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‘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. Shewasn’ta 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.’
