Crime Of Passion(22)

‘I am very pleased to meet you, Señorita Morrison,’ Beatriz said with cool formality.

‘Miss Leon,’ Georgie murmured.

‘Your novia is very beautiful, Rafael.’ The brunette’s gracious smile embraced both of them but her eyes remained cold as charity.

‘Novia?’ Georgie parroted, that being one of the very few Spanish words she was familiar with, thanks to Maria Cristina. It meant bride or fiance.

Rafael’s arms tightened around her. ‘Excuse me, we have some calls to make before breakfast.’

Georgie was dragged—there was no other word for it—into Rafael’s library. He closed the door and swung round to survey her with hooded dark eyes.

‘Novia?’ Georgie said again, an entire octave higher.

‘Tia Paola has arrived to act as your chaperon.’

Hands on hips, Georgie stared back at him, aghast. ‘My what?’

‘Whatever happens now, I naturally wish to safeguard your reputation. My family is very traditional,’ Rafael drawled without apology. ‘In bringing you here alone, I compromised you. Tia’s presence will silence any adverse comment.’

Georgie pushed an unsteady hand through her mass of vibrant hair. ‘They think I’m going to marry you, don’t they?’

‘You will,’ Rafael responded with complete conviction. ‘I told you last night that I wouldn’t even consider it!’ Georgie stalked across the room in turmoil, raw tension edging every bitten-out word. She spun back to him. ‘And I’m not likely to change my mind. All you’re going to do is embarrass yourself with your family.’

‘Not at all. If no wedding takes place, they will sigh and say I’ve wriggled off the hook yet again‘’

‘Make a habit of that, do you?’ Georgie couldn’t resist stabbing.

‘I have never raised expectations I had no intention of fulfilling.’

Once you raised mine. But she didn’t say it. The biting pain still lingered, and with it a tortured vulnerability. She felt torn in two. One half of her, what she deemed to be the intelligent half, desperately wanted to go home to sanity, but the other half of her was savaged by the sure knowledge that she would never see Rafael again.

‘I won’t marry you,’ she said stonily.

‘I want you more than any woman alive,’ Rafael intoned with a wine-dark harshness underlying his accented drawl. ‘Your beauty glows like a vibrant flame in this dim room. You look at me with those passionately expressive violet eyes and that enticing sultry mouth and I burn for you. If such hunger isn’t a basis for marriage, what is?’

A quiver ran through her slender length. The hair at the nape of her neck prickled. The very sound of his voice could make her ache. In the smouldering silence, the tension was suffocating. Sex, she thought in shame, as her breasts stirred in response beneath her cotton bra. Every skin-cell in her treacherous body was poised on the peak of anticipation.

‘It’s not enough for me,’ she said jerkily, lifting her chin, forcing back a response she despised.

Blazing golden eyes clashed with hers, and for an instant she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even think straight. He was lounging on the corner of his desk, as terrifyingly beautiful as a hungry tiger, ready to spring. Her heart clenched. The fierce primal power of him sprang out at her in an aggressive wave. Last night’s humility hadn’t survived to greet the dawn. The driving force of his strong will was stamped in every hard bronzed feature.

‘I could make it enough,’ he asserted.

But I would be the lover, not the loved. Her pride could not tolerate that mortifying image. A flush ran up beneath her magnolia-perfect skin. She would be the toy in his bed, just another possession to a male already bountifully blessed with life’s richest possessions. She saw how his natural arrogance had altered the reasoning she had believed she understood mere hours earlier. Forget the reparation angle! Rafael was now telling her that he was freely choosing to marry her for the sexual pleasure he expected her to give him.

Maybe that had been what he called love four years ago. Desire. A desire honed to a fine lustful edge by her youthful unavailability when they had first met. Hadn’t he admitted that himself? That he had never had to wait for anything he wanted before? And she hadn’t distinguished herself by making him wait this time, had she? No, she had been an easy conquest, betrayed by passion and need and love. And, if she married Rafael, she would betray herself over and over again in his bed until self-loathing spread through her like a cancer.

Almost clumsily she folded her arms, as if to hold in the fiery emotions surging up inside her. ‘No,’ she said again, her voice taut with unbearable strain.

‘And will you be able to live with that choice?’ Rafael asked in a velvet-soft purr of enquiry. ‘For I will certainly marry someone in the near future. I am of an age to want a wife and a family.’

Georgie turned deathly white. That one casually cruel statement was like a knife thudding into her unprotected breast.

Rafael held her darkened violet eyes with savage amusement twisting in his hard mouth. ‘Sometimes, I am a primitive bastard, es verdad? But you’re taxing my patience. Every jealous, possessive bone in that exquisite body of yours revolts at the mere idea of me marrying another woman—’

‘No!’ she gasped strickenly, shattered by his instinctive cruelty and the cool insight which had made him use that particular weapon against her.

Rafael lifted his handsome dark head and angled a sizzling smile over her. ‘Had we more time at our disposal, I would have been more diplomatic, more sensitive—’

‘You arrogant swine!’ she shot from between gritted teeth.

‘I will not allow your need to punish me to come between us.’ Eyes black as night surveyed her impenetrably from below lush ebony lashes. ‘Nor will I crawl. Remember this, querida you were not the only one to suffer four years ago, you were not the only one whose pride and emotions were injured…’

Georgie stiffened, deeply disturbed by the assertion. Honesty forced her to admit that she had been less than generous in her ability to see those events from his side of the fence. But then, deep down inside, she still believed that if Rafael had really cared about her he would have betrayed his emotions more and he would at least have tried to listen to her. Was that so unreasonable? And what did it matter now, anyway? she asked herself with helpless bitterness. Even if he had loved her then, to the best of his seemingly limited ability, he wasn’t in love with her now. If it wasn’t for the sizzling animal sexuality he emitted as naturally as some men simply breathed, Rafael wouldn’t be half so keen to marry her.

‘Breakfast,’ he sighed with sudden impatience.

Only as he straightened and moved forward did Georgie see what reposed on his desk. She darted forward, an exclamation on her lips. ‘My bag!’

‘Sí… I had informed the hotel manager of your loss. The driver returned the bag to your hotel and it was conveyed here late last night with my guests. Check the contents.’

Georgie was already in the midst of doing so. Her passport was there… and so was her money. She went weak with relief.

‘Most people prefer the—er—convenience of travellers’ cheques,’ Rafael remarked.

‘I just didn’t have time to get them before the flight out…OK?’ Georgie demanded with belligerence. ‘I want to give that cab-driver a reward—’

‘It’s already taken care of.’

‘I’m sorry I called him a thief,’ Georgie muttered.

‘He may well have been tempted, but the fear that you would describe him, and might even have the registration of his cab, may have influenced him. Who knows?’ Rafael returned with rich cynicism.

Georgie drew in a deep, sustaining breath and lifted her head. ‘There’s no problem now. I can go home…’

‘But before you leave I will naturally demand the certainty that you are not carrying my child,’ Rafael decreed, his beautifully shaped mouth compressing into a forbidding line. ‘And you cannot give me that assurance yet.’

Frustrated fury hurtled through her. ‘Last night, you admitted that you regretted everything you had done!’

‘That does not mean I now give you the freedom to behave with the foresight of a five-year-old,’ Rafael delivered with sardonic bite.

Rage roared through Georgie in a blinding, seething surge. Her hands clenched into fists by her sides. ‘Don’t you dare put me down like that! I didn’t ask to come here! I wanted nothing to do with you!’

‘Then why when you woke up in that cell did you look at me with such hunger?’ Rafael sliced back with indolent cool.

‘I did not look at you like that!’ Georgie seethed in outrage.

‘And maybe you don’t recall smirking and flexing those truly fabulous legs like offensive weapons on the drive back to La Paz either?’

‘I do not smirk… and if you can’t keep your lousy libido under control, that is not my problem!’ she practically spat back.

‘You got exactly the effect you wanted. I was ignoring you and you didn’t like it.’

‘How dare you say that?’