She didn’t like to think about time slipping past. The fact that he wasn’t standing here right now, in front of the imposing front door to her father’s exquisite Belgravia house, was a reminder of how much she had come to depend on the support he gave her without even realising that she was doing so.
Not just support when it came to interacting with her father but support with the accountancy course she had been determined to pursue, support with the landscaping of the garden to the cottage they visited on the weekends, dismissing what he didn’t like with a casual wave of his hand, and reminding her of how little interest he had in anything outdoors and green, yet glancing at the pictures she showed him and expressing opinions with his typical self-assurance. There were times when he slung his arm over her shoulders and leant into her to say something, and she could almost forget that what they had wasn’t actually real.
She rang the doorbell and, as soon as her father greeted her, she knew that he was well aware that his godson wasn’t going to be there.
‘Nice to have you to myself!’ David beamed, ignoring her tight, apprehensive expression and spinning round to lead the way into the sitting room, where tea was always taken. A part of her unexpectedly softened because his tenacity when it came to building a bond with her was slowly cutting through her defences.
Over the weeks, he had gained weight and was fond of dismissing the dietary guidelines strictly laid down by the nurse ‘companion’ he had hired to cook for him and oversee all his physical requirements, including distributing his tablets, which he had no trouble forgetting to take.
He was talking about nothing in particular, asking her about what she had been up to, and she found herself chatting back.
‘For a fake marriage,’ he mused, depositing himself on one of the deep chairs, ‘You seem to have some pretty real headaches. Rafael’s selfish, my dear. It’s a learned skill.’
Sofia scowled and wondered how she’d managed to blather on so much about him that David had actually picked up on it. She opened her mouth to protest and found herself asking with a nonchalant toss of her head, ‘What do you mean that it’s a learned skill? How can someone learn to be selfish? Not that I’m concerned one way or the other.’
Their eyes met, and she blushed.
‘He had to learn how to be a man when he was just a boy,’ David mused thoughtfully. ‘By which I mean that he had to learn how to suffer disappointment and rise above it.’
‘Because his parents weren’t around?’ What was wrong with a little curiosity?
‘Because they were very fond of making promises about visiting and then failing to deliver on the day because something better had come up. By the time Rafael was ten, he’d learned that waiting by the window of his dorm was pretty much a waste of time. So you see, my dear, independence was thrust upon him and selfishness became a way of life, because if you didn’t think about anyone else you couldn’t be hurt.’
Sofia’s eyes pricked. This was the first real conversation she had had with her father, because Rafael wasn’t around, and a warmth spread through her that fought through her stubborn pride. She blinked, cleared her throat and changed the subject but her head was full of images of a disappointed child wondering why his parents hadn’t shown up for the Nativity play or Sports Day or whatever else kids at posh boarding schools did with their free time.
‘The old bag has gone the extra mile and made some tasty little treats for us.’ He was waving his hand at the highly polished sideboard which was laden with exquisite titbits—delicate sandwiches, blinis and an assortment of miniature cakes.
‘I say made. She unbent enough to make the sandwiches, and those funny little things there, but told me that if I wanted more I’d have to hire someone else. The cheek! Good job I’m just the sort of understanding employer she can’t tear herself away from!’ He chuckled, peering at the array and filling his plate while Sofia shot to her feet and gently removed the plate.
‘You can’t eat most of this stuff,’ she chided.
‘The old witch isn’t around to supervise. Gave her a few hours off. Didn’t want her hovering and glowering.’
‘Gladys is one of the nicest people I have ever met.’
‘Hmph. Got the kind of thing I thought you’d enjoy, my dear. Your mother always had a soft spot for pastries. Used to enjoy watching her eat them. Delicate as a cat, licking her fingers one by one.’
Sofia stilled because this was one of those rare occasions when her mother had been mentioned.
Blushing furiously, she helped herself to what was on offer, very much aware of her father using a walker to return to his favourite chair, chatting about this and that, telling her about all the amazing changes Rafael had already initiated in the company.
It left her with a burning desire to bring the conversation back round to her mother but not quite knowing how she could achieve that.
So much the coward, she thought...too scared to let go of past resentments yet too scared to confront them.
‘You were talking about my mother.’ She interrupted him mid-sentence, before immediately frowning down at her half-empty china plate. She had poured them both cups of tea and hastily she gulped a hot mouthful, then darted a look at David to find him staring thoughtfully back at her.
‘Not if it upsets you, my dear,’ he said gently. ‘And I know it does. You don’t enjoy raking over the past any more than I do and I apologise if I inadvertently said anything to upset you.’
‘You haven’t.’ She was beetroot-red, but now that she had embarked on this she couldn’t jump ship. ‘I... I want to talk about it. It’s been festering inside me and I want to know why you dumped my mum. You and Rafael think that I can just shove the past away into a box and pretend it never happened, but she was never the same after you walked out on her. She was...she became...a mess as time went by.’ She looked away but it was taking everything she had inside her not to start crying.
She cringed as he heaved himself out of the deep chair using his walker, and made the few steps towards her, sinking onto the blue velvet sofa and patting the side for her to join him.
‘My dear, I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said, bewildered. ‘I never dumped your mother. It was the other way around!’
‘That’s not true,’ she whispered.
‘You have to listen to me, Sofia. I was called away on urgent family business all those years ago. A life-and-death situation that left me no time to contact your mother, so I left word with a friend and colleague, the only one who knew the details of our relationship in its entirety. I told him to explain to your mother what had happened. I left a letter, all sorts of forwarding details. Told him to tell her that I would be back, that she must wait. I had the ring, my dear. I had dreams.’
Sofia stared. ‘But—but that can’t be right,’ she stammered. ‘No, you have to be lying...mistaken...’
‘I kept the ring. I have it. I never put it on the finger of the woman I stupidly married because I was hurting. I still look at that ring.’
‘But you dumped her... Jon James told her that you couldn’t face telling her yourself but it was over. He told her to leave the hotel immediately before it became a public scandal. He said that there would be no references if the whole truth came out. She left and never looked back.’
The silence settled over them.
Restless in her own skin and thoughts all over the place, Sofia was dimly aware that she was asking questions, and lots of them, voice jerky and shaking as she pieced together a tale of a jealous colleague who had lied to both parties because the woman he wanted, her mother, had rejected his advances. Jon James, it turned out, was long gone but he had left behind a legacy that had outlived him because he had played with the truth and told enough lies with sufficient conviction to make sure he destroyed what could have been.
As proof of David’s unrequited love, she was eventually
shown the ring her father had bought for the woman he had intended to marry. It was ornate, engraved, and her mother would have loved it. She’d always had a soft spot for the garish.
Sofia stared at it for such a long time that she felt as though she was freezing on the spot.
‘I should go,’ she said, eventually. When she looked at him she saw the man she had slowly been accepting over time—a strong, kind man who would have made her mother happy.
‘I want you to have the ring,’ David said. ‘It was only ever mine on loan, waiting for its rightful owner, and that rightful owner should now be you.’
‘But I already have a ring. And, besides, this is a marriage in name only...’
‘Then hang on to it, my dear, until the real thing happens. All these misunderstandings...a terrible waste, a terrible shame, and yet to know that I was loved. It’s a comfort, just as it would be a comfort for you to take what was destined for your dear mother.’
In the dim recesses of her brain, Sofia felt that she should want to telephone her aunt immediately and share this tumultuous development, but the person who beckoned to her as confidante was Rafael, and she was waiting for him when he returned to his apartment a scant half-hour after she had arrived back.
He paused in the doorway and her heart leapt in her chest as she stared at him, drinking in the lean lines of his body and that oddly endearing state of semi-dishevelment in which he returned every evening: tie off, shirt cuffed to the elbows, staging a war against the waistband of his handmade trousers, black hair tousled.
‘You’re back.’ He looked at her narrowly while absently hanging his tie over the banister.
‘It’s been...it’s been draining,’ Sofia whispered, moving towards him and not caring what he thought as she stepped into his arms. After just the briefest of hesitations, he wrapped his arms around her and breathed into her hair.
‘Tell me.’
‘I feel terrible,’ she all but sobbed when she had recounted every detail of the afternoon, leaving nothing out. Somehow, without letting her go, they had worked their way to the kitchen and he broke apart to pour her a small amount of brandy in a goblet.
‘Drink this,’ he urged. ‘You’ve had a traumatic afternoon and there’s nothing better for a bout of trauma than a swig of brandy.’
‘I don’t want you to let me go,’ Sofia confessed in a raw undertone, creeping back into his arms and sipping some of the fiery liquid before setting the glass down on the kitchen counter.
She didn’t care what he thought of that statement. She just knew that his arms around her filled her with a sense of well-being and a feeling of rightness.
This was where she belonged, she thought wonderingly. Just like that, her mind flashed back to all the times they had spent in one another’s company. She had summed it all up as two people uniting between the sheets but now she recalled the conversations they had had, the laughter they had shared, and now this...
Wanting him and only him at a time when she had needed soothing.
She loved him and she didn’t know how that had happened or when. She just knew that all her thoughts were of him. He was in her head from the moment she opened her eyes to the second she closed them, and she couldn’t imagine a time when he might not be there. David had said to hold on to the ring for a time when the real marriage happened. What a joke!
Could he ever love her? It happened, didn’t it? People got accustomed to someone and love crept up and ambushed them, wiped out all their cynicism, took them by surprise...
She would never tell him how she felt because she knew that he’d run a mile.
But there were other ways of reminding him that she was a part of his life and perhaps more invaluable than he might ever have expected.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he murmured.
‘I should cook us something to eat. I wouldn’t mind some comfort food. I don’t want any of that fancy stuff we order in from those restaurants.’
But she was winding her arms around his neck and stretching up to kiss him.
He adored her breasts and never stopped telling her.
She stepped back and kept her eyes locked to his as she slowly removed the shirt and flung it on the kitchen table, then the bra followed, releasing her heavy breasts.
His nostrils flared and his eyes darkened and a thrill of feminine power soared inside her.
With deliberate provocation, she held both her breasts in her hands and then, maintaining eye contact, she rotated the pads of her thumbs over the stiffened tips of her big nipples.
Rafael swore under his breath and when he spoke his voice was shaky.
‘It’s going to be a challenge making it up the stairs.’
‘Then we’d better stay down here.’
He smiled slowly and now it was his turn to get undressed, starting with his belt, which he pulled free in one easy move. Then the trousers were down and he stepped out of them, revealing the blatant push of his formidable erection against his boxers.
Sofia stepped forward, dipped her hands under and took his stiffened member so that she could start teasing it, rolling it the way she knew he liked, slowly and firmly, feeling the steady pulsing beneath her fingers.
‘Witch,’ he growled in response, propelling her back until her rear nudged the edge of the kitchen table. And then, in a flurry of discarded clothes, and with an urgency that barely allowed him time to don the necessary protection, he was taking her.
He had her on the table with her legs around his waist, standing in front of her. When he thrust, pushing her back, the pleasure was so exquisite that she cried out and clutched him. He held her in place and kept thrusting, his bigness filling her up, sending her body into a shrieking, uncontrolled response. The only sounds were their breathing, moaning and grunting and she felt her wetness around him as he rammed harder inside her.
They came together, bodies slick with perspiration, tensing, stiffening and then, at last, coming down from the peaks of their mutual ecstasy.
For Sofia, this was love, and she never wanted it to end. Ever.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I THINK I’D like to see...the company.’ Sofia was stretched out on the bed, her hair spilling across the pillow, watching as Rafael got dressed to leave for work. She caught his eye in the reflection of the mirror as he adjusted his tie.
Despite his confidence that the annoying Freddy situation would be sorted within weeks, her father’s stepson was still a thorn in Rafael’s side and it was frustrating the hell out of him.
His level of incompetence was astounding, as he had confided only days previously, but the way he arrogantly strode through the office made it difficult for anyone to take issue with him.
Rafael was now involved in the painstaking process of trying to unpick some of the more stupid decisions Freddy had taken and somehow managed to get past the board of directors, primarily because of his process of dispatching the ones who might have stood in his way.
The whole process was taking Rafael away from his own responsibilities, handling his own sprawling empire, and he was fast losing patience.
‘Why?’ He swung round to look at her and she leapt out of bed, scooping up clothes along the way and heading towards the en suite bathroom.
‘Do I have to have a reason?’ she paused to ask him and he raised his eyebrows and dealt her a crooked smile.
‘You don’t have to,’ he drawled, ‘but I’m curious as to why. I didn’t think you were interested in the company.’
‘I wasn’t but...it’s been a few weeks since all that business with my mother emerged and ever since...well... I feel closer to him. We chat on the phone. He texts often. Have I told you that he’s teaching me how to play chess?’ She gazed at Rafael. By now, she could recreate every line on his beautiful face, every ingrained habit he wasn’t even aware he had. ‘And that’s why I’m suddenly in
terested in seeing what goes on there. Will you wait for me while I have a shower? I won’t be long.’
‘Want me to join you?’ His voice deepened and he moved an inch closer to her.
‘I think I can manage a shower on my own, Rafael.’ She placed her flattened palm against his chest. The slightest encouragement and he would whip off the hand-made suit, the silk tie and the pristine white shirt with the discreetly embroidered initials on the cuffs, and he would join her in the shower and they would make love again.
‘Sure?’ He covered her hand with his and tugged her towards him. ‘You told me that you loved me soaping you...something about the thorough way I did it...’
‘Honestly!’ But she laughed, blushing furiously. He was shameless when it came to saying exactly what was on his mind. The things he whispered into her ear when they made love made her ears burn in the light of day.
‘I adore the way you blush, cara.’ His eyes were serious and he stroked her hair away from her face. ‘Sweet and innocent, even though you set the sheets alight with your passion.’
For a second their eyes tangled and she felt that familiar thudding in her heart, as though they had merged, become one in a moment of unity that went far, far beyond the physical.
He was the first to draw back, frowning as though suddenly perplexed, suddenly at odds with whatever was going through his head.
‘I’ll get changed. I’ll be quick. Time is money, as you once said.’
‘I hate it when you quote me back to myself.’ But he was smiling, relaxed, back to his usual self.
Twenty minutes later she emerged from a quick shower to find that he had already left the bedroom, and when she went downstairs there he was, waiting for her in the kitchen. He looked up from whatever he had been doing on his computer when she walked in.
Shock Marriage For The Powerful Spaniard (Mills & Boon Modern) (Passion in Paradise, Book 5) Page 12