Her clear blue eyes defiantly dared him to challenge her, and accordingly he tilted his head to one side and looked at her in silence.
How could this man manage to get on her nerves, encourage her to open upandturn her onall at the same time?
‘I don’t have to explain myself to you.’ She backed off from completely succumbing to whatever pull he had over her, tried to shake herself free of the spell he was weaving.
‘Quite true.’ He paused. ‘Did the man eventually ask you for money? You’re right, you don’t have to explain yourself to me, but I can tell from the expression on your face that I’ve hit the nail on the head. Trust me, you had a lucky escape.’ He drained the remainder of his coffee and looked at her with brooding, veiled eyes.
Gabriel didn’t do back stories and, as much as he was tempted to quiz her, he wasn’t going to break habits of a lifetime. Doubtless, hers would be a tale of the poor little rich girl, lonely and misunderstood in her gilded cage.
He’d heard a number of similar tales over the years. Privileged backgrounds seemed to breed a disproportionate lot of angst in a certain type of woman.
He wasn’t sure why he was so curious about this particular one but he wasn’t going to explore the reasons. She’d slept with some man who ended up wanting to fleece her and she’d run away from whatever job she had because she couldn’t deal with it. Experiences like that toughened up a person and it would toughen her up even though, right now, she looked immensely frail and vulnerable, with those delicately flushed cheeks and that hurt, defensive expression in her big, blue eyes.
He wondered whether that side of her was what his daughter found so appealing—the side that was strangely childlike, even though she could be as fierce and frankly more outspoken than most of the women he had surrounded himself with after his divorce.
He continued to look thoughtfully at Izzy, his thoughts cloaked by dark eyes that were adept at expressing as much or as little as he thought appropriate. Right now, he had no intention of expressing an iota of what was going through his head.
Izzy and Rosa had bonded and from that bond could come some very useful information. Slowly but surely, he was beginning to flesh out the bigger story of what life for his daughter was like with Bianca.
He had never wanted to play dirty, and had refrained from doing anything that conceivably could jeopardise his relationship with Rosa, but with the threat of having to fight to keep his daughter in the country the tides were beginning to turn.
If information could land in his lap without him having to do anything that involved Rosa feeling that she might be taking sides, then who was he to walk away from it?
And if that information could come via Izzy, with her clear, blue eyes and halting shyness, then why not encourage that conduit?
Solution-based as he was, Gabriel saw nothing wrong with his tactics. He would encourage confidences. Why not? He would see how things played out between them. Certainly that kiss advertised a chemistry that sparked, and so what if he used that chemistry to get to where he wanted to go? No hardship there. They were two adults. One thing might very well lead to another, and pillow talk could prove very rewarding.
He thought of that one thing leading to another and felt himself involuntarily harden in immediate and pleasurable response.
‘I know that,’ Izzy confided in a broken, halting voice. ‘Not that it felt much like a lucky escape at the time.’ No, it was devastating to realise that she had been wanted for what she had and not who she was.
‘A broken heart,’ Gabriel inserted, ‘is never easy to deal with.’
‘And you should know, I guess.’ Izzy shot him a sympathetic look. ‘Considering you’re divorced. I’ll bet you’ve suffered a lot more than I have.’
Gabriel stiffened, automatically primed to repulse any attempt by anyone to ask about his private life. He didn’t deal in explanations and he had never met any woman who dared encroach beyond the No Trespass signs which were always glaringly in place.
But a bigger picture was taking shape, stampeding over the ridiculous tightness in his chest at her story, and he knew that letting his guard down for once in his life would be a small price to pay.
He nodded curtly. ‘Divorce is never pleasant,’ he muttered.
‘No, I can’t imagine it is,’ Izzy murmured. ‘I’m sorry for you that it seems to have ended on such an acrimonious note, but I guess love and hate are just opposite sides of the same coin.’
Gabriel grunted.
‘You don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Nothing to talk about,’ he said and shifted, veiling his expression further. ‘I prefer not to dwell on what’s gone. Always more profitable living in the present and looking towards the future.’
‘That’s exactly what I came here to do,’ Izzy admitted, sounding rueful.
‘Until you became embroiled in the saga of the cottage and your mother’s nanny...’
‘Until that happened.’ Izzy lowered her eyes and Gabriel could see the steady pulse in her neck, the gentle flush creeping into her cheeks. With some sixth sense he knew that she was torn between wanting to pursue a conversation about the cottage and not wanting to break the tremulous accord between them.
She looked up. For a split second their eyes met and held, and he smiled. There was a reason why she didn’t want to ruin the electricity that had sprung up between them, and he had to concede that she wasn’t on her own here. He was enjoying this sizzle of excitement, an undercurrent of tantalising, shimmering possibilities. That kiss had opened a Pandora’s box and he, for one, had no intention of trying to shut it.
But neither was he going to make a play for her. He would let her come to him.
