Assignment: Baby

‘Well, here goes!’ Tess took a deep breath and resolutely unbuttoned Harry’s little body suit.

By now, Harry was crying in earnest and wriggling alarmingly, and it took two of them to stop him squirming off the marble onto the floor while they worked out how to unfasten the nappy.

Both grimaced when it finally fell apart, and they looked at each other for a pregnant moment. Gabriel found himself staring into Tess’s eyes and noticing with an odd, detached part of his mind that they were a beautiful shade of brown, the colour of clear honey, shot through with gold. He had never really seen her eyes before, he realised. Usually they were hidden behind the spectacles she wore when she was working at the computer or taking dictation, and looking into them now for the first time he felt as if he had received a tiny electric shock.

It was an odd feeling. Even odder was the strange tightening of the air between them as they looked at each other. Afterwards, Gabriel would think it could only have lasted a second or two, but at the time it seemed as if their eyes held for an eternity, and when Tess turned back to the protesting baby he felt unaccountably jarred, even dislocated.

Brushing the sensation from his mind, Gabriel set his jaw and forced his attention back to the messy business of changing Harry’s nappy.

To Tess, it all seemed unbelievably complicated. She couldn’t understand how the mothers she had seen deftly changing babies in washrooms managed on their own. She and Gabriel had to keep stopping to refer to Bella’s instructions, and running backwards and forwards to the pram to find the various wipes and creams and spare nappies that seemed to be required.

Although she would have died rather than admit it, Tess was glad that Gabriel was there. It was a relief to discover that he was even more squeamish than she was, and by the time they had finished he was looking positively green about the gills, but his hands were very steady as he held Harry still. There was something oddly reassuring about them, Tess thought inconsequentially. They were big and square and competent, with very clean nails, and for some reason she was very conscious whenever her fingers brushed against his.

At last it was over. Harry, buttoned up again, was obviously more comfortable, and he stopped grizzling when Tess picked him up and cuddled him carefully against her shoulder. She must be getting the hang of it, she congratulated herself.

‘Thank God that’s over!’ said Gabriel, disposing of the dirty nappy with distaste, and Tess found herself nodding in sympathy as their eyes met again. There was that same puzzling charge to the air, the same sense that a smile was lurking, waiting for the slightest excuse to shimmer between them, before Tess looked quickly away, more disturbed than she wanted to admit. It wouldn’t do to start thinking that she and Gabriel had anything in common, even if it was only a squeamishness about nappies!

Fortunately, that uncomfortable sense of complicity didn’t survive the trip down to the underground car park to Gabriel’s car. Tess had frequently wondered why it took so long for friends with babies to do anything, but that evening she discovered that with a baby in tow you couldn’t simply put on your coat, pick up your bag and go.

Harry refused to be put down in his pram, so they had to take it in turns to hold him while they repacked all his stuff, switched off lights and computers, and gathered up their own things. It all took forever, and then they had to negotiate the lift with the pram. They were halfway down before Gabriel remembered the papers he needed to check that night, so they had to go back up again.

His temper was not improved when they got to the car at last and had to work out how to collapse the pram. Cursing fluently under his breath, Gabriel wrestled with knobs and levers.

‘It can’t be that difficult,’ said Tess unwisely. ‘You see mothers with these prams the whole time. They can’t all have degrees in mechanical engineering.’

‘No, and they don’t all have people hanging around making pointless remarks, either!’ Gabriel snarled, and Tess bridled.

‘There’s no need to bite my head off just because you can’t do it,’ she said coldly, forgetting her earlier resolution to keep her tongue between her teeth. ‘It’s not my fault you’re in a bad mood.’

Gabriel thought that was a matter of opinion. If she had dealt properly with Harry’s grandmother, the evening wouldn’t have turned into the unmitigated disaster it was already shaping up to be. As it was, he had been forced to beg for her help, had endured a revolting session with the baby’s nappy, and was now making an idiot of himself struggling with this cursed pram.

And all he had to look forward to was an evening spent in the company of his PA, who had made no secret of the fact that she disliked him intensely. Gabriel reckoned that Tess had plenty to do with his bad mood, but he had to content himself with casting her a filthy look as he turned back to the pram. He vented his temper instead on a lever that he had already tried more than once, jerking it savagely towards him, and the pram collapsed in one smooth motion that smacked uncannily of reproach for his excessive use of brute force.

At last they were on the way, but almost immediately found themselves in heavy traffic heading south of the river to where Tess lived. Gabriel drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as they edged forward, annoyed to find himself very aware of Tess sitting beside him.

He wished he hadn’t noticed her eyes. He wished he hadn’t noticed her legs. He wished he hadn’t noticed anything different about her, because now that he had started noticing, it was somehow difficult to stop.

There was no reason to notice her. She hadn’t done anything to attract him—quite the opposite, in fact—but Gabriel couldn’t stop his gaze sliding sideways to where she sat staring haughtily out of the window. That exasperatingly crisp competence had deserted her for once, he noted with a kind of perverse satisfaction. If nothing else, this evening so far had demonstrated that she had a healthy temper of her own beneath the poised and unflappable mask she usually wore.

It was dark outside, and in the dull light of the dashboard Gabriel could just see the fine curve of her jaw, and the corner of her mouth, compressed into a cross line. By rights, she should have had frosty blue eyes to match her manner, he thought, but Tess’s eyes hadn’t looked like that at all. They were clear and brown and dappled with gold, the eyes of someone warm and alluring, and not those of the PA who treated him with such icy civility. Gabriel was unnerved by how vividly he could picture them still.

Irritably, he flexed his shoulders. He had only looked into Tess’s eyes for a matter of seconds. Nothing had changed. She was just sitting there with her nose stuck in the air, so why should he suddenly find her so distracting?

He didn’t have time to be distracted, he reminded himself roughly. Taking over SpaceWorks had been a risky strategy, and if they didn’t get the Emery contract, he would have lost his gamble, not to mention a lot of money. Gabriel didn’t like losing. He wasn’t going to jeopardise the whole bid by letting himself get diverted by a baby, and certainly not because his secretary had taken her glasses off!

Harry was asleep by the time they drew up outside Tess’s house almost an hour later, so Gabriel waited in the car with him while she ran inside and threw a few things for the night into a bag. Then they had to turn round and crawl back through the traffic to the City where Gabriel lived in a recently converted warehouse near the river.

Tess was fed up of sitting in the car by the time they got there and, when she saw his flat, she wished that she had suggested they simply stay at her house, which might be shabby but which at least had the advantage of being comfortable. She had thought about making the offer when she’d been packing her bag, but her home was her haven, and she wasn’t sure she wanted Gabriel there.

His apartment was aggressively modern, all gleaming steel and glass and neutral fabrics. Cosy, it was not. Open-plan throughout, the various living areas were cleverly suggested by the arrangement of furniture or lighting. It was chic, stylish and completely soulless. Tess couldn’t imagine anyone actually living in it. As it was, Harry’s pram with its bright, plastic colours struck a jarring note amongst all that restrained taste.

Perhaps it was just as well she hadn’t invited Gabriel to stay with her, she decided. If this was his style, he would have hated her house.

‘It’s very…new,’ she said.

‘You don’t like it.’ Too late, Gabriel heard the accusing note in his voice, which made him sound almost as if he cared what she thought.

‘It’s not that. It’s just doesn’t have much character, I suppose.’

‘I don’t want character,’ he said tersely. ‘I want convenience. These apartments have been snapped up. They all come fully equipped with sheets, towels, crockery, even a selection of wine in the wine rack. They’re ideal for successful people who don’t have time to waste finding somewhere to buy a corkscrew.’

Tess was unimpressed. ‘I don’t think I’d want to be successful if it meant I didn’t have time to make a home,’ she said.

‘Home is just somewhere to sleep.’

Nettled by her lack of enthusiasm, Gabriel went to draw the vertical blinds over the expanse of glass that stretched almost the entire length of the apartment. He hadn’t noticed it until now, but when it was dark outside and the rain was splattering against the window like now, the apartment didn’t look very welcoming. Perhaps she would appreciate it more if he shut out the blackness.

‘I only moved in two days ago,’ he said, looking for some way to pull the blinds. He liked the view at night, so he hadn’t had to work out how to close them before. ‘I was living in a hotel until then,’ he went on as his hand moved up and down the edge of the blind in search of a cord or some kind of mechanism, ‘but this is much better. It’s serviced in the same way as a hotel, but it’s private and, because it’s new, everything works.’

‘Not quite everything,’ said Tess, observing his increasingly frustrated efforts to deal with the blinds. He was muttering under his breath, and looked ready to rip the blinds bodily from the window as she moved him aside. ‘Here, let me try.’

To Gabriel’s intense irritation, she located the high-tech controls straight away that had been cleverly concealed in the wall, and with one touch of a button the blinds swished smoothly across the vast window.

‘Very convenient,’ she murmured.

Gabriel glared at the irony in her voice, but Harry was making little mewling noises from the pram.

‘He’s waking up,’ said Tess nervously.

Drawn together insensibly by their shared apprehension, they peered into the pram, where the baby was squirming and knuckling his eyes.

‘Now what do we do?’ asked Gabriel, keeping a cautious distance.

Tess pulled Bella’s instructions out of her bag. ‘I think we need to feed him,’ she said, squinting in an attempt to decipher a squiggle in the margin. ‘We’ve got to make up some formula,’ she added, hoping that she sounded more confident than she felt. Crouching down, she searched through the equipment that Gabriel had carried up from the car. ‘There should be a tin…ah, that must be it.’

‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ said Gabriel suspiciously as he followed her into the kitchen area.

‘No.’ She held out her scribbled notes with a challenging look. ‘If you can read my shorthand, you’re welcome to try and work it out for yourself.’

‘No, no,’ he said, recoiling. ‘You’d better do it.’

Tess was reading the instructions on the back of the tin. ‘Can you find me a saucepan?’

‘I expect I could manage that,’ said Gabriel with dignity, still smarting over his defeat with the blinds. He began opening cupboards, having ignored the kitchen, like the windows, until now. Eventually he found a pan and gave it to Tess, who sent him back to keep an eye on Harry.

‘This is complicated,’ she told him frankly. ‘I can’t concentrate with you standing over me.’

Harry grew increasingly restless as Gabriel hovered by the pram, watching anxiously as the little face contorted itself into a variety of plaintive expressions, each of which looked alarmingly as if he was on the point of wailing miserably.

When he did finally utter a spluttering cry, Gabriel threw a glance of appeal at Tess, who was carefully measuring powder into a jug. ‘Is his milk ready yet?’

‘No, I’ve still got to warm it,’ she said, throwing Harry a harassed glance. ‘You’ll have to distract him.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know…give him a cuddle or something.’

With a sigh, Gabriel hoisted Harry awkwardly against his shoulder and joggled him about a bit. ‘It’s not working,’ he complained when the baby’s cries only increased in volume.

‘I’m not surprised.’ Tess looked up from the hob where she was puzzling over a control panel that wouldn’t have looked out of place at NASA. ‘Is that your idea of a cuddle?’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ he said stiffly.

‘Nothing, if you think cuddling means holding someone at arm’s length and shaking them up and down.’

‘I didn’t realise you were such an expert,’ he said with a snide look.

‘I’m not,’ she said, ‘but I know how I like to be held.’

She didn’t have to say that it wouldn’t be the way he would hold her. ‘Perhaps you should give lessons,’ snapped Gabriel, unaccountably provoked. He could imagine her doing it, too, with the same cold efficiency she did everything else. No doubt she would allot special cuddling windows in her diary and keep one eye firmly on the clock to make sure they didn’t run over schedule.

‘Lessons would be extra,’ Tess snapped back, ‘and I’m already on double overtime this evening.’

‘Don’t worry, I hadn’t forgotten,’ said Gabriel sourly.

Grudgingly, he held Harry a little closer and walked up and down in what he hoped was a soothing manner. Not that it made the slightest difference to the volume of the baby’s crying. So much for Tess and her advice on cuddling.

‘What’s taking so long?’ he demanded at last, breaking the hostile silence. ‘It’s only milk, isn’t it? Anyone would think you were preparing a five-course meal.’

Tess gritted her teeth. ‘I’m being as quick as I can. I’ve got to check the temperature before I can give it to him.’

Craning her neck to refer to her scribbled notes, she shook the bottle and upended it to squeeze a few drops of milk onto the inside of her wrist. It felt just warm, but not hot, just as Bella had said it should.

Relieved, Tess looked around for somewhere to sit, but it wasn’t the kind of kitchen designed to be cluttered up with tables where you could read the paper, drink coffee, let things pile up and generally gather mess. The chairs set perfectly around the glass dining table looked downright uncomfortable, and in the end she sat down a little dubiously on one of the cream sofas.

‘OK, let’s try him with this.’

Gabriel handed a bawling Harry over with relief. Tess pretended not to notice when their hands brushed, and concentrated on presenting the baby with the bottle. Fortunately, Harry knew more about bottle-feeding than she did and, once he recognised the teat, he soon settled into sucking.

Their sniping momentarily forgotten, Tess and Gabriel watched warily, and were just allowing themselves to relax when he coughed and choked milk down the front of his Babygro. Too late, Tess remembered the bibs that had been tucked in a bag with the nappies.

‘What’s happening?’ said Gabriel.

‘I don’t know, do I?’ Tess sat Harry upright and patted his back, which seemed to be the right thing to do, for he stopped spluttering. Cautiously, she let him have the bottle again. ‘I’d no idea what a tense business it was looking after a baby.’ She sighed.

‘Me neither,’ Gabriel agreed with feeling. He had taken off his jacket and was standing at the glass table, loosening his tie with one hand and pulling papers from his briefcase with the other. ‘Give me executive stress any day!’

‘I wouldn’t have thought that was something you suffered from,’ said Tess and Gabriel glanced up at her with a frown.

‘What do you mean?’

‘No one could call your management style relaxed,’ she pointed out, thinking of the last frantic weeks putting the Emery bid together. ‘You only seem to operate under high pressure.’ She bent her head back over the peacefully suckling baby. ‘I’m surprised you even know what executive stress is!’

‘Of course I know what it is,’ said Gabriel irritably. ‘I hear my executives whining about it often enough! It’s not something I’ve got a lot of time for, I admit.’

‘Not everyone thrives under pressure the way you do,’ said Tess. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to work in an office where the pace is relentless, where the boss storms around making unreasonable demands of his staff and everything always has to be done yesterday.’

Gabriel’s fearsome brows twitched together. Looking up from his papers again, he found his gaze resting on her bent head, the brown hair caught the light and gleaming with gold, reminding him of her eyes. He could see the pure line of her cheek, the downward sweep of lashes, that small but stubborn chin.

He wrenched his eyes away. ‘It doesn’t seem to bother you.’

Tess glanced up briefly and then away. ‘I cope with it,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t mean I like it.’

‘You don’t have to like it,’ said Gabriel, reverting to his brusque manner to disguise the sensation that had stirred so strangely inside him as he watched her cradling the baby in her arms. ‘You just have to do the job you’re paid to do, and that’s helping me put the Emery bid together. Once we get that in, you can start worrying about stress! Until then, we’ve got better things to do.’

He glanced at his watch. ‘We ought to be able to get quite a bit done tonight. I’ve got to redraft the introduction, and I want you to cross-check every single figure we put forward. There’s going to be some stiff competition for this contract, and we can’t afford to look sloppy.’

‘You want me to check figures tonight?’ said Tess incredulously.

‘I am paying you overtime,’ Gabriel reminded her.

‘For helping you with Harry!’

He brushed that aside. ‘Since you’re here, you might as well help me with the bid, too. There’s no TV, no books. There’s just you, me, and a whole heap of paperwork. What else is there for us to do this evening, after all?’

The sardonic note in his voice brought a flush to Tess’s cheeks. Most men and women could find something better to do with an evening alone together, but she and Gabriel didn’t have that kind of relationship, did they? They might be alone in his apartment with the whole night ahead of them, but he was still her boss and she was still his PA.

‘In the circumstances, nothing,’ she agreed stiffly.

‘You don’t have to help,’ said Gabriel with an indifferent shrug. ‘It’s up to you if you want to lose your job.’

Tess’s head jerked up and she stared icily at him. ‘Is that a threat?’

‘No, it’s not a threat.’ Gabriel’s voice was flat and hard and as cold as her own. ‘It’s reality. We need this contract. If we don’t get it, I’m going to have to reconsider my investment in SpaceWorks. In that case, the company will fold, and your job with it. It’s as simple as that. Contraxa is a leader in its field, and our reputation depends on consistent quality and success. We can’t afford to be associated with failures, even in a minor division.’

Tess knew that what he said was true, but she couldn’t help bridling at his casual dismissal of the company where she had worked so loyally for over ten years. SpaceWorks was more than a minor division! ‘I wonder you bothered with us at all if we’re that unimportant!’ she said tightly.

‘Because I believe in taking risks to get what you want,’ said Gabriel. He dropped the last of the papers from his briefcase onto the table where they landed with a dull slap. ‘SpaceWorks isn’t important now, but it’s got the potential to be very important indeed. If my gamble pays off, it will give me the toe-hold I need to expand into Europe. It’s a global market now, Tess. You’ve got to stay ahead of the game, and you don’t do that by playing safe.’

‘Sometimes playing safe is the only option.’ Tess sighed a little, thinking of Andrew with still another year to go before he finished his education. ‘Some of us have got commitments. We can’t all afford to take risks.’

‘That’s why I avoid making commitments,’ said Gabriel dismissively. ‘You can’t succeed if you’re always looking over your shoulder, worrying about your responsibilities.’

It was all very well for him, thought Tess crossly, removing the empty bottle from Harry’s tenacious grasp. Some commitments were there whether chosen or not.

She put the bottle on the floor and stood up with Harry. ‘Well, here’s one responsibility you can worry about right now,’ she said, deliberately brisk. ‘You can take your nephew for a while.’

CHAPTER THREE

GABRIEL eyed the baby Tess was holding out to him. ‘What shall I do with him?’ he asked uneasily, his highhanded indifference abruptly deserting him.

‘According to Bella, he needs to be winded. I’ve seen her husband do this,’ Tess said, relenting in the face of his panic-stricken expression. ‘It’s easy. All you have to do is walk up and down, patting his back until he burps.’

Gabriel felt that he had already done quite enough walking up and down with Harry but, since Tess had fed him, he couldn’t really refuse. Stretching out his arms reluctantly, he let her put the baby into them.

‘Got him?’ she asked sharply to disguise the inexplicable frisson of awareness as her hands brushed against his again.

‘Yes,’ he admitted, although without much enthusiasm.

‘Now, hold him against your shoulder, and pat his back—gently.’

Gabriel patted gingerly. ‘Like this?’

‘Well, Roger sings while he’s at it,’ said Tess as she went into the kitchen to rinse the bottle, ‘but I think that’s optional.’

She watched Gabriel under her lashes as she dragged the steriliser out from under the pram and unpacked it from its box. Face intent, he was walking dutifully around the apartment with Harry. If only the others at SpaceWorks could see him now, the ruthless arrogance and uncompromising confidence demolished by one small baby.

Sometimes, thought Tess, life could be sweet.

Completing another circuit, Gabriel arrived back in the kitchen. ‘I think I’m beginning to get the hang of it,’ he confided, and ventured a hum to demonstrate his new-found confidence.

Harry was promptly sick over his extremely expensive shirt.

Yes, definitely sweet, decided Tess, hiding a smile. Even perfect.

‘You were a bit out of tune,’ she reproached him.

Gabriel shot her a look as he craned his neck over his shoulder to assess the damage. ‘That’s all I need,’ he said sourly. ‘A critic.’

Tess hunted through the pristine cupboards for a cloth, eventually locating an unopened packet which she ripped open. ‘That must be why Roger always wears a cloth over his shoulder when he winds Rosy,’ she said, extracting one and wetting it under the tap.

‘I’m so pleased you remembered that now,’ he grumbled.

Ignoring him, Tess wrung out the cloth and put a hand on his arm. ‘Stand still,’ she instructed. She wiped away the mess on his shoulder, but she had barely finished before Harry obligingly gugged up a little more milk.

Gabriel screwed up his nose. ‘Yeuch!’

‘Oh, don’t make such a fuss.’ she said, half-exasperated, half-indulgent. ‘It’s only a bit of milk.’ She rubbed his shirt vigorously. ‘There…all gone.’

He peered suspiciously at the unpleasantly damp patch behind his shoulder before raising his gaze to meet Tess’s. The honey-coloured eyes were dancing with amusement, and Gabriel felt as if his stomach had disappeared without warning, leaving him with a strange, hollow feeling inside. All at once he was acutely conscious of Tess standing close beside him, of her hand burning through the fine material of his shirt, of her hair, glimmering in the glare of the overhead light, of her perfume, elusive, beguiling, faintly spicy.