Crime Of Passion(11)

‘I thought you were more mature. Now I face reality—the inescapable gap between hope and selfdelusion,’ Rafael had commented very drily. ‘Then, how do I blame you? One does not rob the schoolroom and expect to be rewarded with an adult. But, right now, I feel that I robbed the nursery department!’

Georgie had subsided like a pricked balloon but she had been wildly confused by the unfamilair strength of the emotions tearing her apart. One minute she loved him, the next she felt she hated him. And when he talked down to her like that, hatred rose uppermost.

But he had rewarded her sullen silence with a kiss, yet another in a long line of fleeting salutes, as if she was in very truth, the child he accused her of being. Still, there had not been an ounce of the passion she craved. And she had wanted so badly to prove that she was a woman, a real woman capable of satisifying his every adult desire.

And maybe she had also been trying to convince herself that she in turn had some power over him. So what had she done? Even four years after the event, Georgie cringed from recalling the fact that she had shamelessly thrown herself at Rafael in the car, employing every atom of wanton encouragement she had ever read about in racy female magazine articles of the ‘How to hang on to your man’ variety.

And it had worked… briefly. Rafael had uttered a ragged groan. With satisfying speed, all that infuriating restraint of his had vanished. She had ended up flat on the passenger seat, his mouth hotly sealed to hers, his body hard and demanding, crushing her yielding curves, all the red-hot passion she had for him finally matched. It hadn’t even occurred to her that they were in a public car park. Georgie had been beyond such trivialities. But then Rafael had sworn viciously in Spanish and thrust himself back from her, an unholy glitter in his dark probing gaze.

‘Who taught you how to arouse a man?’ he had demanded, without hesitation ablaze with suspicion and distrust.

He hadn’t been impressed by her stammered assurance that nobody had taught her anything. Georgie had been eaten alive by mortification. In the end she had been in such a state of sobbing incoherence that when she had seen Steve crossing the car park she had leapt out of the Ferrari and raced after him.

Steve had had a row with Janet, who had already gone home in a taxi. He had taken Georgie back to his house, sooner than subject her to the horror of facing her father in the condition she was in. And then her nightmare evening had taken its second very bad turn for the worse… in many ways, at the time, the very worst turn of all.

Georgie paced the richly carpeted floor, recalling with a shudder how she had felt when Steve had, without any prior warning that she had noticed, switched from understanding big brother to would-be lover. He had had a comforting arm round her shoulders as they walked into the lounge and then he had suddenly grabbed her and begun kissing her! Georgie had been shattered and repelled. Steve might not be her real brother, but she had always regarded him in the asexual guise of one. His forceful embrace might only have lasted a short time but it had shocked and frightened Georgie as much as attempted rape.

‘Hell, I’m not your brother…don’t look at me like that!’ Steve had shouted at her before she escaped upstairs to lock herself in the bathroom and be horribly sick.

He had tried to talk to her through the door. He had had too much to drink. He was upset about Janet, Couldn’t she understand? But that night Georgie hadn’t been capable of understanding. She had shrunk from the challenge of opening that door and facing him again. And when Steve had told her that he was going out to check that he had locked his car, Georgie had fled through the back door.

She had gone to Danny’s apartment, hadn’t been able to think of any other place to run, would certainly not have turned to Rafael after the treatment he had meted out earlier. Danny had given her his bed and slept on the lounge sofa. Georgie had been so upset, he really hadn’t known what to do with her. In the end he had just made her a cup of coffee and left her in peace.

The next morning, raised voices had wakened her. She had sat up, naked in the tumbled bed, to find Rafael standing in the bedroom doorway in a sort of seething silent rage of incredulity. Without a word he had swung on his heel and stridden back out of the flat. Danny had appeared then, shivering wet and dripping from the shower, still wrapped in a bath-towel. ‘He just forced his way in…’ he had mumbled. ‘And he’s a lot bigger than I am. Hope you didn’t mind me making myself scarce.’

Steve had been their second visitor, close on Rafael’s heels. Georgie hadn’t been able to meet her stepbrother’s eyes.

‘How did Rafael know where I was?’ she had demanded.

‘I guessed you had to be here and I told him.’ Steve had sighed. ‘I thought you’d want to see him and smooth over that stupid row you had with him.’

And, of course, had Rafael not completely misinterpreted what he had seen, she would indeed have been glad to see him.

Steve had bent over backwards to make peace with her, fervently apologising for upsetting her the night before. He had papered over the cracks of her discomfiture, made it easier for her to try and pretend that nothing had changed between them. But it had, she acknowledged sadly. A new distance had gradually eroded their once close ties.

Later that day, when she had approached Rafael, it had not initially occurred to Georgie that Rafael might not listen to her. She had been incredibly naive in her assumption that Rafael would believe her when she explained that things might have looked suspicious at Danny’s but that in actuality everything had been entirely innocent. But then, she had naturally assumed that Rafael knew her well enough to have some degree of trust in her…

She had put his ridiculous suspicions in the Ferrari down to her own childish behaviour and mutually frayed tempers. Indeed, travelling up in the lift to Rafael’s penthouse apartment, Georgie had been so far removed from reality that she had been happily thinking that Rafael must have been jealous and that jealousy had to mean he cared. And, right now, remembering that piece of inane stupidity made Georgie want to tear her hair out and scream. That day she had been a lamb to the slaughter.

But never again, she reminded herself doggedly and, since sleep was the last thing on her over-active mind, she stripped, filled the marble bath with hot water and bubbles and climbed in to wash her hair and then lie back and thoughtfully survey the mermaid taps. For her benefit… Incredible. When, when had he done all this? And how had everything contrived to go so badly wrong? Her throat ached. Running a flannel under the cold tap, she draped it irritably across her still reddened eyes.

Rafael had fallen off his pedestal with a resounding crash. First love—nothing more painful, nothing more intense. It was those memories which saddened her, not any sense of loss or regret. The marriage would have been a disaster. Like Desdemona but without the saintliness, she conceded ruefully, she might have ended up murdered by her enraged and jealous husband. Rafael hadn’t trusted her one inch.

She could not have been the wife his intelligence would have chosen. Perhaps it had been the awareness that they were temperamentally unsuited which had made him seize on the escape-clause supplied by her supposed fling with Danny. Rafael had not had grounds to judge her that harshly. He had known how much she loved him. How could he have seriously believed that after one stupid row she would jump into bed with a boy almost a year younger than she was? What kind of sense did that make?

‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the bath…’

Tearing the flannel from her eyes in shock, Georgie reeled up into a sitting position, water sloshing noisily everywhere. ‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ she gasped in outrage.

Rafael angled a splintering smile over her startled features and laughed with genuine amusement. ‘You’re such a curious mixture, Georgie. Puritan and sybarite.’ His dinner-jacket hooked in one hand, his white silk dressshirt undone at his brown throat, he sat down on the edge of the bath. ‘You radiate conflicting signals which confuse. Looking at you now, I see why I was taken in four years ago. That look of shock and indignation is very impressive, but the way you’re hugging your knees is decided overkill,’ he murmured silkily, surveying her with glittering golden eyes. ‘You have a very beautiful body…why hide’it?’

‘Get out of here!’ Georgie sizzled back at him furiously.

He tugged a fleecy towel off the rail just out of her reach and extended it with a faintly derisive smile. ‘Then you’ve already learnt that a little mystique is more stimulating than a floor-show?’

Georgie snatched at the towel and wrapped it clumsily round herself as she stood up, her cheeks burning hotly. ‘I want you to leave,’ she told him stiffly, striving for a note of command and dignity.

Rafael flung his ebony head back and laughed spontaneously.

Georgie stood there, violet eyes flashing with rage. ‘Look, I have got the message that you consider yourself absolutely irresistible, but I’ve made it clear that I am not interested!’

‘Where was I?’ Rafael prompted.

‘Where were you when?’ Georgie snapped.

Rafael slid fluidly upright. ‘Where was I when you were making it very clear that you were not interested?’ he enquired lethally.