by Lynne Graham
As much as Rafael’s entire concentration was focused on Gilly and Ben, Sarah’s was relentlessly bent on him. Somehow she could sense his raw frustration, his uncertainty of what to do next. It was there in the taut lines of his lean, powerful body, in the angle of his arrogant dark head and the silent jut of his jawline. Something poignant and unnameable in his chosen isolation tore at her heart and sent her barriers crashing down, forcing her to rise above the terrible, tortured confusion of her own emotions. Had he intended to come here? Or had he not been able to stay away? His shock over the discovery that he was a father had understandably been replaced by a burning desire for knowledge. Yet had there been any other children of the same age and colouring with the twins he might not have been able to identify them. Pain clenched her stomach muscles as he turned away and began heading for the exit without making any attempt to approach either her or the children.
Without thinking about it, Sarah found herself racing after him. She was within feet of him when he spun round fluidly to face her. The cold anger in his set dark features was a physical entity, powered by the bitter denunciation in his hard stare.
‘Por que?’ he demanded of her and in that single phrase dwelt a wealth of judgement and bitterness. ‘Why?’
Sarah paled. ‘We have to talk.’
‘Talk? Why should I talk to you now?’ he flared. ‘Did you talk to me when you decided you wanted out of our marriage? No. You hid behind your parents. You made your choice, Sarah. Now you have to live with it.’
‘You gave me an ultimatum,’ she reminded him in a hot surge of spirit. ‘How many daughters are willing to cut off their parents and never see them again?’
‘I didn’t ask you to choose. I made the decision,’ Rafael drawled with unflinching clarity. ‘You were my wife. Your loyalty should have been to your husband.’
Angrily she threw her head back and challenged him. ‘You simply expected me to obey you, didn’t you?’
Apparently unaware of any inherent fault in such reasoning, Rafael surveyed her with all the fierce, uncompromising pride that was his strength. ‘What else would I expect?’ he turned the question boldly back on her. ‘I knew what had to be done if our marriage was to survive. I chose the only course.’
‘And you never had any doubt of that, did you?’ Helpless sarcasm thickened her voice.
‘Self-doubt is not a habit of mine. I stand by my decisions,’ he delivered deflatingly.
‘In the same way I suppose it never occurred to you that your responsibilities towards me might extend to more than one fleeting enquiry of my parents as to where I was?’ Sarah retorted sharply.
Dark blood flamed over his high cheekbones, fury in the slashing line of his wide mouth. ‘I believed you were ridding yourself of my child.’
‘You were pretty quick to accept that, weren’t you?’ Her temper was rising steadily. ‘It suited you to believe that. You were having a whale of a time in New York. Your exhibition was a sell-out to rave reviews. Maybe my parents were right about you all along…’ Raggedly she paused for breath.
‘I may thank God that we parted before you hurled lines of that nature,’ Rafael slotted in with biting satire.
‘I expect you do. When you were broke, I was money in the bank. When you weren’t, I was a liability and a pregnant liability at that!’ Sarah condemned in a furious rush of emotion.
‘Eso basta!’ Rafael gritted in an incensed undertone. ‘You think a public park is the place for this?’
Sarah froze, cast a scurrying and anxious glance to either side and established to her own satisfaction that the trees concealed them from general view. ‘If it doesn’t bother me, why should it bother you?’ she slung, growing in stature. ‘You can’t blame me for everything that went wrong!’
His jawline clenched. ‘Can you not speak the truth even now? Why did you marry me?’
‘I…I was unfortunate enough to fall in love with you.’ Cornered into the grudging admission, she felt as though she had lost valuable ground.
‘Whose delusion is that?’ he derided. ‘It has never been mine. Let me refresh your memory. You were desperate to escape your parents but you didn’t have the guts to rebel on your own. You needed me to fight them for you. And when you had made your escape and found the big wide world less to your taste than you had anticipated, you realised that Mama and Papa could be brought to their knees if you hung out long enough. Once you had them there, you graciously agreed to return to the fold…’
‘It wasn’t like that; it was never like that!’
Stinging contempt glittered in his intent gaze. ‘What a shame that you neglected to tell me that I was only a temporary aberration. Then you confused me with your father, es verdad?’
‘My…my father?’ she echoed blankly.
‘That sneaking, carping hypocrite, who has been chasing everything that moves in a skirt since the day you were born!’ he supplied bluntly. ‘That pillar of church and community, that sworn arbiter of other people’s morals with the so-complacent wife. I’ve known about your father’s affairs for years. He’s well known for his…’
‘Stop it!’ she gasped. ‘It’s got nothing to do with us!’
‘Has it not? Were you not hoping for the same set-up when you married me?’ he contradicted roughly.
‘Dear God, no!’ She shuddered, shaken by the secret shame that he had forced out into the open, experiencing afresh the nudges and giggles she had endured from her classmates at school. She was equally shattered by the appalling conclusion he had drawn. ‘I fell in love with you…maybe part of me did want to escape from home but—’
‘Sarah mia,’ he rhymed with burning incredulity. ‘I played a leading role in the spoilt little princess’s drama. I so far misunderstood the rules that I actually dared to get you pregnant. When you realised, you gave me what was undoubtedly the only honest response I ever received from you. You had hysterics and you told me that you’d never forgive me and that you didn’t want my baby!’
What she read in his burnished eyes was hatred. A hatred founded on an anger that had fed on raw bitterness through the intervening years. ‘You never even tried to understand how I felt,’ she gasped strickenly. ‘I was so scared–’
‘Sai. Mama and Papa had not bargained on a baby. Would they consider the little princess sullied beyond repair?’ he scorned.
Sarah shook her head in violent disagreement. ‘I’d never even held a baby before. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to cope. I knew that a baby was usually the last straw in a shaky marriage. I was too young and I felt trapped and that was your fault!’
‘Concerning the past,’ Rafael breathed in blistering response, his dark eyes like hot coals on her over heated skin, ‘I have nothing to say. My behaviour requires no explanation of my conscience.’
‘Like hell it doesn’t! Dammit, don’t you dare walk away from me! You’ve had your say—what about me?’ Trembling, she caught her unruly tongue between her teeth and watched him stride across the road to swing into his powerful car. Once she had done the walking away, the turning aside. Only in her case it had been an attempt to defuse tension and avoid an argument. And nothing, she realised now when it was too late for it to make any difference, could have been guaranteed to infuriate Rafael more. This time she was the one consumed by an angry wave of frustration and it was a new experience for her.
At home again, the twins noisily engrossed in playing in their room, Sarah paced the lounge carpet for over an hour. But it was no use…the memories wouldn’t leave her alone.
At eighteen, her dreams had been of romance and irresponsibility, not of marriage and motherhood. But after one blazing confrontation with her father, Rafael had forced her to make a choice. Either she stayed on in Paris as his wife or she returned home alone. He had not even mentioned the possibility of visiting her in England. No, indeed…Rafael had known exactly how to exert the pressure. And, terrified as she had been of losing him, Sarah had agreed to that recklessly hasty marriage but her
The wedding in a foreign country, shorn of both frills and family support, had seemed curiously unreal in the aftermath and a disillusioning far cry from her youthful fantasies of the most important day of her life.
‘These things are trivial,’ Rafael had dismissed impatiently, surveying her with brilliant dark eyes already darkening with sensual anticipation.
On their wedding night she had been faced with the reality that Rafael was still virtually a stranger to her. In vain had she suggested that he give her a few days to adjust. His expressive mouth curling with very male amusement, he had ignored the plea, laughing when she struggled awkwardly to explain how she felt. In the bedroom, Rafael had proved to be as unashamedly dominant as he was everywhere else. She had not expected pleasure from sexual intimacy. Her upbringing had been too repressed, inescapably coloured by her mother’s distaste for anything relating to the physical union between a man and a woman.
Even so, Rafael’s distinct lack of inhibition had been a decided shock to her system. And nothing could have prepared her for the pain of that initiation. Had she been less miserably tense, less bitterly resentful beneath her seemingly submissive faade that night, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened that way. That it had, ironically fulfilling her worst fears, had been extremely unfortunate.
‘It will never be like that again,’ Rafael had promised fervently, gathering her rigid body close, fighting her silent unwillingness to be held.
He had been correct but the damage had already been done. From that night on, Sarah had never been able to relax, had never been able to vocalise the raw feeling of resentment that tensed her up every time Rafael pulled her into his arms.
He had railroaded her into a relationship she wasn’t ready for, refusing to allow her the smallest space in which to find her feet in a threateningly new and very demanding environment. The disillusionment of the bedroom had soon been followed by other less important but no less upsetting discoveries for Sarah. Rafael would not allow her to draw on her trust fund, disdaining what he saw as Southcott money. Sarah had not found it easy to manage on a small budget. She had been no more at ease in the kitchen, where her efforts swung between the inedible and the just passable with humiliating regularity.
Few marriages could have set sail under a heavier stress factor. Sarah had been brought up to believe that she was deeply indebted to her adoptive parents. In one fell swoop she had destroyed all their ambitious hopes for her future–her marriage to Rafael had shattered them. It had also burdened Sarah with guilt and a helpless need to try and compensate her parents for the bitter disappointment she had caused them. But in striving to please both Rafael and them she had pleased neither. And as the hostilities had hotted up rather than showing any sign of abating, Sarah had been put under intolerable pressure by the people she loved.
Not surprisingly, her self-esteem had sunk to an all-time low. She had felt horribly inadequate and Rafael’s attitude towards her hadn’t helped. He had taken charge of her life, taking over exactly where the Southcotts had left off, controlling her every move and treating her like a witless child in need of care and protection. At times she had wanted to scream that she was sick and tired of people telling her what to do…only she hadn’t been able to let go of her frustrations that easily.
She had been taught to hide her emotions and suppress her anger. Nobody had ever told her that it was all right…indeed perfectly normal to get furiously angry with someone she loved. Nobody had ever taught her how to cope with such conflicting emotions. Rafael invariably turned discussions into fierce arguments, shooting her down in a hail of words she could not hope to match. As the months passed, Sarah’s inner resentments had mounted to stifling proportions…
The bell went in three shrill, staccato bursts. It was unmistakably Karen’s signature tune. Cursing under her breath, Sarah went to answer the door.
CHAPTER FOUR
KAREN erupted breathlessly through the door like a tornado. ‘Rafael Alejandro is your husband and it’s time you came clean!’ she delivered and, as a guilty afterthought, ‘Where are the kids?’
‘In their room.’
‘Good.’ Karen took advantage of her bemusement and pressed her into the kitchen. ‘Enlightenment hit me over lunch. Gilly and Ben are the picture of him!’
‘I was planning to tell you,’ Sarah muttered uncomfortably.
‘Rubbish!’ Karen shot her a glance of mingled annoyance and reproach. ‘You were going to take your secrets to the grave with you!’
‘Secrecy gets to be a habit.’
‘I thought you’d married a waiter or a deckchair attendant or something!’ Karen fumed. ‘I also thought I was your best friend.’
‘You are.’ Squirming with guilt, Sarah sighed. ‘I just don’t know what you expect me to tell you…’
‘What’s he like in bed? No, scratch that! It was quite, quite unforgivable,’ Karen retracted hurriedly as Sarah turned pale. ‘Sorry. It’s just one can’t help wondering and putting one’s foot in one’s mouth by thinking out loud.’
‘Don’t ask me.’ Sarah put the kettle on with unsteady hands. ‘Take a census of public opinion.’
‘Ouch,’ Karen framed and ruefully released her breath. ‘Enough said to be understood,’ she added with unusual quietness.
Involuntarily Sarah was recalling the passion she had roused in Rafael. A look or the merest touch had been enough to communicate the primitive depth of that masculine hunger she had not then properly understood. But she had not been the only one guilty of misconceptions. Rafael had mistaken her inhibitions for shyness, her reluctance for innocence, and neither trait had displeased him. Women had been throwing themselves at Rafael since he was a teenager. One capable of coolly detaching herself from his most heated embrace to repair her lipstick had challenged the hunter in his hot-blooded temperament.
‘When did you marry him?’ Karen cleared her throat awkwardly. ‘Or wasn’t there a marriage?’
Sarah could see some justification for that question and she wasn’t offended. ‘We got married three weeks after we met. In Paris.’
‘Three weeks?’ Karen exclaimed incredulously. ‘You only knew him for three weeks?’
‘My father made an unscheduled visit and…he found out about Rafael,’ she encapsulated with understatement, losing colour at the memory. ‘It was either marry him or never see him again. We hardly knew each other. We must have been insane. I couldn’t boil an egg without burning it!’ She forced a laugh.
‘There are more important things,’ Karen said drily.
But she had failed in that field as well, she acknowledged painfully, and thumbscrews wouldn’t have dragged that admission from her. Instead she managed a careless shrug. ‘I was only eighteen. We had a lot of strikes against us. We had my parents doing everything they could to break us up and we didn’t have much money either—’
‘What?’ Karen cut in. ‘Elise told me that he’s from a very wealthy background.’
Sarah looked at her in astonishment. ‘I can’t imagine where she picked up that idea.’
Karen frowned. ‘Maybe I misunderstood. Sorry, I interrupted you.’
‘There isn’t much more. In the end, Rafael got bored. His reputation as an artist was taking off,’ she murmured flatly. ‘And he took off with it. End of story.’
‘That was very informative, Sarah,’ Karen breathed with irony. ‘You spend a couple of years with a male who looks as if he could make a handshake into a whole new erotic experience and you compress him into two throwaway lines like a tax write-off! You could take the fantasy out of Disneyland.’
Sarah’s lashes veiled her strained eyes. She suppressed an urge to admit that that had been more or less Rafael’s opinion as well.
That night she lay awake for a long time. To be in the midst of a gathering storm and do nothing was to invite disaster. And where Rafael was concerned sitting on the fence was positively suicidal. The fence was likely to collapse while you were still sitting on it. Hours of frantic soul-searching forced her to certain conclusions, none of which eased her mental conflict.
Rafael had a legal right to see Gilly and Ben. Admitting that went against the grain but there it was, one of those facts of life that couldn’t be ignored. She ought to be able to take control of the situation and act like a mature woman of twenty-five. As a rule she was calm and sensible. She could usually see both sides of an argument even when her own feelings were involved. Why should those qualities go out of the window now when she most needed her wits about her? Why had both her attempts to reason with Rafael ended in dismal failure?
And she knew why, oh, yes, she knew within her heart and her soul where only the truth could dwell. Some bonds went too deep to break. Some emotions were quite independent of pride and common sense. You didn’t stop loving someone just because they hurt you. If love died so easily there would be a lot less unhappiness in the world. In every other way her life had changed since their separation. There was only one constant between then and now.
It was a humiliating irony that she should grow and mature and still retain an utterly adolescent and uncontrollable set of reactions to Rafael. She refused to put a label to those feelings. After all, time had moved on for Rafael, if not for her, and every time she saw him she hated him just that little bit more for that reality. Perhaps in the end that would be the saving of her, she conceded with angry self-loathing.
She had a frantic rush to get out the next morning. Gilly and Ben were attending a birthday barbecue after nursery school and she not only had to search for the present she had bought, but wrap it as well. Arriving at work within a minute of opening time, she felt under pressure. Summer flu had decimated the office and she had a heap of typing to do while she greeted arriving clients and dealt with their queries. She made elementary mistakes in letters she could normally type with her eyes closed. By finishing time she felt like a wet rag and that was when Rafael strolled in.
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