Assignment: Baby

‘Couldn’t you break it?’

Silently, Gabriel cursed his absent brother. It went against the grain to beg a favour from anyone, let alone from Tess Gordon with her frosty Scottish voice and her disapproving expression, but he was desperate. There was no way he was going to be left alone with that baby.

‘Look, I know it’s a lot to ask,’ he went on, forcing the words out, ‘but I need help. I can’t manage Harry on my own. I’ve never even held a baby before.’

The edge of desperation in his voice couldn’t help but strike a chord with Tess, but she hardened her heart, remembering how quick he had been to disclaim any responsibility for Harry at first. He hadn’t exactly been supportive then, had he?

‘You must have friends who could help you,’ she said.

‘I don’t know anyone else in London,’ said Gabriel. ‘I’ve only been here a month.’

‘Oh?’ Tess thought of the newspaper in the bin under her desk. ‘I did hear somewhere that you knew Fionnula Jenkins,’ she said pointedly.

‘Not well enough to ask her to give up her evening and a whole night to take care of a strange baby.’

‘You don’t know me very well, but you’re asking me to do it.’

‘That’s different.’ Gabriel glowered at her lack of logic. ‘You work for me.’

‘I’m your personal assistant, not a nanny!’

‘Yes, and it would assist me personally if you helped me look after this baby tonight.’

Tess put up her chin. She wasn’t going to be bullied into this! ‘I’m sorry,’ she said firmly, ‘but I—’

‘I’ll pay you overtime, of course,’ Gabriel interrupted her, switching tactics. ‘Double the usual rate,’ he added cunningly.

It was a masterly stroke. Fatally, Tess hesitated. She had been wondering how she was going to find the money to help Andrew out of his difficulties, and now here was an opportunity to earn some extra cash, without the need to grovel to Gabriel for a pay rise that he would almost certainly refuse.

Could she really afford to turn it down?

‘I don’t know any more about babies than you do,’ she said, but Gabriel could tell she was weakening and he pressed home his advantage.

‘You can’t know less,’ he said. ‘Come on, Tess, you can’t leave me on my own with him.’

When she thought about how prepared he had been to leave her on her own with Harry, Tess longed to be able to tell him that she most certainly could, but then she made the mistake of looking down at the baby. His face was puckering with misery, and she bent instinctively to pick him up. The poor wee mite had already been abandoned once today. She couldn’t walk away and abandon him again.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE sighed. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll help you—but help is the operative word.’ Lifting her chin, she met Gabriel’s gaze with a challenging expression in her clear brown eyes. ‘I’m not looking after him all by myself. You’re going to have to do your share.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Gabriel, too relieved to object to any conditions. Anything was better than being left on his own with the baby. ‘We’ll take him to my apartment,’ he went on quickly, before she had a chance to change her mind. ‘I can drive you home to get whatever you need for the night, and then we can go straight on.’

He was all set to hustle her off there and then, but things were happening a bit too quickly for Tess’s liking. ‘We could do with some advice first,’ she prevaricated, not sure she was ready to be swept off to Gabriel’s apartment just yet. She might have agreed to help him, but there seemed to be a lot of things they hadn’t discussed yet, and she wanted to be clear just what it was she had agreed to do.

‘I thought you said all the agencies would be closed?’ said Gabriel, frowning.

‘I’m not talking about ringing an agency. I’ve got a friend who had a baby earlier this year. Since neither of us know what we’re doing, I think it would be worth giving her a ring—if that’s OK with you, of course,’ she couldn’t resist adding with an innocent look that didn’t fool Gabriel for a moment. ‘I know you don’t like us making personal phone calls,’ she reminded him virtuously.

‘Yes, yes, get on with it!’ snapped Gabriel, thinking that staff phone calls were the least of his problems right now.

To his horror, he found the baby thrust into his arms as Tess reached across the desk to twist the phone round to face her. She had Bella’s number on the phone’s memory, but since she had just reminded Gabriel about his threatened crack-down on personal calls, she decided it would be wiser not to draw attention to it. That meant looking it up in her diary, which was something she rarely had to do with all the technology at her fingertips, and laboriously dialling the number in full.

Not that Gabriel was likely to have noticed. He had followed her to the desk, clearly in case he had to hand Harry quickly back, and was holding him awkwardly at arm’s length, eyeing him with a mixture of trepidation and appalled fascination. Tess wouldn’t have believed that anyone could look more uncomfortable with a baby than her, but Gabriel managed it easily.

The ruthless arrogance had been wiped from his face now he’d been presented with a baby, she noticed with some amusement. In his shirt sleeves, with his tie askew where he had been tugging at it in frustration, he seemed younger and much more approachable all of a sudden.

That had to be an illusion, thought Tess sourly. She had never met anyone less approachable than Gabriel Stearne. He was cold, unscrupulous, and completely out of touch with the people who worked for him, whom he treated with a blend of indifference and contempt.

And this was the man she was going to spend the evening with, she reminded herself with a sinking heart.

Oh, well, she thought, she would just have to keep thinking of the money.

Perching on the front of her desk, she listened to the busy beeping in her ear as the phone connected and watched Gabriel jiggle the baby nervously up and down. For a moment, Harry looked unsure whether he liked it or not and, as his face screwed up, Tess held her breath, waiting for the outraged wail that she was sure would follow.

But Harry didn’t cry. He dissolved without warning into a gummy and quite irresistible smile which left Gabriel completely nonplussed. Tess saw astonishment, relief and perplexity chasing themselves across his face, swiftly succeeded by a kind of baffled pride at the baby’s unexpected reaction to his handling, before he smiled instinctively back at Harry.

Tess nearly fell off the desk. It was like running up to someone you thought you knew and finding yourself face to face with a perfect stranger. She had never seen Gabriel smile before—she had never even imagined him smiling—and she was caught off guard by the way the cold eyes lit with humour and the stern mouth relaxed, creasing his cheeks and revealing teeth that were strong and very white against his dark features.

Her heart jerked suddenly in her chest. If Gabriel had been taken aback by Harry’s smile, it was nothing to her own reaction to his, and she hoped her own expression wasn’t as easy to read. She felt jarred and breathless, and it was some moments before she realised that a puzzled voice was speaking in her ear.

‘Hello…? Hello? Who is this?’

‘Bella!’ Tess jerked her gaze away from Gabriel and recollected herself with an effort. ‘It’s Tess.’

‘Tess!’ cried Bella in carrying tones. ‘I haven’t heard from you for ages! How’s the boss from hell?’

‘Standing right beside me,’ said Tess thinly. She didn’t dare look at Gabriel. Had he heard Bella or not?

As succinctly as she could, she explained the situation to her friend, but it wasn’t easy with Bella exclaiming and interposing irrelevant questions, and it took Tess some time to get her to the point. Once, she risked a glance at Gabriel, who raised a sardonic eyebrow. He had heard all right.

‘Just tell us what to do, Bella,’ she said hastily. ‘Harry’s grandmother said that we would have everything we needed under the pram, but I might as well be looking under the bonnet of a car. There’s a whole lot of stuff there, but I’ve got no idea how any of it works.’

Responding to her frantic gesture, Gabriel pushed the pram nearer, so Tess could describe the various packets and bits of equipment that had been packed onto the lower rack.

‘Hmm.’ Bella considered. ‘How old is this baby?’

Tess covered the receiver with her hand, although since Gabriel had clearly already heard both sides of the conversation it seemed a little late for discretion. ‘How old is Harry?’ she asked him.

‘How do I know?’ he replied unhelpfully.

The ‘boss from hell’ jibe was still rankling, and he was annoyed to find that he had been distracted by the way Tess was leaning against her desk. She was wearing the same discreetly elegant grey suit she always wore, the same sensible court shoes, but she looked somehow different. Had she always had legs like that? Gabriel wondered. And, if so, how was it that he had never noticed them before?

‘A baby is a baby, isn’t it?’ he added crossly, hoping that Tess hadn’t noticed him staring.

‘Apparently not,’ she said, holding onto her own temper with an effort. It wasn’t easy to concentrate on what Bella was saying when she could feel him frowning at her. Obviously Bella’s comment hadn’t gone down well.

Tough. Tess tried to convince herself that she didn’t care. It wouldn’t do Gabriel any harm to realise what they all thought of him, although the timing was less than ideal, she had to admit. If he had to learn how much she disliked him, it might have been better if it hadn’t been just before they had to spend the entire night together!