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She wandered. She mingled in the glorious weather with the rich fashionistas. She walked past the expensive restaurants and cafés. There was no time to visit any of the museums but she could admire the architecture of some of the grand buildings and submerge herself in the airy affluence. She stopped to have a coffee and a croissant in one of the cafés and sat outside so that she could people watch.
In her head, she replayed every word Gabriel had said to her and relived the hurt she had felt at being dismissed as someone inferior. It didn’t matter whether he praised her work skills to the skies. It didn’t matter if he complimented her on her initiative in digging out bits of useful information on companies he was interested in acquiring. It didn’t matter if he now trusted her to flesh out reports which he gave to her in skeleton format.
She was the drab, grey little person who didn’t know how to dress.
She had a flashback of Georgia in the office, in her tight red dress and her high, high shoes, with her dark hair everywhere and her long nails painted scarlet.
There was no way that Alice would want to replicate that look. As far as she was concerned, the other woman had embodied everything that was obvious and way too out there.
But she wasn’t going to be a mouse.
It took her a little while, but by the time she hit the fourth shop she was in her stride. She cruised through all the designer shops, growing in confidence as the afternoon wore on, and by five o’clock she returned to the hotel clutching several bags. She could have summoned the limo again but the walk had been tempting, if tiring.
And what better place to soothe a weary body? She dumped the bags in her bedroom, inhaled the gorgeous opulence of a hotel room the likes of which she would never stay in again for a few heady minutes and then phoned through to make an appointment at the hotel pa.
By six-thirty, Alice was fully rested and relaxed. Back in her room, she looked at her nails, her feet, her hair.
Vanity had never been a problem for her. As a teenager, when all the other girls had been preening in front of mirrors and whispering about boys she had been busy keeping her head down, studying and wondering what the following day would bring; wondering what sort of mood her mother might be in or whether her father might be on one of his many ‘time out’ trips.
The years had passed her by without her taking time out to pay much attention to her appearance.
Besides, her learning curve had been subtle but powerful. Beauty came with a price. She wasn’t beautiful and she had no interest in making herself try to be.
But now...
She had a long, lingering bath in a bathroom that was ridiculously luxuriant and emerged twenty minutes later feeling refreshed and...weirdly excited.
She wasn’t Cinderella going to the ball—not exactly—but she would leave behind serious, composed, take-no-risks Alice Morgan for the evening.
She had bought four dresses, one for each evening they would be in Paris, but the dress she had bought for tonight’s affair was the dressiest.
It was a long dress, in the palest of pink, with a scooped neck and was figure-hugging. Her long body, which she had always considered far too thin and far too flat-chested, filled it out perfectly and her height was accentuated by four-inch stilettos. She had bought a matching cashmere throw, iridescent with little pearls, to sling over her shoulders. Her nails matched the outfit and her hair...
Her brown hair, always au naturel, had been highlighted while she had had her hands and feet done. Shades of warm chestnut and caramel streaked through it, giving it dazzling life, turning her into a person she barely recognised as herself.
On the spur of the moment, she took a picture of herself and messaged it to her mother, and grinned when her mother returned a message which was just several exclamation marks.
She was a different person, at least on the surface, and she left her bedroom at precisely seven-thirty to make her way downstairs to the bar.
People turned to stare.
That had never happened to her in her life before. She wasn’t sure whether she liked it or not but it was certainly an experience.
Was this what it was like for Gabriel? she wondered. Was that why he had become so lazy? Why he picked what he wanted from life and discarded the rest without a backward glance? Was he so accustomed to walking into a room and finding himself the focus of attention that he no longer saw the point of trying any more? Why seek people out when they sought you out? Why make an effort with a woman if the woman was happy to do all the chasing? Why commit to a relationship when you could treat life like a great big candy shop where you could pick and choose the candy you wanted before moving on to sample something else?
She wondered whether he got pleasure from making money. He had made so much already and at such a young age, more than enough to last several lifetimes. He threw himself into his work, there was no denying that, and the man was a genius with a knack of knowing the markets—but did it still give him a kick? When you could have whatever you wanted without trying, was there anything that was still capable of giving you a kick?
