The Secret Spanish Love-Child by Cathy Williams Page A

coming to a smooth halt in the airfield.
    Between the cluster of other small planes, against which his gleaming black jet stood out like a sore thumb, he could see his parents’ driver waiting behind the fence.
    ‘Alonso has come to meet us—’ he turned to Alex, who was looking uncertainly around her as if waiting for the cap-tain’s voice to come across the tannoy telling her that she could safely unclasp her seat belt and disembark ‘—so you can put your nerves on hold temporarily.’
    ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Alex mumbled, finally galvanising her body into action and turning her attention to Luke, who was busily occupying himself in her arms, making plane-like noises and pretending to give orders to an imaginary crew.
    ‘My turn will come,’ Gabriel said dryly. ‘When I confront your family and get beaten to death by your brothers.’ His fabulous dark eyes met hers and she gave him a reluctant smile.
    ‘I can’t imagine you being nervous.’
    ‘Good,’ he drawled, tipping her face up to his before she could begin leaving the plane. ‘I like that.’
    That was so typically Gabriel, even the Gabriel she used to know, that she laughed and he felt his breath catch in his throat. With driving intensity, he focused on her soft, full lips, her pearly white teeth and then the nervous way her fingers raked through her short hair as she tuned in to his wavelength. For a second, the rest of the world disappeared.
    Alex’s breath caught in her throat and, when he reached out to brush a strand of hair from her face, she inhaled sharply before turning away with a slight stumble. She was horrified to find that she hadn’t wanted that sudden electric connection to end and if it had to end, she had wanted it to end with him kissing her. How could she have so completely forgotten the nerve-racking present in favour of a treacherous, erotic fantasy?Luke had stopped the random twirling of his toy plane and was now contorting his little body in her arms so that he could stare directly into her eyes.
    Flushed with guilt, Alex dropped him to his feet as soon as they were on the tarmac and her polite chit-chat about the heat dried up as she saw him reach out and unconsciously slip his tiny hand in his father’s.
    Above his curly dark head, Gabriel’s eyes met hers and there was a moment of wordless communication before she looked away.
    The long black limo waiting for them rescued her from dwelling on her nerves as it was a source of boundless fascination for Luke in a way the plane had failed to excite him. While she grappled with the ever advancing and dreaded meeting with Gabriel’s parents, he squirmed and investigated everything there was to investigate in the car, from the little drinks bar to the dark windows to the various high-tech gadgets, there to make life more comfortable for the average billionaire. In the process, he babbled a running commentary on nothing in particular, peppering random insights into some of the other children in his pre-school class with a hundred questions about what in the car did what and why.
    ‘He seems highly intelligent,’ Gabriel remarked, looking at Alex, and, for the first time since they had stepped into the limo, she gave him a genuinely warm smile.
    ‘I think that’s called parental bias.’
    With a mere forty minutes left before they reached his parents’ impressive mansion on the outskirts of the city, Gabriel determined to employ distraction tactics. There was no way that he wanted Alex to be on the defensive when she met his parents. It would be a sure fire way of ensuring that the two weeks spent with them was a crashing failure. He hadn’t been able to gauge the level of his parents’ disappointment with the abrupt change of wedding plans via a phone call but he wasbanking on severe. Nor had he been able to decipher the depth of their shock at what he had had to tell them a scant twenty-four hours previously but he was also betting on severe. To add a