‘I’m going to give him a bath and settle him down,’ she said quietly. ‘You can leave if you want to, or you can wait for me in the kitchen. I won’t be much longer than half an hour.’

Gabriel could no sooner leave than he could grow wings and fly through the window. His brain, while taking in everything and already working out a series of consequences, was not functioning at all on another level. He was a father. In what could only be classified as a complete mess he was a father—because there was no doubting paternity. Yes, he could make a song and dance about dates and times and then request a DNA test, because he was nothing if not suspicious by nature, but the proof of his genetic link to the child was glaringly obvious. He could have been looking at a picture of himself aged four and a half.

He remained frozen to the spot for a few minutes after she had disappeared up the tiny staircase. He was aware of noises drifting down. Very slowly he made his way to the kitchen, and this time when he inspected his surroundings it was with renewed interest.

He had a child.

by

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Cathy Williams is originally from Trinidad, but has lived in England for a number of years. She currently has a house in Warwickshire, which she shares with her husband Richard, her three daughters, Charlotte, Olivia and Emma, and their pet cat, Salem. She adores writing romantic fiction and would love one of her girls to become a writer—although at the moment she is happy enough if they do their homework and agree not to bicker with one another!

GABRIEL heard his secretary’s sharp rap on his office door with a sense of relief.

Perched on his desk, with her high, high heels dangling from her feet and her short, short skirt provocatively and purposefully riding high enough to expose a generous eyeful of thigh, Cristobel had been in full flow for the past twenty minutes.

She needed to really start doing the shops, the wedding was getting closer by the day and everything had to be perfect and there was just no way that she was going to leave all the details to that ridiculous wedding planner his mother had insisted on hiring.

She had punctuated each statement with a flick of her long, curling blonde hair and a jabbing motion with her finger, taking care to lean forward so that he couldn’t fail to notice her deep cleavage and the full swell of her breasts under the tightly pulled silk top.

Cristobel was nothing if not sweepingly confident about her ability to use her body to its maximum advantage and while Gabriel would concede that he had been distracted by it for all of two minutes, right now he just wanted her out of his office and safely tucked away in whatever mind-blowingly expensive shop she favoured. He really didn’t care. He had calls to make and several reports to look at and the high pitched, insistent staccato of her voice was beginning to give him a headache.

Naturally he had contained his impatience because she was, after all, his fiancée but he had almost given his secretary a standing ovation when she had tactfully suggested that she had checked the personnel files and found a Spanish speaking employee who would be delighted to take Cristobel to Knightsbridge, where she would be able to shop to her heart’s content before she headed back to Madrid.

‘But I want you to come with me,’ Cristobel pouted now, leaning further forward and sweeping aside several documents as she planted her hands flat on his desk. ‘It’s important for you to get involved with the planning.’

‘You don’t want me involved with the planning, Cristobel,’ Gabriel told her dryly. ‘At any rate, you know how I feel about these things. Lavish weddings are not my cup of tea.’ Nor, he mused now, were weddings of any sort, at least in so far as they pertained to him, until a year ago when he had finally and philosophically ceded to loving but insistent parental pressure.

His parents were both keen to see him married and settled. They were getting older. They wanted grandchildren. Whilst they were still at an age to enjoy them. Before they died.

And Gabriel had finally acknowledged that perhaps the time was right to take a wife. There was a very thin line between the desirable bachelor and the oldest swinger in town. He was now in his thirties and life had a habit of racing on.

Cristobel would make a perfectly suitable wife. Her family tree was as old as his was and as wealthy. She understood the unspoken rules of the way his life operated and would abide by them. Whatever she wanted, she would have and in return she would understand that his work was a priority for him. She was also a beautiful woman, small, voluptuous and well groomed.

On paper, it was a union brokered in heaven and any doubts were expertly fielded by using common sense and reason, two things which had never let him down in his life before.

‘You’ll enjoy Harrods with another woman.’ His phone rang and he answered it, his mind already on work, watching distractedly as Cristobel slid off his desk and stood up, smoothing down her tight cream skirt with her hands and pouting at him.

She was moving towards her bag when the door opened and in walked his Spanish-speaking saviour. A number on a file somewhere in the bowels of his cutting-edge glass building, a name he hadn’t even been told because it was such an insignificant detail. But that face. The memory of it leapt out at him as though it had been lying just below the surface, nudging the edges of his consciousness.

Gabriel had a moment of utter speechlessness, while Cristobel continued to sort herself out, dabbing some lipstick on her mouth and angling a little compact mirror so that she could inspect her handiwork.

Alex Mcguire. He didn’t need Janet to announce her because he realised that he could put the name to the person in an instant, even though it had been years since he had last had anything to do with her. She was as tall as he remembered, as tall as Cristobel was tiny, and she still had that coltish, boyish grace he had once found so unusual and so appealing. Short dark hair, which she had always defiantly refused to grow because she just wasn’t that type of girl, the type of girl who wore stilettos and push up bras and red lipstick and tight clothes. In fact, he had never, not once, seen her in anything smart, but she was dressed smartly now, in a sober grey suit, although the shoes were still flat and the nails were still short and she still didn’t wear much by way of make-up.

Alex, a newcomer to the Cruz business empire, had followed Gabriel Cruz’s secretary along the opulent top floor of the offices in a state of nervous tension. At first, when she had been summoned from her lowly office on the first floor, she had steeled herself for a worst case scenario. Had she sent the wrong invoice to the wrong, very important client? Mistyped something critical? Used the wrong tone of voice to the wrong person on the telephone? She might just be a small cog in the finance department, but rumour had it that nothing escaped the mighty Gabriel Cruz’s eagle eye and mistakes were never allowed to slip through the net. She needed this job. The salary was so much higher than what she had been getting before and when she thought that she might have blown it by doing something stupid, something that might require a personal summons by the great man himself, then her stomach had twisted into desperate knots and brought her out in a cold sweat.