A Bargain with the Enemy

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOU’VE GONE PALE again,’ Gabriel said, striding determinedly towards where Bryn now stood transfixed and unmoving by the closed door of his office. A dark scowl creased his brow as he saw how the colour had once again leeched from those creamily smooth cheeks. ‘Perhaps you should sit down for a minute—’

‘Please don’t!’ She stepped back and away from the hand Gabriel had raised with the intention of lightly grasping her arm, her fingers tightly clutching her bag, her eyes deep pools of dark and angry velvet-grey as she gave a determined shake of her head. ‘I have to go.’

Gabriel’s mouth tightened at her aversion to his even touching her. ‘We haven’t finished our discussion yet, Bryn—’

‘Oh, it’s definitely finished, Mr D’Angelo,’ she assured him spiritedly. ‘As I said, thank you for the—the honour, of being chosen as the seventh candidate, but I really have no interest, or time, to waste on being a runner-up.’ Her eyes flashed darkly. ‘And I have no idea why you would ever have thought that I—’

‘You were far and away the best of the six candidates to be chosen for the exhibition, Bryn,’ Gabriel bit out briskly—before she had chance to dig a bigger hole for herself by insulting him even further. ‘I saved the best till last,’ he added dryly.

‘That I might be, so thank you for your interest, but—’ She broke off her tirade to stare up at him blankly as his words finally trickled through the haze of her anger. She moistened her lips—those sexily pouting lips!—with the tip of her tongue before speaking again. ‘Did you just say...?’

‘I did,’ Gabriel confirmed grimly.

‘But earlier you said— You told me that I was the seventh person being interviewed—’

‘And one of the previous six is the reserve. And happy to be so,’ he added harshly.

Bryn stared up at Gabriel as the full horror of what she had just done, what she had said, was replayed back to her in stark detail. At the same time realising he was right; at no time had Gabriel said she was the seventh-place candidate, only that she was the seventh artist being interviewed.

She swallowed as the nausea washed over her, and then swallowed again, to absolutely no avail, the single-malt whisky she had ‘guzzled down like lemonade at a child’s birthday party’ obviously at war with her empty stomach; she had been far too tense about coming back to the gallery to be able to eat any breakfast this morning. ‘I think I’m going to be sick!’ she gasped as she raised a hand over her mouth.

‘The bathroom is this way,’ Gabriel said quickly, lightly grasping her arm and pulling her towards a closed door on the opposite side of the office.

Bryn didn’t fight his hold on her this time, too busy trying to control the nausea to bother resisting as he threw open the bathroom door and pushed her inside. Bathroom? It was more like something you would find in a private home, with a full glass-enclosed walk-in shower along one wall, along with the cream porcelain facilities, and had to be as big as the whole of the bedsit in which Bryn had lived and painted this past year!

Bryn dropped her bag to the floor and ran across the room to hang her head over the toilet only just in time, as she immediately lost her battle with the nausea and was violently and disgustingly sick.

‘Well, that really was a complete waste of a thirty-year-old single-malt whisky!’ Gabriel commented dryly some minutes later, when it became obvious from Bryn’s dry retching that she had nothing else left in her stomach to bring up.

Adding further to her humiliation Bryn realised he must have remained in the bathroom the whole time she was being physically ill. ‘I’ll buy you a replacement bottle,’ she muttered as she flushed the toilet, and avoided so much as glancing at the dark figure looming in the doorway as she moved to the sink to turn on one of the gold taps and splash cold water onto her clammy cheeks.

‘At a thousand pounds a bottle?’

Bryn’s eyes were round with shock as she lowered the towel she had been patting against her cheeks, before turning to look at him as he leaned against the doorframe, arms folded across the broad width of his muscled chest.

She instantly wished she hadn’t looked at him as mockery gleamed evidently in his eyes. ‘Who pays that sort of money for—? You do, obviously,’ she acknowledged heavily as he raised his dark brows. ‘Okay, so maybe I can’t afford to buy you a replacement bottle right now.’

He gave an appreciative and throaty chuckle. And instantly threw Bryn into a state of rapid, heart-thumping awareness.

It had been years since she had seen Gabriel laugh—there had been no room for humour or soft words between them once her father had been arrested!—and the transformation that laughter made to his harshly handsome face reminded her of exactly why she had fallen so hard for him all those years ago.

She had believed—hoped—that if they should ever meet by chance, she wouldn’t still respond to him like this, but the warmth that now shone in his eyes, the laughter lines beside those eyes and the grooves that had appeared in his chiselled cheeks, along with the flash of straight white teeth between those sculptured and deeply sensual lips, instantly proved how wrong she had been to hope. Gabriel might be sinfully handsome when he wasn’t smiling, but he became lethally so when he was!

Bryn abruptly averted her gaze to finish drying her face and hands before checking her appearance in the mirror behind the sink—dark shadows beneath tired eyes, pale cheeks, throat slender and vulnerable. A vulnerability she simply couldn’t afford in this man’s presence.

She took a deep, controlling breath before turning back to face Gabriel. ‘I apologise for my comments earlier, Mr D’Angelo. They were both rude and premature—’

‘Stop there, Bryn,’ he interrupted as he straightened. ‘Abject apology doesn’t sit well on your defensive shoulders,’ he explained as she looked at him warily.

Angry colour rushed back into her cheeks. ‘You could have at least let me finish my apology before mocking me.’

He was obviously having difficulty holding back another smile as he answered her. ‘As I just said, abject apology doesn’t appear to come naturally to you!’

She sighed at the deserved rebuke. ‘I apologise once again.’ Bryn didn’t even attempt to meet his mocking gaze now as she instead kept her gaze fixed on the beautiful marble floor. She might know exactly why she harboured such resentment against this man, but as she had guessed—hoped—Gabriel didn’t remember her at all, and she didn’t want to do or say anything that would make him do so either.

‘Shall we go and finish our conversation now?’ he prompted briskly. ‘Or do you need to hang over my toilet for a while longer?’

Bryn gave a pained frown. ‘It was the whisky on top of an empty stomach.’ And the fact that she knew, as did he, that she had prejudged his words without so much as a single hesitation!

‘Of course it was,’ Gabriel humoured dryly as he stood aside for Bryn to precede him back into the office, only too well aware that it was her resentment towards him for past deeds that was responsible for her having jumped to the wrong conclusions. ‘And it’s sacrilege to drink single-malt whisky any other way but neat.’

‘At that price I can see that it would be, yes,’ he heard Bryn mutter derisively. A mutter he chose to ignore as he instead returned to the reason for her being there in the first place. ‘As I said, you are definitely one of the six candidates to have been chosen for the New Artists Exhibition being held in the gallery next month. Shall we sit down and discuss the details?’ He indicated the comfortable brown leather sofa and chairs arranged about the coffee table in front of those floor-to-ceiling picture windows.

‘Of course.’ She noticeably chose to sit in one of the armchairs, rather than on the sofa, before crossing one of her knees neatly over the other and looking up at him questioningly.

Gabriel didn’t join her immediately, but went to the bar instead to take a bottle of water from the refrigerator, collecting a clean glass as well, then walking back to place them both down on the coffee table in front of her before lowering his length down into the chair opposite hers.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured softly, taking the top off the bottle and pouring the water into the glass. She took a long, grateful swallow before speaking again. ‘Mr Sanders told me some of the details last week but obviously I’m interested in knowing more...’ Her tone was businesslike.

Gabriel studied her through narrowed lids as they went on to discuss the details of the exhibition more fully, Bryn writing down the details in a notebook she had taken from her bulky shoulder bag.

Five years ago this woman had still been sweetly innocent, a young woman poised on the cusp of womanhood, a combination that had both intrigued and fascinated him. The passing of those years had stripped away all that innocence, in regard to people and events, at least; Gabriel had no way of knowing whether Bryn was still physically innocent, although somehow he doubted it. Five years was a long time.

But not only had Bryn grown more beautiful during those years, she had also grown in confidence, especially where her art was concerned, and she talked on the subject with great knowledge and appreciation.

‘Have you ever thought of working in a gallery like Archangel?’ Gabriel prompted as their conversation drew to an end half an hour later.

Bryn looked up from placing her notebook back into her handbag. ‘Sorry?’

He shrugged. ‘You’re obviously knowledgeable on the subject, enthusiastic and bright, and those things would make you an asset to any gallery, not just Archangel.’

Bryn frowned as she looked warily at Gabriel across the glass coffee table, not sure if she had understood him correctly. ‘Are you offering me a job?’ she finally prompted incredulously.

He returned her gaze unblinkingly. ‘And if I was?’

‘Then my answer would have to be no! Thank you,’ she added belatedly as she realised she was once again being rude, a rudeness that was totally out of keeping with her expected role as one of the grateful finalists in the New Artists Exhibition.

‘Why would it?’

‘Why?’ She gave an impatient shake of her head at his even having to ask that question. ‘Because I want my paintings to hang in a gallery, to hopefully be sold in a gallery, not to work as an assistant in one!’

He shrugged. ‘Do you have something against taking a job to help pay the bills until that happens?’

Bryn eyed him guardedly, only too aware that her rent was due to be paid next week and that she had other bills that had reached the red-reminder stage too. And yes, a job did help to pay the bills, but she already had a job, at yet another café, even if it didn’t pay nearly well enough to cover both her monthly rent and the bills, no matter how much she tried to economise.

It was almost as if Gabriel had guessed that and was offering her charity....