“And you were the innocent victim, frantically trying to salvage her pride, is that it?”
“It might have been a little more sensible of me to wait a while. Get a little distance from the situation, before deciding what I wanted to do about it. But I was young, in love, and completely devastated by what I had heard.”
“By what you thought you had heard,” he corrected, his expression grim.
She shook her head wearily. “Sure, whatever. By what I thought I had heard. Anyway, I didn’t want to be your gull a second time around.”
For the rest of the meal, they conversed little. Later, as Rafael started up the car in the parking lot, he asked, “So what exactly did you overhear me say?”
She shrugged, eager to retreat to the solitude of her room, away from him and the uncomfortable silences that had prevailed since she had told her side of the story. “I don’t even remember all the specifics. I just remember your friends joking with you about dating the boss’s daughter and how you would be in for a windfall once you popped the question. And throughout most of it, you didn’t say a word--didn’t try to correct them or insist you really loved me. Nothing.”
She swallowed hard, as she thought about what had been the clincher for her at the time. How ironic that as an indirect result of that very conversation, Paulo’s crude suggestion would no longer even be a possibility for Rafe to consider. The accident had seen to that. “Then, someone suggested that you should get me pregnant, just as insurance, and you said something about keeping that in mind.”
She shook her head, acutely conscious of his presence beside her. “I just wanted to sink into the ground and disappear. I would have slunk out right then if I hadn’t been waiting for Steve.”
“Was there more?” She heard the tension in his tone, but in the dimly-lit parking lot, she couldn’t see much of his expression.
“It’s all a bit hazy. I think after hearing that, I was so buried in my misery that everything else kind of faded out of focus. I just remember sitting there, not hearing anything anymore as I tried to decide what the hell I was going to do next, given that all my expectations and hopes had just been crumbled to dust.”
“I see,” he said again, before putting the car into gear and roaring out of the parking lot.
Once they had entered the suite, Ali turned towards her room.
“Ali, wait.”
She turned back to him. “Please Rafe, I’m tired. I just want to sleep.”
He nodded. “I just wanted you to know. I loved you. It killed me to see you leaving the pub with some other man--to hear those things you told me that night.”
She gave a weary snort. “Loved me. Right. You loved me enough to consider getting me pregnant as insurance.”
He shook his head. “I was being sarcastic. It irritated the hell out of me that my compadres were being jerks--saying stupid things like that. But like me, they were from broken homes--and many of them had far more difficult times of it than I did.” He sighed. “Paulo had the worst of it. He probably wouldn’t have known real love if it had hit him between the eyes back then--a good man, but cynical, without any reason to be otherwise. There would have been no point in trying to correct him, or any of the others. I figured time would prove them wrong, so I didn’t have to.”
“Really.” Ali didn’t know what to believe anymore. She had spent so many years mistrusting him and assuming his motives were mercenary. But, as she thought about it, she realized that what he said did make sense. She had enough guy friends to know that often as not, part of the male bonding process over beers involved joking around with any of their friends who seemed to be getting serious about a girl. It was part of some bizarre initiation rite she didn’t pretend to understand. But she also knew the jokers rarely meant anything by it--now.
At the time, the thought hadn’t even occurred to her. She had been too naïve. Too in love.
“Do you believe me, Ali?”
His voice startled her out of her thoughts and she looked over at him. He was watching her with the hooded gaze of a bird of prey, and despite her fatigue, she felt something hot and intense kindle deep inside her.
She frowned. “Yes, I think I actually do.” She paused, looking away from him. “And I’m sorry you were hurt by the thing with Steve. The possibility didn’t occur to me at the time, since I was just so sure you didn’t give a damn about me, except as an easy ticket to status and success.” She glanced at him with tight smile. “What about you? Does my story hold up to your scrutiny?”
He nodded. “I believe you. It took me a little while to work everything through to my satisfaction. But now, yes. I believe what you’ve told me.” He shrugged. “We were young, stupid and full of pride. We should have talked instead of shouting and trying to cover the depths of our feelings.”
She smiled wryly. “At last. Something we agree about. So can you leave off with the deprecations and the barbed comments?”
He nodded. “Accept my apologies.”
She chuckled. “It’s not really a request, coming from you, is it? Anyway, good night.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Except that once again she couldn’t sleep, too disturbed by the edged awareness that he was in the room beside hers, undoubtedly shirtless, his perfectly sculpted body bared to the long shadows and the moonlight. Even more disturbing was the knowledge that he wasn’t the manipulative bastard she had believed him to be for so long--or at least he hadn’t been, all those years ago.
It had been far easier to simply hate him. Now, she had no emotional buffer for her longings--for his body, his smile, his desire. And this, she knew, was dangerous territory.
If they made love, he would see what had happened to her. And, while he might have loved her all those years ago, the man he had become was a stranger. A man who felt he had earned--and could afford--the best, and who had no interest in settling for flawed goods.
Perhaps she was reading too much into his offhanded comments--she could admit to that possibility. But did she want to risk her own emotions on the chance that she wasn’t--that he had become the sort of man who would lose interest in her once he saw how her body had been marred?
She shifted restlessly in the bed, then sat up, blinking at the dim outlines of the furniture. The door to the balcony stood open, but again, the moonlight slanted across it, leaving her half in shadow.
She slipped from the bed, shaking her head. No. It was impossible.
She strode across the room and stepped out onto the balcony, staring out at the pines and the moon-washed waves rolling languidly to shore. The temptation to glance at the living room was almost too strong, but she managed to resist. She didn’t need to see how beautiful he looked and be reminded of what she couldn’t allow herself to have.
“So you couldn’t sleep, either.”
She started, turning to see him sitting up on the couch, eyes black shadows in the silvered planes of his face.
“No, I…” She shook her head, feeling the pulse of her attraction for him, even though she deliberately avoided the sight of his bared chest. “No, I couldn’t.”
His mouth lifted. “It’s strange, isn’t it? Learning that what you had thought immutable fact for so many years was nothing more than perception.”
She looked away. “I suppose so. But then the older I get, the more I realize that’s generally the way of things.”
He walked over to where she stood, so close that she could feel the warmth of his breath against her ear. But he didn’t touch her. “So, what’s say we put aside our mistakes from the past?”
Hardly realizing what she did, she leaned back against him, feeling the electric heat of his chest against her back, through the thin fabric of her sarong.
His hands came to rest on her hips and she felt the heat of a rising excitement.
Ali let out a shaky sigh. “And what would this be about, then?” she asked, placing her hands over his.
She felt him shrug as he shifted, his arms slipping around
her. He moved forward, holding her against the hard length of his body and she let out a gasp to feel the press of his erection against her back. She drew in a deep breath, her heart beginning to speed up as his fingers slipped between the draped folds of the sarong.
“What do you want it to be about, Ali?” he murmured, his voice close to her ear as he placed his cheek against her head.
She shook her head, feeling her hair catch in the rasp of his late night stubble. “I don’t know.” She remained silent a few moments. “Perhaps it should be about making peace with the past. Setting it behind us and closing the door, once and for all.”
His fingers left aching trails of heat on the bare skin under her breasts and distantly, she felt him nod. “So be it, then.”
Something inside her capitulated at his acceptance. She would give them this one night, then. A night in which to indulge her fantasies--to live out her desire for him. And, she fervently hoped, to finally put whatever hold he had over her into the past.
She turned in his arms and lifted her face to his. He kissed her deeply. She felt the plunging heat of his tongue in her mouth and responded in kind, gasping at the rising tide of sensations that threatened to carry her away into the moonlit darkness.
Somehow they managed to make their way to the bed, her body full of a rhythmic heat that pounded through her blood like the breaking surf on the shore outside.
They stood beside the tousled expanse of the mattress, lost in the complexity of the sensations they shared.
She groaned as his fingers slipped between her legs, fondling her, even as her own hands roamed across the hard contours of his chest, feverishly touching the etched muscles she had traced with hungry eyes the previous night.
His other hand found the knot of her sarong and worked it loose. The fabric slipped from her body into a silken pool at her feet. Then, he put his arms around her waist and eased her backwards onto the bed. Her back against the cool of the sheets, she wrapped her legs around his waist, her hands continuing their explorations.
“I want to see you--all of you,” he murmured.
Ali knew something about that should bother her, but it was only as he began to pull away from her that the haze of sensation cleared enough for her to realise her danger. If he saw her--all of her…
She grasped the hand Rafe had been reaching towards the bedside lamp, lacing her fingers between his.
“Not now, Rafe,” she whispered, taking his chin in her other hand and turning him to face her. She could barely make out his features in the darkness and she let out a breath of relief. “Make love to me.” She raised her head and kissed him with a deep, plunging urgency--and the swirling current between them shifted abruptly, into something darker, fiercer, more intense.
He groaned, releasing her hand so that he could rake through her hair with his fingers, pushing the strands from her face as he deepened the kiss.
Ali’s body burned with a throbbing, rising need to be closer against him. To fuse his flesh with her own, merge with him and ride the wild tide of their passion together.
Her hands moved over the hard muscles of his back as she pulled herself closer, drowning in the rising intimacy. He shifted, then entered her, and she echoed his movements with her own, the rhythm of her excitement coursing through her in a stormy ebb and flow of mounting oblivion.
The pounding rush of culmination rose to submerge her in the crash of its climax as he moved inside her. Her cry was lost in the shattering power of the orgasm that held her in its heated, swirling embrace.
Afterwards, she lay awake, physically sated but filled with doubts. She had wanted their lovemaking to be a final goodbye to what they had once shared--an acknowledgment of their past love and the wrongness of their misunderstanding. She had wanted to walk away from it feeling sated and ready to move on.
But she didn’t feel that way at all. She glanced at the shadowed lines of Rafe’s sleeping form and knew that if he woke and reached for her, she’d be lost in the wild tide of her desire once again. Instead of an end, it felt like a beginning--the first taste of something she couldn’t turn away from.
And yet, she had to, didn’t she?
Ali sat up and slipped out of the bed. Then, moving as silently as she could manage, she dressed in a tracksuit and snuck out of the suite.
Outside on the beach, she sat, hands in her pockets, watching the dim pounding of the waves until the sky brightened with the first vestiges of dawn, and the day slipped out from the cover of darkness. But, she was still no closer to an answer she could like.
Even assuming that he wanted to continue things after this--and there was no guarantee that he would--she dared not allow things to progress. For, in spite his autocratic manner, she was well on her way to falling in love with him again. Before they had made love, she hadn’t wanted to admit how deeply her attraction ran.
But, now that they had shared such spectacular lovemaking, she knew she was in real danger, for their intimacy had spoken to something deep inside her. Something she believed she had managed to extinguish completely as part of the process of becoming self-reliant, in the years after the accident.
And so, while he might walk away from a brief affair with nary a backward glance, she knew she’d be limping off to the sidelines and licking her wounds for some time to come.
“You’ve been sitting out here for a long time,” piped a voice from behind her. She turned to find a frizzy-haired young girl watching her with wide dark eyes. She looked no more than five years old. “What were you doing all this time?”
Ali saw a young woman walking towards them from the direction of the hotel. “Lina, I thought I told you not to bother the lady.” Switching her gaze to Ali, the woman smiled apologetically. “It’s our last day here and Lina was up at the crack of dawn, staring out the window of our room at the water because she wanted come down to the beach one last time before we left.”
“No worries.” Ali returned the other woman’s smile, before returning her attention to Lina. “And to answer your question, I was watching the waves and thinking.”
A frown creased Lina’s forehead. “I bet playing in the water’s way more fun.”
Ali laughed. “I can almost guarantee it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Ali.”
“That’s pretty. My name’s short for Selina.”
“That’s a very pretty name, too.”
“Mummy’s name is Anna, isn’t it mummy?”
“Yes it is, sweetie. But we should let the nice lady go, now. Say goodbye.”
Lina gave a solemn wave, which Ali returned, before grinning at the other woman. “Nice meeting you both. Take care.”
She returned inside, feeling the familiar, wistful ache she always experienced when she saw young children. The thought brought her back to her present dilemma with Rafael. After all, almost worse than the notion of a short-term affair was the possibility that he might end up wanting more from her. For if he did want a real relationship, then she would have to tell him everything.
And how would a man like Rafael Alvarez take to the notion that his partner could never give him a baby? He’d have to decide whether to stay with her or walk away, in search of a woman who could give him what she never could--a child of his body.
And somehow, knowing Rafe--beneath the veneer of his Canadian upbringing, he was Hispanic to the core--she already knew what he would decide. Even less traditional men would probably have difficulty accepting the truth and choosing to stay with her in spite of it.
Her throat tightened once again as she contemplated the beautiful, irreplaceable treasure she had lost on that winter night two years ago. But she had already mourned for the children she could never have, even if she still hadn’t reached the point where she could freely talk about her loss. Or where she could accept that she hadn’t become half a woman when she became infertile.
She stood, her resolution fixed. No matter how much her body and her emotions longed for more, she c
ould not permit herself any further intimacies with Rafael Alvarez.
Ali stopped by the front desk on the off chance that another room might have freed up--and it turned out she was in luck. One of the other guests at the hotel had been called back a day early because of some work emergency. She would have a room to herself tonight.
As she made her way upstairs, Ali sorted through the odd blend of feelings this change in plans had evoked. Part of her really had wanted to be tempted again--tested beyond her strength, because she hadn’t had nearly enough of Rafe yet. But she pushed those niggling feelings aside. She was glad to be able to make a clean break.
She nodded firmly. Of course she was. That was exactly what she had wanted--what she had decided was for the best.
Rafe was already up and showered when she entered. He was sitting at the table, reading his paper and drinking coffee. The usual vast array of room service breakfast was spread across the table.
He glanced up and gave her a nod, a cool half smile tilting his lips.
“Out for an early morning walk?”
She nodded, eyeing him cautiously. Either he was also having second thoughts, or he suspected something was up.
“More or less.” She shrugged. “I also stopped by the front desk.” She deliberately injected some lightness into her tone as she continued, a bright smile on her lips. “And it turns out that one of the other rooms has been freed up. So I’ll be out of your hair for tonight.”
He set aside the newspaper, letting out a low whistle as he shook his head.
Her smile dimmed. “What?”
“You really do not do things by halves, do you?”
He looked at her, and it was only then she realized how angry he was.
“I don’t know what you mean. What happened last night--“
“Was amazing.” His expression dared her to deny it.
“True. But it was also about the past, not the future. It’s over between us, and last night was about finally closing that door on what happened.”
Leaving Rafe Page 7