Boardrooms of Power. Heidi Betts

her a few seconds to orient herself and make sense of her surroundings, and then it occurred to her exactly what was wrong.

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      WHAT woke Rose was the stillness. The night sounds, she realised after a few unsettling seconds, had disappeared. Living in London had acclimatised her to a certain amount of noise at night and its absence was eerie.

      She stood up. She felt remarkably okay, considering bed had been a mattress on the floor. No aches and pains anywhere.

      She drew back the shutters and opened the window. Now the silence was deafening. As was the lack of movement. No breeze. Nothing. Rose shivered and wondered uncertainly what she should do. Wake Gabriel? She knew nothing about hurricanes. She might be spooked but what if this was just a feature of the tropics? Lots of noise between six-thirty and midnight and then at—she picked up her watch which she had adjusted on the plane and stuck it on—it was a little after three in the morning—at a little after three in the morning the comforting noises gave way to complete silence.

      Without bothering to think about it, Rose stuck on a pair of jeans, one of two pairs she had packed, leaving on the baggy T-shirt she had brought to sleep in. Somehow it seemed urgent that she get to Gabriel, wake him up, even if his response might just be to laugh at her and tell her to go back to sleep.

      His door wasn’t locked. In fact, it was ajar and Rose pushed it open to see him sprawled in slumber on the mattress on the ground. This would be the only time she would ever get to catch him off guard and she couldn’t resist the opportunity. She forgot the elemental fear that had propelled her into his room and tiptoed to stand over him. Awake, he was compulsively fascinating, with his high octane energy and sinful good looks, and asleep he was no less so. The sheet covered most of him but he had obviously felt the heat during the night and worked his way free of some of the covering so that part of one leg was exposed and most of his upper body.

      Rose licked her lips nervously, unable to break the spell as she stared down at his, quite frankly, perfect body. He looked very brown against the white sheets. His chest was broad and muscular and the dark hair was almost a little too masculine for her curious eyes. She gulped and looked away, but all that did was bring her gaze into contact with one leg, also muscular, also with that disturbingly masculine dark hair. She decided right there and then that waking him up was out of the question. She would sidle off quietly and her fear would gradually ease off. She was about to turn away when he spoke. Just like that. His voice ever so slightly amused.

      ‘Are you finished staring or would you like a bit longer?’

      Rose nearly teetered backwards in shock.

      ‘I…I thought you were asleep!’ She managed to make it sound as though he had purposefully tricked her into staring at him.

      ‘I was. Until you came in. What’s the matter?’ He began sitting up, which was a bit of a disaster because more of his body was exposed to her carefully averted, yet still fully aware, gaze.

      ‘I…I know this is going to sound stupid, but I…I couldn’t hear anything and I got a little nervous.’

      ‘What do you mean, you couldn’t hear anything?’

      ‘Outside. No noise. It’s spooky.’ Rose laughed nervously. ‘I know you’re just going to tell me to get back to sleep…’

      ‘What I am going to tell you is that you need to look away right about now if you don’t want to see more of me than you might have bargained for…’ He yanked back the sheet a fraction of a second before Rose could avert her startled eyes. It was long enough for her to realise that he wasn’t wearing the pair of polite boxer shorts she had expected. He wasn’t wearing a stitch. She gave a little yelp and stepped back just as he levered himself up.

      She knew that he was saying something to her, something about hurricanes and their behaviour patterns, but all her mind could focus on was the fact that less than five feet away her very sexy boss was dragging on some trousers while she stood with her back to him and tried hard not to imagine what she would see if she turned around.

      ‘…so we need to go outside and check everything,’ she heard him finish up. ‘Of course, you can stay put in here but two pairs of hands and eyes would be a damn sight more helpful than one…’

      Slowly her fuzzy brain clunked back into gear and she looked at him worriedly. ‘What are you saying?’

      ‘I thought I’d just made it clear.’ Gabriel paused to look at her as he pulled on a T-shirt. He was still getting over the pleasant sensation of knowing that she was staring at him. It had been crazily sexy. And now she was looking at him, all wide-eyed and feminine, after his quip the night before when she had told him in no uncertain terms that she didn’t enjoy playing the damsel in distress. He was very tempted to remind her of her statement but he thought that that might have been pushing his luck too far.

      Uppermost in his mind was the fact that they had to go and do the checks which he had anticipated doing during daylight hours. Nevertheless he couldn’t stop his eyes from straying just that little bit, noticing that her T-shirt, baggy though it was, still revealed the glaring fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

      ‘The calm before the storm…’He headed for the door and she followed, even more spooked by the fact that he actually looked concerned. Gabriel was not a man to be easily rattled. But he was moving quickly now, switching on the lights in the house, warning her that the luxury of electricity might not be with them for too long.

      ‘We’ll circle the place together,’ he told her, pausing only once when they were outside so that he could look around him, as though judging the gravity of the situation from tell-tale signs she was not aware of. ‘There should be nothing to retrieve, but you can never tell.’

      Rose shivered at the tone of his voice and edged a little closer to him.

      With no cooling effect from the sea breeze, it was muggy outside and very dark. The lights inside the sprawling house illuminated a small patch just outside the double-fronted doors which led out to the gardens overlooking the sea, but beyond that was inky-black, scarily black. Rose had never seen anything quite like it. She was accustomed to a certain amount of light pollution that came from living in London. Just as she was accustomed to the constant low level noise.

      ‘It’s going to happen, isn’t it?’

      ‘You don’t have to whisper.’ He had brought two torches. She had no idea when he had grabbed those, but they were invaluable now as they fanned them along the walls of the villa, both of them moving quickly and finding, to Gabriel’s satisfaction, that everything was as it should be.

      ‘Right. Now, inside.’ They had covered the outside in a little under forty minutes. ‘There’s no phone link here yet so I won’t be able to check on the Internet for any updates with the weather patterns, but we’ll fill some buckets with water and cover them. Come in handy for having a wash in the morning. We’ll also start lighting some oil lamps and candles, but no candles where they can be a fire hazard. Think you can manage?’

      Rose wondered what he would do if she said no. He hadn’t brought her over here to look after her. First and foremost, she was his practical secretary, after all!

      ‘Think so!’ she assured him briskly.

      ‘Good girl.’

      They hadn’t made it back to the front doors when the eerie stillness was broken dramatically by a flash of lightning that forked across the sky and was accompanied almost immediately by a clap of thunder that was loud enough to make her ears ring. And then an ominous sound that grew louder as they ran towards the house, hampered by the fact that they had to dodge the usual building debris that was neatly stacked but still an impediment to a clear path.

      ‘Rain!’ Gabriel shouted just as it came, in one gusty, raging downpour that was accompanied by the howl of winds gathering speed.

      Rose had never experienced anything like it. In under thirty seconds she was drenched. When she looked to her left, she could see