by Lynne Graham
Incredulously, she whirled round. The glass slid between her fingers and fell with a soft thud, spilling out an amber pool of liquid in a slowly spreading stain on the carpet.
CHAPTER TWO
‘LO SIENTO. I’m sorry. Did I startle you?’ Grimly amused by the entrance he had achieved, Rafael uncoiled his lean length from the doorway. He executed the motion with inherent animal grace, strolling soundlessly into the lamplight out of the shadows. From beneath luxuriant black lashes that a woman would have killed to possess, narrowed tiger’s eyes inspected her. ‘It is so unlike you to be clumsy.’
Her tongue unglued from the roof of her mouth. ‘How did you get in?’
‘The girl was leaving. I told her I was awaited. She was surprised but very trusting.’ Even white teeth flashed against golden skin. ‘You have this one trait which I can appreciate now. There was no risk that I would be breaking up a private party for two. You really should tell that pretty tailor’s dummy that he’s on to a very bad bet; I might almost find it within my heart to pity him.’
She could barely follow what he was saying to her. Over four years of silence and then this? Why should Rafael come here now? It made no sense. Her violet eyes were huge against her pallor. ‘How did you find out where I lived?’
‘That wasn’t difficult.’ His hard mouth twisted.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded shakily.
A broad shoulder sheathed in butter-soft leather shifted in an infinitesimal shrug. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I was curious.’
‘Curious?’ she echoed, her voice rising steeply.
He glanced round the small, pleasantly furnished room. ‘This is not how I pictured you living,’ he admitted. ‘I would picture you in the drawing-room at your parents’ home, a butterfly safely preserved behind glass.’
Dialogue with Rafael had never been straightforward. He had a disorientating habit of leaping back and forth, voicing exactly what passed through his agile mind. Jerkily she folded her arms. He bent a long-fingered hand down to the corner of the armchair beside him, twitching up something that had caught his attention. It was a cookery book. ‘You use this?’ he asked, much as if it were a mechanic’s wrench.
Perspiration was dampening her skin. Hysteria was clawing at her. She was too afraid to make sense of his sudden impulsive appearance. ‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’ she enquired defensively.
Casting the item carelessly aside again, he straightened to his full six feet two inches. ‘When you stand like that, you look like a little fishwife. Mama wouldn’t like it,’ he said cruelly. ‘Who takes care of you here?’
The blood rushed hotly to her cheeks. ‘Nobody.’
‘You have learnt to cook and clean? You astonish me.’
‘If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the police!’ she threatened in a wild rush.
Rafael dealt her an unmoved glance of contempt. ‘I am still your husband. If I want to be here, I have the right to be here.’
‘No! You do not have that right!’
‘You should be calm. One may have the right without the desire to exercise it for very long,’ he sliced back. ‘Why do you live in a place like this? Don’t tell me—Papa’s finally been caught insider dealing!’
Agonising tension was squaring her slight shoulders. ‘I meant what I said. If you don’t leave, I’ll—’
Rafael bit out a sardonic laugh. ‘Why not? Call the police and entertain me. It is the emptiest threat of all and you know it. You would not court the publicity.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’ He had moved slightly closer and she took a tiny uncertain step backwards, her pale head gradually lowering in defeat. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘I don’t understand why you should be so afraid.’ He paused, brilliant golden eyes clashing with her upward glance in naked enmity. ‘What a lie! You have the intelligence to be afraid. But what of? Violence may be what I feel but it would put me in prison and I have no love of small, closed places. And some couples may celebrate an approaching divorce with a farewell tumble between the sheets but when I become that desperate for a woman I will become celibate,’ he spelt out with brutal candour.
Humiliation pierced her like a knife-point. A primitive need to claw him for that unnecessary taunt charged her but a moment later she wanted to curl up and die. The condemned woman, branded a failure, finally scorned and cast aside. ‘I hate you,’ she framed strickenly.
‘Then it is more than you felt for me before. Even hatred—it is something. There is hope for you yet,’ he responded unfeelingly. ‘Who was the man you were with?’
She spun away, savaged by him as she had been so often before. Only this time she was tormentingly aware that she was betraying her reactions and Rafael was receiving a vulture’s satisfaction from her apparent new vulnerability. Her composure had cracked wide open earlier tonight. Now she was bare, stripped of all poise. ‘Why should you want to know?’
‘It amuses me to ask. It is so liberated to ask such a question of one’s wife.’ Provocation quivered through every accented syllable. ‘Though perhaps not in your case. Hell will freeze over before you invite him into your bed!’
Outraged by his derision, she swung back. ‘Are you so sure?’
Rafael stilled, straight ebony brows lowering over piercing tawny eyes.
‘You and your bloody ego!’ she gasped. ‘Yes! That idea really gets to you, doesn’t it? You can let some trollop crawl all over you six feet from me but—’
‘Trollop?’
‘Puta!’ she spat, her emotions spinning into a fierce spiral of rage and mortification.
‘No es,’ Rafael fielded smoothly. ‘I have never had to stoop to payment, muneca mia.’
‘Don’t call me that!’ she shrieked at him. ‘I am not a doll!’
As he tilted his head to one side, his whole concentration unnervingly pinned to her, light glistened over the black silk luxuriance of his gleaming hair. ‘You are arguing with me. Increible. You are answering back,’ he breathed in wonderment. ‘You are even shouting.’
His response drained the wild, unfamiliar anger from her, leaving her weak and badly shaken up. ‘Please go,’ she whispered.
‘Who taught you to shout?’ he prompted. ‘It is a very healthy sign. I like it.’
Her hands flew up, covering her ears. ‘You are driving me out of my mind!’
‘That is what you did to me. You threw my heart back at my feet and trampled on it. Two years of torture on this earth,’ Rafael intoned rawly, his sensual mouth compressed into a white line. ‘I gave you everything. You gave me nothing. You had the generosity of a miser. No woman has ever done to me what you dared to do. Por dios, when I think of how I suffered, I marvel that I stand here now and keep my hands from you…’
Involuntarily a hollow laugh escaped her. ‘The sole saving grace of your visit is that you now possess that capability.’
Dark colour scorched his high cheekbones. ‘You throw that in my teeth?’
She knew that intonation. Her tongue moistened her dry lips. It was the untrustworthy quiet before the storm.
‘You think I made unnatural demands of you?’ he raked at her between clenched teeth. ‘Every time I touched you, I was made to feel like an animal. You lay like a block of ice beneath me, tolerating my filthy desires!’
Sarah was the one reddening now, spinning away to present him with a defensive back. ‘Do you have to be so crude?’
He vented a stifled expletive. ‘You are the only woman who has ever called me this…that,’ he corrected in a driven undertone. ‘To think that I was once enslaved by you…it makes me shudder.’
‘The feeling is mutual.’ Waves of pain were tearing at her. Rafael had not lost his impassioned powers of picturesque speech.
‘Crude,’ he repeated again.
Sarah went white, strangely ashamed of herself. On some crazy level she was attuned to the awareness that she had drawn real blood. A lean hand was clenched into a fist at the insult. Her eyes stung. He had ne
ver been crude. Indeed, for someone afflicted with his hot-blooded, over-sexed temperament, he had been extraordinarily gentle and patient and kind. Only it hadn’t helped. Her inhibitions had proved insurmountable.
Sex. Just a small thing, not of great importance, something she could endure when she had to as no doubt other women had endured from the beginning of time. The sheer stupidity of her reasoning before their marriage tormented her now. Then she had been secretly flattered by the intensity of the hunger she roused in Rafael. Afterwards she had learnt to be afraid of that hunger, jerking away at his slightest touch.
It was typical of Rafael to be so gloriously and unashamedly wrapped up in his own sufferings, as he called them, she thought bitterly. Had he ever really thought of what it was like for her? To be married to a male so extravagantly gorgeous and innately virile and know you were a disaster in his bed? To live day in, day out with the knowledge that you were losing a little more of him by the hour? And finally to sink so low in a sense of utter inadequacy that she had taken his infidelity for granted. Closing her eyes, refusing to see. Anything just to keep him, anything so long as he stayed, a lesson learnt well at her mother’s knee with a father whose extra-marital affairs were as numerous as they were well known.
Rafael was splashing brandy into a glass, throwing it back. Strong muscles worked in his brown throat. ‘Tonight I will get drunk.’
‘Are you driving?’ The question fled her strained lips, inspired by an instinctive practicality and concern.
He shot her a gleaming, killing glance. ‘So prosaic, so sensible, so much the lady. Your hair up like a royal princess, the not too revealing dress. This is what I lived with. The patronising smiles, the small talk when our marriage was dying. We must not notice. We must not talk about these personal, private things. It is not nice. That is the word.’
She was trembling. Oh, dear God, why had he had to come here to destroy her all over again? Look forward, never back, her great-aunt Letitia had once told her. Until now it had been excellent advice. Without Letitia’s brusque and unsentimental support, Sarah wasn’t entirely sure that she would have been here today, a completely different Sarah from the mixed-up, desperately unhappy girl she had been in her teens. She had come through a baptism of fire to find her own security. She no longer endured agonies of guilt over her parents’ emotional blackmail. She no longer attempted to twist herself into something that she wasn’t to please other people. In the year since she had made her home in London, Sarah had gone from strength to strength. But now, all of a sudden…horrifyingly, it was as though she had been catapulted back in time.
Why was Rafael behaving as if he were the innocent party? Innocence had deserted Rafael in his cradle. But conversely an image of him on a hot, dusty pavement laughingly bestowing flowers on a Parisienne baglady chose to surface in her mind’s eye. Rafael, exuberantly, indescribably happy and wanting to share it with the world. In those days there had still been a streak of the child in Rafael. And now it was gone.
Hard cynicism curved his chiselled mouth. Nobody could stare like Rafael. You got the feeling that he could see right into you, strip away the concealing layers and pretences until only the inner self remained. ‘Shall I call a taxi?’ She couldn’t bear the silence any longer.
‘When I wish to leave, I will leave.’ He loosed a hard, humourless laugh. ‘I know why I am here. You will think me quite the sentimentalist. But I have this one question and it is not at all…nice.’
‘I’d sooner not hear it, then.’
An ebony brow arched and she was suddenly, shockingly aware of the raw tension in his lean, powerful body. ‘But you will,’ he asserted fiercely. ‘Did you ever regret it?’
‘Regret what?’
Something akin to naked violence seethed in his brooding gaze, setting up tiny ripples of fear in the pulsing atmosphere. ‘The price of family forgiveness. Is that how you thought of it?’ he slung at her harshly. ‘If God has given you a night of uninterrupted sleep in five years, he has been too good to you!’
In bewilderment, she muttered, ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know what I am saying,’ he bit out, if it was possible with even greater ferocity. ‘Did it mean so little to you? A brief stay in some discreet clinic where I couldn’t find you? It was against the law…it must have been somewhere very expensive. But what is expense to your parents when they find it within their power to destroy the last evidence of your most unfortunate marriage? Ah…you go pale. Did you think I would have forgotten so easily? How could I forget? It was an act of revenge. You did it to punish me!’
‘Rafael, I—’ she began, lost in the welter of demands that she didn’t understand.
‘You murdered my unborn child and I curse you for it. You did not have the right to make that choice. I will never forgive this nor will I ever forget it,’ he swore in implacable condemnation. ‘You did not want my child but I would have taken him, I would have brought him up…’
Sarah’s perception of reality was rocking on its axis. A tiny sound dragged her glazed eyes from Rafael. Gilly was peering round the door, her pixie face screwed up against the intrusion of the light. She came stumbling across the room, powered by sudden noisy sobs. ‘Ben tol’ me the spider’s gonna get me and eat me up!’ she wailed, clutching at Sarah’s skirt. ‘And it was in my dream. Mummy, make it go away or give it to Ben. It’s his spider!’
Rafael mumbled something incomprehensible in Spanish.
Sarah bent down to lift her daughter, smoothing a hand over her tousled black curls. Gilly pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder. ‘Who’s dat man?’
‘Never mind.’ Curving protective arms tightly round Gilly’s hot little body, she attempted to brush past Rafael.
A bruising set of fingers closed over her shoulder. ‘She called you Mama. Who does she belong to? Es imposible. Speak!’ he pressed fiercely.
Tearing free of his punishing hold, Sarah sped into the hall. Her sole concern was Gilly. Gilly must not be exposed to Rafael. She’d sink a knife between his ribs before she’d let him come within twenty feet of either of her children! He had accused her of aborting their child. Of course, he couldn’t believe that! A piece of nonsense, that was what it was! Some sly, sneaky gambit aimed at explaining away a four-year uninterest in fatherhood? He must think she was mentally deficient. Well, she wasn’t and where her children were concerned she would fight like a lioness. Had natural curiosity finally pierced his tough hide? Well, it was too late. He was nearly five years too late. He wasn’t walking in here now to exercise rights he had surrendered of his own free will…no way was he doing that!
Her hands were shaking so violently that she had trouble in covering Gilly up again. Her daughter was much too sleepy to notice the state she was in. ‘Is it gone away?’ she mumbled.
‘Far, far away,’ Sarah soothed tremulously, scanning the other single bed with frightened eyes. Ben was just a bump under the duvet, not a centimetre of him in sight. In sleep, Ben was a burrower. Gilly was a sprawler, kicking the bedding off while she slept.
Rafael was blocking her exit from the bedroom. She raised her hands. ‘You can’t come in here.’
He wasn’t moving anywhere. Neither forward nor back. ‘Madre de Dios,’ he muttered weakly, lapsing into Spanish, accented syllables rising and falling disjointedly.
Her palms planted against his broad chest. She thrust him bodily from the room, hauling the door closed behind her, denying him even the view. In none of these instinctive reactions did she recognise herself. Fear and rage were consuming her in equal parts. ‘Go!’ she gasped. ‘I don’t want you here!’
A brown hand collided abruptly with her shoulder, forcing her back to the wall. ‘My daughter…she’s got black hair. She has to be mine. She has to be!’ he grated.
‘Not yours. Not unless you can call basic biology paternity!’
Hooded tiger’s eyes bore down on her. ‘And the other one?’
‘Twins!’ she snapped.
> A flaring, incredulous fury had entered his dark features. Before she could retreat, he slammed a hand to the wall an inch or two from her ear. The reverbation tremored through her pounding temples. He frightened her half out of her wits. ‘So you lied to me. All of you lied! The abortion story? A lie. Por dios, a lie!’ he vented in the soaring crescendo of all-encompassing black fury. ‘All this time, all these years a lie to enable you to steal my children from me. You think you can do this with impunity? You think I would let a frozen vixen raise my own flesh and blood? For this you will pay. You will lose them. I will take them away.’
Sarah was beyond understanding a tithe of what was happening to her. She grasped only that final, searing threat. ‘You can’t do that!’
He withdrew his hands. ‘I will see you and your family in court. I have papers. There is no reference to my children. I have proof of what has been done to me. No judge will award custody to a woman who is both a liar and a cheat!’
Sarah gazed at him in horror. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was heading out of the door. She raced after him, heedless of her bare feet. In panic she clutched at the sleeve of his jacket and he shook her off in violent repudiation. ‘Liar!’ he roared at her loud enough to wake the entire building.
But still she skidded in his wake. The instinct to pursue was her only driving purpose. When the lift doors slotted closed, she fled down the stairs two at a time, round and round and round again until she charged dizzily across the small, polished foyer.
‘Mrs Southcott!’ The security man exclaimed, jumping out of his seat to follow her.
A black Lamborghini raked off down the street with the speed of a jet on a runway. Sarah stood in the centre of the pavement, strands of pale hair falling round her fevered cheeks.
‘What happened?’
Dumbly she faced the anxious guard, not at all sure what she was doing outside in the evening air. ‘Nothing…nothing,’ she said again.
Shivering, she stepped into the lift. Angela’s mother was standing at her flat door, peering in. ‘I heard someone shouting. My goodness, you look dreadful! My dear,’ she gushed.