Crime Of Passion(15)

‘Did you think I didn’t know?’ Rafael threw back his imperious dark head, his challenging gaze imprisoning hers by blatant force of will.

‘Didn’t know what?’ Tension had sprung into the atmosphere, thickening it. Georgie suddenly felt cold and threatened.

‘Is the habit of secrecy still so engrained that you cannot be honest even after all this time?’ Rafael demanded with derision. ‘Por Dios…you live with him!’

Georgie went white by slow, painful degrees. Her tongue stole out to wet her dry lips. She could not believe that he would dare to suggest that she actually lived in the sexual sense with Steve or, indeed, that she had ever had an intimate relationship of any form with her stepbrother.

‘I know,’ Rafael repeated very quietly. ‘I know that you began sharing his bed when you were seventeen.’

Her stomach curdled at the enormity of such a belief. ‘That is the most disgusting thing anyone has ever accused me of,’ she whispered strickenly, her distressed eyes clinging helplessly to his. ‘And you can’t believe it…you can’t possibly believe it.’

Rafael rose fluidly upright, his hard golden features fiercely set. ‘I prefer to have this out in the open between us. While I can appreciate your reluctance to face the fact that that liaison is no secret to me, I will not allow you to lie to me.’

He believed it. He actually believed that she had slept with Steve before she had even met him. Incredulous at the revelation, Georgie stared at him with wide, shocked eyes. ‘You’re crazy… absolutely crazy!’

Rafael stood back several feet from her, six feet two inches of darkly powerful masculinity. But, despite that distance, he had her cornered. Implacably obdurate dark eyes were trained on her. ‘I am aware that my sister has no idea of that relationship, but surely your father and your stepmother cannot still be in the dark? Or are you telling me that it is now at an end and you remain just good friends under the same roof?’ he derided.

‘Steve doesn’t even live under the same roof,’ Georgie heard herself protest, her brain in too much turmoil for her to know where to attack first. ‘He has an apartment now. He rents out the house to students at the college nearby. I have a tiny flat in the attic and I act as a sort of caretaker, keeping an eye on things…’ Her voice simply drained away then as she wondered numbly why she was rabbiting on about something so utterly trivial.

‘So it is over now—’

‘It never began!’ Georgie threw back with sudden wildness, her distress growing as the full connotations of what Rafael believed her capable of sank in. ‘I’ve never had any sort of intimate relationship with Steve and I don’t know how you can accuse me of something so disgusting! I’ve always thought of him as my brother—’

“That is all he ever should have been until you were old enough to know what you were doing. He took advantage of your youth and your passion, but you should have known that it was wrong,’ Rafael delivered in harsh condemnation.

‘You’re not listening to me… are you? You don’t believe me,’ Georgie registered sickly.

Rafael vented a roughened laugh. ‘I followed you home with him that last night. I didn’t trust him with you. Madre de Dios… I didn’t want to distress you with my suspicions about the exact nature of his feelings for you! Then, through the window, I saw you in his arms, lovers kissing passionately. Everything fell into place then. At last I understood.’

‘You saw Steve kissing me?’ Georgie echoed hollowly. ‘But how…? The curtains weren’t pulled,’ she recalled abstractedly.

‘Correct. I had a superb view…’

Georgie was deep in shock. Rafael had opened a locked door on the past, filling in details she hadn’t been aware of then. But he had twisted the picture as she knew it and flung her into violent turmoil. ‘It wasn’t what you thought,’ she burst out abruptly.

‘The only acceptable response now is the whole truth and nothing but the truth!’ Rafael delivered with murderous quietness. ‘And I do believe I’m entitled to ask one question.’

Numbly she looked back at him, pale and shaken and unbearably tense.

‘While you were seeing me, were you still sleeping with him?’

‘Dear God…’ Georgie was so appalled that her stomach responded with a nauseous lurch of protest.

‘So you weren’t. One small consolation,’ Rafael breathed scathingly. ‘Then I supplanted him. Were I generous, I should now excuse his every jealous attempt to come between us, but I excuse nothing that he did and I blame you for deliberately deceiving me into believing that you were innocent. Did it amuse you? Or did you want to believe that you could carry the deception through to the bitter end?’

Georgie covered her face with her hands and turned unsteadily away, desperate to escape that lethal accented drawl.

‘I believed you would marry him,’ Rafael admitted harshly. ‘For years, I have expected to hear news of your marriage through my sister. Instead, what do I hear? One man after another—friends, Maria Cristina trustingly calls them—but you and I both know that you lie back on the nearest bed for your male “friends”…’

Suddenly Georgie just couldn’t take any more, and the very abruptness with which she dived past him took him by surprise. She flew out of the house, running without even knowing where she was going. Her heart was thumping sickly in her throat, every sobbing intake of oxygen rattling through her lungs. She wanted to take off like a jet plane and leave everything that distressed her far behind, but the torment of pain was remorselessly trapped inside her and she was stuck with it.

The heat swiftly sapped her energy. She got a stitch in her side and had to stop and bend over, struggling to get her breath back, the dusty ground below her feet tilting sickeningly up at her.

‘Georgie!’

Her head whirled up. She saw Rafael moving with long, determined strides towards her and panic filled her. No more. Right now, she really couldn’t take any more! Her fevered eyes whirled round the cluster of buildings near and far, passing blindly over the curious faces of the people in the vicinity, and then she saw the pretty little whitewashed church with its open doors and took off again.

The coolness of the dim interior engulfed her in welcome. Her feet took her down the aisle into a seat in the shadow of a stone pillar. Wrapping her arms round herself, she attempted to catch her breath and banish the awful nausea threatening. Shock. She knew what was wrong with her. Shock and a kind of horrified disbelief that even Rafael could believe such things of her.

‘This is not the place for you,’ Rafael murmured in a stifled undertone from behind her.

‘Go away,’ she mumbled. Did he think she was going to desecrate his precious church by her mere presence? She wouldn’t be surprised if he did. And even in the Middle Ages, Rafael wouldn’t have allowed her sanctuary here. He would have dragged her out and thrown her to the crowd to be torn apart, no doubt, she reflected wildly. Rafael was a savage and, with anyone who fell into the whore category, he was a throwback to the Spanish Inquisition.

And then she heard another voice—very quiet, very calm—speak in Spanish, and there was one of those explosive silences which could be physically felt… It seemed to go on forever and ever before she heard the astonishing but unmistakable sound of Rafael’s retreat. Only then did she appreciate that for once impulse had not betrayed her. The church was the one place Rafael Rodriguez Berganza did not rule supreme.

She knew her saviour had to have been the priest, and she waited shakily to be forced into speech, but no voice spoke and the silence stayed, slowly soothing the tumult of her emotional upheaval, enabling her to think again.

So now she knew why Rafael had refused to listen to her attempts to explain the platonic nature of her friendship with Danny. He had been suspicious of her morals long before that day. The pills—then what? Steve’s dislike of him? Steve had not been jealous, for goodness’ sake! Steve simply hadn’t liked Rafael. And when Rafael had seen that embrace, he had forced every other fact to fit, choosing to assume that that accidental glimpse was merely the tip of the iceberg in a far more intimate relationship. After all, hadn’t she been shamelessly encouraging towards him?

Had her passionate response to him been that misleading? Had she come across as some sort of nymphomaniac? He had a wild imagination… Or had he? Witnessing that embrace certainly would have been a shock, as much of a shock for Rafael as it had been at the time for Georgie. Rafael could never have seen a hint of such intimacy in her behaviour with Steve at any other time. And that fact alone might well have been the final confirmation of Rafael’s suspicions. Clearly he had believed that she and Steve were polished pretenders at being simply stepbrother and sister in public view, an act they had put on to conceal their true relationship from family and friends.

Moisture dripped on her tightly clenched hands. She lifted an uncertain hand to her damp face, discovered she was crying. It was so very hard to try and be calm about an accusation so outrageous and so distressing. But that same accusation revealed so much about Rafael. She shuddered.