by Lynne Graham
'You were safe,' Rafael drawled at Steve, his golden features set with blistering derision. 'You were safe, though you didn't know it. I had no intention of telling her.'
'Telling me what?' Georgie broke in, as Steve's fingers loosened their grip and finally dropped from her. She stepped back from him, her head spinning between the two men, both of whom were ignoring her. Steve was rigid and pale, breathing heavily. Rafael had an aura of violence she had never seen in him before. It scared her. Although the two men were fairly evenly matched in size, she sensed that Rafael had a killer instinct which Steve lacked. And she also knew, after one shocked glance at Rafael's shimmering golden gaze, that he had every intention of getting physical.
'Right,' she said, raising her hands in what she hoped was a strong, meaningful motion. 'I am not having this. If you lay one finger on him, Rafael... the wedding is off. Steve may be behaving like an idiot but you are not helping matters, and I would like him all in one piece for the photos '
'You think I'm scared of that slimy bastard?' Steve seethed, striding forward and thrusting her roughly out of his path.
'Go back to the house, querida,' Rafael murmured in a flat aside.
Georgie shook her head vehemently. 'No way!'
'If you do not go voluntarily, I will have my bodyguards carry you back,' Rafael told her, with a sudden spurt of flaming impatience.
'Did you hear me tell you that I'm not marrying you if you touch him?' Georgie's voice wobbled with rage and pain. The threat hadn't made Rafael bat a magnificent eyelash.
'It's your word against mine, Berganza! Who do you think she'll believe?' Steve slung aggressively. "There's a lot of family mileage in twenty-one years. Are you going to take that risk?'
'Oh, beat the hell out of each other... I'm past caring!' Georgie hissed at the pair of them in disgust, stalking off several yards, hoping that her stinging scorn would cool Rafael off. She just couldn't believe that he was behaving like this. And what were they talking about? Steve's word against Rafael's on what!
She glanced back over her shoulder before she realised that Rafael had actually taken her at her word. Appalled, she watched him take a swing at Steve. Her stomach clenched with nausea as the blow connected. 'Stop that... right now!' she shrieked, and began racing back, ready to throw herself between them, but someone caught her from behind, anchoring a restraining arm round her.
'What the ?' Craning her neck, she discovered one of Rafael's bodyguards gazing down at her with a mixture of embarrassment, apology and steel determination to do as he had evidently been told.
Georgie actually thought she was going to be sick when she saw Rafael hitting Steve again. She had never realised that the sight of two men fighting could be so brutal or so frightening. And she had been right in her estimation of the odds. Her stepbrother was on the brink of being hammered to a pulp and there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it. Nobody was about to interfere.
'I'll never forgive you,' she screamed at Rafael, and she really meant it. The man was an animal. She didn't care what lay between the two men, could not imagine that there could be anything capable of excusing the savagery being enacted before her. And she was devastated that Rafael could behave in such a fashion. She saw her hopes and her dreams breaking into pieces in front of her. Seeing this side of Rafael terrified her. He was a maniac, subject to paranoid jealousy—that was all she could think.
Steve hit the ground and stayed down. Was he unconscious? Rafael spun on his heel and walked away, pausing with apparent calm to address some instruction to one of the hovering men, who had been watching the fight. The arm round Georgie dropped away. She sped over to Steve. He was already lifting his head with a groan.
'God...' he mumbled, wiping the blood away from his mouth. 'I hate to admit it but I'm glad you stayed. I think he'd have killed me if he hadn't had you as an audience.'
'The doctor will see to him,' Rafael murmured icily from behind her.
"The only person who needs a doctor around here is you!' Georgie gasped in quivering disgust. 'A psychiatrist! Tell Teresa to pack my clothes—my clothes, not those fancy rags you bought. I'm not going back into that house. I am not marrying you. And I never want to hear from you again... is that clear?'
Rafael raked diamond-hard dark eyes from Georgie's furious face down to Steve's emerging look of relief. He released his breath in a soft hiss. Four centuries of icy hauteur tautened his proud dark features. 'The loser takes all, es verdad? You take his side over mine...'
'It's one heck of a lot more complex than that!' Georgie vented not quite steadily, but she met his eyes in a head-on collision.
'But you are the woman I intended to marry and you have neither loyalty nor trust in me,' Rafael condemned.
'This is so painfully melodramatic,' Steve said snidery, picking himself up.
Rafael hit him again.
Georgie just couldn't believe it. Her stepbrother went sprawling back on the ground again, clutching his nose and groaning.
'Go with him. I no longer want you,' Rafael delivered. 'But you deserve to know the truth before you leave.'
'What truth?'
Rafael stared down at Steve's prone figure with burning loathing and contempt. 'Have you the guts to tell her, or must I do that as well?' As the taut silence stretched and her stepbrother made no response, Rafael emitted a harsh laugh. 'He was in love with you four years ago '
Wo!' Georgie interrupted sharply.
'And you rejected him that night. He was jealous and he was bitter,' Rafael continued in the same murder ously quiet drawl. 'And when I came looking for you the next morning, he confessed all to me, but he confessed to lies. He told me you had been lovers since you were seventeen, that he loved you and wanted to marry you '
Georgie started to tremble, her darkened violet eyes clinging to Steve's clenched profile. 'No, he couldn't have done that...'
'He was very convincing. He even told me how ashamed he was of taking advantage of your youth and inexperience, but that he just couldn't help himself!' Rafael spelt out in disgust.
A stifled sound of distress broke from Georgie. Suddenly she knew that she was hearing the truth. Steve couldn't even meet her eyes, nor was he making any attempt to defend himself. She was appalled.
'And, not content with that, he suggested that you had also slept with your friend Danny, and he told me how much he blamed himself for damaging your ability to tell the difference between real love and sexual pleasure!' Rafael completed witheringly.
'You couldn't have done that to me,' Georgie whispered sickly, staring at Steve.
'Wake up, Georgie. He did it because, as far as he was concerned, if he couldn't have you, he didn't want me to have you either!' Rafael scorned. 'Your rejection of him must have cut deep indeed. This man, who stood in the position of a brother to you—he thought nothing of voicing filthy foul lies which resulted in your pain and humiliation. I assume that was your punishment for not finding him attractive... and mine was having my faith and my trust in the woman I loved totally destroyed! Never would I have believed that a man who was a member of your family, who had watched you grow up and behaved as a brother towards you, could have stooped to such a level as he did. Or that any man would confess falsely to such shameful behaviour!'
Georgie was in deep shock, her anguished eyes clinging to Rafael's dark, driven features. She was appalled that she had never once suspected that Steve could have been in love with her then. Yet she dimly understood how fixed an image one could form of a family member, how easy it could be never to question what might lie behind that safe image. She had been very close to Steve but, in the absence of any form of sexual awareness on her side, she had been effectively blind to his feelings, translating his interest and concern for her as purely brotherly responses. Only now did she see so clearly that Steve had been too interested and too concerned... and too hostile towards Rafael.
'If s all behind us now, for God's sake,' Steve muttered hea
vily.
'But you came here to take her away sooner than risk exposure. You didn't want her to know the truth,' Rafael asserted. 'And I was fool enough to keep quiet because I didn't want to hurt her.'
Georgie flinched and covered her hot face with cold, trembling hands. 'I didn't know.. .how could I have?'
But, looking back, she saw Steve at her shoulder playing devil's advocate, stirring the pot of her insecurity about Rafael, undermining their relationship at every opportunity by planting little darts where they would cause the most damage. She also grasped the full extent of Steve's deception, shuddered as she recalled his sympathetic response to Rafael's rejection of her.
'How could you do that to me? You knew I loved him!' Georgie burst out abruptly, and then she noticed that Rafael had already walked away, that she was alone with her stepbrother.
'I thought you'd get over him, maybe turn to me.' Steve rose upright, dug his hands into his pockets and looked back at her with rueful eyes. 'I had it bad. It was a long time before I accepted that I was beating my head up against a brick wall and that you were never going to feel the same way.'
'But to tell him that ' In distress she turned away.
'He didn't have to believe it,' Steve said defensively.
But Georgie understood exactly why Rafael had believed those lies. Rafael was fundamentally a very honourable man. He had known that Steve loved her, seen them kiss, been forced to witness her close ties with her stepbrother. No, she didn't blame Rafael for believing, she blamed herself for being so bound up in her love that she had been blind to what was happening around her. And ironically, four years ago, Rafael had actually protected Steve by choosing not to face her with what he had been told. Why?
Why had he continued to protect her from the truth about Steve? Rafael had known how much the truth would hurt, and hurt it had and did, but perhaps not to the degree which Rafael had assumed. The intervening years had eroded her close ties with her stepbrother.
'I'm sorry,' Steve said. 'I just couldn't face it coming
out. I got over you. It's behind me '
'But you still didn't want me to be with him "
'I'm never going to like the guy, Georgie. What do you expect? What do you think it was like for me standing by on the sidelines watching the two of you together?' he asked with remembered bitterness. 'I'm not. proud of what I did, but I didn't think he had any intention of marrying you. He put the weapon in my hand when he told me he'd seen us kissing, and I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist using it.'
Dully she nodded, for she could dimly understand that.
'Look...I'm off. I'd be distinctly de trop at the wedding,' Steve muttered with a grim smile. 'Maybe I'll make it for the first christening... OK?'
'There isn't going to be a wedding,' Georgie reminded him in a shaky voice.
Making his stiff and painful passage back towards the helicopter he had arrived in, Steve turned his head. 'Georgie...the fight was a male thing, if you know what I mean, and you shouldn't have interfered.'
'It was disgusting!'
'But oddly enough I feel better.' Steve grimaced at her look of disbelief. 'It's like it's finally finished now and, since I'm feeling generous, I'll give you another reason why he took until now to tell you what I did... and why he just walked away. I think he's scared.'
'Scared? Rafael?' Georgie parroted.
'Scared that once you knew how I used to feel about you, that fondness you once had for me,' he explained wryly, 'might just warm up into something more meaningful.'
Georgie froze, and turned an abstracted glance on him as he headed for his transport out. But all she had sought to do was stop the fight, naturally not wanting to see the two men come to blows. Then, she hadn't known just how powerful a motivation lay behind Rafael's need for physical vengeance. And then, afterwards, Rafael had said, 'The loser takes all,' when she had rushed to Steve's aid, believing Rafael to be the main aggressor and therefore underserving of her attention. Maybe she should have kicked Steve while he was down, she thought hysterically. In Rafael's presence she had not condemned what Steve had done...she had still been too shocked.
She hurried back to the house and was shattered to discover Teresa in her bedroom, laying out her clothes on the bed to pack them.
Teresa sighed, and shook her head. 'Ees very hard to understand this on, off, on, off wedding.'
Her heart in her throat, Georgie ran Rafael to earth in the drawing-room where he was standing moodily surveying an ancestral portrait with a large drink in one hand.
'Oops.. .gosh.. . didn't think what I was saying when I said the wedding was off.' Georgie leapt in and tested the water straight off.
'I will put no pressure on you to remain,' Rafael retorted harshly.
'All right, if that's the way you feel about it...' Georgie drew herself up to her full height, her chin tilting, and then drew in a deep, shivering breath. 'Well, actually, it's not all right because I'm not going—not unless you tell me that you want me to go.'
'You have your mind of your own.' Hooded dark eyes flicked her a forbidding glance. 'Where is he now?'
'Steve? Probably airborne by now. He reckoned he-would be unwelcome at the wedding but he might just make it for the first christening,' Georgie dared.
Rafael's jawline clenched. 'I forgot about that possibility.'
'Fancy that, and just a few days ago, that was all you could think about!' Georgie reminded him helplessly.
'No doubt that is why you insist that you are not leaving,' he drawled in the same unyielding tone.
'Franky, no. Whether or not I might be pregnant hasn't even crossed my mind and it wouldn't influence my feelings either way,' Georgie stated with perfect trur.it, 'It isn't a good enough reason to get married.'
'Then what have we to discuss?'
Georgie went white. Steeling herself, she had been trying to work up to telling him how she really felt about him. No more lies, no more half-truths to save face, she had told herself, no more room for misunderstandings. Pride urged her to agree the point and go with dignity, as she had not done four long years ago. But now she knew that, then, Rafael had undoubtedly been far kinder to her than most men would have been in the same situation. He had not thrown Steve's sordid revelations in her face and she still marvelled at that restraint.
'Rafael... I am very sorry that Steve lied like that '
'It is not your place to apologise for him... or is it?' he growled, glittering golden eyes on her with almost physical force. 'Do you now defend him for what he did, even though it was your reputation he destroyed?'
'No...I don't defend him at all. I think it was a revolting thing to do and I was very shocked, but it happened four years ago,' Georgie stressed tautly, her violet eyes clinging to his hard, set features. 'And I can't get as worked up about it as you can because I didn't know about it when it really mattered. I also thought that we had overcome the past.. .but it seems I was wrong!'
'Your sole concern was for him out there '
'And you've accused me of being childish,' Georgie suddenly launched at him, her voice nonetheless shrill with distress, for she wasn't getting through to Rafael. He had withdrawn to some remote place, outraged and offended. 'That was before I knew what you were fighting about and I thought Steve had been knocked out. You hate him and I can understand that now '
'How can you understand what I feel? How can you possibly understand?' Rafael suddenly shot at her in savage surge. "Thanks to him, I lost the woman I loved four years ago and, thanks to him, I have lost you again!'
'You haven't lost me.' Georgie licked her dry lips.
'I do not want you without love. It wouldn't work.' Rafael stared down broodingly into his half-empty glass, his strong features strikingly taut. 'I am already bitter-how much more bitter would I become, thinking of what we once had and lost? I cannot pretend that what we have is enough, when I would always be wanting what you could not give me,' he bit out with raw emotion. 'So, go while I am in this
sane state. I do not want a broken marriage between us and I see no way of us ever overcoming the past.'
Sentenced to stillness by the savage edge to his emotional delivery, Georgie was afraid in that welter of bitter words, she had somehow misinterpreted what she had heard. Her heartbeat was racing madly behind her ribcage. 'Rafael,' she said weakly.
'I feel resentment now, even though I have no entitlement to it,' Rafael continued darkly. 'You were the victim, not I. It was not you who lied, not you who were stupid enough to swallow his lies, and I was the one who walked away, so what right do I now have to demand more than you are capable of feeling? You desire me, and you have a naturally sunny and affectionate disposition and, for many men, that would be enough. But is is not enough for me. If I cannot have it all, I am better off with nothing.'
Tears swam in her eyes and she wrinkled her nose hold them at bay. She had never seen him so worked up and, characteristically, he was looking solely on the dark. side, apparently unable even to consider the idea that she might, after all, be capable of giving him what he insisted he needed. She cleared her throat. 'Are talking about love?'
His beautifully shaped mouth tightened and realised that pride had permitted him to talk all the way round the subject as long as the fatal word was not actually mentioned. 'What else?'
A surge of joy filtered through Georgie, restoring the colour to her cheeks, chasing off the strain from her vibrant face. 'Oh, well, if that's all, you've been unusually modest in your assumptions. And I would have said you were not the modest type '
'What are you talking about?' Rafael demanded, with no diminution in his grim bearing.
'Let me give you this scenario, Rafael. You spirit me out here with the worst of gothic intentions. How hard did I try to escape? Why did I go to bed with you? Why did I finally agree to marry you? Why was I prepared to stay with you even though you might lose everything?' Georgie questioned with a helpless smile, although she had intended to keep him hanging to the end. 'And, if you're as clever as I think, you ought to be coming to one of two possible conclusions. Either I'm as limp as a wet dishcloth or I'm crazy about you.'