Less welcome was the suspicion that she was trying to get rid of him, but he decided to discard that option.

‘Apology accepted,’ he drawled, his sharp eyes picking up the way her mouth tightened at that. Sorry, he realised, was something she certainly wasn’t feeling.

God, he’d forgotten how feisty the woman was. He’d forgotten how refreshing it had been to be with a woman who didn’t tiptoe around him. He’d put into mental cold storage that memory of being able to drop his cynicism and function with an openness he had never had and didn’t have now. Crazy, inappropriate memories.

‘If that’s all, then…?’ Alex sprang to her feet and snatched up her bag from where she had earlier dumped it on the ground next to the chair.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that she couldn’t wait to get out of his office. Gabriel stood up with his usual lithe, easy grace and strolled over to where she was making a hasty beeline for the door.

‘So…’ His voice exuded the lazy confidence of a man who expected to be obeyed the second he opened his mouth and, sure enough, Alex paused in her tracks and turned to look at him. ‘Where can I find you…?’

‘What?’ Her face drained of colour. Find her? Why would he want to find her?

‘I mean, which department do you work for?’

‘Why?’ Alex asked cautiously.

Gabriel could feel irritation getting the better of him. ‘Because I might need your services again,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Cristobel comes to London on a regular basis. It would be helpful if you could act as her tour guide if I am not available.’ Had he meant to say that? Maybe not, but her desperation to get away from him was annoying.

Alex lowered her eyes, cut to the quick. Was he that thoughtless that he could suggest some kind of bonding experiment between his ex-lover and his wife-to-be? How thick could one guy get? But then hadn’t he proved that his only concern was himself? He had wanted time out five years ago and so he had lied to her and used her. Now, he might need a Spanish translator and so he would demand her services and to heck if she found the arrangement inappropriate.

Put in an impossible situation and already coming to terms with the fact that there was too much at stake for her to remain in her job, Alex raised her eyes to his and ignored the way her pulse quickened as his dark gaze swept over her. She remembered the way he could make her feel. She reasoned that that was why her body felt so tingly, as though she had suddenly become uncomfortable in her own skin.

‘That’s not going to happen,’ she told him quietly. ‘I’m not paid to babysit your fiancée whenever she happens to be in London. I also didn’t enjoy my duties today. You may be crazy about your fiancée and I’m really happy for you, but there’s no way that I’m going to be ordered to go shopping with her again. We aren’t similar and we didn’t get along. We tolerated each other because neither of us had a choice.’ She took a deep breath and found that her hands were shaking so she stuck them behind her back and bunched them into fists. ‘Today’s been a bit of a shock. It’s a weird coincidence that I’ve ended up being employed in your company but there’s no reason why we should have anything further to do with one another. We’ve both moved on with our lives. I wish you all the best but when I walk out that door, I really don’t want to see you again.’

She fled with the last word, even resorting to taking the stairs rather than wait in mounting anxiety for the lift to arrive.

She’d always wondered how things might have turned out had she been able to get in touch with him all those years ago…tell him about Luke. Now he was getting married and his life was in a different place. He had moved on, found the perfect partner. Alex realised that she would just have to accept that there were some waters that could never be disturbed.

ALEX handed in her resignation the following Monday. There were a lot of questions and raised eyebrows but Alex played it down, using the old time worn favourite about family problems. No one liked to ask too many questions when confronted with someone else’s family problems, especially when the someone else in question had only been employed by the company for less than a month.

She felt a pang of sharp, bitter regret as she quickly and efficiently cleared her desk, but she had had a night to think over the situation and there was no way that she could continue working in the same company as Lucio/Gabriel. He would have had no qualms about ordering her to flit around London with his fiancée, looking at stupid bits of fabric and translating ridiculous questions about shoe colours and flower arrangements. He might even have seen it as fitting punishment, considering she had laid into his wife-to-be with brutal honesty.

She barely gave consideration as to how this development would impact on her meagre finances. She had been too busy making sure that she vacated the smoked glass building with the minimum of fuss and under the radar of Gabriel’s eagle eye, should he happen to be around. It was just a stroke of luck that his offices were on the top floor, safely out of harm’s way.

One week later and she had managed to land herself back into her old job, which had seemed a miserable step backwards but she could hardly afford to turn the money away. And her old boss had been nice enough about her slinking back with her tail between her legs. No awkward questions. No snide remarks. He had accepted her vague waffle about things not living up to expectation and installed her right back into her swivel chair in front of the computer in the small reception area.

Which was where she was precisely eight days later when Gabriel showed up.

She didn’t see him. She was busy putting the finishing touches to a document she had been given to edit, racing against time, which was what she always seemed to do the minute the clock struck four-thirty.

From the small corridor, Gabriel’s eyes quickly and efficiently scanned the room, for the office was really just one big room, amateurishly divided into cubicles by flimsy partitions. The weather had turned chilly and it was cold. So cold, in fact, that, as his eyes rested on her downbent head, he became aware that she was typing quickly, wearing fingerless gloves and with a woolly hat pulled down low so that only the ends of her short dark hair were visible. The smart get-up in which he had last seen her dressed as she had sat across from him in his office had been abandoned in favour of a pair of jeans and a grey jumper. He guessed that she would be wearing trainers. She had once told him that she had not possessed a pair of high heeled shoes until she turned seventeen and had to attend her grandfather’s funeral.

Gabriel wasn’t entirely sure why he had attempted this trip halfway across London but she had lodged in his brain like an irritant and he hadn’t been able to clear his head of her image.

He had finally persuaded himself that he should see her to make sure that she was all right. She had quit without notice and he had, after all, once been her lover. He felt duty-bound to satisfy himself that she hadn’t done anything crazy. She could be impetuous. And she had seemed pretty overwrought the last time he had seen her.

Having successfully attained the moral high ground, he had done the unthinkable and cancelled his meetings for that afternoon, choosing to drive instead to her office, having had someone verify that she was back working there.

It was some minutes before anyone noticed him and then his presence was announced via a network of urgent whispers and giggles until someone who must have been the section supervisor headed towards him.

Alex, he noted with dry amusement, was lost in a world of her own, immune to the flurry of attention his appearance had aroused.