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“You’re way off base, Ms. Bauer.” He hadn’t called her by her last name since the first day she’d interviewed with him.
Heat rose in her cheeks. “You think I don’t know that?” Talk about twisting the knife till blood gushed.
“I’ve never proposed marriage to a woman before, and thought this the ideal place.”
Marriage—
The cup slipped from her hands, spilling some of the coffee on her blouse.
“S-sorry I’m so clumsy,” she stammered as she dabbed at the stain with a napkin. “I must have misunderstood what you just said.”
“You mean about my asking you to be my wife?” His hand covered hers, stilling it.
“You’re joking of course—”
“I never joke.”
She knew that.
His was a serious nature, even brooding. The man worked harder than anyone she knew, and expected the same from the people around him. She doubted he had a frivolous bone in that tall, powerful body she found undeniably appealing.
Sometimes she glimpsed a mystifying streak of melancholy that tore at her heartstrings. After their conversation last night, she thought she understood part of the reason for it.
“You don’t marry someone when you’re not in love,” Andrea whispered, struggling to find her voice.
“We like each other.” He inserted the irrefutable fact in the same way he made a polarizing comment at a board meeting, inevitably silencing everyone. “All you have to do is remember last night to know it’s true.”
Last night…
She hadn’t been able to think about anything else. It had haunted her dreams and made her so restless she’d wanted to steal to his room and beg him to make love to her.
“Who’s to say ‘like’ isn’t preferable to love that can twist and torture the soul.” Gabe’s rhetorical question was proof his parents’ divorce had crippled him emotionally, just as she’d thought.
“Admit we have an excellent working relationship, Andrea. We know each other better than anyone else. I don’t recall us ever having a serious disagreement. There’s no doubt we’re sexually compatible.” The thumb caressing her palm was sending little darts of awareness through her system.
“You’re crazy!” As if she’d just been stung, she pulled her hand away. Beyond pain, she said, “I’ve worked with you long enough to know Gabe Corbin never does anything without it being part of a grand design.”
He sat back. “That’s true.”
She eyed him frankly. “What’s the real reason you’ve picked on me to enter into a loveless marriage?”
After subjecting her to an intimate appraisal he said, “I’m not about to allow you to throw away your chance to give birth to your own child if I can help it. We’ll make it our top priority.”
They were back to a discussion of her female problem. “You want to give me a baby—” she mocked.
“Barring unforeseen circumstances, yes, I’d like to give you a child. I want us to marry so that you can have our baby.”
She sprang to her feet and put her fists on the edge of the table. “What’s going on?” she demanded. “And don’t tell me you want to do this for me out of the kindness of your heart! What’s in it for you?” By now her curvaceous five-foot-five body was leaning toward him.
Lines darkened his features making him look all of his thirty-six years. “A way to atone for my sins,” he answered in a gravelly voice.
It never failed that when Andrea asked him a pointed question, he always came back with an unexpected answer that confounded her. This one reached a spot deep in her soul and she quietly sat down. “What sins?”
“When I left St. Pierre for college, Jeanne-Marie, one of the girls from the island, came to my apartment in New York.”
Andrea knew there had to be a Jeanne-Marie-whatever-her-last name-was somewhere in his past.
“She claimed she hadn’t wanted me to leave home and was hoping I would marry her.”
If anyone understood what it was like to love Gabe, Andrea did. The heartbroken girl would have been in agony to watch him walk out of her life.
“That was a ludicrous announcement on her part since Jeanne-Marie and I had no past together. She knew there could never be a future.
“The truth is, we slept together one time. I’m not proud of the fact that I had a one-night stand, but I did and marriage was the last thing on my mind where she or any woman was concerned.
“I told her to go back to St. Pierre. Later on I received a call from my father that she was going to marry my brother Yves.”
The picture was getting clearer. When Jeanne-Marie couldn’t have Gabe, she chose the next best thing.
“It pained me to realize I’d been with a woman my brother loved enough to marry. He deserved to know the truth about Jeanne-Marie and me before things went any further, so I made plans to fly back to the island to talk to him. But my father told me something that changed my life.”
Andrea had a premonition where this was leading. Her eyes closed tightly and she sat back down in her chair.
“He said she’d just suffered a miscarriage. Though everyone thought it was Yves’s baby, he knew differently, meaning I was the father. My father suggested that for Yves’s happiness, it might be wise if I never came back.”
“Gabe—” Gut wrenching pain tore through her. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve never been home since?”
Emotion darkened his eyes until she couldn’t see any silver. “I flew in the day my grandmother was buried, but waited till night to visit her grave. Grand-père was there alone. We talked until first light, then I left the island.”
She shook her head, aghast to think of his being estranged from his family all these years. “Why didn’t Jeanne-Marie tell you she was pregnant when she came to see you?” her voice trembled.
“The night we were together I took precautions which let her know I didn’t want there to be any consequences. She was probably afraid to tell me she’d gotten pregnant.”
“But it was your baby!” Andrea said emotionally. “You had a right to know.”
He folded his powerful arms. “I agree. However at eighteen who’s thinking clearly?”
“You were, otherwise you wouldn’t have left home to follow your dreams.”
“I got out of there because I couldn’t stand to see the pain in my father’s eyes after he and mother divorced.”
Andrea believed him, but whether he realized it at the time or not, she knew other forces had been at work prompting him to fulfill his destiny.
“I’m so sorry, Gabe.” She wished there were a better word besides sorry to convey her feelings. “I— I still don’t understand how marrying me would help you atone for your sins.”
He sucked in his breath, “You haven’t lived with my guilt. Jeanne-Marie needed me and I rejected her.”
“You wouldn’t have, if she’d been truthful with you!”
A wintry smile came and went. “Thank you for defending me, but it doesn’t relieve me of blame. I slept with her when I didn’t love her.”
“She sought you out because she was willing, Gabe. That makes her share equally in the blame.”
“Maybe,” he conceded, “but if I’d married her, she might not have had the miscarriage.”
Her heart ached for him. “You’re beating yourself up for something you were helpless to rectify without knowing all the facts.”
He shook his dark head. “None of that matters now. Our baby didn’t survive, and there’s been no way for me to make restitution. When you came to me yesterday morning, I sensed your desperation and realized there was something I could do for you before it’s too late.”
She averted her eyes.
“Knowing what was at stake, I admired your honesty in not using Bret who was obviously ready and willing to make you his wife, something I wasn’t prepared to do for Jeanne-Marie…” His voice trailed. “I believe we could make a marriage work, Andrea. We have no secrets, only the hope of getting you pregnant.”
Andrea looked up at him again. His eyes shone with an intensity she’d never seen before. If she didn’t miss her guess, he wanted a baby to replace the one his father had told him he’d lost.
Her stomach clenched because she was holding back a lie of her own by not revealing that she was in love with him. But how could she open up to him? He wasn’t asking for her love any more than he’d asked for Jeanne-Marie’s…
“I’m far from perfect, Gabe.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders, drawing her attention to the movement of rock-hard muscles beneath his T-shirt. “Our relationship would be built on honesty, not perfection.
“What I’m proposing is that we get married immediately and try to get you pregnant as quickly as possible.”
“And if I don’t conceive?” she challenged. His cold-blooded approach to something as sacred as marriage angered her.
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes.”
“You mean divorce.”
After a pause, “Only if it’s what we both want.”
He was too shrewd an entrepreneur not to leave himself a loophole. Oh Gabe—you’re so transparent. He might just as well have pushed her off a cliff. A heart could only take so much.
“There is one condition. For fathering our baby and bestowing my worldly goods on the two of you for the rest of our lives, you would have to agree to it.”
She knew there had to be a condition! In fact she’d been waiting for the other shoe to fall.
If she were to marry him and they divorced, naturally he wouldn’t be ecstatic about parting with half of those worldly goods which included a billion dollars or more.
Andrea couldn’t comprehend that amount of money any more than she could comprehend the damage done to him by his parents and Jeanne-Marie.
“Beyond a healthy respect for the way you’ve made your money by the sweat of your brow, I would never want to have your wealth. The responsibility would be…frightening.”
“I’m well aware of that,” came the surprising rejoinder. “When you’re in my position of having lived hand-to-mouth before making a fortune, you acquire a sixth sense about people. I’ve learned to choose my associates carefully.”
He subjected her to an intense regard. “If you had been a gold-digger, you would never have made it through our first interview.”
A shiver ran down her spine. She imagined many women, ambitious and otherwise, had tried without success to pierce his impregnable armor. How could they know a scarred soul lived inside such a successful man?
“Don’t you want to know what my condition is?”
She shivered.
When Bret had started dating her, he’d told her there was a ruthless side to Gabe’s nature. Otherwise he wouldn’t have become a billionaire by the time he was thirty-six.
Andrea had laughed off the comment because she’d never witnessed that trait in Gabe. Though he’d always been somewhat aloof, everyone in the company admired him. He treated his employees fairly and cared about them. The man commanded the highest respect from people worldwide.
But she’d seen multiple sides of him since coming to Paris and felt no urge to laugh. In fact she was in a state of absolute panic because she could feel herself caving even though she knew he wasn’t capable of loving her or any woman.
“Gabe—”
“I’m going home to St. Pierre.”
She blinked. “You mean you want to take me with you for a visit?”
“No. It’ll be for good. Yves and Jeanne-Marie now have two teenage children, I’m no longer a threat to their marriage. I miss the sea…and home.”
“But your company—”
“I’m selling it and funneling the money into a perpetual fund for the welfare of the island which has been in economic crisis for years.”
He was giving away his billion dollars? Just like that? “When did you make this decision?”
“A long time ago. Since my family wouldn’t let me help them financially, I had to find another way to do it. The point is, I always intended to go back, and have stayed in touch with my grandfather.
“However since my grandmother’s death, he has been depressed. To make matters worse, his friend from childhood, Gorka Zubeldia, who lived next door passed away recently. His widow Karmele is planning to move to the Pyrenees any day now to join their son.”
“So you weren’t the only son to leave the island.”
He flashed her another penetrating glance. “No. When Grand-père told me that news, I had my realtor buy the Zubeldia’s house for me without Grand-père’s knowledge. It has possibilities.”
“Possibilities? In other words, it will need a lot of work.”
His lips twitched. The sight was so rare, it was hard not to stare. “Until it’s vacant, we’ll stay with Grand-père. I’m hoping my return will raise his spirits and help him to enjoy the years he has left. The Corbins are known for their longevity. He’s only eighty-one.”
She studied Gabe for a long moment. He seemed to have planned everything down to the last detail. It was all going so fast. “He has no idea you’re coming, does he.”
“No. But the day I left St. Pierre, my grandparents told me their door would always be open. That has never changed over the years. The house holds many choice memories for me.
“Nevertheless it’s an isolated world, Andrea, and in some ways very harsh. Naturally I’m going to keep enough money in trust for you and our child so that if anything happened to me, you would be taken care of.
“But I’m speaking of the total picture, of the fog and the interminable ice and cold of winter. Few outsiders can make it in such an insular society of people who tend to stick to their own and draw their livelihood from the sea.
“But it’s my home. If I had a child, that’s where I would want to raise it. No son or daughter of mine is going to grow up any differently than I did.”
What an extraordinary man he was.
“Except for my father and grandfather, the family doesn’t know the real reason I never came home again. They believe I’m a traitor who left the island because hard times hit economically.
