Her throat closed over. Suddenly it hurt to breathe. She fought back the memories and doggedly lifted her chin again, refusing with all the fire of her temperament to be cowed or embarrassed. But Georgie could still wake up in a cold sweat at night just reliving the humiliation of their final meeting. She hated Rafael like poison for the way he had treated her. It was a tribute to the strength of her fondness for his sister that their friendship had survived that devastating experience.
As the two men continued to talk, ignoring her with supreme indifference, Georgie studied Rafael. Against this shabby setting he looked incongruous, exotically alien in a fabulously well-cut grey suit, every fibre of which shrieked expense. The rich fabric draped powerful shoulders, accentuated narrow hips and lithe long legs. Her nails clenched convulsively into the hem of her far from revealing skirt. Maybe he thought she looked like a tart because he was so bitterly prejudiced against her.
His photograph had been splashed all over the cover of Time magazine the previous summer. Berganza, the Bolivian billionaire, enemy of the corrupt, defender of the weak. Berganza, the great philanthropist, directly descended in an unbroken line from a blue-blooded Castilian nobleman, who had arrived in Bolivia in the sixteenth century. The journalist had lovingly dwelt on his long line of illustrious ancestors.
Georgie had been curious enough to devour the photographs first. He was very tall, but he dominated not by size but by the sheer force of his physical presence. A staggeringly handsome male animal, he was possessed of a devastating and undeniable charisma. His magnificent bone-structure would still turn female heads thirty years from now.
She searched his golden features, helplessly marking the stunning symmetry of each, the wide forehead, the thin arrogant nose and the savagely high cheekbones. She wished she could exorcise him the way she had burned that magazine, in a ceremonial outpouring of self-loathing and hatred. Her voluptuous mouth thinned with the stress of her emotions.
A split-second later, it fell wide again as she watched the ‘enemy of the corrupt’ smoothly press a handful of notes extracted from his wallet into the grateful policeman’s hands. He was bribing him. In spite of the fact that Georgie had always refused to believe in the reality of Rafael Rodriguez Berganza, the saint of the LatinAmerican media, she was absolutely shattered by the sight of those notes changing hands.
Her cell door swung open. Rafael stepped in. His nostrils flaring as he cast a fastidious glance round the cell, he swept the blanket off the makeshift bed and draped it round her stiff shoulders. ‘I almost didn’t come,’ he admitted without remorse, his fluid, unbearably sexy accent nipping down her taut spinal cord, increasing her tension.
‘Then I won’t bother saying thanks for springing me,’ Georgie stabbed back, infuriated by the concealing blanket he appeared to find necessary and provoked by the unhappy fact that she had to throw her head back just to see him, her height less than his by more than a foot. But beneath both superficial responses lurked a boiling pool of bitter resentment and remembered pain which she was determined to conceal.
‘Were it not for my sister, I would have left you here,’ Rafael imparted with harsh emphasis. ‘It would have been a character-building experience from which you would have gained immense benefit.’
‘You hateful bastard!’ Georgie finally lost control. Having been subjected to the most frightening experience of her life, his inhuman lack of sympathy was the last straw. ‘I’ve been robbed, assaulted and imprisoned!’
‘And you are very close now to being beaten as well, es verdad? Rafael slotted in, his low-pitched voice cracking like a whiplash. ‘For if I will not tolerate a man offering me such disrespect, how do I tolerate it from a mere woman?’
Hot-cheeked and furious, Georgie literally stalked out of the cell. A mere woman? How could she ever have imagined herself in love with Rafael Rodriguez Berganza? Then, it hadn’t been love, she told herself fiercely. It had been pure, unvarnished lust, masquerading as a bad teenage crush. But at nineteen she had been too mealy-mouthed to admit that reality.
He planted a hand to her narrow back and pushed
her down the corridor, and she was momentarily too shaken by the raw depth of naked rage she had ignited in those dark eyes to object. What the blazes did he have to be so angry about? OK, so it had no doubt been inconvenient for him to come and fish her out of a cell at eight in the morning, but dire straits demanded desperate measures and surely even a self-centred swine like him could acknowledge that?
Outside, the sunlight was blinding, but she was disorientated by the crowd of heaving bodies surrounding the two Range Rovers awaiting them outside. With a slight hiss of irritation, Rafael suddenly planted two hands round her waist, swept her off the ground and thrust her into the passenger seat in the front one. Then he turned back to his ecstatic audience.
All the men had their hats off. Some of the women were crying. Kids were pressing round his knees, clutching at him. And then the crowd parted and the policeman reappeared, with an elderly priest by his side. The priest was grinning all over his face, reaching for Rafael’s hands, clearly calling down blessings on his head.
What it was to be a hero! It made her stomach heave. Georgie looked away, only to stiffen in dismay as she noticed the squirming sack on the driver’s seat. What the blue blazes was in the sack? She shrank up against the door.
Frozen into stillness, Georgie watched the sack wobble and shiver. There was something alive in it, unless she was very much mistaken… With an ear-splitting shriek of alarm, Georgie catapulted herself head-first out of the car. She came down on the hard dusty ground with enough force to knock the breath from her lungs.
‘Not happy unless you’re the centre of male attention, are you?’ Rafael breathed unpleasantly, bending over her as she scrambled up on to her knees. Two of his security men had climbed out of the vehicle behind to see what was happening.
Red as a beetroot but outraged, Georgie gasped, ‘There’s a snake in that sack!’
‘So?’ Rafael enquired drily. ‘It’s a local delicacy.’
He dumped her back in the seat she had left in such haste, the blanket firmly wrapped round her quivering limbs. Perspiring with fright, impervious to the amusement surrounding her, Georgie watched the policeman smilingly tie the sack more securely shut and deposit it back in the car.
‘Please take it away, Rafael,’ she mumbled sickly, leaning out of the window. ‘Please!’
A lean brown hand reached for the offending article and removed it, putting it in the back seat.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered as he swung into the driver’s seat. A stray shaft of sunlight gleamed over the blue-black luxuriance of his silky hair. Like a reformed kleptomaniac in an untended store of goodies, Georgie clasped her hands, removed her eyes from temptation and hated herself. Why did memory have to be so physical? She shifted on the seat, bitterly ashamed that she could still remember just how silky his hair felt.
‘So tell me, how—in your view—did you land yourself in a cell less than twenty-four hours after your arrival in my country?’ he invited curtly, making it clear that whatever was on his mind, it was certainly not on a similar plane to hers.
‘Yesterday, I decided to go and see the Zongo Valley ice-caves’
‘Dressed as you are now?’ Rafael cut in incredulously. ‘In a mini skirt and high heels?’
‘I’ A mini skirt? He regarded a glimpse of her
knees as provocative?
“The climb to the caves takes almost two hours even for an experienced hill-walker!’
Georgie’s teeth clenched. ‘Look, I simply saw this poster in the hotel. I didn’t know you had to be an athlete to get up there!’
‘When did reality dawn?’
‘When I got out of the taxi and saw a trio of brawny, booted, bearded types swarming up the hill,’ she admitted in a frozen voice, empty of amusement. ‘So I thought I’d walk back and see the lake instead, and I turned back to tell the taxi-driver that I wouldn’t be long and he’d gone…with my handbag!’
‘Jorge suspected something of that nature.’
‘Who is Jorge?’
‘The village policeman,’ Rafael said drily.
‘My bag was stolen. The driver just took off with it on the back seat!’
‘It may have been an oversight on his part. Had you asked him to wait?’
Georgie stiffened. ‘Well, I thought he understood’
‘Do you know the registration of the taxi?’ Rafael surveyed her with an offensive lack of expectation.
Angrily she shook her head.
‘Your bag may yet reappear,’ Rafael asserted. ‘If your bag is not handed in, then you may say that it has been stolen, not before. You were stupendously careless!’
‘Lecture over yet?’ she demanded shortly.
‘When you found yourself stranded, what did you do?’
‘By the time I realised he wasn’t coming back, the place was deserted, so I started walking and then I…’ She hesitated. ‘Then I hitched a lift. You wouldn’t believe how pleasant and unthreatening the driver was when I got into his truck—’
‘I believe you. I should imagine he came to a wheelscreeching halt,’ Rafael murmured with withering sarcasm. ‘Then what?’