by Lynne Graham
A manservant let her into the penthouse apartment. It was as contemporary as Rafael’s other properties were traditional: an imposing display of soaring ceilings and immense stretches of marble and limestone space. Rafael was talking in French on the phone and did not initially see her. He was propped up against the edge of a glass desk in a relaxed pose. His lean, bronzed profile was etched against the light spilling through the window behind him. He laughed, moving a lean brown hand in an expressive gesture of emphasis. For an instant she thought her heart might crack wide open; for an instant the agony she had suppressed leapt to the fore and threatened to destroy her.
‘Harriet…’ He framed her name softly and stretched out his hand with the unquestioning assurance of a lover who knew his every attention was welcome.
She lost colour, her fine skin tightening over her delicate bone structure. Numbly she compressed her lips, shook her head in urgent negative, and turned away to walk back out of the room in a silent indication that she would wait for him to finish his call.
Rafael watched her departure with a frown. Harriet had yet to utter a single critical word in relation to her mother or her sister. She had told no lies either. As a result, Rafael had wasted no time in reaching his own conclusions about Harriet’s nearest and dearest. In his opinion Eva was shallow and neglectful, and Alice a spoilt and spiteful cheat; neither of them deserved Harriet. Now she had returned from visiting her relatives looking as though she had just staggered clear of a motorway pile-up, and Rafael knew exactly where to bestow the blame. Obviously there would have to be some changes, he reflected grimly. The next time he would be present when Harriet saw her relatives. That way he could ensure that she was treated with all due respect.
Harriet stumbled dizzily into the cloakroom, where she was overcome by nausea. In the aftermath, she leant up against the wall, rested her clammy brow on the cold, unyielding tiles and shivered uncontrollably. She felt like she was living a nightmare she could not wake up from. Please, please let me wake up, she thought wretchedly. For the first time in her life she could find nothing to be positive about, and that sense of black hopelessness was threatening to drown her. Struggling to get a grip on herself again, she freshened up. She examined the hollow blankness in her eyes in the mirror and glanced away. She had to do it and leave the apartment again. One small step at a time. But it was such a huge, terrifying step now she was actually facing it.
‘I have something to say…’
Rafael inclined his proud dark head, the charismatic smile she adored tugging at the corners of his expressive mouth.
Her spine as stiff as a poker, Harriet contrived to look in his direction and yet not focus. ‘I loved Italy. I had a great time. But I’d like us to just go back to being partners in the yard…and nothing more.’
‘OK…’ Rafael murmured, without any expression at all.
‘I’ve been really happy, and I don’t want you to think that I don’t appreciate you.’ Harriet hovered in desperate search of words that might remove the risk of her inflicting the smallest sting to his ego.
His lean, strong face was impassive. ‘Why would I think that?’
‘It’s just that I thought you might, and I couldn’t bear that,’ she muttered frantically, letting her restive hands link in front of her and twist together. ‘It’s important to me that you know that I was really, really happy with you—’
‘Only not right at this moment.’
Harriet blinked, misery choking her thoughts and responses. ‘Sorry?’
‘It would seem obvious that I am not making you really, really happy right now,’ Rafael delineated, with cutting clarity of diction.
Harriet shot him a stricken look. ‘But that’s not your fault. Please don’t think that it is. I hope we can still be friends.’
‘No,’ Rafael asserted, without hesitation.
Her lower lip wobbled and she studied the marble floor until she had a grip on her flailing emotions again. ‘It’s important to me.’
‘Either you’re in my life on my terms or out of it.’
‘Out,’ she mumbled sickly.
‘Are you still planning to go straight back to the airport?’ Rafael drawled.
‘Yes.’ She could hardly squeeze the word out.
He lifted the phone. ‘My driver will take you.’
And she waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. The silence clawed at her, and she was afraid that she would fill it, that she would let the truth spill out to damage him as much as it had damaged her.
To guard against that risk, Harriet turned on her heel and walked back out into the echoing hall. A minute later the manservant appeared with her suitcase. No other sound disturbed the quiet until the buzzer on the intercom announced the arrival of the limo. She wanted to run back and say…What would she say to Rafael? What was there to say? Despair settling like a lump of concrete inside her, she let the lift carry her down to the basement car park.
CHAPTER TEN
UNA ALMOST FELL off her bicycle in her desperate eagerness to speak to Harriet. ‘I think Fergal must be seeing that English tourist who’s renting a room at Dooleys!’
Harriet glanced at the teenager’s anguished face and hurriedly looked away again. ‘So?’
‘Don’t you know how I feel about him?’ Una gasped tearfully. ‘I just saw him walking through the village with her!’
With effort, Harriet fought free of her preoccupation. She put an arm round the distressed girl and gave her a comforting hug. ‘I’m sorry you’re hurt.’
‘I’m more than hurt…I love him. I can’t stand to see him with someone else!’
Harriet breathed in deep but remained silent.
‘Go on—say what you’re thinking!’ the teenager urged fiercely.
‘You’re too young for Fergal and I’m afraid that he has a life to get on with,’ Harriet murmured, as gently as she could.
‘You don’t understand how I feel about him,’ Una mumbled thickly. ‘I told Rafael and he understands—because he didn’t say anything like that…he just listened!’
Harriet stared a hole in the sack of feed she was opening. She was not as naive as Una, who seemed to have no suspicion of how protective her brother was. She was imagining Rafael listening. Rafael, who was too clever and too controlled to speak and reveal his thoughts. It was ten days since they had parted in London. He had been cold as ice. He had shown nothing, felt nothing. But what had she expected? Wasn’t it better that way? On his terms it had been a casual affair that he, at least, would swiftly forget. Why should that hurt her even more? Her eyes were so heavy that she marvelled she didn’t fall asleep standing up. But she knew that no matter how tired she was she would be tormented by nightmares. She would also wake up feeling distraught in the middle of the night, and then lie tossing and turning until dawn.
‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed that Rafael and you are acting real weird. I just haven’t said anything because Tolly said I shouldn’t,’ Una added, half under her breath, before she took off to park her bike and help in the morning routine of feeding, mucking out and exercising the horses.
Harriet wanted to chase after the younger woman and ask how Rafael had been acting. She craved information about him but would not allow herself to seek it. With every atom of her will-power she was attempting to suppress her longing for him and retrain her thoughts. Incest. The word and the meaning of it haunted Harriet. She had tried so hard to avoid it, but it crept up on her and attacked her countless times a day. A crime against the moral order of society. A crime in law. It was done and could not be undone.
Yet still she found it hard to believe that she had unwittingly made such a disastrous mistake—that in the whole wide world she had had to meet and fall madly in love with the only other man who was as closely related to her as Boyce was. But then it was quite natural for her to be reluctant to believe that, wasn’t it? How could she trust her own misgivings about Eva’s dramatic revelation? Why had some inner streak of unf
amiliar cynicism noted that even at seventeen Eva had not sunk to the level of a Mr Ordinary? Even in a remote Irish village her mother had still managed to catch the eye of a very wealthy and newsworthy man. But then Eva was very beautiful, and why on earth would her mother choose to lie about such a thing?
If Valente Cavaliere had fathered Una, why should he not also have fathered Harriet thirteen years earlier? Rafael had acknowledged that his late father had been a womaniser without any sense of conscience or responsibility. Harriet had looked for pictures of Valente on the Internet and had sought in vain to find some point of similarity between her supposed father and herself. Rafael and Una had inherited Valente’s height and colouring and his bone structure, whereas she bore not the slightest physical resemblance to the man. Yet that only meant that she had inherited her physical characteristics from the maternal side of the family.
Was it possible that on some deep level she had felt a strong affinity with both Rafael and Una right from the start because of the very existence of that blood relationship? That was a possibility she shrank from.
That evening she was running a bath when she heard the helicopter passing overhead. Before she could stop herself, she had run through to the back bedroom to watch the helicopter drop down over the trees and disappear from view as it went into land. Dressed in clean jodhpurs and a faded green shirt, she was feeding Samson and Peanut at the back door when she looked up and stilled in surprise. Rafael was out by the sand paddock beyond the stables, watching Fergal put Tailwind through his paces.
She feasted her attention on him, helpless before her overpowering need to stare. There was an aching familiarity now to his lean, dark profile and tall, powerful physique. But the instant she experienced that magnetic pull she was ashamed of herself, and she dredged her attention guiltily from him again. She no longer knew how to behave around him. Just ten days earlier she would have felt free to walk over and join the two men. Now she was constrained by a whole host of concerns and she went back indoors. Half an hour passed slowly and painfully before she heard a car engine start and a car move off into the distance. He was gone again, she reflected just as a knock sounded on the front door.
Her heart in her mouth, she answered it.
Rafael studied her with dark as midnight eyes full of keen enquiry. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m great,’ she said weakly.
She was lying, Rafael decided: she looked as though she wasn’t sleeping or eating properly. He had no idea what was going on, but he had every intention of getting to the bottom of the mystery.
‘May I come in?’
Harriet hesitated, and then moved back to let him enter the cottage.
‘Why didn’t you warn me that my sister was infatuated with Fergal Gibson?’
Unprepared for that grimly voiced question, Harriet frowned in dismay.
‘Didn’t it occur to you that she might be at risk?’
‘Not with Fergal, no. He’s decent and sensible, and he’s well aware of what age she is. He does nothing to encourage her,’ Harriet countered tautly. ‘I hate to say it, but he’s probably at more risk from Una.’
Taken aback by that frank opinion, Rafael almost laughed out loud. ‘I get the picture. Your honesty on that point is appreciated.’
‘I just meant that she can be very determined. But I don’t think you need to worry. I gather Fergal’s dating some tourist at the moment.’
‘Whitewash. Fergal is not as indifferent to my sister as I would like him to be.’
‘He’s fond of Una…yes…’
‘He may not even know it, but he’s hooked. It’s a dangerous situation and I’ll deal with it.’ Rafael leant back against the solid oak table with indolent cool. ‘Next on the agenda…us.’
Harriet stiffened. ‘That’s over.’
‘But what I would like to know is…why?’
An electric silence fell. Her mind was blank. It was the most simple question, and hardly unpredictable, and yet she could not think of an answer.
‘There’s no one else, is there?’
‘No…’ The admission had escaped her before she could think better of it.
‘Then explain what happened with your sister and your mother.’
She froze. ‘What do you mean?’
‘When we flew back from Italy everything was fine. But then you went visiting for a few hours and came back the colour of a ghost, and suddenly all bets were off.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that—’
‘It was, and I want to know what changed. Did someone warn you off me? Tell tales that made your blood run cold?’ Rafael had his brilliant dark golden eyes pinned to her with penetrating force. ‘I’m trying to understand what the problem is.’
‘I didn’t say there was a problem—’
‘But there is… I’ve spent the last ten days without you. That’s a problem.’
That statement shook Harriet. ‘Is it?’
His dense lashes lowered over his intent gaze. ‘The ten lonely nights were equally painful.’
Beneath his scrutiny, Harriet lost colour, her fine facial bones tightening as she spun away from him, saying, ‘Don’t!’
‘Don’t what? This is new to me, a mhilis. I haven’t been in this position before. Usually I do the dumping. Full marks for taking me by surprise. Very few people have ever managed to do that to me.’
‘Are you saying nobody ever dumped you before?’ Suddenly, ridiculously, Harriet wanted to wrap her arms round him and cry.
‘All I want is an explanation. What went wrong? I’m an alpha-male high achiever. If you tell me why, I will never mention it again.’
Her hands knotted into fists as she fought the tears burning the back of her eyes. ‘It’s not that simple—’
‘It is that simple. Why do women always make things more complicated?’
The dark knowledge dammed up inside her weighted her down. ‘You don’t know everything…you wouldn’t even want to know…’
Rafael picked up on that declaration straight away. ‘What wouldn’t I want to know?’
Too late she recognised her mistake. ‘It was just a figure of speech.’
His hands came down on her rigid shoulders and slowly, carefully, turned her back round to face him. ‘No, don’t lie to me. Or, should I say, don’t keep on lying to me. I respect your truthfulness. But from the minute you entered my London apartment I saw that you were hiding something from me.’
Harriet felt cornered, even though he had been careful to drop his hands and step back from her again. ‘No!’
Stunning dark golden eyes flared down into hers. ‘Whatever it is, I need to know. Because not knowing is driving me crazy!’
Harriet sped back to the door and dragged it open. ‘I think you should leave—’
‘And you said you wanted to be friends?’
She didn’t trust herself to look at him. ‘I’ll talk to you about Una or the yard, but not about anything more personal.’
Rafael strolled out through the door at his leisure. ‘I won’t quit until you tell me.’
‘Just leave it,’ she muttered in a feverish plea, half under her breath. ‘Don’t push me on this.’
She had not expected Rafael to tackle her and demand an explanation. She had not been prepared for him to drop his façade of fabled cool and impassivity to stage so open a confrontation. The only woman ever to dump him. A choked sob was wrenched from her and she rolled up in a tight ball, as if she was trying to contain her grief. The hot tears slid down her face in silence.
When she had believed that he was essentially indifferent to her she had been able to tell herself that she was only precipitating an ending that would have occurred anyway. She had consoled herself with the belief that their affair had had no future—that, in effect, she had lost nothing—for his interest would inevitably have waned before many more weeks had passed. But now Rafael had approached her, ten days after she’d walked out of his life, and asked her to tell him where things had gone wro
ng. He wasn’t demonstrating indifference. He was reserved and he trusted few people. He was also very proud. Yet he had still been prepared to make that request, and ironically that made her feel more wretched than ever.
*
Rafael listened to Albert bring in the dawn on his new and unique middle-of-the-night timescale. It bothered him that for the first time he did not feel like strangling the rooster in mid flow. It bothered him that he had been lying awake for hours and that he had skipped dinner the night before. The uneasy rocking of his previously well-ordered world disturbed him.
He was a logical man. Illogical behaviour naturally unsettled him. Some men said women were illogical. But Rafael had from the outset of his acquaintance with Harriet appreciated her innate common sense. She had no inclination to make mountains out of molehills. At the fattoria she had glowed with contentment and happiness. Even when she had slept there had been a hint of a smile on her ripe mouth. Her good-natured tolerance had smoothed the edges off every tiny irritation. She drew him like an oasis of peace in a war zone.
Why, then, did such a woman suddenly begin acting out of character? Why would she suddenly finish a very satisfying affair? And contrive to look inconsolable at the same time? The more he devoted his powerful intellect to that conundrum the more impatient he became to get to the truth of the matter. Then he would be content, he reflected with confidence. Once she had given him a proper explanation he would be satisfied and he would put the matter behind him.
*
Harriet walked down through the ancient oak woods soon after six that morning, as she did most days. Usually she rode, but Snowball had been off-colour with a mild viral infection for a few days and the vet had recommended complete rest. She could have taken Missy out instead, since she had enjoyed exercising the young lively mare. But Una now rode Missy most days, and Harriet no longer liked to borrow her.
She always took a break at the heart of the wood, where the oak and the ash and the hawthorn grew. She would remember her first visit to the tranquil green bower with Rafael. Before she continued on to the beach she would shut her eyes tight and wish for happiness, as if she was still a child who believed in magical places and fairy spells.