Assignment: Baby. Jessica Hart

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