A hand snaked out and trapped her fingers, preventing her retreat. Calmly he dried himself with a napkin while retaining that punishing grip on her. Only then did he turn blazing dark eyes on her furiously flushed profile. ‘It really hasn’t dawned on you yet, has it?’ he demanded, jerking her round so that she had to face him. ‘You bounce through life like an exuberant, destructive child—undisciplined, wholly self-centred and greedy, careless of the damage you cause, never counting the cost. But today is the day you start paying for being a shallow, opportunistic little bitch.’
Georgie stared back at him in stunned disbelief. ‘You’re—you’re out of your mind…’ she whispered.
‘No,’ Rafael murmured softly, silkily, ‘I’m the kind of unforgiving bastard you wouldn’t find in your worst nightmares. And you really don’t know why, do you?’
‘I think you’re acting like someone unhinged,’ she muttered helplessly.
‘I was very unhinged four years ago,’ Rafael agreed, his fingers tightening so savagely on hers that her smaller hand was crushed. He threw his handsome dark head back and studied her with unflinching intensity, his eloquent mouth hardening. ‘Take a good long look at those rooms upstairs. Take a note of the severe lack of good taste in that Hollywood film-star bathroom. Ask yourself who you know with a vulgar penchant for mermaid taps and marble. And then ask yourself why I would have wasted an obscene amount of money actually paying someone to make them.’
Transfixed by the savage onslaught of his biting dark eyes, Georgie’s stomach cramped up. She couldn’t feel her hand any more but she was beyond that awareness. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, because she was paralysed by what he was telling her, unable to credit that her insanely confused thoughts could be heading in the right direction. ‘I—I…’ And for the life of her, she couldn’t think of what to say.
‘That suite was decorated for my bride—for my beautiful, pure bride.’ Rafael drew her bruised fingers to his mouth and kissed them in a scathing demonstration of derision before dropping her hand again.
‘You wanted to marry me?’ Georgie demanded starkly, her voice cracking loudly in the charged silence.
‘You really didn’t know… I always wondered.’ Rafael vented a grimly amused laugh as he read the sheer astonishment in her dazed eyes. ‘But then, how could you know how to deal with a man who treated you with respect? Naturally, I did not want to make love to you before our wedding-night, but that restraint on my part was not appreciated. You got bored, didn’t you?’
Every scrap of pink had drained from Georgie’s vibrantly beautiful face. ‘No…no!’ she said again shakily.
‘So you went to bed with someone else—someone wise enough to know that the very last thing you wanted was respect—another teenager.’ All the raw savagery of Rafael’s conquistador ancestry was stamped into the harsh lines of his golden features, his embittered fury starkly apparent in his blazing stare. ‘I, Rafael Rodriguez Berganza, made to look a fool by a teenage boy!’
Trembling, Georgie whispered jerkily, ‘Danny was a friend, nothing more—’
Rafael reached out and curved a cruelly strong hand round her elbow, forcing her closer. ‘You think that makes a difference? That it meant nothing to you, that it was a drunken one-night stand which I was never intended to know about? I always knew that! But was it worth it? I ask you now, querida mía was it worth what you lost? Looking at you now, I would say not,’ he derided, thrusting her back from him with contempt. ‘Because you still want me. You still want me so much it terrifies you… and if you had had any intelligence at all, you would have known yourself safer in that prison cell than you are here with me!’
Georgie backed away. ‘I don’t like being threatened!’ she spat back at him in a tempest of emotion too tangled for her even to comprehend. All she could recognise was the terrible rage which dominated her every other reaction. ‘And I didn’t want to marry you anyway! My idea of marriage is not being told what to do from dawn to dusk and getting the big freeze when you fail… and my ideal partner is not some international playboy, who sleeps with every woman he wants and then thinks he’s got some God-given right to marry a virgin!’
Rafael plunged upright. ‘I did not think it my right—’
‘No, evidently you selected me at school and hoped to God you’d got me in time!’ Georgie slung back in disgust. ‘You know something? You are everything Steve ever said you were. Primitive, backward and bigoted.’
Rafael froze and shot her a seething look of such frightening anger that her voice simply died away. ‘You say that name once more in my presence and I will surely kill you…’
Georgie spun on her heel and took off through the dining-room like a rocket. She flew up the stairs, raced across the landing and slammed breathlessly into her bedroom. Then she flung herself on the bed in the darkness and burst into helpless floods of tears.
CHAPTER FOUR
A GOOD cry was supposed to be therapeutic. Georgie peered at herself through swollen eyes half an hour later, acknowledged the tumultuous state of her jangling nerves and distraught emotions, and decided dully that the good cry had utterly failed.
Teresa was hovering with a large laden tray when Georgie walked back into the bedroom. She aimed an uncertain smile at Georgie, but Georgie was so embarrassed by her red, puffy face that she lowered her head.
‘You have dinner, señorita?’
‘Thanks.’ Distress hadn’t killed Georgie’s appetite. But then, food had been pretty thin on the ground over the past forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours, she reflected sickly. That swine had all but wiped her out in little more than twelve hours! Yet, four years ago, Rafael had actually planned to marry her! Finding out that now shook her rigid. Pick a teenage bride and mould her like unformed clay into the correct image… She hadn’t been rich or well-born but, heaven knew, she had been malleable! And Rafael must have wanted her; Rafael must very badly have wanted her, she decided dazedly, to overlook all her other deficiencies.
For a few minutes, Georgie hugged that new knowledge to her. It shed a different light on that long-ago summer, briefly mollified her damaged pride. Then, with protective parents hovering, not to mention her youth and close friendship with his sister, he hadn’t had that many options, she conceded ruefully. How could he have embarked on an affair with her? There would always have been the risk that she might tell Maria Cristina when it was over. And how did you have an affair with a girl who had to be home by midnight unless her stepbrother was in tow? A choky little laugh escaped Georgie. Was that why he had gone up in flames at the mere mention of Steve?
It would be foolish to deny that her parents had been worried by Rafael’s interest in her, their concern exacerbated by Steve, who had slated the idea that Rafael could be trusted with their precious daughter. Throughout those weeks with Rafael, Georgie had been irritated by Steve’s attitude, but she had grudgingly conceded his genuine concern that she was going to be badly hurt.
And when Steve’s expectations had been fulfilled, Georgie had been grateful for his smooth and careless dismissal of their parents’ astonishment that her relationship with Rafael had been so abruptly concluded. In fact, that understated kindness in shielding her from awkward questions had helped Georgie more than anything else to forget her stepbrother’s disturbing behaviour on that final night.
She shivered, for she liked to recall that least of all. But, whether she liked it or not, the events of that catastrophic evening were flooding back to her. Did she blame everything on the amount of alcohol she had recklessly consumed? No, she could not allow that excuse. And, even without Steve’s encouragement, she would have rebelled against Rafael’s arrogance sooner or later.
She remembered Steve’s girlfriend, a very pretty girl, only a couple of years her senior. It had been the first time she had met Janet. But that evening she had noticed how very careless Steve was of Janet’s feelings. He hadn’t paid her much attention. It had been a new view of Steve which she hadn’t liked. It had made her wonder if all men were like that. Once a man knew you loved him, did you then become boring?
Georgie had been so much on edge that night, conscious that Rafael had been disturbingly distant on the last two occasions she had been with him. She had felt threatened and insecure and she had simultaneously despised herself for being so weak. She had told herself that if Rafael was getting bored with her, she could handle it. But she hadn’t handled it. She had got childishly, stupidly drunk.
‘I’m taking you home,’ Rafael had told her grimly.
‘If you take her home in that state, my stepfather will kill her!’ Steve had protested.
‘As opposed to me killing her?’ Rafael had drawled with flat indifference. ‘I’ll take her home to her father and let him do it. Will that make you happy?’
Steve had become abusive. Rafael had ignored him and dragged Georgie out to his car. She hadn’t wanted to go home. At that point, the evening had gone totally haywire. She had started to scream at Rafael in the Ferrari, and it was amazing how much she had said that later, she had to acknowledge, had truly come from the heart. Alcohol had filled her with the Dutch courage to list her every resentment.