Crime Of Passion(14)

CHAPTER FIVE


GEORGIE made her plans while she was getting dressed the next morning. One way or another she needed to get off the estancia and persuading Rafael to do it for her would be the very easiest way to accomplish her escape. Deliciously sneaky, wonderfully simple. She strolled into the dining-room, vibrantly eye-catching in clinging pink Lycra shorts and an off-the-shoulder emerald lace-edged top. ‘It’s kind of quiet around here, isn’t it?’ she complained.

Rafael’s brilliant dark eyes slowly swept over her. He lowered his newspaper, his expressive mouth twisting.

‘Oh, no,’ Georgie sighed mockingly. ‘You don’t like what I am wearing?’

‘You are not on the beach,’ Rafael responded drily.

‘I have a thought for the day.’ Georgie angled a brilliant smile at him. It wobbled slightly as she collided with piercing dark eyes, screened by lush ebony lashes, and her intended act slipped momentarily. He really was gorgeous—devastatingly, dangerously gorgeous. Had she married him and been able to tape his nasty mouth shut, she could probably have passed her time just looking at him and thinking utterly brainless thoughts of the ‘he’s mine’ variety.

‘Don’t keep me in suspense,’ he said with a distinctly cutting lack of interest.

Georgie tore a croissant to pieces with her restive hands, angry and dismayed by the sudden lurch of lost concentration evoked by her response to all that virile masculinity lounging at the other side of the polished table. ‘Thank God, we didn’t get married,’ she said with helpless sincerity.

‘You expect me to credit that you feel that way?’ Rafael derided, arrogantly unimpressed.

‘You’d have felt that way within two weeks if you had married me, and I bet there’s never been a divorce in the family.’ Georgie cast a speaking glance at the humourless dark faces of the portraits on the wall. ‘Your ancestors were a pretty miserable bunch, weren’t they? The men probably got rid of undesirable wives with childbirth. In those days, pregnancy was as dangerous as sky-diving. Poison was quite a common method too, or a fall down the stairs. In the Dark Ages, being a woman was being a victim. You could be beaten to death by your husband and nobody did a thing.’

Rafael murmured in a slightly strained tone, ‘Desde luego…of course, you were always fascinated by history. But to my knowledge none of my ancestors ever became that desperate.’ He spread fluid hands and, without warning, his spontaneous laughter rang out, banishing the austerity from his dark features. ‘Then, no doubt they took such dark secrets to their graves with them and, sadly, no one had the good sense to leave a diary of confession behind!’

Georgie was furious with herself for straying off stupidly into actual conversation with him and, worst of all, making him laugh. For a split-second, she absorbed his blatant amusement, and never before had she been more disturbingly aware of the intense charisma he possessed. Her face tightened. Hurriedly, she dived into the first move of her plan.

‘Do we have to stay here?’ she pressed abruptly.

His laughter died away, his eyes narrowing. ‘I don’t think I understand.’

She leant forward confidingly, ‘I would be a whole lot more amenable—if you know what I mean—some-where where I could have a little fun,’ she told him softly, damning the tide of pink rising below her skin, terrified it would betray her. ‘Twelve more hours out here in the boonies and I will drop dead with boredom. There is nothing but grass, cows and peasants out there.’

Inwardly, Georgie winced at the ignorant role she had chosen to play.

‘My people are not peasants,’ Rafael retorted with a flash of even white teeth, faint red darkening his hard cheekbones.

Georgie shrugged and thrust her chin back up again with determination, ready to play out her plan to the bitter end. ‘Let’s just put our cards on the table. You want me, you can have me, but there are certain—er— terms.’

‘I want you, I can have you?’ Intense golden eyes whipped over her beautiful face, resting on her hot cheeks. ‘Now, then…let us go upstairs,’ he challenged smoothly.

Georgie’s sip of coffee went down the wrong way. She coughed painfully, struggling to appear cool. ‘Terms,’ she reminded him chokily.

‘Am I to understand this is a form of negotiation?’ Rafael enquired with immense calm, lounging back in his carved chair to study her, very much as though she was the hired entertainment. ‘Would you mind telling me what I am to receive in return?’

‘You know damned fine what I’m offering you!’ Georgie snapped back.

A beautifully shaped ebony brow elevated. ‘What I could have had for nothing last night,’ he prompted very softly.

Her teeth gnashed together, violence shimmering in her outraged violet eyes.

But, as she parted her lips, Rafael moved a silencing hand. He watched her with intense stillness. ‘How amenable is amenable?’ he encouraged lazily.

Hooked, she thought in triumph. ‘Anything you want… whenever you want,’ she whispered throatily, but she had to study the table to say it.

‘And my side of the deal? Taking you somewhere without cattle and peasants?’

‘I just want to have a good time and I’m not going to have it here, am I?’ she pointed out tautly.

‘Anything I want, whenever I want,’ Rafael mused smoothly. ‘But I have everything that I want right here. No deal.’

She stole a glance at his starkly handsome features, the cool dispassionate expression which revealed nothing. ‘No deal?’ she queried.

‘Next time you try to bargain with me, be sure to arm yourself with the promise of something which isn’t already mine for the taking.’ Diamond-bright dark eyes raked over her furious face. ‘For you are mine. And next time—and I hope there is a next time, for this has been the most entertaining breakfast I have had in years,’ he confessed lethally, ‘struggle not to look as if you’re overdosing on cyanide when you’re offering to be my sex-slave!’

‘I am not yours and I never will be!’ Georgie asserted fiercely. ‘And I haven’t got the temperament to be anybody’s sex-slave!’

‘But mine—and that awareness is killing you, isn’t it?’ Rafael traded lazily. ‘You can screw around with all the men you like, but why not with me? What makes me different? Shall I tell you why you fight me to the best of your limited ability?’

A chill was enclosing her flesh. Another game had come to an end. She wanted to cover her ears and run but she sat there, looking blankly back at him, forcing herself not to reveal how sick she felt inside.

‘You remember what it was like between us four years ago, before it started coming apart… and, deep down inside, you would very much like to have that romantic illusion back.’

She tasted blood in her mouth as her teeth bit into the soft underside of her lower lip. ‘I wish I’d never met you, I certainly don’t wish to relive any of it!’

‘But the past is still there. You can’t escape it… any more easily than you can escape me. In the thirty years of my life, I have been the focus of female seduction routines more times than I can count,’ Rafael told her with harsh amusement. ‘Women who know what they’re doing. You don’t appear to—’

‘I’m not really interested in your opinion.’

‘Subtlety evidently doesn’t come with maturity. A Mae West impression at this hour of the day could only make me laugh.’ Rafael expelled his breath audibly, shooting her a forbidding look from hooded dark eyes. ‘Then you always did make me laugh, es verdad? It was that streak of highly deceptive naivete” which blinded me for so long to your real nature. I should have been warned by the birth-control pills I saw in your bag’

‘The what?’ Georgie broke in with a furrowed brow, and then she tensed with comprehension.

Rafael shot her a sardonic glance. ‘I assumed they were for my benefit.’

‘You would.’ Embarrassment held her only briefly.

‘It should have occurred to me that you had already been involved in a sexual relationship, but then, my romanticised view of you did not allow such reasoning at that early stage.’

A ragged little laugh, empty of humour, fell from her strained mouth. Rafael was so sharp he would cut himself some day, and wasn’t it fascinating to learn that he had been ready to misjudge her right from the beginning? Such a tiny thing, an oversight, a glimpse of a packet of pills in her bag, from which he had drawn incorrect conclusions. She would have died sooner than admit that she had been put on the contraceptive pill to regulate irregular periods.

She stood up. ‘I think I need some fresh air,’ she said jerkily.

‘Georgie… strange as it may seem, I do not hold you responsible for a liaison begun at so early an age. You were the innocent party,’ Rafael drawled with grave emphasis, his hard jawline clenching. ‘But, at the time, I found the discovery of that particular relationship deeply offensive. It contravened my every principle of familylife, though I knew he was not in fact your brother—’

‘What the heck are you talking about?’