Bella would be returning over his dead body.
He continued to look thoughtfully at the pair of them, utterly absorbed in what they were doing, as close as conspirators plotting.
He hadn’t asked Izzy anything. Hadn’t engineered the conversation in any direction. He had backed off because they were lovers now and, while she certainly played it cool, made it clear that she wasn’t in it for anything long term, he was still uneasy with the notion of outright exploiting their situation.
For once, his motto ‘the end justifies the means’didn’t seem entirely appropriate. A conscience he’d been unaware of had made itself felt.
That said, she had talked, soft, lazy and drowsy when good sex had blurred the edges and lowered any qualms she might have had when it came to confiding. In between the titbits about how she and Rosa spent their time when he was working—the home baking, the den making and the paper-boat racing—he had learnt some rather interesting facts about his daughter’s life when he wasn’t around.
Bianca seemingly was around far less than she made out. There were lots of trips abroad. He had already got one of his people to tabulate just when those trips had occurred, for how long and with whom?
School was an institution randomly adhered to, with Rosa being removed for things as trivial as manicures and pedicures. What six-year-old needs a manicure? He had barely been able to contain his fury. As with the trips abroad, he had compiled a dossier on all those pointless visits.
No wonder Bella had settled into home schooling. Rosa would need it, judging from her sketchy class attendance.
There had also been men back at the house and, whilst Gabriel did not expect his ex-wife to be a paragon of celibate virtue, he wondered at just how cavalier she was when it came to inviting them back. This last item he had found out from Rosa, who had casually chatted about some man having lunch there.
It had taken every iota of willpower not to get on the phone and lay all his information at his dear ex-wife’s door. However, he would play a waiting game. He would garner his facts and he would plan his manoeuvres. There was nothing to be gained from undue haste.
And, in the meantime, his conscience was clear. On every front, he had played it fair and square. He hadn’t prised information from Izzy, hadn’t asked questions and had been upfront so that, when the time came for them to bid farewell, it would be done without room for accusations about promises made but not delivered.
On the subject of the cottage? The topic had been raised in a roundabout manner just the once and he had skilfully diverted the conversation because, really, business was business. Maybe he would take her on a sightseeing tour of some of the more desirable places in the valley, open her eyes to where life could be perfectly liveable for a woman in her late seventies.
Right now, though...
On so many levels, things were going much better than he could ever have anticipated. He began moving towards them. One week, he decided, and he would have to move on. He would start the ball rolling by telling Bianca that Bella’s services would no longer be required and should she throw a hissy fit... Well, this time round she might find that she couldn’t hold a man to ransom when he’d stockpiled sufficient ammunition.
Izzy discovered that she was becoming adept at putting off thinking about when the end of this strange relationship with Gabriel was going to come.
She had agreed to be Bella’s replacement in good faith. She had seen it as a way of inserting herself into his routine, finding opportunities to persuade him that he must not buy the land to increase his holdings, must not pull the house out from under Evelyn’s feet. On site, she’d reasoned, she would be able to work away at him, dismantle his plans bit by bit, or at leasttry.
But they had become lovers a week ago and since then she had broached the subject of the cottage once, and he had had nothing to say on the subject. He had shrugged, told her something vague about tallying up the costs of ditching the project, waffled on for a couple of minutes about the difficulties of stopping the tide once the barriers have been raised and then promptly changed the subject.
And she had let him because she had fallen under his spell. The minutes, the hours, the days... She was drifting on a cloud and she didn’t want to spoil things by bringing reality into the equation.
She’d thought that he would continue to devote his time to his work but she had been surprised at the alacrity with which he’d conceded when she had sternly told him that he needed to come with her and Rosa to all the stuff she’d lined up.
Bella would be back soon enough, she’d said, and he’d looked at her without saying anything for a while, then lowered those fabulous eyes of his and agreed.
Since then, they’d been to a medieval-themed castle winery that had all the atmosphere of a sorcerer’s castle with its moat and drawbridge and towers and ramparts, and a torture chamber that Rosa had adored. They’d been ice-skating at a rink which was open all year round, and they’d been apple-picking and sampled home-made ice-cream from a legendary ice-cream shop in Sebastopol.
Everything in this part of the world felt lazy, and the vastness of the scenery helped her feel as though she was living in an alien landscape, in a sort of dream world.
It disturbed her that she didn’t want any of it to end.
She gazed up at the house from where she was standing by the pool. It was a little after ten-thirty and for the first time they had been out to dinner, having Evelyn over for Rosa for the evening.
Izzy was still in her finery. Gabriel had nipped upstairs to check on Rosa, having delivered Evelyn back to her cottage.
‘Let’s have a nightcap by the pool,’ he’d suggested. ‘Rosa will be safely asleep, and we could even have a swim. There’s nothing more invigorating than having a swim at the end of a muggy day.’
Izzy strolled to one of the chairs by the side of the pool, sat down and drew her knees up to clasp her arms around them. When she tried to chart the progression of her feelings for Gabriel, she got lost along the way. How could her seething antipathy have turned into something that held her fiercely captive? How couldlusthave morphed into real feeling? Izzy didn’t want to put a name to what thatfeelingwas, but it hovered on the periphery like a flash of something caught out of the corner of the eye, gone before the brain had time to register it.
She found him exciting. Arrogant, infuriating butexciting.Even before she’d taken the job of helping with Rosa, even when she’d been gritting her teeth and wanting tohithim for the anxiety he was causing Evelyn, there had still been something about him that had begun to suck her in, something intense that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
She disapproved of him, yet she was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.
He wasn’t her type, yet her body curved to his like a flower bending to bask in the warmth of the sun.
