Wife By Contract, Mistress By Demand

Rufus eyed her speculatively. ‘I was always surprised by your own choice of career…’ he murmured questioningly.

She stiffened defensively. ‘Why?’

He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘Obviously a restaurant in Gresham’s would only be open the same hours as the store, but usually restaurant work involves long, unsociable hours.’

Gabriella still eyed him challengingly. ‘Your point being?’

His point being that it seemed a career too much like hard work for a woman who had always had her eye on attaining a rich husband…

But maybe she really had thought the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach…?

He could have told her years ago that it was usually another part of a man’s anatomy that governed his decisions!

Whatever. If they went through with this, after six months Gabriella would no longer have any need for a husband, rich or otherwise.

He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘You’ll have to cook a meal for me some time,’ he said dryly.

Gabriella eyed him impatiently. ‘You would be taking a risk—I might be tempted to add arsenic to it!’

‘Oh, I’d make you eat some first,’ he assured her as they stepped out of the lift onto the fourth floor.

Gabriella gave what was obviously a totally impulsive laugh, her violet eyes glowing, her teeth white and even against the fullness of her lips.

Rufus found himself fascinated by that smile, and stared down at her with hungry eyes.

The laugh caught at the back of Gabriella’s throat as she saw the way Rufus was looking at her. Almost as if it were her he would like to eat!

But she must have been mistaken, she decided as that cynicism hardened his face once more, green eyes pale and assessing now as he returned her gaze challengingly.

‘Rufus, what—?’She broke off as she realized where he had brought her, her eyes widening and pulse leaping as she looked excitedly round the huge restaurant area on the fourth floor.

A restaurant that, if she agreed to marry Rufus, would become hers. Hers to keep even when the marriage was over.

The restaurant was at the front of the store, taking up half the fourth floor, totally separate from the book and magazine department that took up the rest of the floor space. At the moment it was being run more as a self-service cafeteria, but the possibilities for it becoming an exclusive lunch-time restaurant, as well as a place for morning coffee and afternoon tea, were endless. Gabriella was already able to envisage the changes she would make to the décor, like taking away some of the tables and replacing the utilitarian chairs with more comfortable upright armchairs.

It would become somewhere to relax and enjoy a leisurely lunch that Gabriella would make from totally fresh ingredients—

It could only become that if she agreed to marry Rufus!

‘Let’s go up to my office and finish discussing this, Gabriella,’ he said briskly, once again taking a firm hold of her arm.

Finish discussing it? She wasn’t aware that they had started!

Gabriella was familiar with the executive offices on the sixth floor, and indeed the chairman’s—Rufus’s—plush office, having visited her mother there very occasionally over the period she had worked as James’s secretary.

God, that seemed a lifetime ago!

Which, in fact, it was in a way—with her mother and James both gone now, and only Rufus left to torment her.

She didn’t recognize the secretary behind the desk in the outer office—but then, why should she?—a tall, shapely blonde who turned to smile warmly at Rufus as the two of them entered the room, and Gabriella gave Rufus a speculative look.

His fingers tightened painfully on her arm as he all but dragged her into the inner office to shut the door firmly behind them. ‘I would never make the same mistake my father did,’ he assured her coldly as he released her so suddenly Gabriella almost lost her balance.

Never fall in love with his secretary, Gabriella knew he meant. Certainly never marry her.

‘They were happy together, Rufus,’ she defended impatiently. ‘Couldn’t you see that? Feel that when you were with them?’

Oh, yes, he had seen his father’s happiness with Heather, and knew that losing her had probably killed him. But he believed his father had been blinded by love and had never allowed himself to get close enough to Heather to hear her side of the story, truthful or not.

Heather had certainly tried to get closer to him over the years, but only for his father’s sake, Rufus felt sure.

Anyway, Rufus had totally resisted Heather’s friendship for his own sake as much as anything else.

Heather and Gabriella, despite Gabriella’s years in France, had continued to be close, and if Rufus had lowered his guard towards Heather then he would have been lowering it towards Gabriella, too. And that was something he had no intention of doing.

Either then.

Or now.

He might be being forced into marrying Gabriella if he wanted to keep Gresham’s, but that didn’t mean he had to like it!

‘Did you ever take my advice?’ he prompted dryly.

Gabriella frowned her puzzlement at this sudden change of subject, not sure what advice he was talking about.

Rufus’s mouth twisted mockingly as he enlightened her. ‘Did you ever ask your mother why, six years ago, she needed a hundred thousand pounds?’

Gabriella froze at the taunt, knowing Rufus had done this deliberately, and that he intended to hurt.

Her chin rose challengingly. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘And?’ he prompted impatiently.

And she had promised her mother she would never tell anyone else about it. James had known, of course, because Heather had told him all about her first husband’s gambling, and the debts he had left behind for his widow and young daughter. But Heather had wanted to keep that particular skeleton of the Benito family in the closet where it belonged.

‘And it’s none of your damned business!’ Gabriella told Rufus with hard dismissal, having no more intention of sharing that secret with him than her mother had.

‘Right,’ he accepted scornfully. ‘So how much did you owe my father when he died, Gabriella? More, or less, than he gave to your mother all those years ago?’

This time she felt the colour drain from her cheeks.

So Rufus hadn’t missed her completely instinctive response in David Brewster’s office as he covered that part of his father’s will. Or failed to guess the reason for it.

But she should have known that he wouldn’t. Rufus was too astute, too intelligent, to fail to guess the cause of her dismayed groan.

‘Less,’ she sighed, knowing there was no point in prevaricating, Rufus only had to ask David Brewster the same question for the lawyer to produce the contract that Gabriella and James had signed over a year ago. ‘Much less.’