‘Great… then we both know exactly where we stand.’ With a smile a world-famous actress would have prided herself on, Georgie concealed the fact that in one smooth sentence he had demolished her every hope.
‘And that is important,’ he conceded, without any expression at all.
That seemed pretty much to take care of Rafael’s desire to talk about their future. He didn’t say another word until the helicopter landed and Georgie was too miserable and too busy hiding it to be anything other than grateful for his silence. Exhaustion was dragging her down by then, emotional and physical. Every bone in her body ached. It had been the longest day of her life and it seemed to her that she had worked through every possible emotion in her repertoire.
‘You’re ready to collapse.’ Taking one hard look at her as she stumbled out of the helicopter, Rafael swept her up into his arms and, in spite of her muffled protests, insisted on carrying her into the house.
‘I think it’s also important that you know that there are times when I don’t like you very much,’ Georgie whispered in a choky voice against his broad shoulder, drinking in the familiar warm, sexy scent of him and hating herself for being so susceptible.
‘That’s mutual, too.’
‘You mean you don’t like you or you don’t like me?’ she prompted unsteadily.
‘You,’ Rafael supplied smoothly, as Teresa surged to open her bedroom door.
Georgie burst into a flood of tears. She certainly shocked him. She shocked herself even more. She hadn’t even felt the tears gathering.
‘Don’t be such a baby… I didn’t mean it. Madre de Dios,’ he grated as he laid her down on the bed. ‘I never know what the hell you’re likely to do next! You open your mouth and I haven’t a clue what to expect!’
‘Read my lips, then,’ Georgie sobbed, and mouthed something very succinct and rude, a phrase that told him to take himself off pronto, combined with a look that told him a jump off the balcony would be her preferred form of exit.
Rafael cast her a seething look of angry frustration. ‘I think you are the most irrational woman I have ever met.’
‘And s-stupid…don’t forget that!’ Georgie sobbed, rolling over and burying her face in the pillows, hating the way she was behaving but totally unable to suppress the need to hit out at him.
‘I’m sorry.’
Her sensitive hearing suggested she was being treated to gross insincerity, an apology merely to silence her irrational exasperating behaviour.
He said it again louder, and his intonation was icecold.
She gulped. ‘Accepted.’
‘We will get married on Saturday.’
Saturday was only three days away. ‘Saturday?’
‘The most convenient date in respect of my business commitments.’
Marvellous, she thought, in the mood now really to wallow in her misery. Convenient? The ceremony was to be slotted into his schedule like an appointment.
‘Do you want your parents present?’
‘They’re on a second honeymon cruise of the Greek islands,’ Georgie told him. ‘Why spoil it?’
‘It is your choice.’ Temper back under iron wraps, he was equally dry.
Another sob snaked through Georgie. The mattress gave. ‘You’re overtired,’ Rafael murmured tightly. ‘And maybe I have seemed unsympathetic…’
Unsympathetic’? What a typical Berganza understatement that was!
‘This has been a very emotional day,’ he persisted doggedly, impervious to the lack of encouragement he was receiving. He gripped one of her hands tightly before she could whip it under her like the other one. ‘But I promise you that you will never regret marrying me. I’ll make you happy… Perhaps you don’t want to live here? We can live anywhere.’
Momentarily disarmed, Georgie found herself listening, quite astounded at the idea that he could be offering her a choice of where they lived when she had always believed that Rafael regarded the estancia as his only possible permanent home.
‘Although it doesn’t really matter where the bedroom is, does it?’ That final softly derisive sentence swiftly put paid to any goodwill he might have reanimated.
Georgie snatched her hand away, cut to the quick. He didn’t need to drive that message home any harder. She was already painfully aware of the sole value she had in his eyes. And, as the door closed behind him, Georgie wondered in an agony of doubt if once more she had foolishly allowed impulse to overrule sanity. What sort of a relationship could she possibly build with a man who regarded her in such a light?
And he had sounded bitter. What the heck did Rafael have to be bitter about? Right now, could he be feeling as confused as she did? Throughout the day, Rafael had lurched unpredictably from one mood to another. Was it conceivable that she had hit the nail squarely on the head earlier? Could it have been that, when she had finally agreed to marry him, Rafael had suddenly registerd that that really wasn’t what he wanted after all?
Dear lord, how humiliating that would be… But she couldn’t help remembering all that Rafael had said about the attraction of her unavailability in the past. Rafael liked a challenge. Rafael was a natural predator. For such a male, the hunt was often far more exciting than the catch. Right now, was Rafael bitterly regretting the trap he had dug for himself? Georgie simply couldn’t live with that fear.
Teresa came and insisted on helping her into bed. A beautiful meal was brought up on a tray and everybody showed an embarrassing desire to fuss over her. Rafael’s aunt came up to ask how she was in slow, careful English. Georgie squirmed, unhappily aware that she had caused a furore. And after that she fell asleep, waking up very late to darkness.
For a while she lay pondering her earlier misgivings, and railed at her own reluctance to face up to them. With sudden decision, she rose and pulled on her robe and tidied her hair. The lights were still on downstairs. She was aware that Rafael often worked late, being one of those individuals who seemed to thrive on little sleep.
She was on the last step of the stairs when Beatriz erupted with hot cheeks and wild eyes from Rafael’s library. ‘Never in my whole life have I been so insulted!’ she hissed at Georgie. ‘But I blame you, not Rafael. He is out of his senses with drink! What have you done to him? It is a disgrace that a man of his stature and education should be in a state of gross inebriation’
‘He’s drunk?’ Georgie whispered, having taken some few seconds to recognise this heaving-breasted, outraged young woman as the frigidly correct and controlled beauty she had met earlier in the day. ‘Rafael?’ she stressed, almost as shattered by the idea as her companion was, but a good deal less judgemental.
‘It is this ridiculous wedding… What else can it be?’ Beatriz told her accusingly. ‘I offered my sympathy but he was too proud to accept it. Rafael could not possibly want to marry a woman like you. You are nothing, a nobody…a social climber who used his sister as a passport into his acquaintance! Had you any decency or any respect for the name of Berganza, you would set him free!’
Leaving Georgie white and trembling in shock, Beatriz stalked up the stairs.
CHAPTER NINE
GEOBGIE’S soft knock on the library door drew no response. Apprehensively, she opened the door and walked in. One light was lit on the desk. Rafael was slumped in the swivel chair behind it, his long lean legs planted on the desktop, the mess of papers there crushed indifferently by his booted feet. His face was in shadow but she could see that his eyes were closed and, surmising that he was asleep, Georgie moved closer.
He hadn’t shaved for dinner, if he had had any, and hadn’t changed either. His blue-shadowed jawline and tousled black hair gave him the appearance of a desperado. But the lush ebony lashes fanned down on his abrasive cheekbones were as long as a child’s, and a tortured tenderness twisted through her. She didn’t need Beatriz to tell her to set him free, she reflected painfully, her mouth downcurving at the sight of the low level on the bottle of malt whisky. If the prospect of marrying her reduced him to this level, Rafael could look forward to seeing the dust of her exit within hours.
And then she saw the gun lying beside the bottle. She had never seen a gun except on television. But there it was, a relatively small black metal article… a revolver? Dear God in heaven. Her stomach heaved. Rafael couldn’t possibly be that desperate… could he? Anyone less likely to be contemplating suicide would be hard to find. Rafael was so strong… wasn’t he? Then why was the gun there? a little voice screamed. Why, when Rafael was doing something so tremendously out of character as getting himself roaring drunk, did he suddenly have a gun sitting beside him?
Her heart in her mouth, Georgie tiptoed closer, intending to take possession of the revolver. Better safe than sorry, she decided. As she moved, a sheet of paper crunched beneath her toes, and she bent down and picked it up, intending to replace it on the desk. Her fleeting glance was caught accidentally by the lines of numerals with minus signs. Some sort of a bank statement, belonging to someone in an enormous amount of debt. Embarrassed that she had glimpsed a no doubt private document, Georgie hurriedly set it down on the desk.