Crime Of Passion(31)

‘Telling me what?’ Georgie broke in, as Steve’s fingers loosened their grip and finally dropped from her. She stepped back from him, her head spinning between the two men, both of whom were ignoring her. Steve was rigid and pale, breathing heavily. Rafael had an aura of violence she had never seen in him before. It scared her. Although the two men were fairly evenly matched in size, she sensed that Rafael had a killer instinct which Steve lacked. And she also knew, after one shocked glance at Rafael’s shimmering golden gaze, that he had every intention of getting physical.

‘Right,’ she said, raising her hands in what she hoped was a strong, meaningful motion. ‘I am not having this. If you lay one finger on him, Rafael… the wedding is off. Steve may be behaving like an idiot but you are not helping matters, and I would like him all in one piece for the photos—’

‘You think I’m scared of that slimy bastard?’ Steve seethed, striding forward and thrusting her roughly out of his path.

‘Go back to the house, querida,’ Rafael murmured in a flat aside.

Georgie shook her head vehemently. ‘No way!’

‘If you do not go voluntarily, I will have my bodyguards carry you back,’ Rafael told her, with a sudden spurt of flaming impatience.

‘Did you hear me tell you that I’m not marrying you if you touch him?’ Georgie’s voice wobbled with rage and pain. The threat hadn’t made Rafael bat a magnificent eyelash.

‘It’s your word against mine, Berganza! Who do you think she’ll believe?’ Steve slung aggressively. ‘There’s a lot of family mileage in twenty-one years. Are you going to take that risk?’

‘Oh, beat the hell out of each other…I’m past caring!’ Georgie hissed at the pair of them in disgust, stalking off several yards, hoping that her stinging scorn would cool Rafael off. She just couldn’t believe that he was behaving like this. And what were they talking about? Steve’s word against Rafael’s on what?

She glanced back over her shoulder before she realised that Rafael had actually taken her at her word. Appalled, she watched him take a swing at Steve. Her stomach clenched with nausea as the blow connected. ‘Stop that… right now!’ she shrieked, and began racing back, ready to throw herself between them, but someone caught her from behind, anchoring a restraining arm round her.

‘What the—?’ Craning her neck, she discovered one

of Rafael’s bodyguards gazing down at her with a mixture of embarrassment, apology and steel determination to do as he had evidently been told.

Georgie actually thought she was going to be sick when she saw Rafael hitting Steve again. She had never realised that the sight of two men fighting could be so brutal or so frightening. And she had been right in her estimation of the odds. Her stepbrother was on the brink of being hammered to a pulp and there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it. Nobody was about to interfere.

‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she screamed at Rafael, and she really meant it. The man was an animal. She didn’t care what lay between the two men, could not imagine that there could be anything capable of excusing the savagery being enacted before her. And she was devastated that Rafael could behave in such a fashion. She saw her hopes and her dreams breaking into pieces in front of her. Seeing this side of Rafael terrified her. He was a maniac, subject to paranoid jealousy—that was all she could think.

Steve hit the ground and stayed down. Was he unconscious? Rafael spun on his heel and walked away, pausing with apparent calm to address some instruction to one of the hovering men, who had been watching the fight. The arm round Georgie dropped away. She sped over to Steve. He was already lifting his head with a groan.

‘God…’ he mumbled, wiping the blood away from his mouth. ‘I hate to admit it but I’m glad you stayed. I think he’d have killed me if he hadn’t had you as an audience.’

‘The doctor will see to him,’ Rafael murmured icily from behind her.

‘The only person who needs a doctor around here is you!’ Georgie gasped in quivering disgust. ‘A psychiatrist! Tell Teresa to pack my clothes—my clothes, not those fancy rags you bought. I’m not going back into that house. I am not marrying you. And I never want to hear from you again… is that clear?’

Rafael raked diamond-hard dark eyes from Georgie’s furious face down to Steve’s emerging look of relief. He released his breath in a soft hiss. Four centuries of icy hauteur tautened his proud dark features. ‘The loser takes all, es verdad? You take his side over mine…’

‘It’s one heck of a lot more complex than that!’ Georgie vented not quite steadily, but she met his eyes in a head-on collision.

‘But you are the woman I intended to marry and you have neither loyalty nor trust in me,’ Rafael condemned.

‘This is so painfully melodramatic,’ Steve said snidely, picking himself up.

Rafael hit him again.

Georgie just couldn’t believe it. Her stepbrother went sprawling back on the ground again, clutching his nose and groaning.

‘Go with him. I no longer want you,’ Rafael delivered. ‘But you deserve to know the truth before you leave.’

‘What truth?’

Rafael stared down at Steve’s prone figure with burning loathing and contempt. ‘Have you the guts to tell her, or must I do that as well?’ As the taut silence stretched and her stepbrother made no response, Rafael emitted a harsh laugh. ‘He was in love with you four years ago—’

‘No!’ Georgie interrupted sharply.

‘And you rejected him that night. He was jealous and he was bitter,’ Rafael continued in the same murderously quiet drawl. ‘And when I came looking for you the next morning, he confessed all to me, but he confessed to lies. He told me you had been lovers since you were seventeen, that he loved you and wanted to marry you—’

Georgie started to tremble, her darkened violet eyes clinging to Steve’s clenched profile. ‘No, he couldn’t have done that…’

‘He was very convincing. He even told me how ashamed he was of taking advantage of your youth and inexperience, but that he just couldn’t help himself!’ Rafael spelt out in disgust.

A stifled sound of distress broke from Georgie. Suddenly she knew that she was hearing the truth. Steve couldn’t even meet her eyes, nor was he making any attempt to defend himself. She was appalled.

‘And, not content with that, he suggested that you had also slept with your friend Danny, and he told me how much he blamed himself for damaging your ability to tell the difference between real love and sexual pleasure!’ Rafael completed witheringly.

‘You couldn’t have done that to me,’ Georgie whispered sickly, staring at Steve.

‘Wake up, Georgie. He did it because, as far as he was concerned, if he couldn’t have you, he didn’t want me to have you either!’ Rafael scorned. ‘Your rejection of him must have cut deep indeed. This man, who stood in the position of a brother to you—he thought nothing of voicing filthy foul lies which resulted in your pain and humiliation. I assume that was your punishment for not finding him attractive… and mine was having my faith and my trust in the woman I loved totally destroyed! Never would I have believed that a man who was a member of your family, who had watched you grow up and behaved as a brother towards you, could have stooped to such a level as he did. Or that any man would confess falsely to such shameful behaviour!’

Georgie was in deep shock, her anguished eyes clinging to Rafael’s dark, driven features. She was appalled that she had never once suspected that Steve could have been in love with her then. Yet she dimly understood how fixed an image one could form of a family member, how easy it could be never to question what might lie behind that safe image. She had been very close to Steve but, in the absence of any form of sexual awareness on her side, she had been effectively blind to his feelings, translating his interest and concern for her as purely brotherly responses. Only now did she see so clearly that Steve had been too interested and too concerned… and too hostile towards Rafael.

‘It’s all behind us now, for God’s sake,’ Steve muttered heavily.

‘But you came here to take her away sooner than risk exposure. You didn’t want her to know the truth,’ Rafael asserted. ‘And I was fool enough to keep quiet because I didn’t want to hurt her.’

Georgie flinched and covered her hot face with cold, trembling hands. ‘I didn’t know… how could I have?’

But, looking back, she saw Steve at her shoulder playing devil’s advocate, stirring the pot of her insecurity about Rafael, undermining their relationship at every opportunity by planting little darts where they would cause the most damage. She also grasped the full extent of Steve’s deception, shuddered as she recalled his sympathetic response to Rafael’s rejection of her.

‘How could you do that to me? You knew I loved him!’ Georgie burst out abruptly, and then she noticed that Rafael had already walked away, that she was alone with her stepbrother.

‘I thought you’d get over him, maybe turn to me.’ Steve rose upright, dug his hands into his pockets and looked back at her with rueful eyes. ‘I had it bad. It was a long time before I accepted that I was beating my head up against a brick wall and that you were never going to feel the same way.’