Abby remained staring at the closed door for several minutes. She marvelled that the life that had absorbed every ounce of her being for close to two years could disappear as quickly as it had. Gabriel’s personality was so huge that he seemed to leave a physical void behind him.
He wasn’t going to reappear. He’d be gone for the remainder of the day, and he was going to remain gone so that, by the time he next stepped foot into his office, there would be no risk of seeing her still there.
Even so, Abby worked fast to complete everything she felt should be done in record time.
She’d made a couple of acquaintances at the office and, in due course, she would get in touch and paper over her hurried resignation with some fabricated story, but for now only Rita would know that she was leaving, and Rita was as silent as the grave.
‘You’ll have to find someone as quickly as possible to replace me,’ Abby told her. ‘Someone...who...well...’
‘Someone who can cope with him.’ Rita smiled, understanding completely, but not pressing her for an explanation.
That hurt, because it reminded Abby of how well she and Gabriel had worked together, and in the end how well they had played together. She had to fight down the temptation to burst into tears.
‘He can be difficult,’ she said, ‘But he’s never unkind and he’s always fair. You’ll just need to get someone with...stamina.’ Which was something she’d thought she had until he’d got under her skin and burrowed into her heart.
She was mentally washed out by the time she returned to her house and the enthusiasm to do anything at all had gone. She couldn’t be bothered to search for jobs on the Internet. She could scarcely be bothered to fix herself something to eat.
She wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear for a few hours. Or days or weeks...
Should she have let him kiss her? One last touch before the big goodbye? She dwelled on what it would have been like to feel his lips on hers one last time. She went to sleep wondering where she could find the inner strength to deal with the fact that she would never see him again.
Find it she would, because she had no choice, but after a week of distracted job-hunting and far too many lie-ins Abby admitted defeat and decided that she would take herself down to her parents’. They were on their cruise. She would have the house to herself and maybe, away from the hustle and bustle of London, she would be able to get her act together. There was no great rush to get a job, as she had ample savings which she had been putting aside for a deposit on a place or a rainy day. This certainly qualified as a rainy day, as far as she was concerned.
And maybe she wouldn’t bother returning to London. There was no need to, was there? She could look for something locally, or maybe further afield in Exeter. She would be able to afford to buy a lot more down there than in the capital.
She would be miles away from Gabriel with no possibility of ever running into him by chance.
And her broken heart would be given the space to heal.
CHAPTER TEN
ABBYSTARTEDTOthe sound of the doorbell just as she had slipped into her pyjamas. It was going to be another early night but that was what deep, dark country living did to someone trying to piece together a broken heart. Outside, there were no street lights to illuminate the twisting road off which her parents’ house sat, squat, square and reassuringly familiar.
After ten days out here, she had finally got up the courage to tell her parents that she had quit her job and was now back in Somerset. She’d had no choice because sooner or later someone from the small village would have emailed them. Returning to her tiny home town was great when it came to wrapping herself up in the comfort blanket of what she knew, but terrible when it came to hiding out.
For a few seconds, she debated whether she should get the door or else just pretend that she wasn’t in, except that was something else that was impossible to achieve in a small home-town—invisibility. If she wasn’t in the house, thenwhere was she?
Not to answer the door would have been to risk a search party being dispatched to try and seek her out.
So off she went, detouring to sling her dressing gown over the drab pyjamas, because she hadn’t been able to bring herself to put on anything sexier.
There was no peep hole through which she could identify an uninvited guest.
She opened the door a fraction, because London had taught her to be careful when it came to doorbells pinging at nine-thirty in the evening.
Leather shoes, patent and expensive. Trousers, grey andunspeakablyexpensive. A hand shoved into one of the trouser pockets, distorting it. Abby’s eyes lingered on that hand, the way the dark hair curled round the dull matt of a steel watch.
Everything in her head was adding up to the identity of her caller, yet she refused to believe what her eyes were telling, her because the last person she expected to see standing on the doorstep of her parents’ house was Gabriel.
Gabriel could read what was going through her head. Like everything else, every other detail quietly stored away over time, this was just another one of those little things that should have pointed to the direction in which his emotions were going. He knew her. He knew her without even realising that he knew her—just as she knew him—and that was something he’d found out in the eerie quiet of his office, with his efficient replacement PA whose presence only served to remind him of the woman who was no longer there. He’d caught himself missing Abby’s smile, the way she could read what he was going to say, thewayshe was.He’d been so sure of himself, so naively convinced that he was invulnerable when it came to falling in love, sobloody stupid.
She was still half-hiding behind the door. With utter shock and the dizzying sensation that soon the ground was going to give way under her feet, Abby finally raised disbelieving eyes to his face and her heart stood still. He had been on her mind every second of every minute of every day, yet how was it that she had failed to remember just how stunningly beautiful he was? How tall? How sinfully sexy? He was smiling that crooked little smile that made her toes curl and her tummy lurch.
How dared he land on her doorstep with that smile?
Abby stiffened and moved slightly to bar him further from entering the house.
‘You,’ she said coldly. ‘What are you doing here?’
