by Lynne Graham
'I was so much of a disappointment, you came to me and you begged me to take you back,' Rafael slotted in, hooded eyes showing a mere glimmer of gleaming gold below the inky black luxuriance of his lashes. 'You wept and you pleaded and you lied...'
Georgie turned white, stared down into her untouched glass, slaughtered utterly by the reminder of her lowest hour. 'And it was like taking the cure,' she whispered between clenched teeth. 'So much for love. It died there and then and I'm happy to tell you that I've never fancied myself in love since.'
'Love has nothing to do with what is between us.'
Her knuckles showed white as she tightened her grip on her glass. 'There is nothing between us.'
'Look at me and tell me that—show the courage of your conviction,' Rafael derided.
Georgie felt as though she was being torn apart. Just minutes earlier she had been playing games with him but that false bravado had now deserted her. She felt cornered, intimidated, suddenly knew that she had been very naive indeed to allow him to bring her to the estancia, even more naive to imagine that he would play the polite host to her role of guest.
'I said... look at me.'
The command, given by a male accustomed to absolute authority, sent her tension climbing to meteoric heights. A lean hand removed the glass from her con-vulsed grip. Powerful fingers closed round her forearm, literally forcing her upright, and instantly she attempted to pull away.
'Stop it,' Rafael commanded rawly, scanning her drawn face with scorchingly angry dark eyes. 'Do you think I enjoy wanting you? Do you think I am proud of the desire you arouse in me? But this time I will not walk away. Why should I? Why shouldn't I take what I want? You owe me...'
Georgie was trembling, shaken by the force of anger she had unleashed. 'I owe you nothing, not even the time of day!'
'But you'll still give me everything,' he assured her.
'Never!' Georgie vowed. 'And stop threatening me!'
'Do you feel threatened when I make love to you?' With a husky sound of very male amusement, Rafael drew her closer and ran an insolently expert hand down over the full curve of her breasts and she shuddered helplessly.
'Don't touch me!' On the edge of panic, Georgie sought to break free of his hold as a blunt forefinger circled the erect bud of a nipple, visibly thrusting through the thin fabric of her dress. A quivering, hateful excitement leapt into being inside her but she fought it to the last ditch.
'Do all your lovers turn you on this hard and this fast?' Rafael lowered his dark head and allowed the tip of his tongue to slide erotically between her lips, just once, in a darting foray that sent heat coursing through her in a debilitating wave.
'Every one of them!' she slammed back in a breathless rush.
'But I'll be the one you remember long after I'm gone,' Rafael completed with predatory assurance, quite untouched by her attempt to repel him, a strong hand splaying across her hips to jerk her into even closer contact, and she stopped breathing altogether as he moved fluidly against her, bringing her into unashamed contact with the hard thrust of his arousal.
Her treacherous body was on fire and she closed her eyes, struggling to think, struggling not to react. 'No,' she whispered shakily.
He lifted her with ease and one of her shoes fell off. She opened startled eyes a split-second before he brought his mouth crashing down on hers. She stopped thinking, she started simply feeling. The effect was that immediate. Her hands bit into his broad shoulders as she strained against the hard heat of his muscular length. Her fingers drifted into his hair and she was lost, controlled by an intolerable need that sent the blood pounding at an insane rate through her veins. Slowly, very slowly, he slid her down the length of his body on to her feet again and lifted his head.
'You go to pieces when I touch you. I like that... I love that,' Rafael muttered with a ragged groan of satisfaction. 'It gives me an incredible sexual high no other woman has ever matched. I saw you lying asleep in that cell and every decent thought, every piece of self-restraint fled instantaneously. I'd have killed to get you out of there and into my bed.'
Finding herself lop-sided, minus one shoe, Georgie crouched down in a dazed and trembling search to locate the missing item. That she couldn't think straight didn't help. But then, Rafael was proving a whole lot harder to handle than she could ever have imagined. She didn't know Rafael as a lover. In that field, she didn't know Rafael at all. And in this mood, Rafael was a revelation, a distinctly intimidating revelation. Nothing she had read, nothing she had ever heard, could save her from feeling gruesomely out of her own limited depth.
'What are you doing?' Rafael enquired huskily.
He pressed her back on a nearby sofa, produced her shoe and proceeded to slide it back on, but he didn't get back up again. He smoothed his lean hands slowly up over her slender calves to her knees, watching her intently from beneath indolently lowered black lashes that a woman would have killed to possess.
'Dinner,' Georgie said jerkily, every muscle tightening in stricken response.
'Dinner is served when I ring,' Rafael leant forward and brushed his mouth very softly across hers, his breath fanning her cheek as long fingers pushed her knees gently apart. 'Dios mio..." he murmured softly, letting his tongue probe smoothly between her lips and making her shake like leaf in a high wind, a tiny whisper of shaken protest escaping her throat. 'Food to die for, clothes to die for... your expression. This has to be sex to die for.'
'No,' she mumbled, but she opened her mouth for his exploration, shivering as the intrusion became less playful.
'Why are you so tense?' Caressing fingers slid below the hem of her dress, stroking along the tender skin of her inner thigh, forcing a stifled gasp to erupt from her.
T-Tense?'
'Surely it has not been that long since a man made love to you?'
Her hands were in his hair, and she didn't honestly know how they had got there. One half of her was petrified, the other half of her was mesmerised by what he was doing to her. 'Forever.' Her voice was a thin thread of barely recognisable sound.
She clashed with devouring golden eyes, drowned as though time had stopped, leaving her in limbo. Never in the twenty-three years of her existence had she experienced anything even approaching what she was feeling now. He was barely touching her and her entire body was in meltdown. The intensity of her own arousal devastated her every attempt to regain her hold on a situation which had moved with incredible rapidity out of her control.
'Por Dios... I want you so badly it hurts,' he muttered fiercely, raking a single fingertip across the tautly stretched scrap of lace covering the very heart of her, jolting every bone in her body with an intolerable rush of erotic sensation.
Somebody banged on the door. In fact, somebody banged on the door so loudly that Georgie very nearly hit the ceiling in shock. Far less susceptible to the disturbance, Rafael dragged shimmering golden eyes from her and sprang fluidly upright. Georgie swallowed hard and rearranged her hemline with trembling hands.
'We will eat,' Rafael murmured flatly.
Hectically flushed, and barely able to stand on legs that were wobbling with shock, Georgie espied Teresa in the doorway and, if possible, felt her blush spread down to encompass every other part of her exposed body. A dark, deep hole to hide in would have been extraordinarily welcome. Saved in the very nick of time by the housekeeper, she thought, on the quivering edge of hysteria.
She made it into the palatial dining-room and down onto a chair. Inside her head pounded a relentless refrain. How could you be so stupid... how could you be so weak? What was she, some sort of brainless puppet? Was she so over-sexed that she couldn't say no like any other decent woman? What did it say about her that after all the insults, all the cruelty, she had still allowed Rafael to touch her?
Rafael said something sharp in Spanish, ice dripping off every syllable. Teresa retreated at speed.
'You don't seem to get on very well with your housekeeper.'
&
nbsp; 'She does not approve of your presence here. But what I do in my own home is entirely my affair.' Rafael shook out a white linen napkin with an air of magnificent unconcern. 'Teresa does not know whether to save you or condemn you. The taxing question of whether you are a virtuous woman being wickedly seduced, or a shameless hussy, will no doubt keep her awake all night. But by tomorrow the truth will out. She will decide that you are beyond saving and that I am no better and no worse than any other man in giving way to temptation. Then peace will be restored to my household!'
Frozen, with a spoon hovering indecisively over the very tempting fruit concoction set before her, Georgie cleared her throat. 'What truth will out?'
"That we are lovers.'
'I am not going to sleep with you!' Darkened violet eyes flared furiously down the table at him.
'I hope not. Sleep does not feature anywhere in my expectations of the night ahead,' Rafael delivered lazily, lifting his wine-glass and resting back in his chair to survey her with slumbrous dark eyes. He toasted her with a graceful movement of one brown hand. 'Salud... to every fantasy being fulfilled. Sadly, the Ferrari is in London, but I don't lack imagination in the bedroom and I doubt very much that you will be disappointed.'
Georgie tossed aside her spoon, any idea of eating now abandoned. 'If you think for one moment that I intend to allow you to use me ' she returned in seething indigation.
'But I intend to reciprocate in being used,' Rafael interrupted mockingly, but there was a current of something distinctly more menacing in the assurance. 'Our hunger is mutual, but I have never had a purely sexual affair before. If I'm a little clumsy sometimes, remember that. I don't quite know how to treat you. Perhaps that is because the minute I take my hands off you, I see your every flaw... then I wonder what the hell I'm doing with you.'
Georgie flew upright, her facial muscles rigid, her beautiful eyes aflame with fury. 'I want to return to my hotel tomorrow!'
'No way,' Rafael said softly. 'You go when I say it is time, not before.'
Georgie lifted her glass and stalked down the length of the polished table. With a flick of her wrist, she tossed the contents in his face. 'But I say it is time now, and I expect you to listen.'
A hand snaked out and trapped her fingers, preventing her retreat. Calmly he dried himself with a napkin while retaining that punishing grip on her. Only then did he turn blazing dark eyes on her furiously flushed profile. 'It really hasn't dawned on you yet, has it?' he demanded, jerking her round so that she had to face him. 'You bounce through life like an exuberant, destructive child—undisciplined, wholly self-centred and greedy, careless of the damage you cause, never counting the cost. But today is the day you start paying for being a shallow, opportunistic little bitch.'
Georgie stared back at him in stunned disbelief. 'You're—you're out of your mind...' she whispered.
'No,' Rafael murmured softly, silkily, 'I'm the kind of unforgiving bastard you wouldn't find in your worst nightmares. And you really don't know why, do you?'
'I think you're acting like someone unhinged,' she muttered helplessly.
'I was very unhinged four years ago,' Rafael agreed, his fingers tightening so savagely on hers that her smaller hand was crushed. He threw his handsome dark head back and studied her with unflinching intensity, his eloquent mouth hardening. 'Take a good long look at those rooms upstairs. Take a note of the severe lack of good taste in that Hollywood film-star bathroom. Ask yourself who you know with a vulgar penchant for mermaid taps and marble. And then ask yourself why I would have wasted an obscene amount of money actually paying someone to make them.'
Transfixed by the savage onslaught of his biting dark eyes, Georgie's stomach cramped up. She couldn't fed her hand any more but she was beyond that awareness. She couldn't breathe, couldn't move, because she was paralysed by what he was telling her, unable to credit that her insanely confused thoughts could be heading in the right direction. 'I—I...' And for the life of her, she couldn't think of what to say.
"That suite was decorated for my bride—for my beautiful, pure bride.' Rafael drew her bruised fingers to his mouth and kissed them in a scathing demonstration of derision before dropping her hand again.
'You wanted to marry me?' Georgie demanded starkly, her voice cracking loudly in the charged silence.
'You really didn't know... I always wondered.' Rafaei vented a grimly amused laugh as he read the sheer astonishment in her dazed eyes. 'But then, how could you know how to deal with a man who treated you with respect? Naturally, I did not want to make love to you before our wedding-night, but that restraint on my part was not appreciated. You got bored, didn't you?'
Every scrap of pink had drained from Georgie's vibrantly beautiful face. 'No...no!' she said again shakily.
'So you went to bed with someone else—someone wise enough to know that the very last thing you wanted was respect—another teenager.' All the raw savagery of Rafael's conquistador ancestry was stamped into the harsh lines of his golden features, his embittered fury starkly apparent in his blazing stare. 'I, Rafael Rodriguez Berganza, made to look a fool by a teenage boy!'
Trembling, Georgie whispered jerkily, 'Danny was a friend, nothing more '
Rafael reached out and curved a cruelly strong hand round her elbow, forcing her closer. 'You think that makes a difference? That it meant nothing to you, that it was a drunken one-night stand which I was never intended to know about? I always knew that! But was it worth it? I ask you now, querida mia was it worth what you lost? Looking at you now, I would say not,' he derided, thrusting her back from him with contempt. 'Because you still want me. You still want me so much it terrifies you... and if you had had any intelligence at all, you would have known yourself safer in that prison cell than you are here with me!'
Georgie backed away. 'I don't like being threatened!' she spat back at him in a tempest of emotion too tangled for her even to comprehend. All she could recognise was the terrible rage which dominated her every other reaction. 'And I didn't want to marry you anyway! My idea of marriage is not being told what to do from dawn to dusk and getting the big freeze when you fail... and my ideal partner is not some international playboy, who sleeps with every woman he wants and then thinks he's got some God-given right to marry a virgin!'
Rafael plunged upright. 'I did not think it my right '
'No, evidently you selected me at school and hoped to God you'd got me in time!' Georgie slung back in disgust. 'You know something? You are everything Steve ever said you were. Primitive, backward and bigoted.'
Rafael froze and shot her a seething look of such frightening anger that her voice simply died away. 'You say that name once more in my presence and I will surely kill you...'
CHAPTER FOUR
A good cry was supposed to be therapeutic. Georgie peered at herself through swollen eyes half an hour later, acknowledged the tumultuous state of her jangling nerves and distraught emotions, and decided dully that the good cry had utterly failed.
Teresa was hovering with a large laden tray when Georgie walked back into the bedroom. She aimed an uncertain smile at Georgie, but Georgie was so embarrassed by her red, puffy face that she lowered her head.
'You have dinner, senorita?'
'Thanks.' Distress hadn't killed Georgie's appetite. But then, food had been pretty thin on the ground over the past forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours, she reflected sickly. That swine had all but wiped her out in little more than twelve hours! Yet, four years ago, Rafael had actually planned to marry her! Finding out that now shook her rigid. Pick a teenage bride and mould her like unformed clay into the correct image... She hadn't been rich or well-born but, heaven knew, she had been malleable! And Rafael must have wanted her; Rafael must very badly have wanted her, she decided dazedly, to overlook all her other deficiencies.
For a few minutes, Georgie hugged that new knowledge to her. It shed a different light on that long-ago summer, briefly mollified her damaged pride. Th
en, with protective parents hovering, not to mention her youth and close friendship with his sister, he hadn't had that many options, she conceded ruefully. How could he have embarked on an affair with her? There would always have been the risk that she might tell Maria Cristina when it was over. And how did you have an affair with a girl who had to be home by midnight unless her stepbrother was in tow? A choky little laugh escaped Georgie. Was that why he had gone up in flames at the mere mention of Steve?
It would be foolish to deny that her parents had been worried by Rafael's interest in her, their concern exacerbated by Steve, who had slated the idea that Rafael could be trusted with their precious daughter. Throughout those weeks with Rafael, Georgie had been irritated by Steve's attitude, but she had grudgingly conceded his genuine concern that she was going to be badly hurt.
And when Steve's expectations had been fulfilled, Georgie had been grateful for his smooth and careless dismissal of their parents' astonishment that her relationship with Rafael had been so abruptly concluded. In fact, that understated kindness in shielding her from awkward questions had helped Georgie more than anything else to forget her stepbrother's disturbing behaviour on that final night.
She shivered, for she liked to recall that least of all. But, whether she liked it or not, the events of that catastrophic evening were flooding back to her. Did she blame everything on the amount of alcohol she had recklessly consumed? No, she could not allow that excuse. And, even without Steve's encouragement, she would have rebelled against Rafael's arrogance sooner or later.
She remembered Steve's girlfriend, a very pretty girl, only a couple of years her senior. It had been the first time she had met Janet. But that evening she had noticed how very careless Steve was of Janet's feelings. He hadn't paid her much attention. It had been a new view of Steve which she hadn't liked. It had made her wonder if all men were like that. Once a man knew you loved him, did you then become boring?