Page 22 of A Diamond Deal with Her Boss
‘Are you telling me that youwouldbe aroused?’
‘Stop playing games with me, Gabriel!’ she cried, and he immediately looked contrite.
‘We could keep going over this until we bored each other into deep REM, but I’ve no idea what the point of that would be, so I’m going to have a shower. I’m hot and tired, as you no doubt are as well.’ He began unbuttoning his shirt and she looked away, horrified that her well-ordered, predictable working relationship with her boss had come to this.
‘Would you like to have the bathroom first?’ he asked, mid-unbuttoning.
Polite, she thought a little wildly. He was being perfectly polite. They had somehow ended up in an unforeseen situation and he was keeping his calm and acting like an adult while she was going into meltdown.
He was right: they were here and she couldn’t storm off with her suitcase to find herself one of those guest rooms, of which there were plenty. She wasn’t just doing this out of the goodness of her heart, which would at least have given her the right to call the whole thing off, even though she knew deep down, having met his grandmother, that she wouldn’t have.
She had signed up to a deal that would help her father. He would surely be worried sick about money as he and her mother cruised their way round the world on a trip that would gradually eat up all his savings and leave them on a much reduced pension. He was doing it for her mother, but if Abby could help her father then she would do so in a heartbeat.
So her rights when it came to calling the whole thing off were non-existent.
She would just have to salvage some of her composure and not go to pieces. She took a few deep breaths, and when she told him that he could go ahead her voice was as normal as his had been.
‘And I apologise,’ she said, ‘if I overreacted. This is a very strange situation for me, and naturally I’m not one hundred percent comfortable with it.’
Gabriel thought that she looked like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Shorn of every scrap of her PA’s façade, she was human all the way through, and he couldn’t deny that he was enjoying this side of her, the ultra-feminine side that she had been at pains to conceal.
‘Understood.’ He turned away, but in his mind’s eye he retained the image of her pink-cheeked, calm, grey eyes stormy and glittering, prissy clothes slightly askew and hair desperate to break free of its restraints.
Feminine.It was a word he had never associated with her but it best described her now. She was utterly and defiantly feminine.
Abby watched until the bathroom door was safely shut behind him and she could hear the running of the shower, then she moved at speed.
She didn’t take time out to appreciate the cool beauty of the bedroom, which really was enormous, including as it did a seating area with two deep chairs and a little table on which a few magazines had been placed. The colours were neutral and calming, and the voile at the windows gave it a tropical feel, but all of those details were lost on her as she hastily began stripping the bed, removing two of the pillows and getting rid of the top flat sheet so that she could hobble together a sleeping arrangement for Gabriel on the floor.
She was sitting on one of the deep chairs when he eventually emerged from the shower. She couldn’t have been more relieved that she had done what she had because he emerged with just some loose tracksuit bottoms on. No top. No comfy bedroom slippers.
Abby’s mouth went dry. She stared, looked away, stared again and then spread her arms wide as he took in his new sleeping arrangement.
‘You’ve been busy, I see,’ he drawled, opening one of the drawers and extracting a tee shirt. He kept a stash of clothes in the room permanently and he slipped it on now as he cast a jaundiced eye at what had to be the most unappetising makeshift bed he had ever seen.
She could kid herself that he was going to sleep there, but she was wrong. His offer to take the floor had been polite at best. She had been on the point of exploding with nerves and it had been the only thing on the table to ease her mind. However, she would just have to appreciate that the floor was not conveniently carpeted, not that that would have made a whole lot of difference. It was cool marble, very pretty to look at but hardly good bedding fodder. The huge silk rug did nothing to help matters.
‘You did offer...’
Gabriel grunted and pulled out his laptop, which gave Abby some measure of hope that he was going to do the decent thing and vacate the bedroom so that he could go and work somewhere else in the house.
With a little start, she realised that it was only the sight of the laptop that had brought her back down to earth with a bump.
He washerboss! So far had she gone since they’d arrived in Seville, she’d almost forgotten!
They hadn’t discussed work once, not that there had been a lot of time, but still...
It was why she had come on this trip in the first place! Instead, here she was. Guilty grey eyes skittered away from the tantalising sight of her powerfully built boss clad in nothing but tracksuit bottoms and an old, soft tee shirt. The same guilty grey eyes travelled down to his feet and then back up, only to race past the tell-tale bulge in the bottoms that seemed to advertise that he was as well built there as he was everywhere else.
‘I’ll use the bathroom now, if you don’t mind.’ She leapt to her feet, practically falling in her haste to get out of the bedroom.
‘Why would I mind?’
‘Good idea to do some work now,’ Abby gabbled as she opened her suitcase and pointedly turned away from him to search out the stupidly sexy lingerie she had brought.
Sexy lingerie and sexy underwear were her little secret pleasures. On the outside, she was perfectly happy with jeans and jumpers, and grey, black and navy-blue for work, but ever since her break-up with Jason she had quietly rebelled against the good-girl image he had had of her.
‘You’re a lovely girl,’ he had said in just the sort of patronising voice that made her blood boil. ‘And you’ll make some lucky man a great wife, but I think I need someone a little more adventurous...’
