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CHAPTER NINE

THE PANORAMIC VIEW outside his penthouse office gave him a moment’s respite before Gabe refocused his gaze on the woman who was sitting at the other side of his desk.

Of course his hopes had been futile. And of course Leila got the job she’d secretly been lusting after. Leaning back in his swivel chair, he looked into the excited sparkle of his wife’s blue eyes. Though maybe that was an understatement. She hadn’t just ‘got’ the job, she had walked it—completely winning over Alastair McDavid, who had described her photos as ‘breathtaking’ and had suggested to Gabe that they employ her as soon as possible.

Gabe drummed his fingertips on the polished surface of his desk and attempted to speak to her in the same tone he would use to any other employee. But it wasn’t easy. The trouble was that he’d never wanted to kiss another employee before. Or to lock the door and remove her clothes as quickly as possible. The X-rated fantasies which were running through his mind were very distracting, and his mouth felt as dry as city pavement in the summer. ‘At work, I am your boss,’ he said coolly. ‘Not your husband or your lover. And I don’t want you ever to forget that.’

‘I won’t.’

‘While you are here, you will have nothing to do with the Qurhah campaign.’

‘But—’

‘No buts, Leila. I’m telling you no—and I mean it. It will only complicate matters. People working on the account might feel inhibited dealing with you—a woman who just happens to be a princess of the principality. Their creativity could be inhibited and that is something I won’t tolerate.’ He subjected her to a steady look, glad of the large and inhibiting space between them. ‘Is that clear?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do say so. And—barring some sort of emergency—you will not come to my office again unless you are invited to do so. While you are here at Zeitgeist, you will receive no deferential treatment—not from me, nor from anyone else. You are simply one of the four hundred people I employ. Got that?’

‘I think I’m getting the general idea, Gabe.’

Gabe couldn’t fail to notice the sardonic note in her voice, just as he couldn’t fail to notice the small smile of triumph she was trying to bite back, having got her way as he had guessed all along she would. And maybe he should just try to be more accepting about the way things had turned out. Alastair McDavid was no fool—and he’d said that Leila had an extraordinarily good eye and that her photos were pretty near perfect. Her talent was in no doubt—and, since her work had been submitted anonymously, nobody could accuse him of nepotism.

But Gabe was feeling uncomfortable on all kinds of levels. For the first time ever his personal life had entered the workplace and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit. Despite years of occasional temptation and countless invitations, he’d never dated an employee or a client before. He had seen for himself the dangers inherent in that. There had never been some hapless female sobbing her eyes out in the women’s washroom because of something he’d done. He’d never been subjected to awkward silences when he walked into boardroom meetings, or one of the Zeitgeist dining rooms.

The less people knew about him, the better, and he had worked hard to keep it that way. He was never anything less than professional with his workforce, even though he joined in with ‘dress-down Friday’ every week and drank champagne in the basement bar next door whenever a new deal was signed. People called him Gabe and, although he was friendly with everyone from the janitor to the company directors, he maintained that crucial personal distance.

But Leila was different.

She looked different.

She sounded different.

She was distracting—not just to him but to any other man with a pulse, it seemed. He had driven her to work this morning—her first morning—and witnessed the almost comical reaction of one of his directors. The man had been so busy staring at her that he had almost driven his car straight into a wall.

Her endless legs had been encased in denim as she’d climbed out of Gabe’s low sports car, with one thick, ebony plait dangling down over one shoulder. In her blue shirt and jeans, she was dressed no differently from any of his other employees, yet she had an indefinable head-turning quality which marked her out from everyone else. Was that because she’d been brought up as a princess? Because she had royal blood from an ancient dynasty pulsing through her veins, which gave her an innate and almost haughty bearing? When he looked at her, didn’t he feel a thrill of something like pride to think that such a woman as this was carrying his child? Hadn’t he lain there in bed last night just watching her while she slept, thinking how tender she could be, and didn’t he sometimes find himself wanting to kiss her for absolutely no reason?

Yet he knew those kinds of thoughts were fraught with danger. They tempted him into blotting out the bitter truth. They ran the risk of allowing himself to believe that he was capable of the same emotions as other men. And he was not.

He frowned, still having difficulty getting his head round the fact that she was sitting in his office as if she had every right to be there. ‘Anything you want to ask me?’ he questioned, picking up a pencil and drawing an explosion of small stars on the ‘ideas’ notepad he always kept open on his desk.

‘Do people know I’m pregnant?’

He looked up and narrowed his eyes. ‘Why would they?’

‘Of course. Why would they?’ she repeated, and he thought he heard a trace of indignation in her voice. ‘Heaven forbid that you might have told somebody.’

‘You think that this is something I should boast about, Leila? That an obviously unplanned pregnancy has resulted in an old-fashioned shotgun marriage? It hasn’t exactly sent my reputation shooting up into the stratosphere.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘Up until now, I’d always done a fairly good job of exhibiting forethought and control.’

Pushing back her chair, she stood up, her face suddenly paling beneath the glow of her olive skin. ‘You b-bastard,’ she whispered. ‘You complete and utter bastard.

He’d never heard her use a profanity before. And he’d never seen a look of such unbridled rage on her face before. In an instant he was also on his feet. ‘That didn’t come out the way it was supposed to.’

‘And how was it supposed to come out?’ She bit her lip. ‘You mean you didn’t intend to make me sound like some desperate woman determined to get her hooks into you?’

‘I was just pointing out that usually I don’t mix my personal life with my business life,’ he said, raking his fingers through his hair in frustration.

‘I think you’ve made that abundantly clear,’ said Leila. ‘So if you’ve finished with your unique take on character assassination cunningly designed as a pep talk, perhaps I could go and start work?’

For once Gabe felt wrong-footed. He saw the hurt look on her face and the stupid thing was that he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to break every one of his own rules and pull her into his arms. He wanted to lose himself in her, the way he always lost himself whenever they made love. But he fought the feeling, telling himself that emotional dependence was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He knew that. He knew there were some things in life you could never rely on and that was one of them.

But guilt nagged at him as he saw the stony expression on her face as she turned and walked towards the door. ‘Leila?’

She turned around. ‘What?’

‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

Her smile was wry. ‘But you did say it, Gabe. That’s the trouble. You did.’

Shutting his office door behind her, Leila was still simmering as she walked into the adjoining office to find Alice waiting for her and with an effort she forced herself to calm down. Because what she was not going to do was crumble. She could be strong—she knew that. And she needed to be strong—because she was starting to realise that she couldn’t rely on Gabe to be there for her.

Oh, he might have put a ring on her finger and made her his wife, but she couldn’t quite rid herself of the nagging doubt that this marriage would endure—baby or not.

Pushing her troubled thoughts away, she smiled at Alice. ‘Gabe says you’re to show me around the Zeitgeist building,’ she said. ‘Though judging by the size of it, I think I might need a compass to find my way around the place.’

Alice laughed. ‘Oh, you’ll soon get used to it. Come on, I’ll show you the canteen first—that’s probably the most important bit. And after that, I’ll take you down to the photographic studios.’

Leila quickly learnt that paid employment had all kinds of advantages, the main one being that it didn’t give you much opportunity to mope around yearning for what you didn’t have.

Overnight, her first real job had begun and, although she was fulfilling a lifetime ambition just by having a job, she found it a bit of a shock. She’d grown up in a culture which encompassed both opulence and denial, but she had never set foot in the workplace before. She was unprepared for the sheer exhaustion of being on her feet all day and for being woken by the alarm clock every morning. Quickly, she discovered that dressing at leisure was very different from having to be ready to start work in the studio at eight-thirty. Her lazy honeymoon mornings of slow lovemaking were replaced by frantic clockwatching as she rushed for the shower and grappled with her long hair.

‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ said Gabe one morning as they sat at some red lights with Leila hastily applying a sweep of mascara to her long lashes.

‘What? Wear make-up?’

‘Very funny. I’m talking about putting yourself through this ridiculous—’

‘Ridiculous what?’ she interrupted calmly. ‘Attempt to prove that I’m just like everyone else and that I need some sense of purpose in my life? Shock! Horror! Woman goes out to work and wears make-up!’

‘What does the doctor say about it?’ he growled.

‘She’s very pleased with my progress,’ Leila answered, sliding her mascara back into her handbag. ‘And it may surprise you to know that the majority of women work right up until thirty-six weeks.’

She sat back and stared out of the car window, watching the slow progress of the early-morning traffic. Gabe’s car was attracting glances, the way it always did. She guessed that, when viewed from the outside, her life looked like the ultimate success story. As if she ‘had it all’. The great job. The gorgeous man. Even a little baby on the way.

From the inside, of course—it was nothing like that. Sometimes she felt as if her marriage was as illusory as the many successful advertising campaigns which Gabe’s company had produced. Those ones which depicted the perfect family everyone lusted after with the artfully messy table with Mum and Dad and two children sitting around it, giggling.

Yet everyone at Zeitgeist knew that the model father in the advert was probably gay and that the model mum’s supposedly natural beauty was enhanced by hair extensions and breast implants.

No, nothing was ever as it seemed.

Nothing.

Gabe was still Gabe. Compelling, charismatic but ultimately as distant as a lone island viewed from the shoreline. And she realised that was the way he liked it. The way he wanted to keep it. They weren’t growing closer, she realised. If anything, they were drifting further apart.

One evening, they arrived back at the apartment after an early dinner out and Gabe went straight to their bedroom to change. Minutes later he reappeared in jeans and a T-shirt, with his face looking like thunder.

‘What the hell has been going on?’ he demanded. ‘Have we been burgled?’

Leila walked over to where he stood, looking at the room behind him with a sinking heart. He had left early for a meeting this morning and somehow she’d slept through the alarm and had woken up really late. Which meant that she had left home in a rush, and it showed—particularly as today was the cleaner’s day off.

Automatically, she moved forward and started to pick up some of the discarded clothes which lay like confetti all over the floor. A pair of knickers were lying on his laptop. ‘I overslept,’ she said, hastily grabbing them from the shiny surface. ‘Sorry.’

Her words did nothing to wipe the dark expression from his face, for tonight he seemed to be on some kind of mission to get at her. ‘But it isn’t just when you oversleep, is it, Leila?’ he demanded. ‘It’s every damned day. I keep finding used coffee cups around the place and apple cores which you forget to throw away. Did nobody ever teach you to tidy up after yourself, or were there always servants scurrying around to pick up after you?’

Leila flinched at the cold accusation ringing from his voice, but how could she possibly justify her general untidiness when his words were true?

‘I did have servants, yes.’

‘Well, you don’t have servants now, and I value my privacy far too much to want any staff moving in—not even when the baby’s born. So if we’re to carry on living like this, then you’re really going to have to learn to start being more tidy.’

The words leapt out at her like sparks from a spitting fire.

If we’re to carry on living like this.

Biting her lip, she turned away, but Gabe caught hold of her arm and pulled her against him.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does. That came out too harshly. Sometimes I just...snap,’ he said, his head lowering as he made to brush his lips over hers.

But Leila pushed him away. He thought that making love could cure everything—and usually it did. It was always easy to let him kiss her, because his kisses were so amazing that she always succumbed to them immediately. And when she was in his arms he didn’t feel quite so remote. When he was deep inside her body, she could allow herself to pretend that everything was just perfect. Yet surely that was like just papering over a widening crack in the wall, instead of addressing the real problem beneath.

Sometimes she felt as if she was being a coward. A coward who was too scared to come out and ask him whether he wanted her out of his life. Too scared that he might say yes.

She went into the bathroom and showered, and when she emerged in a cotton dress which was beginning to feel snug against her expanding waist, it was to find him sipping at a cup of espresso.

He looked up as she entered the room, and suddenly his grey eyes were cool and assessing.

‘I have a deal coming up which means that I need to go to the States,’ he said. ‘Will you be okay here on your own?’

‘Of course,’ she said brightly, but, coming in the wake of their recent spat, his words sounded ominous.

She walked over to the fridge and poured herself a glass of fizzy water, exaggeratedly wiping the few spilt drops from the work surface before going to perch on one of the bar stools.

‘How long will you be gone?’ she asked.

‘Only a few days.’

Gabe saw the tremble of her lips, which she couldn’t quite disguise, and suddenly the coffee in his mouth seemed to taste sour. Yet he knew exactly what he was doing. He was insightful enough to know that he was pushing her away, but astute enough to know that he could offer her no other option. Because the thought of getting close to her was making him feel stuff. And that was something he didn’t do.

He put down his coffee cup with more force than he intended.

If only it could be different.

His mouth hardened as he stared into the bright blue of her eyes.

It could never be different.

That night they lay on opposite sides of the bed, the heavy silence indicating that neither was asleep, though neither of them spoke. His sleep was fractured, his disturbing dreams forgotten on waking—leaving him with a heavy headache which he couldn’t seem to shift.

He was just sliding his cell phone into his jacket pocket when he walked into the sitting room to find Leila looking at his passport, which he’d left lying on the table.

‘That’s a very sombre photo,’ she commented.

‘You aren’t supposed to smile in passport photos.’

Leila found herself thinking that he wouldn’t have much of a problem with that. That unless the situation demanded it, his natural demeanour was unsmiling. Those chiselled cheekbones and cold eyes lent themselves perfectly to an implacable facade.

She glanced down at his birth date and her heart gave a funny little twist as she glanced back up at him. ‘Will you phone me?’

‘Of course.’ He took the passport from her and brushed his mouth over hers in a brief farewell kiss. ‘And I’ll be back on Sunday. Keep safe.’

But after he’d gone, all the energy seemed to drain from her. Leila sat down on the sofa and stared into space, her heart thumping like someone who had just run up an entire flight of stairs without stopping. The date on his passport was March fifteenth—the Ides of March. She knew that date. Of course she did. Wasn’t it etched firmly in her mind as heralding the biggest change in her life?

She shook her head, telling herself not to be so stupid. It was a coincidence. Of course it was.

Over the next few days, she was grateful to be able to lose herself in the distraction of work—glad that its busy structure gave her little time to dwell on the uncomfortable thoughts which were building like storm clouds in her mind. Alastair McDavid announced that Zeitgeist had just landed a big contract to advertise a nationwide chain of luxury hotels and spas. And since spa clientele consisted mainly of women, it was in everyone’s interest to use a female photographer.

‘And we’d like to use you, Leila,’ he told her with a smile.

Leila was determined not to let him down and the excitement of planning her first solo assignment was almost enough to quell the disquiet which was still niggling away inside her. Almost, but not quite.

Sunday arrived and Gabe texted to say that he was just about to catch his plane. She wished she was in a position to collect him from the airport, but she still hadn’t learnt to drive. She had allowed her husband and his chauffeur to ferry her everywhere. It had been all too easy to lean on Gabe—and if she wasn’t careful that could get to be a lasting habit.

Because for the first time she was beginning to acknowledge the very real fear that this marriage seemed destined to fail.

She remembered his cold rebuke about her general untidiness, yet she hadn’t even factored in what the presence of a tiny baby was going to do to Gabe Steel’s ordered existence. What if he hated having a screaming infant in his slick, urban apartment? Wouldn’t he get irritated if she went off sex, as she’d been told that new mothers sometimes did?

Her distraction grew as she showered and washed her hair, then picked out a long tunic dress in palest blue silk, which she’d brought with her from Qurhah. She didn’t question why she had chosen to wear that particular tunic on that particular day. All she knew was that it covered her body from neck to ankle and she wondered if she was seeking comfort in the familiar.

She pinned her hair into a simple up do and made tea while she tried not to feel as if she was waiting. But she was waiting. Waiting for some sort of answer to a question she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask.

What was it that they said in Qurhah? That if you disturbed a nest of vipers, then you should expect to get bitten.

She heard the click of the front door opening and the sound of Gabe closing it again. He didn’t call her name, but his footsteps echoed on the polished wooden floor as they approached, and her heart began to race as he walked into the room.

For a moment he stood very still and then he came over and kissed her, but she pulled away.

‘How’s Leila?’ he questioned, his eyes narrowing as they stared into her face.

‘I’m fine,’ she said brightly. ‘Shall I make some coffee?’

‘I had some on the plane. Any more coffee and I’ll be wired for a week.’ He glanced down at the stack of unopened mail which was waiting for him before looking up again. ‘So what’s been happening while I’ve been away?’

‘My...scan went well,’ she said carefully, her fingers beginning to pleat at the filmy blue fabric of her tunic. ‘And I have some good news. Alastair wants me to do the assignment for the new spa contract.’

‘Good.’

She looked up from her fretful pleating and suddenly her throat felt so dry that she could barely get the words out. ‘And March fifteenth is your birthday.’

He gave a short laugh. ‘Interesting that you should tell me in an almost accusatory manner something I’ve known all my life.’

She told herself not to be intimidated by the coldness in his voice, nor to freeze beneath the challenge icing from his pewter eyes. ‘That’s the day we had...sex in Simdahab.’

‘And?’ His dark eyebrows elevated into two sardonic arcs. ‘Aren’t I allowed to have sex on my birthday?’

She shook her head. She was still a relative novice when it came to lovemaking, but she was intuitive enough to know that something about him that afternoon had been different. Something she hadn’t seen since. There had been something wild about his behaviour that day. Something seeking and restless. She chose her words carefully. ‘You gave me the distinct impression that having spontaneous sex with someone you’d only just met wasn’t your usual style.’

‘Maybe you were just too irresistible.’

‘Is that true?’

Gabe met the steady stare of her bright blue eyes and, inwardly, he cursed. If she was a casual girlfriend, he would have told her it was none of her business, and then to get out and leave him alone. But Leila was his wife. He couldn’t tell her to get out. And the truth was that he didn’t want to.

He met her eyes. ‘No, it’s not true,’ he said quietly. ‘I seduced you that day because I was in Qurhah, a place where it’s almost impossible to buy whisky, which is my usual choice of drink on my birthday.’ There was a pause. ‘And in the absence of the oblivion brought about by alcohol, I opted instead for sex.’

Mills & Boon Modern February 2014 Collection

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