absolutelyalwaysscrew up with Gabriella?
And as he paced the floor, it seemed so obvious to him why things went continually wrong with Gabriella. His childhood had screwed him up. In any relationship with a woman, he would always be waiting for the axe to fall, and so he had avoided relationships altogether once he’d left his teens behind. All because his mother had been a cold creature, more interested in her latest lover and the beautiful face that met her in her mirror than in her own flesh and blood?
Angel knew right then and there that he didn’t want to go through life refusing to have faith in others. What sort of an example would that set his son, Alexios? Alexios, in his innocence, had offered his father instant love and trust. And if he wanted to be the father and the husband that his wife and child deserved, he had to open up and share his past to give his trust as well.
Gaby sat down to lunch alone. She had no appetite, but Viola had been so attentive that she felt that she had to eat lest she hurt the older woman’s feelings. Mostly she had sipped her wine, relieved to feel a little bubbly boost from the alcohol when the rest of her felt as flat as a pancake. She wandered round the paved garden with her glass, enjoying the sunshine warming her skin and settling down on a stone seat with beautiful roses blooming all around her.
She heard the crunch of Angel’s footsteps on the gravel before he moved onto the paved path and her slim shoulders squared.
‘Will you come into the house so that we can talk?’ Angel enquired quietly.
‘I really don’t think that we have anything to talk about,’ Gaby parried, fixedly studying the rose bed directly ahead of her.
‘Please...’ Angel planted his big strong body in front of her view.
It was a word he rarely employed and he got points for it. In any case, she knew they had to talk even if she didn’t see what exactly they could discuss. ‘There’s not very much to say about your prejudice against women,’ she murmured flatly.
‘I have my reasons.’
‘Reasons you won’t share,’ Gaby cut in.
‘I will. I will talk freely,’ Angel asserted, crouching down in front of her, endeavouring to enforce eye contact. He reached for her hand, but she yanked it back and he sighed. ‘I haven’t been in what you would call a relationship before, not a proper one. Iwillmake mistakes because I haven’t got that experience.’
‘You’ve been with more women than...probably Casanova!’ Gaby condemned wildly, wrongfooted by a humble approach that she could never ever have expected from Prince Angel Diamandis. ‘Don’t try to make a lack of experience an excuse!’
Accidentally, she connected with tawny black-fringed eyes that were the purest gold in the sunshine and her mouth ran dry.
‘That was sex and only sex,notrelationships,’ Angel specified tightly.
Gaby flushed with pleasure at that admission and slid upright. ‘OK.’
He walked her silently indoors to the library she had heard about and not seen, and it was as much of an anomaly in such a house as the classic frescoes painted on the rear terrace. It was two storeys tall with a spiral staircase in one corner. Customised carved wooden bookshelves covered every wall, and the shelves were packed, upstairs and on the mezzanine above. Sumptuous sofas, armchairs and a large desk completed an ambience that would have been more at home in a Victorian mansion. And yet that very unexpectedness made her like the house even more and wish that his grandparents had survived for her to know them, because she was beginning to understand that the farmhouse had been their escape from the Aikaterina palace, a private place where they could be themselves and indulge their interests like private citizens rather than royals.
‘It’s very comfortable in here,’ she remarked, sinking down on an opulent sofa covered with striped pale green velvet and liberally fringed and tasselled.
