Crime Of Passion

‘Antonio’s mother lives there and Maria Cristina and Rosa are very close,’ Rafael explained smoothly. ‘My sister is expecting her first child and, since her own mother is dead, it is natural that she should want Rosa’s support at such a time.’

Georgie was in a daze. ‘But I received a letter from her less than two weeks ago, inviting me over here. She hoped I’d still be here when she had her baby!’

‘She only decided to go to San Francisco last week. She couldn’t have been expecting you to come.’ Rafael exhibited a magnificent disregard for her natural distress.

‘It was a last-minute decision and I got cancellation tickets,’ Georgie conceded tautly. ‘I tried to phone her the night before the flight but she wasn’t in—’

‘But you came all the same,’ Rafael drawled with an ironic lack of surprise.

‘I wanted to surprise her!’ Georgie slung back. ‘Why didn’t you tell me immediately? Obviously you knew I was here to stay with your sister—’

‘I had hoped you were not that foolish. I told you to stay away from Maria Cristina four years ago,’ he reminded her with grim emphasis. ‘It is a most unsuitable friendship and I made my feelings clear then ’

‘Stuff your bloody feelings!’ Georgie gasped, suddenly swinging away from him, her voice embarrassingly choked. ‘My friendship with Maria Cristina is none of your business.’

Her bruised eyes were filled with tears. So this was what it felt like to be at the end of her tether. She had really been looking forward to staying with her friend. This disappointment was the last straw. She also knew that, as a recently graduated student teacher, who had yet to find employment, it would be many years before she could hope to repeat such an expensive trip.

It was unlikely that Maria Cristina would come to London under her own steam. Rafael’s sister was very much a home-bird, who had only tolerated her English boarding-school education because it had been her late mother’s wish and who had freely admitted that she hadn’t the faintest desire to ever leave Bolivia again once her education was completed. Her marriage to a doctor, no more fond of travelling than she was, had set the seal on that insularity.

‘Anything which threatens my family is my business.’

‘Threatens?’ Georgie queried jerkily, fighting for composure. ‘And how do I threaten your family?’

‘I will not allow you to hurt my sister, and the day that she realises what kind of a woman you really are, she will be hurt.’

‘God forgive you.., I would never hurt Maria Cristina!’ Georgie gasped painfully, swinging back to him in a rage. ‘She’d be a whole lot more hurt if she knew that the brother she idolises is a slimy toe-rag!’

‘What did you call me?’ Dark eyes had turned incandescent gold, his savagely handsome features freezing into sudden incredulous stillness.

Georgie vented a shaky little laugh. All that bowing and scraping people did in his vicinity did not accustom him to derision. But she knew that she would never forget the depths to which he had sunk in his desire to humiliate her today. ‘If think you heard me, and let me assure you that your seduction routine leaves a lot to be desired!’ she spelt out, hot with anger and bitterness.

‘Seduction was quite unnecessary,’ Rafael asserted softly, his beautifully shaped mouth twisting with blatant contempt. ‘If I’d kept quiet, I’d be inside you now, and the only sounds in this room would be your moans of pleasure. You’d share a bed with any man who attracted you! I don’t pride myself on the idea that there is anything exclusive about your response to me.’

Georgie was trembling violently. Every scrap of colour had drained from her features, leaving her white as snow. Her hand flew up of its own volition but steel-hard fingers snapped round her wrist in mid-air.

‘Don’t you dare,’ Rafael grated down at her in a snarling undertone.

And the violence in the atmosphere was explosive, catching her breath in her dry throat. Raw aggression had flared in his smouldering gaze and instinctively she backed away, massaging her bruised wrist as he freed her, her heartbeat thumping so loudly in her ears that she felt faint and sick, but still she wanted to kill him, still she wanted to punish him for saying those filthy things to her.

‘I’m not like that,’ she murmured tightly, turning away, despising the little shake that had somehow crept into her voice, betraying her distress. ‘And even if I was, it would be a cold day in hell before I let you touch me.’

There was so much more she wanted to say but she didn’t trust herself. Once before, she had attempted to reason with Rafael in her own defence. He hadn’t listened. He had shot her every plea down in flames, immovably convinced that she had betrayed him in another man’s bed. Afterwards she had felt even more soiled and humiliated by his derision. She would never put herself in that position again.

The silence went on forever, reverberating around her in soundless waves.

‘Are you able to settle your bill here?’

Four centuries of ice in that chilling enquiry—well, what did she care? Numbly she shook her head.

‘I’ll take care of it.’

For five minutes, she simply stayed there in the empty room, struggling harder than she had ever had to struggle for control. When she had managed it, she walked down to Reception and found him just moving away from the desk. Without once glancing in his direction, she climbed back into the Range Rover. He would take her to the airport, put her on a flight back home. She really didn’t care any more.

The silence smouldered, chipping away at nerves that were already raw and bleeding. ‘I presume you can take care of the passport problem,’ she muttered, half under her breath, thinking of the bribery he had apparently employed to get her out of her cell.

‘What passport problem?’ His accented drawl was dangerously quiet.

‘Well, obviously it went with everything else in my bag,’ she pointed out, surprised that he hadn’t grasped that fact yet.

He uttered a raw imprecation in his own language.

‘Oh, don’t be shy…say it in English!’ Georgie suddenly heard herself rake back with a sob in her voice. ‘You think I’m a stupid bitch!’

‘Georgie…’ Fluent though his English was, he couldn’t quite handle the two syllables of her name coming so close to each other. He slurred them slightly, his rich dark voice provoking painful memories. ‘Don’t start crying’

‘I am not crying!’ She bit her tongue, tasted blood, blinked back the scorching tide dammed up behind her eyelids.

Soon after that, he stopped the car and got out, leaving her alone for about ten minutes. She waited, enveloped by a giant cloud of unfamiliar depression. It took Rafael to do this to her. He slammed a lid down on her usually bubbly personality. He made her seethingly, horribly angry. And he hurt her. Nothing had changed. She didn’t even lift her head when he rejoined her.

‘We’re here.’

Rafael opened the door. One of his security men already had her bag in one beefy hand.

Rafael extended a black coat.

‘What’s this?’ Georgie had yet to focus on any part of him above the level of his sky-blue silk tie.

‘I bought it for you. You cannot walk through the airport with—with your top falling off,’ Rafael shared flatly.

She wanted to laugh, because she had managed to forget that she was still wearing yesterday’s torn and dirty clothes. But somehow she couldn’t laugh. She stuck her arms in the sleeves of the expensive silk-lined raincoat. It was light as a feather but so long it had to look like a nun’s habit. Numbly she watched Rafael’s fingers do up the buttons. It took him a surprisingly long time, his hands less deft than she had expected.

His double standards were perhaps what she most loathed about Rafael Rodriguez Berganza. He had undoubtedly stripped more women than Casanova. Maria Cristina had been a gossip while they were at school. Rafael had a notorious reputation for loving and leaving beautiful women. But Georgie would have known anyway.

Many very good-looking men missed out on being sexy. But not Rafael. Rafael was a blatantly sexual male animal, flagrantly attuned to the physical. The air around him positively sizzled. So why the heck was this sophisticated, experienced Latin-American lover having so much difficulty buttoning up her coat? Unwarily she collided with glittering golden eyes, and it was like being struck by lightning.

He was so close she could smell a hint of citrusy aftershave, overlying clean, husky male. Her nostrils flared. Her nipples tightened into painful sensitivity, a spiralling ache twisting low in her stomach. Nearby, someone cleared their throat. She tore her gaze from Rafael’s and met the looks of visible fascination emanating from his bodyguards, standing several feet away. She realised that she and Rafael had simply been standing there staring at each other. Devastated by her overpowering physical awareness of him, Georgie turned away, her throat closing over.

In silence they entered the airport. Her head felt incredibly light and her lower limbs weak and clumsy. Exhaustion, stress and lack of food, she registered, were finally catching up with her.

Officialdom leapt out of nowhere at them. The crowds parted. Uniformed guards paved every step through the airport, down an eerily empty concourse, their footsteps echoing. There was no sign of other passengers. Clearly she was being put on the flight home either first or last.

As they emerged into the fresh air and crossed the tarmac, she realised incredulously that Rafael intended to see her right on to the plane to be sure she went. It made her feel as though she was being deported in disgrace. And that was when it happened—something that had never happened to Georgie before. As she fought to focus on him and say something smart on parting, her head swam alarmingly. The blackness folded in and she fainted.

‘Lie still.’ As Rafael made the instruction for the second time and Georgie attempted to defy it, he lost patience and planted a powerful hand to her shoulder, to force her back into the comfortable seat in which she was securely strapped. ‘I don’t want you to swoon again.’

If he used that word again, she would surely hit him. ‘I didn’t swoon, I passed out!’ she hissed, twisting away from his unwelcome ministrations. ‘And will you take that wet flannel out of my face?’

Dense black lashes screened his clear gaze from her view, a curious stillness to his strong, dark face. ‘I was trying to help,’ he proffered very quietly.