A Fiery Baptism

‘I don’t understand why you should be so afraid.’ He paused, brilliant golden eyes clashing with her upward glance in naked enmity. ‘What a lie! You have the intelligence to be afraid. But what of? Violence may be what I feel but it would put me in prison and I have no love of small, closed places. And some couples may celebrate an approaching divorce with a farewell tumble between the sheets but when I become that desperate for a woman I will become celibate,’ he spelt out with brutal candour.

Humiliation pierced her like a knife-point. A primitive need to claw him for that unnecessary taunt charged her but a moment later she wanted to curl up and die. The condemned woman, branded a failure, finally scorned and cast aside. ‘I hate you,’ she framed strickenly.

‘Then it is more than you felt for me before. Even hatred—it is something. There is hope for you yet,’ he responded unfeelingly. ‘Who was the man you were with?’

She spun away, savaged by him as she had been so often before. Only this time she was tormentingly aware that she was betraying her reactions and Rafael was receiving a vulture’s satisfaction from her apparent new vulnerability. Her composure had cracked wide open earlier tonight. Now she was bare, stripped of all poise. ‘Why should you want to know?’

‘It amuses me to ask. It is so liberated to ask such a question of one’s wife.’ Provocation quivered through every accented syllable. ‘Though perhaps not in your case. Hell will freeze over before you invite him into your bed!’

Outraged by his derision, she swung back. ‘Are you so sure?’

Rafael stilled, straight ebony brows lowering over piercing tawny eyes.

‘You and your bloody ego!’ she gasped. ‘Yes! That idea really gets to you, doesn’t it? You can let some trollop crawl all over you six feet from me but—’

‘Trollop?’

‘Puta!’ she spat, her emotions spinning into a fierce spiral of rage and mortification.

‘No es,’ Rafael fielded smoothly. ‘I have never had to stoop to payment, muneca mia.’

‘Don’t call me that!’ she shrieked at him. ‘I am not a doll!’

As he tilted his head to one side, his whole concentration unnervingly pinned to her, light glistened over the black silk luxuriance of his gleaming hair. ‘You are arguing with me. Increible. You are answering back,’ he breathed in wonderment. ‘You are even shouting.’

His response drained the wild, unfamiliar anger from her, leaving her weak and badly shaken up. ‘Please go,’ she whispered.

‘Who taught you to shout?’ he prompted. ‘It is a very healthy sign. I like it.’

Her hands flew up, covering her ears. ‘You are driving me out of my mind!’

‘That is what you did to me. You threw my heart back at my feet and trampled on it. Two years of torture on this earth,’ Rafael intoned rawly, his sensual mouth compressed into a white line. ‘I gave you everything. You gave me nothing. You had the generosity of a miser. No woman has ever done to me what you dared to do. Por dios, when I think of how I suffered, I marvel that I stand here now and keep my hands from you…’

Involuntarily a hollow laugh escaped her. ‘The sole saving grace of your visit is that you now possess that capability.’

Dark colour scorched his high cheekbones. ‘You throw that in my teeth?’

She knew that intonation. Her tongue moistened her dry lips. It was the untrustworthy quiet before the storm.

‘You think I made unnatural demands of you?’ he raked at her between clenched teeth. ‘Every time I touched you, I was made to feel like an animal. You lay like a block of ice beneath me, tolerating my filthy desires!’

Sarah was the one reddening now, spinning away to present him with a defensive back. ‘Do you have to be so crude?’

He vented a stifled expletive. ‘You are the only woman who has ever called me this…that,’ he corrected in a driven undertone. ‘To think that I was once enslaved by you…it makes me shudder.’

‘The feeling is mutual.’ Waves of pain were tearing at her. Rafael had not lost his impassioned powers of picturesque speech.

‘Crude,’ he repeated again.

Sarah went white, strangely ashamed of herself. On some crazy level she was attuned to the awareness that she had drawn real blood. A lean hand was clenched into a fist at the insult. Her eyes stung. He had never been crude. Indeed, for someone afflicted with his hot-blooded, over-sexed temperament, he had been extraordinarily gentle and patient and kind. Only it hadn’t helped. Her inhibitions had proved insurmountable.

Sex. Just a small thing, not of great importance, something she could endure when she had to as no doubt other women had endured from the beginning of time. The sheer stupidity of her reasoning before their marriage tormented her now. Then she had been secretly flattered by the intensity of the hunger she roused in Rafael. Afterwards she had learnt to be afraid of that hunger, jerking away at his slightest touch.

It was typical of Rafael to be so gloriously and unashamedly wrapped up in his own sufferings, as he called them, she thought bitterly. Had he ever really thought of what it was like for her? To be married to a male so extravagantly gorgeous and innately virile and know you were a disaster in his bed? To live day in, day out with the knowledge that you were losing a little more of him by the hour? And finally to sink so low in a sense of utter inadequacy that she had taken his infidelity for granted. Closing her eyes, refusing to see. Anything just to keep him, anything so long as he stayed, a lesson learnt well at her mother’s knee with a father whose extra-marital affairs were as numerous as they were well known.

Rafael was splashing brandy into a glass, throwing it back. Strong muscles worked in his brown throat. ‘Tonight I will get drunk.’

‘Are you driving?’ The question fled her strained lips, inspired by an instinctive practicality and concern.

He shot her a gleaming, killing glance. ‘So prosaic, so sensible, so much the lady. Your hair up like a royal princess, the not too revealing dress. This is what I lived with. The patronising smiles, the small talk when our marriage was dying. We must not notice. We must not talk about these personal, private things. It is not nice. That is the word.’

She was trembling. Oh, dear God, why had he had to come here to destroy her all over again? Look forward, never back, her great-aunt Letitia had once told her. Until now it had been excellent advice. Without Letitia’s brusque and unsentimental support, Sarah wasn’t entirely sure that she would have been here today, a completely different Sarah from the mixed-up, desperately unhappy girl she had been in her teens. She had come through a baptism of fire to find her own security. She no longer endured agonies of guilt over her parents’ emotional blackmail. She no longer attempted to twist herself into something that she wasn’t to please other people. In the year since she had made her home in London, Sarah had gone from strength to strength. But now, all of a sudden…horrifyingly, it was as though she had been catapulted back in time.

Why was Rafael behaving as if he were the innocent party? Innocence had deserted Rafael in his cradle. But conversely an image of him on a hot, dusty pavement laughingly bestowing flowers on a Parisienne baglady chose to surface in her mind’s eye. Rafael, exuberantly, indescribably happy and wanting to share it with the world. In those days there had still been a streak of the child in Rafael. And now it was gone.

Hard cynicism curved his chiselled mouth. Nobody could stare like Rafael. You got the feeling that he could see right into you, strip away the concealing layers and pretences until only the inner self remained. ‘Shall I call a taxi?’ She couldn’t bear the silence any longer.

‘When I wish to leave, I will leave.’ He loosed a hard, humourless laugh. ‘I know why I am here. You will think me quite the sentimentalist. But I have this one question and it is not at all…nice.’

‘I’d sooner not hear it, then.’

An ebony brow arched and she was suddenly, shockingly aware of the raw tension in his lean, powerful body. ‘But you will,’ he asserted fiercely. ‘Did you ever regret it?’

‘Regret what?’

Something akin to naked violence seethed in his brooding gaze, setting up tiny ripples of fear in the pulsing atmosphere. ‘The price of family forgiveness. Is that how you thought of it?’ he slung at her harshly. ‘If God has given you a night of uninterrupted sleep in five years, he has been too good to you!’

In bewilderment, she muttered, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You know what I am saying,’ he bit out, if it was possible with even greater ferocity. ‘Did it mean so little to you? A brief stay in some discreet clinic where I couldn’t find you? It was against the law…it must have been somewhere very expensive. But what is expense to your parents when they find it within their power to destroy the last evidence of your most unfortunate marriage? Ah…you go pale. Did you think I would have forgotten so easily? How could I forget? It was an act of revenge. You did it to punish me!’

‘Rafael, I—’ she began, lost in the welter of demands that she didn’t understand.

‘You murdered my unborn child and I curse you for it. You did not have the right to make that choice. I will never forgive this nor will I ever forget it,’ he swore in implacable condemnation. ‘You did not want my child but I would have taken him, I would have brought him up…’

Sarah’s perception of reality was rocking on its axis. A tiny sound dragged her glazed eyes from Rafael. Gilly was peering round the door, her pixie face screwed up against the intrusion of the light. She came stumbling across the room, powered by sudden noisy sobs. ‘Ben tol’ me the spider’s gonna get me and eat me up!’ she wailed, clutching at Sarah’s skirt. ‘And it was in my dream. Mummy, make it go away or give it to Ben. It’s his spider!’

Rafael mumbled something incomprehensible in Spanish.

Sarah bent down to lift her daughter, smoothing a hand over her tousled black curls. Gilly pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder. ‘Who’s dat man?’

‘Never mind.’ Curving protective arms tightly round Gilly’s hot little body, she attempted to brush past Rafael.

A bruising set of fingers closed over her shoulder. ‘She called you Mama. Who does she belong to? Es imposible. Speak!’ he pressed fiercely.

Tearing free of his punishing hold, Sarah sped into the hall. Her sole concern was Gilly. Gilly must not be exposed to Rafael. She’d sink a knife between his ribs before she’d let him come within twenty feet of either of her children! He had accused her of aborting their child. Of course, he couldn’t believe that! A piece of nonsense, that was what it was! Some sly, sneaky gambit aimed at explaining away a four-year uninterest in fatherhood? He must think she was mentally deficient. Well, she wasn’t and where her children were concerned she would fight like a lioness. Had natural curiosity finally pierced his tough hide? Well, it was too late. He was nearly five years too late. He wasn’t walking in here now to exercise rights he had surrendered of his own free will…no way was he doing that!

Her hands were shaking so violently that she had trouble in covering Gilly up again. Her daughter was much too sleepy to notice the state she was in. ‘Is it gone away?’ she mumbled.