‘Es verdad’ Rafael searched her bright, speaking eyes and suddenly dropped the cold front. He strode forward and gripped her shoulders. ‘You are serious?’
‘I’m beginning to think I never really stopped being crazy about you. I love you so much… How can you not see that?’ she whispered ruefully.
‘I didn’t. I thought you felt sorry for me when you saw me getting drunk, and I was prepared to use that to hold you,’ he confessed, a dark flush accentuating his handsome cheekbones. ‘But it was a shameful thing to do.’
No, it had been an education, but she was tactful enough to keep that acknowledgement to herself. ‘You were that desperate?’ she couldn’t help prompting.
‘I wanted what we had back and I believed it was lost forever… but it was not lost for me,’ Rafael muttered, with something less than his usual perfect English. ‘You had not been here very long before I understood that even with all the unpleasant things I had believed of you, I still loved you.’
‘You love me too?’ Georgie was in seventh heaven.
‘It was not only the desire which tore my heart out from the first day,’ Rafael told her with satisfying fervour as he pulled her up against him and stared down at her with adoring dark eyes and a slightly stunned expression, as if he still couldn’t yet believe that she loved him back. ‘It was the liking and the laughing too. Your spirit, your sense of humour, the manner in which you stood up to me. I had turned you into a shallow bitch inside my mind over the years, and then instantly I was faced with the reality that, whatever your morals were, you were really still the warm, vibrant girl I fell in love with at the age of seventeen—’
‘I love the sound of your voice,’ Georgie confided honestly, ‘especially when you’re saying things like that. Did you really fall for me back then?’
‘One look that first day and it was like being hit by lightning.’
‘Lightning struck twice. I thought you were gorgeous. I couldn’t take my eyes off you,’ Georgie admitted unsteadily.
‘Te quiero, querida mia!’ Tired of talking, Rafael raked impassioned eyes over her and lifted her up in his arms to devour her mouth with an intense hunger he no longer tried to hide.
Some timeless minutes later, Georgie registered that what she was lying on was not a bed, but a rigid and hard sofa. Rafael’s jacket was on the floor along with his tie, and his shirt was hanging open, revealing the glorious expanse of his muscular chest. She scratched her fingernails through the curling dark hair hazing his pectorals, smiling a very feminine smile of power as he shuddered in response and came back down to her again fast, sealing his hard body to hers in a movement that gave her no doubt of his ultimate intentions.
‘You are wearing too many clothes,’ he muttered raggedly, positively aflame with impatience.
‘I thought we were waiting for tomorrow night,’ Georgie gasped, as one lean hand closed over the mound of one swelling breast, frustratingly barred from him by the right bodice of her fitted top.
‘Forget that,’ Rafael groaned. ‘I cannot wait…’
‘And to think I thought you were not a spontaneous guy,’ Georgie sighed in delight.
Neither cine of them heard the door open. They were far too busy kissing.
‘Tia’s no great shakes as a chaperon, is she?’
Rafael’s head flew up in shock. Georgie froze. As Rafael sprang off the sofa, Georgie sat up and grinned from ear to ear. Maria Cristina was wearing a matching grin on her rounded, pretty face.
‘This is going to take a lot of living down, brother dear,’ Rafael’s sister asserted, tickled pink at having surprised her very self-disciplined older brother in such a situation. ‘And in the drawing-room too, where anybody could walk in.’
‘Anybody else would have had the good manners to knock,’ Rafael vented in a driven undertone.
Georgie flew across the room into her friend’s arms. ‘You already knew I was here!’
‘I knew the day you arrived. I’ve been in cahoots with Teresa. I swear it was excitement which sent me into labour,’ Maria Cristina chuckled. ‘Go and meet your nephew, George,’ she said to Rafael, ‘Georgie and I have some catching up to do.’
Teresa brought coffee. Antonio, Maria Cristina’s husband, wandered in briefly to be introduced. Teresa brought Georgie’s namesake in and he was much admired before he closed his big dark eyes and went cheerfully back to sleep in his beribboned Moses basket.
‘Of course I knew you were in love with my brother,’ her friend laughed. ‘And I thought he was in love with you. I even guessed when you started seeing each other. Rafael was so happy and you floated about as if you were on a cloud. Then you broke up, and ever since I’ve been racking my brains on how to bring the two of you together again. This time, when I invited you, I was really devious and I took an awful risk—’
‘You knew you were going to California and yet you practically pleaded with me to come and stay with you?’
‘Guilty…but it worked. You had to contact Rafael to find out where I was, and I knew he was still interested because he was always so keen to know what you said in your letters and what you were doing,’ Maria Cristina confided. ‘But I have to tell you, with a wedding arranged for tomorrow, the pair of you have more than exceeded my wildest expectations!’
‘Are you pleased?’
‘Georgie, I’m over the moon! I couldn’t be more delighted—Rafael has been so gruesomely serious since you broke up…’
‘Alone at last,’ Rafael groaned, leaning back against the door as he locked it. Por Dios... what are you we&ring?’
Sinuously sheathed in a peach satin and lace teddy, which made no attempt to pretend that its function was anything but pure female provocation, Georgie lounged back against the pillows on the comfortable bed and shamelessly basked in the reality that her new husband was riveted by the view.
They had had the most glorious wedding-day, with her parents and all Rafael’s closest relatives in attendance. Georgie thought headily of the moment Rafael had slid that gold ring on her finger and of the expression of love in his rich dark eyes. Her toes curled, just reliving that moment of knowing that she was the most wonderful woman in the world as far as he was concerned.
‘You haven’t even asked where we are going,’ Rafael said mockingly, dropping his jacket in a careless heap and coming down on the bed beside her.
Her heart raced at his proximity. The throb of the jet engines was not as loud as her own heartbeat. ‘I’m expecting to be taken to heaven tonight.’ she whispered, running wantonly possessive eyes over his magnificent length.
‘I have the villa in the Caribbean.’
‘I can’t wait that long…’
Rafael leant down and extracted a devastatingly erotic kiss that turned her bones to liquid honey. ‘Did you think I would ask you to?’
She linked her arms round his brown neck, weak with longing. Golden eyes merged with violet in the smouldering silence.
‘Te qtuero, enamorada,’ he muttered feverishly, and drew her close. For a long time afterwards there was nothing but the heated rise of their breathing and her long, gasping sighs of pleasure. Satiated, they lay wrapped tightly together in an intimate tangle of limbs.
‘I’m glad you didn’t have to get rid of the jet. This bed is very convenient,’ Georgie sighed.
Rafael tautened. ‘I have a confession to make.’
‘Anything bar murder, you’re forgiven,’ Georgie mused dizzily, running a worshipping hand over his smooth golden back.
‘I lied about the financial reverses…’
‘You lied?’ Forcing him back from her, Georgie sat up and surveyed him in horror and bewilderment. ‘But how could you have been lying? I saw a bank statement lying on the floor that night, and it must have belonged to you, and the account was in the red to the tune of six figures.’
‘A bank statement?’ Rafael frowned. ‘In the red… Ah, those statements I was studying that night belonged to a bankrupt company I was thinking of buying.’
‘Really?’ Feeling decidedly foolish, Georgie went very pink and dropped that angle. ‘You were saying that you lied to me, which I consider quite unforgivable!’
Rafael started talking fast. ‘But you warmed to me as never before when you thought I was having business problems,’ he protested.
‘You rat, you utter rat!’ Georgie screeched at him, reflecting on her painful enactment of the stand-by-yourman routine.
‘Think of our children… you would not want them to be poor, surely?’ Rafael reasoned in desperation.
‘You must have been laughing your socks off at me that night!’
‘No, for the first time I was encouraged to hope that I could win you back,’ Rafael asserted. ‘So I thought maybe I would be a loser for a little while and see what happened—’
‘You played on my sympathy, you sneaky, conniving rat,’ Georgie condemned afresh. ‘What was all that guff about you having nothing left?’
‘Without your love, I had nothing. That was why I was drowning my sorrows and feeling sorry for myself. You had told me you wanted me only for the life I could give you, and that cut deep…’