To Sin with the Tycoon

And it wouldn’t have happened now, Alice deduced, except for the fact that he had wanted to put her to the test. Maybe he thought that she would not be up to the task—too prim and proper. She didn’t have to hear him say that to know that it was what he had been thinking and she bristled even though a part of her knew that, yes, she took life seriously. She had always had to. There had not been much scope to develop a frivolous side when she had spent so much of her youth supporting her mother through the innumerable bouts of her father’s indiscretions.

Pamela Morgan had never seemed to have the strength to stand up to her bullying, philandering husband, so she had turned to Alice for moral support. By the time Rex Morgan had died, in a car accident, his wife had become a shadow of the girl who had married him in the false expectation of living happily ever after.

Alice’s dreams had been put on hold and, when she looked back, she could see that she had spent her teenage years laying down the foundations for the person she would later become: reserved, cautious, lacking in the carefree gaiety that might have been her due, given a different set of circumstances.

Her one experience with the opposite sex had merely served to drive home to her that it never paid to think that anything good was a foregone conclusion.

‘Is there anything else you’d like me to do now, and what time might I expect you to be in tomorrow morning? I don’t know what your diary is.’ The diary he never used.

‘I keep my diary on my phone. I’ll email you the contents. And tomorrow? I expect I’ll be in...at my usual time. Then I’m away for the next three days. Think you can handle being on your own?’

‘As I said, Mr Cabrera, I will do my utmost to deal with anything you can throw at me...’

* * *

Disgorged from the jumble of people on the tube three weeks later, it occurred to Alice that whatever had been thrown at her had obviously been full of all the right vitamins and proteins because she was enjoying her job. No, more than enjoying it. She got up early with a spring in her step, looking forward to the workload ahead of her and the slow creeping of responsibilities that were landing on her plate.

Her brain was being challenged in all sorts of ways. She was personally responsible for three large accounts. She had enrolled for her accountancy studies. And, by her standards, she was being paid a small fortune.

It was amazing, given the fact that she disapproved of much of what Gabriel stood for. She disapproved of his blatant womanising; she disapproved of the way he picked up lovers and then discarded them. He made no secret of the fact that he was as ruthless in his private life as he was in his working one. She disapproved of his supreme certainty that whatever he wanted would be his. She disapproved of the way every female employee, almost without exception, practically went down on bended knee whenever he deigned to address them. She disapproved of his ego.

On a daily basis, she fielded calls from women who wanted to talk to him and she could gauge from their hopeful, breathless voices that talking was not the only thing they wanted.

She disapproved of all of that.

The guy clearly didn’t have to try when it came to the opposite sex, so he didn’t. He was pursued and presumably, when he felt like it, he took one of his pursuers up on her offer and established something that couldn’t even really be called a relationship.

He was lazy.

But so beautiful, a little voice in her head absently pointed out, and Alice halted for a second so that the crowds parted around her, some of them muttering impatiently under their breath.

She wouldn’t deny that he had looks. The strong, aggressive lines of his lean, dark face were imprinted in her head with the force of a branding iron. She thought about him in passing more than she liked, then justified her lapses by telling herself that of course she would think of him—he was an exciting person to work for and she was only new to the job, hadn’t had time to get used to him yet.

Which was why she knew just how long his dark lashes were and the way they could conceal the expression in his eyes... Which was how she knew that the second he entered the office, bringing all that force and vitality behind him, he would roll up the sleeves of his shirt, walk past her and immediately ask for his coffee.

She doubted that he even really noticed her. She was his über-efficient secretary who did as she was told faster than the speed of light. For long periods of time, he barely glanced in her direction at all.

She picked up speed, suddenly irritated for allowing her thoughts to stray down forbidden paths. He didn’t notice her because she wasn’t his type.

His type was...

No, she wasn’t going to let her mind start speculating.

By now familiar with the impressive entrance foyer and well used to the hordes of workers and, later in the day, the tourists who were always milling about, Alice blanked everyone out as she strode purposefully towards the lift.

It was not yet eight. The three floors occupied by his company would only be partly peopled. She liked the relative quiet as she was transported upwards...and upwards and upwards...

She felt a curl of excitement as she exited the lift. She barely recognised the emotion. Her head was full of what she had to do that day. The last thing she was expecting was to enter her office to the sight of two figures having an argument in Gabriel’s office.

Through the slender panes of glass, Gabriel’s face was dark with anger. She couldn’t make out what was being said but his voice was low and deadly. The woman’s, on the other hand...

She should interrupt. She should try to manage this situation because it was just the glorified version of what she occasionally had to do on the phone.

He didn’t seem to care whether women chased him or not, or even whether they threw hissy fits down the end of the line, but he kept sharp dividing lines between work and play.

Obviously some poor woman had failed to pay attention to that dividing line and was paying the price.

And doesn’t it serve him right?

The thought sprang from nowhere but, once it took hold, it couldn’t be budged.

She had no idea who this woman was but why shouldn’t he sort this situation out himself? Just because he had all the money and power in the world, it didn’t mean that he could take the easy way out when it came to the situations he engendered with his women!

She calmly removed her lightweight coat and hung it up in the sliding cupboard. Then she made herself a cup of coffee and, with mug in hand, she sat at her desk and switched on her computer.

But she couldn’t focus. Her eyes kept sliding from her computer screen to the sketch being enacted behind Gabriel’s closed door. That said, she was still shocked when the closed door was banged open and out flew a woman with waist-length dark hair and a porcelain-white complexion. Her red dress was skin-tight, her heels were five inches high at the very least and she was trailing a pink-and-black-checked summer coat over her shoulder.

She looked furious. Furious and upset. She paused just long enough to glare at Alice through tear-filled eyes.

‘He’s a pig!’ She glared over her shoulder to where an impassive Gabriel was watching them both with steely-eyed coldness, then fixing enraged dark eyes on Alice. ‘But at least he hasn’t got one of those dolly birds working for him this time!’

‘Georgia...’ Gabriel’s voice silenced what promised to be a tirade. He spoke very quietly and with such contained menace that Alice felt sorry for the poor woman. ‘If you don’t leave my premises immediately, I will call security and have you thrown out. And you...’ He directed this at Alice who tilted her head to one side in perfect secretarial mode. ‘Kindly escort Georgia out of the building and then come into my office...’

She was barely aware of Georgia talking non-stop on the way down in the lift. The diminutive brunette was angry, bitter and, reading between the lines, humiliated because she had never been dumped in her life before. Men chased her and she was the one responsible for doing any dumping.

Alice could have told her that she had taken on far more than she could ever have hoped to chew with a man like Gabriel.

‘Well, at least you’ll be safe as houses,’ the other woman sniped as her parting shot. ‘Gabriel would never look twice at someone like you. And tell him from me—I hope he rots in hell!’

The spurt of courage that had prompted her to stay put in her office twenty minutes earlier had evaporated by the time Alice returned there, having successfully deposited Georgia on the street outside. Still, there was no way that she intended to apologise for not having interrupted the scene in his office.

With any luck, he would simply brush over the whole incident and the day would commence as it always did, at full tilt.

‘What the hell do you think you were playing at?’ were his opening words as she walked into his office with her tablet in her hand, ready for the day to begin.

‘I beg your pardon?’ She started as he swooped round his desk to perch on the edge so that he was looming over her, face as dark as thunder.

‘And don’t give me that “butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth” look! I saw the way you sneaked into the office and hid behind your computer!’

‘I did not sneak into my office, Gabriel...’ It always felt odd to call him by his Christian name but after three days of ‘sir’ and ‘Mr Cabrera’ and ‘Mr Cabrera, sir’ he had impatiently insisted that she drop the titles and call him Gabriel. It was one of those names that did not happily roll off the tongue. It was just too...sexy...

‘Nor,’ she asserted firmly, ‘did I hide behind my computer!’

‘You did both. You knew that I was trapped there with that woman and instead of offering to escort her out you ducked for cover and watched from the sidelines!’

‘That woman...?’

Gabriel flushed darkly and raked long fingers through his hair. ‘I’m not in the mood for your sermonising,’ he growled, glaring at her.