by Lynne Graham
Georgie had been so much on edge that night, conscious that Rafael had been disturbingly distant on the last two occasions she had been with him. She had felt threatened and insecure and she had simultaneously despised herself for being so weak. She had told herself that if Rafael was getting bored with her, she could handle it. But she hadn't handled it. She had got childishly, stupidly drunk.
'I'm taking you borne,' Rafael had told her grimly.
'If you take her home in that state, my stepfather will kill her!' Steve had protested.
'As opposed to me killing her?' Rafael had drawled with flat indifference. 'I'll take her home to her father and let him do it. Will that make you happy?'
Steve had become abusive. Rafael had ignored him and dragged Georgie out to his car. She hadn't wanted to go home. At that point, the evening had gone totally haywire. She had started to scream at Rafael in the Ferrari, and it was amazing how much she had said that later, she had to acknowledge, had truly come from the heart. Alcohol had filled her with the Dutch courage to list her every resentment.
'I thought you were more mature. Now I face reality—the inescapable gap between hope and self-delusion,' Rafael had commented very drily. "Then, how do I blame you? One does not rob the schoolroom and expect to be rewarded with an adult. But, right now, I feel that I robbed the nursery department!'
Georgie had subsided like a pricked balloon but she had been wildly confused by the unfamilair strength of the emotions tearing her apart. One minute she loved him, the next she felt she hated him. And when he talked down to her like that, hatred rose uppermost.
But he had rewarded her sullen silence with a kiss, yet another in a long line of fleeting salutes, as if she was in very truth, the child he accused her of being. Still, there had not been an ounce of the passion she craved. And she had wanted so badly to prove that she was a woman, a real woman capable of satisifying his every adult desire.
And maybe she had also been trying to convince herself that she in turn had some power over him. So what had she done? Even four years after the event, Georgie cringed from recalling the fact that she had shamelessly thrown herself at Rafael in the car, employing every atom of wanton encouragement she had ever read about in racy female magazine articles of the 'How to hang on to your man' variety.
And it had worked... briefly. Rafael had uttered a ragged groan. With satisfying speed, all that infuriating restraint of his had vanished. She had ended up flat on the passenger seat, his mouth hotly sealed to hers, his body hard and demanding, crushing her yielding curves, all the red-hot passion she had for him finally matched. It hadn't even occurred to her that they were in a public car park. Georgie had been beyond such trivialities. But then Rafael had sworn viciously in Spanish and thrust himself back from her, an unholy glitter in his dark probing gaze.
'Who taught you how to arouse a man?' he had demanded, without hesitation ablaze with suspicion and distrust.
He hadn't been impressed by her stammered assurance that nobody had taught her anything. Georgie had been eaten alive by mortification. In the end she had been in such a state of sobbing incoherence that when she had seen Steve crossing the car park she had leapt out of the Ferrari and raced after him.
Steve had had a row with Janet, who had already gone home in a taxi. He had taken Georgie back to his house, sooner than subject her to the horror of facing her father n the condition she was in. And then her nightmare evening had taken its second very bad turn for the worse... in many ways, at the time, the very worst turn of all.
Georgie paced the richly carpeted floor, recalling with a shudder how she had felt when Steve had, without any prior warning that she had noticed, switched from understanding big brother to would-be lover. He had had a comforting arm round her shoulders as they walked into the lounge and then he had suddenly grabbed her and begun kissing her! Georgie had been shattered and repelled. Steve might not be her real brother, but she had always regarded him in the asexual guise of one. His forceful embrace might only have lasted a short time but it had shocked and frightened Georgie as much as attempted rape.
'Hell, I'm not your brother.. .don't look at me like that!' Steve had shouted at her before she escaped upstairs to lock herself in the bathroom and be horribly sick.
He had tried to talk to her through the door. He had had too much to drink. He was upset about Janet. Couldn't she understand? But that night Georgie hadn't been capable of understanding. She had shrunk from the challenge of opening that door and facing him again. And when Steve had told her that he was going out to check that he had locked his car, Georgie had fled through the back door.
She had gone to Danny's apartment, hadn't been able to think of any other place to run, would certainly not have turned to Rafael after the treatment he had meted out earlier. Danny had given her his bed and slept on the lounge sofa. Georgie had been so upset, he really
hadn't known what to do with her. In the end he had just made her a cup of coffee and left her in peace.
The next morning, raised voices had wakened her. She had sat up, naked in the tumbled bed, to find Rafael standing in the bedroom doorway in a sort of seething silent rage of incredulity. Without a word he had swung on his heel and stridden back out of the flat. Danny had appeared then, shivering wet and dripping from the shower, still wrapped in a bath-towel. 'He just forced his way in..." he had mumbled. 'And he's a lot bigger than I am. Hope you didn't mind me making myself scarce.'
Steve had been their second visitor, close on Rafael's
heels. Georgie hadn't been able to meet her step-brother's eyes.
'How did Rafael know where I was?' she had demanded.
'I guessed you had to be here and I told him.' Steve had sighed. 'I thought you'd want to see him and smooth over that stupid row you had with him.'
And, of course, had Rafael not completely misinterpreted what he had seen, she would indeed have been glad to see him.
Steve had bent over backwards to make peace with her, fervently apologising for upsetting her the night before. He had papered over the cracks of her discomfiture, made it easier for her to try and pretend that nothing had changed between them. But it had, she ac- knowledged sadly. A new distance had gradually eroded ' their once close ties.
Later that day, when she had approached Rafael, it had not initially occurred to Georgie that Rafael might not listen to her. She had been incredibly naive in her assumption that Rafael would believe her when she ex- , plained that things might have looked suspicious at Danny's but that in actuality everything had been entirely innocent. But then, she had naturally assumed that Rafael knew her well enough to have some degree of trust in her...
She had put his ridiculous suspicions in the Ferrari down to her own childish behaviour and mutually frayed tempers. Indeed, travelling up in the lift to Rafael's penthouse apartment, Georgie had been so far removed from reality that she had been happily thinking that Rafael must have been jealous and that jealousy had to mean he cared. And, right now, remembering that piece of inane stupidity made Georgie want to tear her hair out and scream. That day she had been a lamb to the slaughter.
But never again, she reminded herself doggedly and, since sleep was the last thing on her over-active mind, she stripped, filled the marble bath with hot water and bubbles and climbed in to wash her hair and then lie back and thoughtfully survey the mermaid taps. For her benefit... Incredible. When, when had he done all this? And how had everything contrived to go so badly wrong? Her throat ached. Running a flannel under the cold tap, she draped it irritably across her still reddened eyes.
Rafael had fallen off his pedestal with a resounding crash. First love—nothing more painful, nothing more intense. It was those memories which saddened her, not any sense of loss or regret. The marriage would have been a disaster, like Desdemona but without the saint-liness, she conceded ruefully, she might have ended up murdered by her enraged and jealous husband. Rafael hadn't trusted her one inch.
She could not have be
en the wife his intelligence would have chosen. Perhaps it had been the awareness that they were temperamentally unsuited which had made him seize on the escape-clause supplied by her supposed fling with Danny. Rafael had not had grounds to judge her that harshly. He had known how much she loved him. How could he have seriously believed that after one stupid row she would jump into bed with a boy almost a year younger than she was? What kind of sense did that make?
'I knew you wouldn't be able to resist the bath...'
Tearing the flannel from her eyes in shock, Georgie reeled up into a sitting position, water sloshing noisily everywhere. 'What the hell are you doing in here?' she gasped in outrage.
Rafael angled a splintering smile over her startled fea-tures and laughed with genuine amusement. 'You're such a curious mixture, Georgie. Puritan and sybarite.' His dinner-jacket hooked in one hand, his white silk dress-shirt undone at his brown throat, he sat down on the edge of the bath. 'You radiate conflicting signals which confuse. Looking at you now, I see why I was taken in four years ago. That look of shock and indignation is very impressive, but the way you're hugging your knees is decided overkill,' he murmured silkily, surveying her with glittering golden eyes. 'You have a very beautiful body... why hide it?'
'Get out of here!' Georgie sizzled back at him furiously.
He tugged a fleecy towel off the rail just out of her reach and extended it with a faintly derisive smile. "Then
you've already learnt that a little mystique is more stimulating than a floor-show?'
Georgie snatched at the towel and wrapped it clumsily round herself as she stood up, her cheeks burning hotly. 'I want you to leave,' she told him stiffly, striving for a note of command and dignity.
Rafael flung his ebony head back and laughed spontaneously.
Georgie stood there, violet eyes flashing with rage 'Look, I have got the message that you consider yourself absolutely irresistible, but I've made it clear that I am not interested!'
'Where was I?' Rafael prompted. 'Where were you when?' Georgie snapped. Rafael slid fluidly upright. 'Where was I when you were making it very clear that you were not interested?' he enquired lethally.
Georgie's teeth clenched. 'Look, I just want to go back to La Paz and sort out my passport!'
'You are really running scared.' Sensual dark eyes scanned her shrewdly. 'Why is that? Pride?'
'I don't know what you're talking about.' Georgie stepped out of the bath.
He reached for her without warning, curving two powerful arms round her and sweeping her off her feet. 'I won't let you run.'
'Put me down, for heaven's sake!' Georgie shrieked. 'No.'
He stared down at her, golden eyes meshing with violet. Her own heartbeat thundered slowly, heavily through her body, stretching every tiny nerve taut. 'Rafael...'
'You burn for me... you can't hide that,' he told her. 'I see it in your eyes, in the way you move, in the very voice you use when you speak to me.'
'So you attract me... so what?' Georgie dared in desperation. 'We don't all follow our most basic instincts!' 'But you do... all the time. However, here you will follow your most basic instincts for my benefit alone,' Rafael asserted, settling her down on the bed and dropping down beside her in one powerful movement. 'No strings on either side, no lies, no misunderstandings. We share a bed, nothing more.'
The hectic pink in her cheeks had receded, leaving her pale. He was peeling off his silk shirt to reveal the bronzed breadth of his shoulders and the curling black triangle of hair hazing his pectoral muscles. As though impelled by a force outside her control, Georgie's unwittingly fascinated gaze lingered and she swallowed hard. On one level she couldn't believe that she was actually in a bedroom on a bed with Rafael. It felt so unreal.
'If you touch me, I'll scream blue murder!'
'What a novel promise,' Rafael breathed huskily, winding long brown fingers into her tangled damp hair as she attempted to sit up and preventing the movement.
'Now just back off before this gets embarrassing for both of us!' Georgie hissed up at him. 'If I scream, your servants will come running!'
'We are alone in the house.'
As he lowered his weight down on to hers, Georgie froze, and stared up at him with darkened violet eyes. 'We can't be...'
'We are.' He bent over her and nipped playfully at her lower lip with the kind of sensual expertise she was defenceless against, the tip of his tongue following gently in the wake of the tiny pain to further inflame. 'I have waited so long to see you on this bed in this room,' he confessed. 'And when it's over, when you're gone, everything will be ripped out and these rooms will be renovated. It will be as though you never existed '
The assurance dug sudden fear into her bones, banishing her momentary loss of concentration. Georgie put up her hands and hit out at him with raw hostility. With a stifled imprecation, he anchored both her hands to the sheet and gazed down at her with incandescent golden eyes, his strong jawline clenching as he absorbed the apprehension in her upturned gaze.
'For Dios... why should you fear me?' he demanded abruptly, releasing her wrists.
Trembling, Georgie thrust him away from her and sat up, clutching with desperate hands at the bath-towel's dipping edge across her full breasts. It was a kind of fear he could never have understood, for he would not have believed its source. She was afraid of herself and him. 'I just want you to -leave me alone!' she muttered shakily.
He murmured something soft in his own language and pulled her close. Stiffening, she shivered violently as the towel lurched dangerously downward. 'No!' she gasped, panicking.
"Si...' Rafael countered, choosing to gather her even closer and cover her lips hungrily with his. The towel slipped; she didn't notice, but a tiny gasp was torn from her as her taut nipples were abraided by his hair-roughened chest.
She was electrified by the way he was making love to her mouth. He searched out every sensitive spot and explored it, making the breath rasp in her throat. It felt so good, indeed, it felt so incredibly exciting that she clutched him with her hands, seduced by her own helpless response. As he settled her smoothly back against the crisp white sheet, she was overwhelmed by the sheer welter of sensation that attacked her when he sealed every virile inch of his lean, powerful body to hers.
He stared down at her with a raw, sexual hunger that burned through clear to her bones. Heat flooded her in a blinding surge. A hard thigh sank between hers and she quivered violently, the fevered pulse-point of desire thrumming ever higher inside her.
'You see...' Rafael muttered thickly. 'And I haven't even begun yet.'
As he buried his mouth in a tiny hollow below her fragile collarbone, he let his thumbs rub expertly across her thrusting pink nipples. She jerked, an involuntary moan torn from her, and he lowered his head to employ his mouth and that wickedly knowing tongue on those unbearaby sensitive buds. He drove her crazy. Sensation like white-hot lightning licked at every nerve-ending and she twisted and gasped in helpless excitement. She was in thrall to a dark enchantment of the senses and the most extraordinary pleasure.
Her fingers dug into the thick silky depths of his hair and tightened as he sucked a swollen nipple into his mouth. 'Rafael... oh, God, Rafael...' she moaned, out of control and burning up.
Through passion-glazed eyes she focused on him, the darkness of his head against her pale skin, the gold of his hands shaping her treacherously responsive flesh. Her palms moved restively over the satin-smooth muscles in his shoulders and then her fingertips drove into his hair again as her heavy eyelids slid down. There was an ache between her thighs, an absolutely unbearable ache. Her teeth clenched. She wanted, needed...
He slid up and twisted a hand painfully into her hair as he devoured her mouth again, bruising her lips but answering her every unspoken need. She kissed him back with wild passion, trembling all over, lost in the depths of her own excruciating excitement. He moaned something raggedly in Spanish, cupping her cheekbones, meeting that passion with a savager
y that dominated, drove, demanded...
'Tentadora...bruja,' Rafael groaned, and then he tensed ever so slightly.
At first Georgie didn't hear the faint buzzing somewhere in the background. Rafael's fingertips were roaming through the damp tangle of curls at the apex of her thighs and she was on a knife-edge of tormented pleasure, quivering skittishly, unable to stay still as he suddenly crushed her mouth beneath his again. And then, with quite paralysing abruptness, he released her and sprang off the bed.
'Rafael?' she mumbled.
"The phone,' he grated.
'What phone?' And then she heard it, buzzing away somewhere like an angry bee.
'My private line—it must be an emergency. Dios,' Rafael swore, shooting her a torn-in-two glance of dark smouldering hunger and incredulous frustration.
Georgie only managed to focus on him as he strode back out of the bathroom, retrieving a mobile phone from his dinner-jacket. And then she got the full effect of Rafael, stark naked. Her lower lip dropped as she stared, for she had no recollection of him removing the rest of his clothes. Sheer shock grabbed her by the throat. Gulping, Georgie took in his uninhibited stance several feet away, not a centimetre of his magnificent golden ohysique concealed from her. Her gaze wandered on a compulsive journey of its own and absorbed with frank alarm her first sight of a rampantly aroused male. She reddened to the roots of her hair.
'One minute... I promise you, querida,' Rafael murmured with erotic emphasis as he surveyed her with blatant male anticipation.
Georgie hauled the sheet over her shamelessly exposed flesh. She started to shake. Aftershock. I am wanton, she thought in a sudden agony of self-reproach. Desire still ached inside her and she was too honest to deny the fact. Rafael had told her that they didn't even need to like each other and she had refused to believe that. But Rafael, veteran of many more such encounters than she, had known better.
From below her lashes, she watched him turn away from her, sounding oddly taut and then breaking into an apparently animated flood of Spanish. You are everything he called you, a nasty little inner voice insisted. She buried her burning face in the pillow. No, she wasn't. Who had ever heard of a promiscuous virgin? But with Rafael her blood ran hot enough to burn her alive. Although right now that same blood was freezing in her veins, because she realised how very close she had come to surrendering her body to a male who despised her.