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Angel didn’t do complicated with women and anything with Gabriella was destined to get messy. Without a signed NDA, he had taken a major risk with her, choosing to trust her thisonetime. Now he needed to walk away. Hehadto walk away. Intelligence told him that he had no alternative because he would not have a future with any woman until he took a wife. Gabriella was under his skin but, unlike his weak father, he wasnotin thrall to Gabriella, and he was strong enough to walk away. He would leave Gabriella a note. His private phone number? He winced and decided that encouraging any kind of ongoing contact with a woman who contravened his rules would be inadvisable. So what if she labelled him a four-letter word of a guy? He would never see her again—never,ever, he swore to himself grimly.
CHAPTER THREE
‘YOUHAVEOPTIONS,’ Gaby’s friend Liz reminded Gaby ruefully, several weeks after that night in Alharia.
Gaby grimaced. Yes, she knew the options. There was termination and there was adoption, both of which were terrifyingly final. She couldn’t face either choice and, in fact, that part of her that had long dreamt of having a family again actually wanted tocelebratethe pleasure of becoming a mother. Stark terror, however, threatened to drown that guilty seedling of joy. The prospect of single parenthood was decidedly scary. Somehow, she would manage, she told herself urgently, although she suspected that her job as a nanny would become too physically demanding when she reached late pregnancy. She would have to find less taxing work by that stage, and she didn’t have much time left because she was already more than three months along.
How had the unthinkable happened? That one night in Alharia still haunted her. She would never forget waking up alone in that palace bedroom, feeling very much like a meaningless one-night stand. A servant had wakened her with breakfast in bed. Presumably, Angel had organised that before his slick and silent departure. Gaby had felt too sick with angry mortification to eat and had fled back to her own room to pack. Angel hadn’t even left her his phone number. No matter what lens she used to look back on that night, her perspective didn’t change: Angel had treated her like dirt, disposable dirt. The least he could have done was wake her to say goodbye before he left but, instead, he had settled for the easier option.
‘If you’re planning to keep the baby, you’ll need the father’s support to make that possible,’ Liz pointed out sensibly. ‘It’s hard and very expensive to raise a child alone.’
Gaby gritted her teeth at the concept of Angel being supportive in such circumstances. He would do what the law demanded for a child he didn’t want but she was quite certain that he would not wish to be an active parent. He would be angry, bitter and hostile and there was nothing she could do to change that reality. As a man who proudly conserved his royal dignity, determined not to even have his name linked with a woman’s in the press, he would scarcely welcome an illegitimate child.
‘I’ll tell him in a few months’ time,’ she remarked stiffly.
‘You shouldn’t leave it that long,’ her friend contended. ‘Give him time to adjust to the idea before the birth.’
Gaby shrugged. She knew what she had to do but she was in no hurry to do it. ‘I could have a miscarriage...or something, so I should wait. And if I leave telling him a bit longer, there’ll be no room for him to suggest a termination.’
Liz frowned. ‘Would he do that?’
‘I really don’t know but I’m not willing to put myself in that position,’ Gaby admitted quietly. ‘It’ll be enough if he knows before the baby is born.’
‘I still can’t believe you had the bad luck to run into Angel Diamandis abroad where you’d be all alone with him,’ the blonde lamented. ‘I mean, what were the odds that you would meet your first love again like that?’
Gaby wrinkled her nose. ‘He wasn’t my first love, well, not in the way you mean.’
‘Gaby, you were besotted with him, and Laurie and I hated him because he was such a player and heknewwhat he was doing to you when he demanded that stupid agreement from you! You would’ve got badly hurt if you had got any closer to him,’ Liz said feelingly. ‘And now look what’s happened!’
‘I’m a big girl and I got tempted. I didn’t expectthisdevelopment.’ Gaby sighed, reflecting that Angel had used contraception throughout the night, although he had possibly been a little careless in not taking precautions sooner the first time. ‘If I’d been on contraception myself, I suppose I would have been safe from this happening...but I swear Angel is the only man alive who could make me behave the way I did.’
‘You and how many other women? Yes, he’s incredibly hot, but he is also very much a bad boy and dangerous.’ Liz groaned, vaulting upright as a baby’s cry sounded upstairs in the small terraced house. ‘I’d better get Robbie, and don’t forget that he arrived even though George and I werecareful. Only abstinence is a foolproof method of birth control.’
Chastened by the reminder, Gaby thought about the baby she had conceived. She had seen her child on the ultrasound screen and that viewing had stolen her heart at first glance, wiping out every sensible thought.
But her pregnancy had still come as a huge surprise. Her menstrual cycle had not stopped completely until the second month and she had been so busy working short-term placements and finding a flat share that she hadn’t noticed. Her breasts had got bigger, but she had simply thought she was putting on weight. Only the final cessation of her cycle had warned her that something was wrong. Liz and her sister, Laurie, had been stunned when she had finally told them about her night with Angel in Alharia, and although her friends had then persuaded her to do a pregnancy test, she had still been genuinely shocked by the result.
Even so, she refused to let herself panic. In due course, she would make a discreet approach to Angel, although she was in no hurry to do so. After all, he had made his lack of interest in her clear by not contacting her again. Had he wished to seek her out he could’ve easily discovered where she worked, but he clearly had not wished to see her again. And that was fine. A one-night stand didn’t make a relationship, only it was more than a little disheartening to appreciate that a guy who had once flooded her flat with flowers to impress her had walked away from their night of passion with such ease, consigning their brief intimacy to history.
Her thoughts pulled her back into the past and she remembered how Angel had ferried her back to his elegant Cambridge town house after she fell down the steps in front of him. He had put plasters on her cut knees, making her feel like a child again. His friends had sat around being polite but staring, visibly unable to comprehend his interest in her. Inevitably, Angel had been part of the student elite, beautifully dressed and wealthy young people, several who also enjoyed titles or famous parents and who, even though they attended the same university, lived an entirely different and more glamorous life than more ordinary students.
Gaby had been mesmerised by those dark golden eyes fringed by inky black lashes. Breathing that close to Angel had been a challenge and when he had asked her out to dinner, she had loosed an uncomfortable laugh and had said that she was too busy studying to go out in the evenings. Realising that he was a prince, as everyone else treated him with near reverence, had turned her off rather thanonand his surprise at her rejection had embarrassed her even more.
‘I’ll change your mind,’ he had told her confidently and that afternoon the flowers had arrived, ridiculously extravagant, gorgeous baskets overflowing with exotic blooms that had so cluttered her small living space that she’d had to give most of them away to neighbours and friends.
Naively, she had associated the giving of flowers with romance. The next time she had run into Angel had been at the library. Over coffee she had thanked him for the flowers, and she had been ready to say yes to dinner should he have asked her again, only Angel had told her instead that he was flying home for three weeks. Regrettably, his disappearance had only fuelled her infatuation.
‘Angel plays with girls like you, that’s all. Don’t start building fantasy castles in the air just because he’s interested in you at the moment...a moment is as long as Angel’s interest lasts,’ Cassia Romano had told her bitchily, going out of her way tobumpinto Gaby after a lecture and deliver that unnecessary warning.
Cassia, a blonde with the looks of a supermodel and reputedly the holder of a defunct Italian aristocratic title, had never strayed far from Angel’s side. He had treated Cassia like a friend, but Gaby had recognised that possessive Cassia was ambitious to be rather more than that.
Gaby had run into Angel his first day back in the UK and had agreed to dine out with him that evening with her emotions running on high.
‘We’ve got absolutely nothing in common,’ she had told him uneasily.
‘What does that matter?’ Angel had asked lazily. ‘We only get one chance to make the most of being young and single. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m not in the market for anything more serious.’
And that candour of his had acted on her that night like the warning jolt of lightning, blowing her romantic hopes sky-high with the truth that Angel, the ruling Prince of Themos, did not see their relationship progressing beyond the level of a fling. She should have backed off then, she reflected, five years older and wiser, but in those days she had been very much into excusing or glamorising Angel’s every flaw. She had told herself that his honesty was refreshing and that she should not condemn him for it. After all, she was still a teenager and wasn’t looking to settle down either. And that night she had decided that he would become her first lover. Never in her life had she even imagined the sheer strength of the physical attraction that Angel exuded for her.
