Crime Of Passion(13)

‘Perdone…but we must postpone our pleasure,’ he imparted with slumbrous mockery. ‘That was Antonio on the phone. Maria Cristina has given birth to a son and the task of spreading the good news among our many relatives falls on me.’

Astonishment filled Georgie’s eyes. ‘Maria Cristina has had her baby? But surely she wasn’t due for another couple—’

‘He came a little early, but both mother and baby are well. There were no complications,’ Rafael assured her, and slowly expelled his breath, a softer light than she had ever seen briefly gentling his strong dark features. ‘But I understand they barely made it to the hospital in time! A little boy…’ His chiselled jawline clenched and he cast her a sardonic glance. ‘He is to be called George.’

His pronounced relief that Maria Cristina had come through childbirth safely, and the open emotion with which he contemplated his nephew’s arrival in the world, twisted something painfully inside Georgie, reminding her just how close were the ties between brother and sister. Then she caught his final statement and her eyes widened. ‘She remembered… She called him after me?’ she gasped, tickled pink by the announcement. ‘Gosh, I can’t wait to see him ’

‘But you won’t unless my sister chooses to travel to London,’ Rafael cut in harshly, his change of mood brutally swift. ‘By the time she flies home next week, you will be long gone.’

Losing her short-lived animation, Georgie stilled. Reality had never been less welcome. She collided with his cold dark scrutiny, and her stomach clenched painfully under the onslaught of that unashamed snub. She felt sick with shame, remembering their intimacy brief minutes earlier.

‘Is that clear?’ Rafael persisted, with what she felt to be quite unnecessary cruelty.

Two years earlier, she had missed out on her best friend’s wedding. Maria Cristina had asked her to be one of her bridesmaids and it had almost broken Georgie’s heart to refuse, for her parents had been willing to dig into their savings to make the trip possible for her. She had been afraid of running into Rafael again, although at the time she had not admitted that fear to herself. Her end-of-term exams had been just around the corner and she had used them as an excuse. But this time—this time, she told herself with sudden ferocityshe would not play the coward.

‘I’ll do what I want,’ she said tightly, and studied him, a tempestuous gleam in her bitter stare. ‘You can’t make me leave Bolivia.’

‘But you cannot stay here.’

‘I’ll have money sent out from home,’ she threw back. ‘I don’t care if I have to sleep on the street but I am not leaving without seeing Maria Cristina and George.’

‘I will not allow it,’ Rafael drawled in a tone of forbidding finality.

Hunched below her sheet, rawly conscious of her lack of clothing, Georgie sent him a look of naked loathing. ‘I want transport out of here tomorrow…do you hear me?’

Rafael dealt her a glittering glance of hard amusement. ‘No transport available. You don’t leave until I want you to leave, and that won’t be until I am finished with you.’

‘I’m finished now…I’ve had enough,’ Georgie launched at him with a sob of rage in her shaking voice. ‘If you don’t get me back to La Paz fast, I’ll make you very sorry!’

Rafael lifted his dinner-jacket and viewed her with an insulting lack of concern. ‘And how do you plan to do that?’

‘Wouldn’t you just love to know?’

‘I would, indeed. Are you always this childish when you are thwarted?’

‘I am not childish!’ Georgie spat back, raising her burnished head so that her hair tumbled like tongues of flame in the lamplight. ‘If you keep me here against my will, that is an offence… you’re breaking the law!’

‘But here I am the law,’ Rafael told her gently.

‘I’ll be six feet under the day I accept that!’ Georgie slung back truthfully.

‘No…you’ll very probably be under me,’ he murmured silkily.

‘How dare you?’ Georgie’s hot temper simply boiled over. ‘There’s a whole lot of ways I can get even, so don’t push me! I can tell tales to Maria Cristina! I can go home and scream rape and kidnapping!’

‘And what proof will you have? These are empty threats. If you had any real affection for my sister, you would not wish to upset her but, even if you did,’ Rafael countered very drily, ‘she would not believe me capable of such behaviour. As for rape, there has never been any question of force. Kidnapping? You came here willingly as my guest.’

The door thudded shut in his wake and she shuddered with frustration, inflamed by her inability to pierce his tough hide. It was slowly sinking in on her that Rafael hadn’t been joking when he had said that she stayed until he chose to let her go. But she still found that incredibly hard to accept. Rafael was an outstandingly welleducated man with a brilliant intellect, outwardly the very epitome of cultured sophistication.

He spoke half a dozen languages fluently, oversaw a vast and flourishing business empire spread across the globe, and still found time to lend considerable support to several international charities, not to mention his environmental interests and the numerous philanthropic projects which made the Berganza name revered on the world stage…, and this was the man now telling her that she was a prisoner in his home until such time as she satisfied his desire for revenge?

Little wonder that she was feeling confused. But revenge was Rafael’s aim. He had brought her here to the estancia and put her in the bedroom she would have occupied as his wife. Her stomach lurched sickly as she recalled his assurance that when she was gone these rooms would be stripped, every reminder of her eradicated forever. But, before he reached that dramatic and gothic conclusion, Rafael intended to possess her body in the very same bed in which she would have lain as his bride. Her skin literally chilled as she saw the savage parody he desired to enact to slake his macho pride of the slur she had cast on it four years ago by her apparent betrayal.

As his bride, she would have been treated with respect and tenderness. But now Rafael saw her as a sort of any time, any place and with any available man kind of girl. He despised her and he wanted to humiliate her and he had chosen the most machiavellian method possible. The dark, primal depths of Rafael’s essentially savage inner self stood revealed, unleashed by anger and unquenchable arrogance. Why shouldn’t he have what he firmly believed she had given every other man she had ever been with? She was the available space on his sexual score-card, she reflected in disgust.

Four years ago, she had believed she knew Rafael… but she hadn’t known him at all. For a start, she had accused him of being a sanctimonious stuffed shirt that final night! Then, she hadn’t known she was being subjected to courtship Bolivian style, where you received flowers, occasionally held hands, barely kissed and generally conducted yourself with immense restraint and maturity. But at just turned nineteen… I wanted to dance all night in stuffy clubs, break speed limits in the Ferrari, neck in the Ferrari, be seduced in the Ferrari, drink pink champagne, wear outrageous attentiongrabbing clothes—his attention—be seen by all my friends in a stretch limousine…

Glory be… She had been far less grown-up then than she had fondly imagined. She only saw that now, looking back, and frankly marvelled that Rafael could ever have thought of marrying her. Had the wedding taken place, there would probably be a gravestone out there somewhere by now, she thought, an almost hysterical giggle lodged in her throat. She would have driven him crazy by the end of the first six months!

The giggle died, her facial muscles tautening. But she had loved him in the wild, head over heels, obsessive style of her strong emotions. And, had he married her, she would no doubt have tried very hard to live up to his high standards… and with every failure she would have lost a little more courage. Rafael had a very powerful personality and a naturally domineering temperament. That came from being filthy rich and a lot brighter than ninety-nine per cent of the people around him. He would have swallowed her alive as a husbandonly think of the traits he was freely demonstrating now…

Crazy… Yes, she had to be crazy, but she just couldn’t help the thought that Rafael was a whole lot more exciting a prospect as a vengeful lover than he had ever been as an unnaturally courteous and yet despotic potential husband, striving to contain and control a naturally exuberant and rebellious teenager. They met as equals now, she told herself squarely—well, almost equals, she adjusted. He couldn’t humiliate her unless she allowed him to do so. And he couldn’t keep her here unless she chose to stay.

It was a kind of a compliment, she decided sleepily, that she should have left that strong an impression on a male of his experience. It was good to know that she hadn’t been the only one burned that summer…but it was time he appreciated that, these days, Georgie was positively fireproof. A flame-thrower couldn’t scorch her.

Only love could hurt—love. Her sultry mouth downcurved expressively. That prison of the mind which had made such a fool of her in the past? When she fell in love again, some day in the future, it would be with someone blond and blue-eyed and frightfully British, someone who fully appreciated her brains, her guts and her passion, and who thought he was one hell of a lucky guy to catch her. As she slid into sleep, at peace with herself at last, she smiled at that consoling image.