Wear My Ring: The Secret Wedding Dress / The Millionaire's Marriage Claim. Элли Блейк
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elevator travel.
‘Now back to your name—’
‘It’s a family name,’ he said, rubbing his fingers across the stiff back of his neck.
‘Mother’s side? Father’s?’
‘Aren’t you hot?’
Paige blinked her big blue bedroom eyes at him and wrapped herself tighter in the cosy warmth of his jacket. Then she slowly shook her head.
‘The air-con’s been turned off,’ he said. ‘When did that happen?’
‘I haven’t been paying attention. But we’ll be fine here for hours. I read a book about a guy in Brussels who was stuck in a lift for like a week. Lived off detritus he dug up from the carpet. Hugh Jackman was going to play him in the movie.’ She seemed to go far away for a second before she snapped back. ‘Compared with him we have it pretty good.’
‘Hugh Jackman, or the guy in Brussels?’ Gabe asked, trying his best not to imagine being stuck in what amounted to a luxury coffin for days. ‘Don’t answer that. In fact no more talk.’
Her cheek lifted as she held back a smile. He hadn’t realised she was a sadist but she was enjoying his discomfort way too much. Proving it, she slid one foot to the wall, cocking a sexy knee in his direction, drawing her tight dress right up her thigh. Then she took a big deep breath before saying, ‘So, Nate seems like a good guy. Great hair. And that dimple? Adorable!’
Gabe clenched his teeth so hard he was sure he heard something crack. ‘Are you kidding me?’
She blinked several times over. ‘I’m sorry, did you want me to stop asking questions about you, or to stop talking altogether?’
He raised one telling eyebrow.
She did the same, and began to swing her knee side to side, drawing his gaze to those legs. Legs that could make a grown man get on his knees and thank God he’d been born. She asked, ‘Is Nate single?’
‘My father’s,’ Gabe ground out.
She cupped a hand to her ear. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘My name comes from my father’s side.’ He checked the ceiling, wondering at what point he should kick out a panel, climb onto the roof, and shimmy up the metal cord—
‘He was a Gabriel?’
Gabe shook his head. ‘Frank.’
‘His father, then?’ Paige pressed. ‘No? His father’s best friend’s war buddy’s pet llama?’
And whether it was the fact that she was apparently willing to suffocate them both before giving up, or the way she looked so soft and smudged in her pretty bare feet and his big jacket, Gabe gave up something he’d never even shared with Nate. ‘My father’s mother was a Gabriella.’
It was a small confidence, but the surrendering of it was felt. He was more than surprised when places inside him seemed to shift to accommodate the newfound space.
Paige’s knee stopped mid-swing and her bottom lip tucked between her teeth, probably to stop herself from grinning at his namesake, but he didn’t much care. The sheen her teeth left in their wake brought on a blood rush of attraction with a vengeance. Screw it. If he was going to die here, he might as well die smiling. Eyes locked onto her mouth, he ambled her way.
She asked, ‘This was the grandmother who made sure your Doris Day knowledge was up to snuff?’
‘Amongst other things. Gabriel had come through several generations, and Gran had no brothers, so …’
‘So not a girlie name, then.’
‘Not.’ He lifted his eyes to hers, to find them darkened. As if she knew exactly what she did to his blood. And his nerves. And the tempo of his breaths. So long as she never realised she had the ability to shake things loose inside him as well.
She shook a lock of hair from her face and the knot tumbled free over one shoulder. ‘Well, I think it’s … sweet.’
‘Do you, now?’
‘Sweet as pie. Sweeter than how my name came about.’ She laughed, but there was no humour in it. And when she frowned and looked down at her bare toes curling and uncurling against the floor Gabe stopped in his tracks.
He wasn’t adept at deep and meaningfuls. In fact they had the tendency to bring him out in hives. But stuck in the lift, their personal space overlapping, it simply felt decent to ask. ‘How’s that?’
Several beats pulsed between them before she flicked her hair from her eyes again and said, ‘Dad was a cricketer. International. Away eighty per cent of the year. Mum figured he’d be away when I was born—which he was. So, in an effort to include him in my birth, she gave him the job of naming me. Carte blanche.’
Her voice was even, but he felt the cool in her as she spoke. Saw the chips of ice in her warm blue eyes. They echoed inside him, banging painfully against the raw edges of the new space there.
‘Want to know who I was named after?’ Paige’s shoulders lifted as she wrapped her arms tighter around herself, and flicked her hair again.
‘More than life itself.’
She laughed even as she frowned at herself for doing so, the husky sound washing over his skin like waves of warmth. ‘The maid who’d turned down his bed at the hotel when he’d got the phone call.’
God. What a prick. Instinct had Gabe wanting to run his thumb across the vertical lines above her nose. Circumspection had him pressing his feet hard into the floor.
She tucked the wayward lock behind her ear. ‘I think Mum had been hoping to rouse some kind of connection in him. Hoping it would encourage him home more. To us.’
‘Did it work?’
Her smile remained, only now it was bittersweet. ‘Not so much. He cheated any chance he got, and she scrubbed the kitchen till it shone. Until one day she had enough, and asked for a divorce. He had the gall to be shocked. And even while she took him for plenty, he left her broken.’ She shook out her shoulders, and scraped her teeth along her tongue as if trying to get rid of a bad taste in her mouth. ‘Anyway. Bygones.’
Bygones, Gabe thought. Things we pretend don’t matter any more. But sweeping them under the rug only creates a lump to be tripped over time and again. He pushed the thought away.
‘Do you see him much? Your dad?’
‘Never. Mum and I are pretty close, though. She’s a good woman, way more forgiving than I could ever be. Yours?’
He should have seen it coming, but he’d been concentrating so hard on Paige the question came out of left field. And he was caught, looking into her big blue bedroom eyes, all liquid, hurting, wanting, patient.
He could practically feel his heart beating in his neck as the words spilled from his lips. ‘They died when I was young. My gran raised me.’
‘Gran Gabriella,’ she said, nodding, even smiling a little, as if the pieces of him slipped into place.
‘She was an amazing woman. Tough. Stubborn. Thank God too. I was a wild kid. Impatient. First to climb the tree. Fastest to the top of the hill. She had a choice to either let me go feral or guide me with a firm hand. All of my focus I owe to her.’
‘Is she in Melbourne still?’
‘She passed several years back. Right about the time my career took off. It broke my heart that she wasn’t around to see it.’ As he breathed out he felt another shift, this one so significant he could practically feel air swirling inside him in the place where he’d harboured that regret for so long.
Paige’s next breath out was long and slow, as if she too was letting things go. He could have kissed her for leaving it there. Hell, he could have kissed her either way. Her hair falling in wisps