Free Challenging Gabriel (Knight Security 2) by Carole Mortimer Page B

mocked his older brother rather than Angel.
    “Ha bloody ha,” Gabriel said unappreciatively before his gaze swept over Angel in her denims and T-shirt. “You’ll need to dress more formally than that if you’re going to appear as Mrs. Sinclair at the bank this morning.”
    She barely suppressed a shudder as she thought of all those years she had lived in ignorance of exactly what sort of monster her husband was. How naïve she had been not to question some of those telephone calls Clive took privately in his study late into the night. The number of bodyguards that followed them everywhere they went.
    She had thought they were just the demands and trappings of a very wealthy man, the phone calls to and from the worldwide stock markets and businesses who were working when they were asleep. Now she realized those calls must have been from Clive’s less than respectable business partners, and the bodyguards were no doubt to protect him from all the enemies he must have made during those illegal dealings.
    She stood abruptly. “I shouldn’t have involved any of you in this. It’s too dangerous. I-I can’t be responsible for anyone else being hurt or…or killed.”
    Gabriel flicked a glance in his brother’s direction. “Care to give us some privacy, Ash?”
    “No problem.” Asher rose to his feet. “I’m your third bodyguard for today, so I’ll be in your study looking for your porn magazines until it’s time to leave.”
    “Good luck with that,” Gabriel scoffed.
    His brother sighed his disappointment. “I’m guessing you don’t keep them in there after all.”
    “I don’t keep them anywhere. Now bugger off and give Angel and me some time to talk. Alone,” he added pointedly.
    “Yes, sir.” Ash gave him a mock salute before leaving.
    “Is he always like that?”
    Gabriel still had a slight smile on his lips when he turned back to Angel. “Irreverent and crude?” He nodded in answer to his own question. “Ask his wife, Lissa, sometime about the night the two of them met. She threw a glass of champagne in his face for talking to her so graphically,” he supplied at Angel’s questioning look.
    Her brows rose. “But she married him anyway?”
    “Over a year later, so he had to work for it.”
    Angel avoided meeting his gaze. “I meant what I said, Gabriel. I shouldn’t have involved you or your family in this. I’ll never forgive myself if anything happens to any of you.”
    Gabriel could see by the dark circles under those luminous gray eyes and the pallor of her face that she had probably spent the rest of the night thinking rather than sleeping. Much as he had spent the rest of the night drinking. Not for the same reasons, though. Angel was worried about everyone but herself. Gabriel had spent the same hours fighting the demon on his shoulder urging him to go to her bedroom and make love to her.
    None of that agonizing showed in his relaxed demeanor as he leaned back against one of the kitchen units. “So what are you going to do? Give Sinclair the evidence you have and meekly go back to being his wife as if none of this had ever happened? How long do you think you would survive?” he added harshly as her guilty blush answered that question. “A week, a month, before he decides it’s too much of a risk to allow wife number three to continue living, knowing what you do about him? To cut his losses and arrange for you to have a convenient accident? And what about Daniel, Angel? If you think I’m leaving my son with that bastard a moment longer than absolutely necessary, then you don’t know me at all.”
    Angel didn’t know this cool stranger in his dark tailored suits, his silk shirts and ties, and his handmade black Italian leather shoes. A man of wealth and style, so unlike the warrior and renegade she had known eight years ago, or the demanding savage who had almost made love to her last night.
    “They’re all one and the same man, Angel,” he admitted as he seemed to guess her