AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘It certainly is.’ Her mother’s light voice danced with excitement. ‘Alistair is just thrilled. So tell me, darling, what’s he like, this Gabriel Silva...?’
The question bumped around Dove’s head long after her mother had hung up.
Picturing Gabriel’s arresting face, she tightened her fingers around the cold glass. Whatever she had expected in London, this was a million times worse. It would be easier if they just hated one another. And sometimes she did hate Gabriel. But at other times she could feel her body reaching out to his, and she knew that he was feeling it too—that knife-edged need that had somehow survived the terrible implosion of their relationship.
It made no sense. But then it wasn’t supposed to. Sexual attraction wasn’t a science. You couldn’t apply logic to it. It supplanted reason, analysis and argument. Her mouth twisted. Apparently, it overrode pain and betrayal too.
Only so what if it did?
Maybe her body’s response to him—that alarming, shimmering reaction that swamped her whenever he was near—was impossible to change. But she could change the way she reacted to those feelings. Even if this was personal—and it was—she could make it about business, about the acquisition.
If she wanted to survive this—survivehim, Gabriel Silva, again—that was what she was going to have to do.
And she would survive, she told herself firmly.
This was a long way from the worst place she had been. A long way from the dark place she’d been in six years ago. So even though his beauty made her catch her breath, she would pretend it didn’t. She would pretend as Gabriel had pretended.
After all, how hard could it be?
Gazing across the dazzling indigo sea that was one shade lighter than his eyes, Gabriel felt his pulse slow. He knew the science of ‘blue space’, but for him there was more to it than just the generic restorative powers of the colour of the water or the sound of the waves. Out here, away from the rigidity of the land, there were no boundaries or barriers. Just an endless vista of blue, stretching unhindered to the horizon and beyond.
Maybe that was why someone like him found it so calming. Having doors shut in your face was not something you forgot.
Or forgave.
He looked away to where a reddish sun was slowly slipping beneath the line of the horizon. After Dove’s rejection he’d took a flight to America alone, wanting,needingto go somewhere no one would know his past or see his pain.
And it had worked. Living among strangers, he had found his humiliation and misery was invisible to most people. Only his parents and siblings had sensed the change in him. His father, ever the romantic, had put it down tosaudade—a potent word used by the Portuguese to describe an impossible to translate mix of melancholy and longing. His mother had just thought he was homesick.
But home had not been the solution. In fact, even just thinking about England had made all his symptoms worse. It was work that had helped. Just having a routine, a focus.
But a part of him had never forgotten or forgiven the two women who had rejected him so coolly, so brutally, and six months ago it had been work that had offered up a way for him to avenge himself on both Fenella Ogilvy and Dove Cavendish.
He glanced down at his watch. It was already eight o’clock, but he made no effort to move. He had no qualms about keeping Dove waiting. Why should he? Six years ago she had happily left him sitting in that hotel bar for two hours.
His chest felt suddenly too tight for his ribs. He could still remember the sidelong glances of the bar staff as he’d checked his phone for messages, and then the slow, creeping shift from excitement into apprehension, then panic, and finally shock when Oscar Cavendish had strolled towards him, looking as out of place in the shabby hotel as a Rolls Royce in a scrapyard.
It had been almost a carbon copy of what had happened a year earlier with Fenella Ogilvy, his biological mother. Different hotel bar. Different smiling emissary. But the same conversation. The same mix of politeness and pity. And, of course, a financial incentive for him to disappear for ever.
Only despite all of that—or maybe because of it—he had been as shocked and hurt as the first time it happened. Devastated, in fact. Because Fenella had only ever been a name, whereas he’d thought he knew Dove.
He did now.
He took one last look at the sea and then stepped back into his luxurious suite.
Dove was waiting for him on deck, and even though he knew it was petty, seeing her standing there made him feel immensely satisfied. He glanced over to where she stood, facing the Mediterranean. He couldn’t help wishing she had defied him, and he realised that the prospect of sparring with her excited him...made him feel more alive than he had in years.
Why that should be the case was beyond his comprehension. It was certainly not something he had anticipated back in New York, when all of this had been theoretical.
But since then he had summoned her toThe Argentumand now he was dining with her alone. He hadn’t planned that either.
‘Good evening, Mr Silva.’
‘Good evening, Hélène.’
The stewardess stepped forward, smiling, and as he greeted her, Dove turned towards him.
He felt the air snap to attention. He hadn’t told her to do so but she had changed for dinner, into a simple grey sleeveless wrap dress. It was the kind of dress that would make most women fade into the background. But on Dove the silky fabric shimmered like a mountain stream in moonlight.
