by Lynne Graham
'You would.' Embarrassment held her only briefly.
'It should have occurred to me that you had already been involved in a sexual relationship, but then, my romanticised view of you did not allow such reasoning at that early stage.'
A ragged little laugh, empty of humour, fell from her strained mouth. Rafael was so sharp he would cut himself some day, and wasn't it fascinating to learn that he had been ready to misjudge her right from the beginning? Such a tiny thing, an oversight, a glimpse of a packet of pills in her bag, from which he had drawn incorrect conclusions. She would have died sooner than admit that she had been put on the contraceptive pill to regulate irregular periods.
She stood up. 'I think I need some fresh air,' she said jerkily.
'Georgie... strange as it may seem, I do not hold you responsible for a liaison begun at so early an age. You were the innocent party,' Rafael drawled with grave emphasis, his hard jawline clenching. 'But, at the tune, I found the discovery of that particular relationship deeply offensive. It contravened my every principle of family-life, though I knew he was not in fact your brother '
'What the heck are you talking about?' 'Did you think I didn't know?' Rafael threw back his imperious dark head, his challenging gaze imprisoning hers by blatant force of will.
'Didn't know what?' Tension had sprung into the atmosphere, thickening it. Georgie suddenly felt cold and threatened.
'Is the habit of secrecy still so engrained that you cannot be honest even after all this time?' Rafael demanded with derision. 'Por Dios... you live with him!' Georgie went white by slow, painful degrees. Her tongue stole out to wet her dry lips. She could not believe that he would dare to suggest that she actually lived in the sexual sense with Steve or, indeed, that she had ever had an intimate relationship of any form with her stepbrother.
'I know,' Rafael repeated very quietly. 'I know that you began sharing his bed when you were seventeen.'
Her stomach curdled at the enormity of such a belief. "That is the most disgusting thing anyone has ever accused me of,' she whispered strickenly, her distressed eyes clinging helplessly to his. 'And you can't believe it...you can't possibly believe it.'
Rafael rose fluidly upright, his hard golden features fiercely set. 'I prefer to have this out in the open between us. While I can appreciate your reluctance to face the fact that that liaison is no secret to me, I will not allow you to lie to me.'
He believed it. He actually believed that she had slept with Steve before she had even met him. Incredulous at the revelation, Georgie stared at him with wide, shocked eyes. 'You're crazy... absolutely crazy!'
Rafael stood back several feet from her, six feet two inches of darkly powerful masculinity. But, despite that distance, he had her cornered. Implacably obdurate dark eyes were trained on her. 'I am aware that my sister has no idea of that relationship, but surely your father and your stepmother cannot still be in the dark? Or are you telling me that it is now at an end and you remain just good friends under the same roof?' he derided.
'Steve doesn't even live under the same roof,' Georgie heard herself protest, her brain in too much turmoil for her to know where to attack first. 'He has an apartment now. He rents out the house to students at the college nearby. I have a tiny flat in the attic and I act as a sort of caretaker, keeping an eye on things...' Her voice simply drained away then as she wondered numbly why she was rabbiting on about something so utterly trivial.
'So it is over now '
'It never began!' Georgie threw back with sudden wildness, her distress growing as the full connotations of what Rafael believed her capable of sank in. 'I've never had any sort of intimate relationship with Steve and I don't know how you can accuse me of some thing so disgusting! I've always thought of him as my brother '
'That is all he ever should have been until you were old enough to know what you were doing. He took advantage of your youth and your passion, but you should have known that it was wrong,' Rafael delivered in harsh condemnation.
'You're not listening to me... are you? You don't believe me,' Georgie registered sickly.
Rafael vented a roughened laugh. 'I followed you home with him that last night. I didn't trust him with you. Madre de Dios... I didn't want to distress you with my suspicions about the exact nature of his feelings for you! Then, through the window, I saw you in his arms, lovers kissing passionately. Everything fell into place then. At last I understood.'
'You saw Steve kissing me?' Georgie echoed hollowly. 'But how...? The curtains weren't pulled,' she recalled abstractedly.
'Correct. I had a superb view...'
Georgie was deep in shock. Rafael had opened a locked door on the past, filling in details she hadn't been aware of then. But he had twisted the picture as she knew it and flung her into violent turmoil. 'It wasn't what you thought,' she burst out abruptly.
'The only acceptable response now is the whole truth and nothing but the truth!' Rafael delivered with murderous quietness. 'And I do believe I'm entitled to ask one question.'
Numbly she looked back at him, pale and shaken and unbearably tense.
'While you were seeing me, were you still sleeping with him?'
'Dear God...' Georgie was so appalled that her stomach responded with a nauseous lurch of protest.
'So you weren't. One small consolation,' Rafael breathed scathingly. "Then I supplanted him. Were I generous, I should now excuse his every jealous attempt to come between us, but I excuse nothing that he did and I blame you for deliberately deceiving me into believing that you were innocent. Did it amuse you? Or did you want to believe that you could carry the deception through to the bitter end?'
Georgie covered her face with her hands and turned unsteadily away, desperate to escape that lethal accented drawl.
'I believed you would marry him,' Rafael admitted harshly. 'For years, I have expected to hear news of your marriage through my sister. Instead, what do I hear? One man after another—friends, Maria Cristina trustingly calls them—but you and I both know that you lie back on the nearest bed for your male "friends"...'
Suddenly Georgie just couldn't take any more, and the very abruptness with which she dived past him took him by surprise. She flew out of the house, running without even knowing where she was going. Her heart was thumping sickly in her throat, every sobbing intake of oxygen rattling through her lungs. She wanted to take off like a jet plane and leave everything that distressed her far behind, but the torment of pain was remorselessly trapped inside her and she was stuck with it.
The heat swiftly sapped her energy. She got a stitch in her side and had to stop and bend over, struggling to get her breath back, the dusty ground below her feet tilting sickeningly up at her.
'Georgie!'
Her head whirled up. She saw Rafael moving with long, determined strides towards her and panic filled her. No more. Right now, she really couldn't take any more! Her fevered eyes whirled round the cluster of buildings near and far, passing blindly over the curious faces of the people in the vicinity, and then she saw the pretty little whitewashed church with its open doors and took off again.
The coolness of the dim interior engulfed her in welcome. Her feet took her down the aisle into a seat in the shadow of a stone pillar. Wrapping her arms round herself, she attempted to catch her breath and banish the awful nausea threatening. Shock. She knew what was wrong with her. Shock and a kind of horrified disbelief that even Rafael could believe such things of her. 'This is not the place for you,' Rafael murmured in a stifled undertone from behind her.
'Go away,' she mumbled. Did he think she was going to desecrate his precious church by her mere presence? She wouldn't be surprised if he did. And even in the Middle Ages, Rafael wouldn't have allowed her sanctuary here. He would have dragged her out and thrown her to the crowd to be torn apart, no doubt, she reflected wildly. Rafael was a savage and, with anyone who fell into the whore category, he was a throwback to the Spanish Inquisition.
And then
she heard another voice—very quiet, very aim—speak in Spanish, and there was one of those explosive silences which could be physically felt... It seemed to go on forever and ever before she heard the astonishing but unmistakable sound of Rafael's retreat. Only then did she appreciate that for once impulse had not betrayed her. The church was the one place Rafael Rodriguez Berganza did not rule supreme.
She knew her saviour had to have been the priest, and she waited shakily to be forced into speech, but no voice spoke and the sDence stayed, slowly soothing the tumult f her emotional upheaval, enabling her to think again. So now she knew why Rafael had refused to listen to her attempts to explain the platonic nature of her friendship with Danny. He had been suspicious of her morals long before that day. The pills—then what? Steve's dislike of him? Steve had not been jealous, for goodness' sake! Steve simply hadn't liked Rafael. And when Rafael had seen that embrace, he had forced every other fact to fit, choosing to assume that that accidental glimpse was merely the tip of the iceberg in a far more intimate relationship. After all, hadn't she been shamelessly encouraging towards him?
Had her passionate response to him been that misleading? Had she come across as some sort of nymphomaniac? He had a wild imagination... Or had he? Witnessing that embrace certainly would have been a shock, as much of a shock for Rafael as it had been at the time for Georgie. Rafael could never have seen a hint of such intimacy in her behaviour with Steve at any other time. And that fact alone might well have been the final confirmation of Rafael's suspicions. Clearly he had believed that she and Steve were polished pretenders at being simply stepbrother and sister in public view, an act they had put on to conceal their true relationship from family and friends.
Moisture dripped on her tightly clenched hands. She lifted an uncertain hand to her damp face, discovered she was crying. It was so very hard to try and be calm about an accusation so outrageous and so distressing. But that same accusation revealed so much about Rafael. She shuddered.
From the outset Rafael had been sickly prejudiced against her. He had probably fought hard against the attraction between them and, even in succumbing to that attraction, he had still been on red alert for any flaws that she might display. Desire had driven Rafael, and the price of fulfilling that desire had been marriage.
But intellectually, of course, he hadn't wanted to marry her. If it hadn't been for her connection with Maria Cristina, Rafael would just have taken what was on offer and slept with her, slaking his desire in the most bask way possible. Subconsciously, he must have fiercely resented that reality. So it must have been relatively easy for Rafael to begin to suspect that her innocence was an act, and fate had been wonderfully kind to him in serving up the kind of evidence he required to convince himself that she was a whore instead.
Rafael had run true to type, she reflected numbly. Hot-blooded, suspicious, jealous and melodramatic—the archetypal smouldering Latin lover. Yet it was so difficult to equate that image with the freezingly self-contained male who had rejected her at their final meeting. He had not mentioned Steve then. Why not? Had it been beneath his precious dignity to reveal the extent to which he believed himself to have been deceived? He had not called her a whore, either. Indeed, in retrospect, she realised that Rafael had been remarkably restrained that day. But it was almost laughable that he could have believed her steeped in sexual sin at so tender an age. But she couldn't laugh, had never felt further from laughter. She felt agonisingly hurt and bitter and it was that incredible pain which she now feared most of all. Her pride and her principles revolted against the image Rafael now had of her. Yes, perhaps she would have liked the romantic illusion back, just as he had shrewdly divined. Being treated like a scarlet woman might have briefly appealed to her sense of humour when she put on an act that first night in an effort to hold her own, but with Rafael, she could never ever forget that once she had loved him.
The memory was just there in the back of her mind all the time, warning her that she was vulnerable, warning her that she still found him staggeringly attractive on a purely physical level, and that something inside her which she was deeply ashamed of made her behave more outrageously around him than she would ever have dreamt of behaving around any other man. Why was that? Was there actually a part of her which rejoiced in his desire for her body? Could she be that stupid? Hurriedly, she rose from the worn wooden pew.
She was walking towards the blinding sunlight flooding through the doors when the portly little priest appeared before her. 'I am Father Tomas Garcia,' he told her in perfect English, extending a polite hand that couldn't be ignored. 'And you are Georgie, Maria Cristina's friend.'
Taken aback by the assurance with which that statement was made, Georgie mumbled she knew not what.
'Would you like some tea? Or possibly some lemonade? This is the hottest part of the day and I think you must be very thirsty. You are a teacher, aren't you? A fine profession, but more challenging now than it was in my time,' he remarked, accompanying her outside and turning towards the small house in the shadow of the church. 'Primary or secondary level?' he prompted with interest.
Ten minutes later, Georgie was ensconced in a comfortable armchair with a glass of lemonade, in a cluttered but sparsely furnished sitting-room, and she didn't quite know how she had got there. 'You know,' she muttered uneasily, fearing that the little priest was acting on a false assumption, 'I'm C of E.'
Father Garcia chuckled. 'I'll forgive you. You were telling me about your history course,' he reminded her.
It was over an hour before she departed, and her throat ought to have been sore from talking so much. After all, when all her years at college had been exhausted, they had somehow moved on to her family and from there to London, which her companion had visited forty years earlier and never forgotten. She was astonished by how relaxed she felt as she turned uncertainly back.
'Thanks,' she said huskily.
'For what do you thank me?' Father Garcia's sparkling brown eyes, so lively in his round, peaceful face, rested on her intently. 'It has been a very great pleasure for me to make the acquaintance of Rafael's bride-to-be.'
'Bride?' Georgie couldn't help it; the repetition erupted helplessly from her startled lips and even to her own ears she sounded like a cat whose tail had been trodden on. 'Fiancee?' the little priest suggested with apparently unshakeable good humour that took no note of her shock. 'That is the modern term, I suppose.'
'I'm afraid you've misunderstood,' Georgie began, in an agony of discomfiture.
'It is supposed to be a secret? But how could it be here?' Father Garcia's expressive eyes twinkled merrily. 'Naturally we are all excited at the prospect of Rafael's marriage.'
And off he went before Georgie could unglue her tongue from the roof of her dry mouth. Dear heaven, did Rafael have any idea of the expectations he had raised by bringing her here? Father Garcia had spoken of their marriage as though it was one centimetre short of accomplished fact, and she had only arrived yesterday! Was he aware that Rafael had once planned to marry her?
In a renewed state of turmoil, Georgie headed back to the house, but this time she was abnormally conscious of the number of smiles and inquisitive looks she received on the way. Without hesitation she went off in search of Rafael, determined to demand transport off the estancia again. This farce had gone far enough! He simply couldn't keep her here against her wishes!
He was on the phone in the library, which he appeared to use as an office. As she burst through the door his gleaming dark head jerked round, an expression of astonishment briefly etched on his devastatingly handsome features. Presumably nobody ever entered the inner sanctum without a knock and official permission.
'I will be with you in a moment.' It was a cool aside.
Stalking over to the window, Georgie turned her back on him and jerkily folded her arms. She listened to him talk in fast, idiomatic French, his accent and inflexion flawless. It set her teeth on edge. He was rapping out orders like the feudal autocr
at that he was. When the call was concluded, she spun round.
'I hear that Father Tomas has been entertaining you '
"The grapevine is supersonic around here, isn't it?' Georgie cut in, throwing her vibrant head back and watching him with a bright little smile pinned to her sultry mouth. 'Did your little bird also tell you that he thinks we're about to get married?'
'What an extraordinary idea,' Rafael gibed without pause, betraying not an ounce of the discomfiture she had expected to rouse. Eyes dark as Hades raked over her and his sensual mouth twisted wtih cruel amusement. 'I may have gone overboard in my lust to possess you four years ago, but you will recall that I didn't ever get as far as a proposal. In short, querida, men like me don't marry women like you, unless they are suffering from temporary insanity.'
The angry flush on her beautiful face slowly receded, leaving her painfully drawn.
'You see,' Rafael extended indolently, 'I first met you at a time when I was bored with the easy availability of your sex. No woman was ever a challenge. Every woman I ever wanted came to me, shared my bed, did whatever it took to try and hold my attention. I wanted to be the hunter but I never needed to exert myself '
'I don't want to hear this!' Georgie interrupted with sudden violence.
'I want you to hear it.' Rafael lounged gracefully up against his solid antique desk and surveyed her with hooded dark eyes. 'And then, one day, I met quite unexpectedly the most stunningly beautiful girl, who blushed with enchanting regularity and looked at me with what seemed to be her every thought written in her gorgeous eyes. But this stunningly beautiful girl was untouchable by virtue of her youth. And that for me was the very essence of the romance which every other woman had been so quick in her eagerness to deny me. Don't look so staggered... remember, I was only twenty-four,' he reminded her with sardonic bite. 'And, with hindsight, not one half as clever as I liked to think I was!'
'Don't!' Georgie was disturbed by his savage self-mockery, and her nails dug painfully into her palms.