‘Enamorada…’ With a curiously harsh laugh, he took her startled, reddened mouth with his own and it began all over again…
What have I done? What have I done? The anguished question rang in ceaseless refrain inside her head as she fumbled her way back into her clothes with hands that just weren’t responding with their usual efficiency. She felt shattered, drained, desperately confused, all at one and the same time. Her mind touched on the raw passion Rafael had employed to attain her submission, and something shrivelled up and died inside her.
He strolled across the flattened grass and gently removed her hands from the crumpled shirt she was attempting to tie closed. He peeled the sleeves back down her arms in silence and strode back to his horse. From a saddlebag, he produced a polo shirt, similar to the one he wore himself. Her cheeks burning, she caught it as he tossed it to her, and hurriedly dived into its voluminous folds.
He vaulted back into the saddle and reached down to pull her up in front of him. She was so tense that he had to flatten a hand to her abdomen to force her into relaxed contact with his hard body. She trembled, stricken by the sheer force of her physical awareness of him now.
‘Is that why you want to marry me?’ She couldn’t hold the question back any longer, though the instant she voiced it she wished she had kept her mouth shut.
‘No entiendo, querida, he drawled.
He understood. He understood damned fine, but he would make her spell it out.
‘The sex—is it worth a wedding-ring?’ Georgie demanded, grateful he couldn’t see the stinging tears lashing her eyes.
‘You can be very crude…’ he murmured lazily against her ear.
‘Put it down to my lack of experience.’
‘Sexually we are a match made in heaven—am I to deny that?’
If the past hours of fevered passion had taught her anything, they had taught her that she could not deny him. But she wanted more, she wanted so much more than the confirmation of the raw hunger she aroused in him. She wanted to be needed…she wanted to be loved. And that terrified her.
Because she couldn’t live without him either. All along she had been playing a kind of game with him without even realizing it. At no stage had she made a realistic effort to leave him. Today… That didn’t count. One last-ditch attempt to do what her intelligence urged her to do, and even then she had run with the safe, sure knowledge that he would follow her. Only she hadn’t dreamt that the resulting confrontation would be so cataclysmic.
Where was pride now? Rafael had smashed it, left no defence to hide behind. Her throat thickened. Quite deliberately he had employed her passionate response to him as a weapon with which to subjugate her. What price now all her angry assurances that she had no intention of marrying him? And that was exactly why he had done it. His patience had run out. Wasn’t it an education to discover that when you pushed him hard enough, honour and principles simply took a hike? In a tight corner, Georgie was impulsive…but in the same position, Rafael was unrepentantly ruthless. She shivered.
His arm tightened around her. ‘I would say the chances of slim to none have shortened considerably.’
Her spinal cord jerked into rigidity as his meaning sank in.
‘And do you have an excuse this time?’ she whispered shakily.
‘None, I wanted you. I didn’t give a damn.’
Georgie couldn’t believe he could be that brazen. Her mouth dropped open.
‘And, as you so generously assured me, a woman of your age takes responsibility for her own actions. Naturally, that freed me to be as irresponsible as I liked.’
‘But you are not an irresponsible person, Rafael!’ she hissed over her shoulder, very nearly giving herself whiplash, she was so indignant at having her own words thrown back at her as justification of his behaviour.
‘But I’m versatile. You wouldn’t believe how quickly I learn.’
She trembled with incredulous resentment. If increasing the odds of her becoming pregnant got him what he wanted, never let it be said that Rafael had shrunk from the necessity. And to think she had actually been dumb enough to believe that at the outset that frenzied lovemaking had been spontaneous on his side. Rafael? Spontaneous? He was a conniving, manipulative… And this was the man she loved? The anger ebbed. Yes, she did love him. Madly, passionately and probably into eternity.
She cleared her throat and took a deep breath. ‘So,’ she said, in what she hoped was a brisk tone. ‘When’s the wedding?’
He dropped the reins. Georgie twisted her head in astonishment at such clumsiness from a superb rider. The stallion had slowed to a ridiculous plodding walk anyway, without either one of them noticing, she abruptly registered. ‘Rafael?’
He bent down to retrieve the reins but she caught the clenched jut of his jawline. The guy was in shock!
Georgie went white. ‘Just joking,’ she said in a highpitched tone. ‘You weren’t really serious about marrying me… Of course, I guessed!’ she improvised tightly. ‘I just thought I’d have my revenge!’
He closed both arms round her so tightly that she could hardly breathe. ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ he breathed not quite steadily into her hair. ‘I don’t joke about things that serious.’
Plastered so close to him, she could feel the accelerated thud of his heart, the audible unevenness as he inhaled. For a split-second, when she had believed he didn’t want to marry her, her entire life had metaphorically gone down a drain before her eyes and she had been ready to let the alligator snack on her, so bleak and dismal had been her future. ‘I’m not sure I’m convinced,’ she muttered uncertainly. ‘You look shattered!’
‘What an imagination you have,’ he murmured, sounding reassuringly more like himself.
‘You look shattered,’ Georgie said again, although she had never been less keen to pursue a subject, for now that she had decided that she was going to marry him, the fear that he might have cooled off on the idea devastated her.
‘Possibly I wasn’t expecting you to surrender this— this…’ Unusually, he hesitated.
‘This quickly? This easily?’ she inserted, burning with mortification. ‘Expected me to be more of a challenge, did you? Suddenly discovered that when I gave you what you said you wanted, you really didn’t want it at all? Well, let me tell you, I!—’
‘Shut up,’ Rafael snapped with a quaver in his usually level drawl. ‘Because if I laugh, I’m dead in the water, es verdad? I’ll go back to being a slimy, insensitive toe-rag… For Dios, I have had enough of this peculiar conversation! I want to look at you…’
Impatiently anchoring his hands beneath her arms, Rafael helped her to dismount. He vaulted down in her wake and gazed at her with glittering dark eyes sharp enough to cut glass. He was perceptibly tense. Both disconcerted and confused, she looked back at him. ‘Rafael, what ?’ And that was as far as she got.
‘Georgie, tell me truthfully—why, after all that I have done, are you prepared to marry me?’
Completely unready for so direct a question, Georgie flushed and glanced away.
‘It doesn’t matter what you say. It won’t change anything,’ Rafael stated, with a tautness at variance with the reassurance.
‘You’re very attractive,’ she mumbled, loathing him for putting her on the hot seat without warning, miserably recalling everything he had said on the subject of marriage—emotion hadn’t figured once either before or after he took her to bed and discovered she wasn’t the bed-hopping tramp he had believed.
‘I think we can take that as mutually understood,’ Rafael retorted very drily, but with an edge of driven impatience. ‘We should talk about this. Trust me and be honest. Why do you want to marry me?’
Did he suspect that she was in love with him? Did that make him feel guilty again? Did it worry him that she might be entering the marriage with expectations and demands he couldn’t possibly fulfil? Slowly, Georgie lifted her fiery head, biting at her lip.
‘You can give me the kind of life I’ve always wanted,’ she answered after much frantic thought, her wide eyes eloquent of her inner turmoil.
He released his breath audibly and sent her a shimmering golden glance that was utterly impassive. ‘Estupendo… fine. I think I’ll radio for the helicopter. You look tired,’ he completed flatly.
In frustration she watched him use the radio. She took a couple of steps away. Evidently, she had said the wrong thing. But what did he want from her? She forced a stilted laugh and swung back from him. ‘Rafael… what would you have said if I had said I wanted to marry you because I loved you?’
‘I’d have laughed myself into the nearest asylum.’ A sardonic smile curved his sensual mouth, hooded dark eyes gleaming over her as he threw his arrogant head back. ‘And run like hell. In a marriage of—shall we say, convenience?—love would be a messy and embarrassing complication.’
He could have taken an axe to her and caused less pain. In the back of her mind she had thought that maybe in time, maybe when all the nasty ripples from the past had settled, maybe when he realized that she could make him happy, his emotions might become involved and he would contrive by some wonderful miracle to look on her as something more than a beautiful, sexually available bed-partner. But now he was telling her with brutal finality that he absolutely didn’t want that kind of emotional attachment between them.