by Lynne Graham
'Ahora... now.'
He lifted himself and plunged inside her in one devastating thrust of possession. Her every sense was screaming for the release that only he could give. Her nails dug into his back and then he was moving on her, inside her, with every powerful stroke of his hips reinforcing his dominance. As the heat of passion spiralkd out of control, she cried out in ecstasy as he drove her to a shattering climax.
Still in a satiated daze, Georgie lifted her heavy eyelids. He reminded her of a primitive golden god, surveying a pagan sacrifice spread out before him. An aching vulnerability swept her as she collided with tawny tiger eyes that revealed nothing of his thoughts.
'Rafael?' Involuntarily her hand reached up to smooth one hard cheekbone.
'Enamorada...' With a curiously harsh laugh, he took her startled, reddened mouth with his own and it began all over again...
What have I done? What have I done? The anguished question rang in ceaseless refrain inside her head as she fumbled her way back into her clothes with hands that just weren't responding with their usual efficiency. She felt shattered, drained, desperately confused, all at one and the same time. Her mind touched on the raw passion Rafael had employed to attain her submission, and something shrivelled up and died inside her.
He strolled across the flattened grass and gently removed her hands from the crumpled shirt she was attempting to tie closed. He peeled the sleeves back down her arms in silence and strode back to his horse. From a saddlebag, he produced a polo shirt, similar to the one he wore himself. Her cheeks burning, she caught it as he tossed it to her, and hurriedly dived into its voluminous folds.
He vaulted back into the saddle and reached down to pull her up in front of him. She was so tense that he had to flatten a hand to her abdomen to force her into relaxed contact with his hard body. She trembled, stricken by the sheer force of her physical awareness of him now.
'Is that why you want to marry me?' She couldn't hold the question back any longer, though the instant she voiced it she wished she had kept her mouth shut.
'No entiendo, querida,' he drawled.
He understood. He understood damned fine, but he
would make her spell it out.
'The sex—is it worth a wedding-ring?' Georgie demanded, grateful he couldn't see the stinging tears lashing her eyes.
'You can be very crude...' he murmured lazily against her ear..
'Put it down to my lack of experience.'
'Sexually we are a match made in heaven—am I to deny that?'
If the past hours of fevered passion had taught her anything, they had taught her that she could not deny him. But she wanted more, she wanted so much more than the confirmation of the raw hunger she aroused in him. She wanted to be needed...she wanted to be loved. And that terrified her.
Because she couldn't live without him either. All along she had been playing a kind of game with him without even realising it. At no stage had she made a realistic effort to leave him. Today... That didn't count. One last-ditch attempt to do what her intelligence urged her to do, and even then she had run with the safe, sure knowledge that he would follow her. Only she hadn't dreamt that the resulting confrontation would be so cataclysmic.
Where was pride now? Rafael had smashed it, left no defence to hide behind. Her throat thickened. Quite deliberately he had employed her passionate response to him as a weapon with which to subjugate her. What price now all her angry assurances that she had no intention of marrying him? And that was exactly why he had done it. His patience had run out. Wasn't it an education to discover that when you pushed him hard enough, honour and principles simply took a hike? In a tight corner, Georgie was impulsive.. .but in the same position, Rafael was unrepentantly ruthless. She shivered.
His arm tightened around her. 'I would say the chances of slim to none have shortened considerably.'
Her spinal cord jerked into rigidity as his meaning sank in.
'And do you have an excuse this time?' she whispered shakily.
'None. I wanted you. I didn't give a damn.'
Georgie couldn't believe he could be that brazen. Her mouth dropped open.
'And, as you so generously assured me, a woman of your age takes responsibility for her own actions. Naturally, that freed me to be as irresponsible as I liked.'
'But you are not an irresponsible person, Rafael!' she hissed over her shoulder, very nearly giving herself whiplash, she was so indignant at having her own words thrown back at her as justification of his behaviour.
'But I'm versatile. You wouldn't believe how quickly I learn.'
She trembled with incredulous resentment. If increasing the odds of her becoming pregnant got him what he wanted, never let it be said that Rafael had shrunk from the necessity. And to think she had actually been dumb enough to believe that at the outset that frenzied lovemaking had been spontaneous on his side. Rafael? Spontaneous! He was a conniving, manipulative... And this was the man she loved? The anger ebbed. Yes, she did love him. Madly, passionately and probably into eternity.
She cleared her throat and took a deep breath. 'So,' he said, in what she hoped was a brisk tone. 'When's the wedding?'
He dropped the reins. Georgie twisted her head in astonishment at such clumsiness from a superb rider. The stallion had slowed to a ridiculous plodding walk anyway, without either one of them noticing, she abruptly registered. 'Rafael?'
He bent down to retrieve the reins but she caught the clenched jut of his jawline. The guy was in shock!
Georgie went white. 'Just joking,' she said in a high-pitched tone. 'You weren't really serious about marrying me... Of course, I guessed!' she improvised tightly. 'I just thought I'd have my revenge!'
He closed both arms round her so tightly that she could hardly breathe. 'Don't talk rubbish,' he breathed not quite steadily into her hair. 'I don't joke about things that serious.'
Plastered so close to him, she could feel the accelerated thud of his heart, the audible unevenness as he inhaled. For a split-second, when she had believed he didn't want to marry her, her entire life had metaphorically gone down a drain before her eyes and she had been ready to let the alligator snack on her, so bleak and dismal had been her future. 'I'm not sure I'm convinced,' she muttered uncertainly. 'You look shattered!'
'What an imagination you have,' he murmured, mounding reassuringly more like himself.
'You look shattered,' Georgie said again, although she had never been less keen to pursue a subject, for now that she had decided that she was going to marry him, the fear that he might have cooled off on the idea devastated her.
'Possibly I wasn't expecting you to surrender this— this...' Unusually, he hesitated.
"This quickly? This easily?' she inserted, burning with mortification. 'Expected me to be more of a challenge, did you? Suddenly discovered that when I gave you what you said you wanted, you really didn't want it at all? Well, let me tell you, I !'
'Shut up,' Rafael snapped with a quaver in his usually level drawl. 'Because if I laugh, I'm dead in the water, es verdad? I'll go back to being a slimy, insensitive toe-rag ... Por Dios, I have had enough of this peculiar conversation! I want to look at you...'
Impatiently anchoring his hands beneath her arms, Rafael helped her to dismount. He vaulted down in her wake and gazed at her with glittering dark eyes sharp enough to cut glass. He was perceptibly tense. Both disconcerted and confused, she looked back at him. 'Rafael, what ?' And that was as far as she got.
'Georgie, tell me truthfully—why, after all that I have done, are you prepared to marry me?'
Completely unready for so direct a question, Georgie flushed and glanced away.
'It doesn't matter what you say. It won't change anything,' Rafael stated, with a tautness at variance with the reassurance.
'You're very attractive,' she mumbled, loathing him for putting her on the hot seat without warning, miserably recalling everything he had said on the subject of marriage—emotion hadn't f
igured once either before or after he took her to bed and discovered she wasn't the bed-hopping tramp he had believed.
'I think we can take that as mutually understood, Rafael retorted very drily, but with an edge of driven impatience. 'We should talk about this. Trust me and be honest. Why do you want to marry me?'
Did he suspect that she was in love with him? Did that make him feel guilty again? Did it worry him that she might be entering the marriage with expectations and demands he couldn't possibly fulfil? Slowly, Georgie lifted her fiery head, biting at her Up.
'You can give me the kind of life I've always wanted,' she answered after much frantic thought, her wide eyes eloquent of her inner turmoil.
He released his breath audibly and sent her a shimmering golden glance that was utterly impassive. 'Estupendo... fine. I think I'll radio for the helicopter. You look tired,' he completed flatly.
In frustration she watched him use the radio. She took a couple of steps away. Evidently, she had said the wrong thing. But what did he want from her? She forced a stilted laugh and swung back from him. 'Rafael... what would you have said if I had said I wanted to marry you because I loved you?'
'I'd have laughed myself into the nearest asylum.' A sardonic smile curved his sensual mouth, hooded dark eyes gleaming over her as he threw his arrogant head back. 'And run like hell. In a marriage of—shall we say, convenience?—love would be a messy and embarrassing complication.'
He could have taken an axe to her and caused less pain. In the back of her mind she had thought that maybe in time, maybe when all the nasty ripples from the past had settled, maybe when he realised that she could make him happy, his emotions might become involved and he would contrive by some wonderful miracle to look on her as something more than a beautiful, sexually available bed-partner. But now he was telling her with brutal finality that he absolutely didn't want that kind of emotional attachment between them.
'Great... then we both know exactly where we stand.' With a smile a world-famous actress would have prided herself on, Georgie concealed the fact that in one smooth sentence he had demolished her every hope.
'And that is important,' he conceded, without any expression at all.
That seemed pretty much to take care of Rafael's desire to talk about their future. He didn't say another word until the helicopter landed and Georgie was too miserable and too busy hiding it to be anything other than grateful for his silence. Exhaustion was dragging her down by then, emotional and physical. Every bone in her body ached. It had been the longest day of her life and it seemed to her that she had worked through every possible emotion in her repertoire.
'You're ready to collapse.' Taking one hard look at her as she stumbled out of the helicopter, Rafael swept her up into his arms and, in spite of her muffled protests, insisted on carrying her into the house.
'I think it's also important that you know that there are times when I don't like you very much,' Georgie whispered in a choky voice against his broad shoulder, drinking in the familiar warm, sexy scent of him and hating herself for being so susceptible.
•That's mutual, too.'
'You mean you don't like you or you don't like me?' she prompted unsteadily.
'You,' Rafael supplied smoothly, as Teresa surged to open her bedroom door.
Georgie burst into a flood of tears. She certainly shocked him. She shocked herself even more. She hadn't even felt the tears gathering.
'Don't be such a baby... I didn't mean it. Madre de Dios,' he grated as he laid her down on the bed. 'I never know what the hell you're likely to do next! You open your mouth and I haven't a clue what to expect!'
'Read my lips, then,' Georgie sobbed, and mouthed something very succinct and rude, a phrase that told him to take himself off pronto, combined with a look that told him a jump off the balcony would be her preferred form of exit.
Rafael cast her a seething look of angry frustration. 'I think you are the most irrational woman I have ever met.'
'And s-stupid... don't forget that!' Georgie sobbed, rolling over and burying her face in the pillows, hating the way she was behaving but totally unable to suppress the need to hit out at him. 'I'm sorry.'
Her sensitive hearing suggested she was being treated to gross insincerity, an apology merely to silence her irrational exasperating behaviour.
He said it again louder, and his intonation was ice-cold.
She gulped. 'Accepted.' 'We will get married on Saturday.' Saturday was only three days away. 'Saturday?' 'The most convenient date in respect of my business commitments.'
Marvellous, she thought, in the mood now really to wallow in her misery. Convenient? The ceremony was to be slotted into his schedule like an appointment. 'Do you want your parents present?' "They're on a second honeymon cruise of the Greek islands,' Georgie told him. 'Why spoil it?'
'It is your choice.' Temper back under iron wraps, he was equally dry.
Another sob snaked through Georgie. The mattress gave. 'You're overtired,' Rafael murmured tightly. 'And maybe I have seemed unsympathetic...'
Unsympathetic? What a typical Berganza understatement that was!
'This has been a very emotional day,' he persisted doggedly, impervious to the lack of encouragement he was receiving. He gripped one of her hands tightly before she could whip it under her like the other one. 'But I promise you that you will never regret marrying me. I'll make you happy... Perhaps you don't want to live here? We can live anywhere.'
Momentarily disarmed, Georgie found herself listening, quite astounded at the idea that he could be offering her a choice of where they lived when she had always believed that Rafael regarded the estancia as his only possible permanent home.
'Although it doesn't really matter where the bedroom is, does it?' That final softly derisive sentence swiftly put paid to any goodwill he might have reanimated.
Georgie snatched her hand away, cut to the quick. He didn't need to drive that message home any harder. She was already painfully aware of the sole value she had in his eyes. And, as the door closed behind him, Georgie wondered in an agony of doubt if once more she had foolishly allowed impulse to overrule sanity. What sort of a relationship could she possibly build with a man who regarded her in such a light?
And he had sounded bitter. What the heck did Rafael have to be bitter about? Right now, could he be feeling as confused as she did? Throughout the day, Rafael had lurched unpredictably from one mood to another. Was it conceivable that she had hit the nail squarely on the head earlier? Could it have been that, when she had finally agreed to marry him, Rafael had suddenly reg-isterd that that really wasn't what he wanted after all?
Dear lord, how humiliating that would be... But she couldn't help remembering all that Rafael had said about the attraction of her unavailability in the past. Rafael liked a challenge. Rafael was a natural predator. For such a male, the hunt was often far more exciting than the catch. Right now, was Rafael bitterly regretting the trap he had dug for himself? Georgie simply couldn't live with that fear.
Teresa came and insisted on helping her into bed. A beautiful meal was brought up on a tray and everybody showed an embarrassing desire to fuss over her. Rafael's aunt came up to ask how she was in slow, careful English. Georgie squirmed, unhappily aware that she had caused a furore. And after that she fell asleep, waking up very late to darkness.
For a while she lay pondering her earlier misgivings, and railed at her own reluctance to face up to them. With sudden decision, she rose and pulled on her robe and tidied her hair. The lights were still on downstairs. She was aware that Rafael often worked late, being one of those individuals who seemed to thrive on little sleep.
She was on the last step of the stairs when Beatriz erupted with hot cheeks and wild eyes from Rafael's library. 'Never in my whole life have I been so insulted!' she hissed at Georgie. 'But I blame you, not Rafael. He is out of his senses with drink! What have you done to him? It is a disgrace that a man of his stature and education should be in a state of
gross inebriation '
'He's drunk?' Georgie whispered, having taken some few seconds to recognise this heaving-breasted, outraged young woman as the frigidly correct and controlled beauty she had met earlier in the day. 'Rafael?' she stressed, almost as shattered by the idea as her companion was, but a good deal less judgemental.
'It is this ridiculous wedding... What else can it be?' Beatriz told her accusingly. 'I offered my sympathy but he was too proud to accept it. Rafael could not possibly want to marry a woman like you. You are nothing, a nobody...a social climber who used his sister as a passport into his acquaintance! Had you any decency or any respect for the name of Berganza, you would set him free!'
Leaving Georgie white and trembling in shock, Beatriz stalked up the stairs.
CHAPTER NINE
Georgie's soft knock on the library door drew no response. Apprehensively, she opened the door and walked in. One light was lit on the desk. Rafael was slumped in the swivel chair behind it, his long lean legs planted on the desktop, the mess of papers there crushed indifferently by his booted feet. His face was in shadow but she could see that his eyes were closed and, surmising that he was asleep, Georgie moved closer.
He hadn't shaved for dinner, if he had had any, and hadn't changed either. His blue-shadowed jawline and tousled black hair gave him the appearance of a desperado. But the lush ebony lashes fanned down on his abrasive cheekbones were as long as a child's, and a tortured tenderness twisted through her. She didn't need Beatriz to tell her to set him free, she reflected painfully, her mouth downcurving at the sight of the low level on the bottle of malt whisky. If the prospect of marrying her reduced him to this level, Rafael could look forward to seeing the dust of her exit within hours.
And then she saw the gun lying beside the bottle. She had never seen a gun except on television. But there it was, a relatively small black metal article... a revolver? Dear God in heaven. Her stomach heaved. Rafael couldn't possibly be that desperate... could he? Anyone less likely to be contemplating suicide would be hard to find. Rafael was so strong... wasn't he? Then why was the gun there? a little voice screamed. Why, when Rafael was doing something so tremendously out of character as getting himself roaring drunk, did he suddenly have a gun sitting beside him?